Newcomen’s valves aren’t just expressions of how well he had trained his mind during his years of experimentation. They also tell of the years he spent21 “educating” his hands at the blacksmith’s anvil, the mechanic’s lathe, and the carpenter’s bench.
This insight is hugely important for understanding not only invention generally, but the era of sustainable invention that Thomas Newcomen inaugurated. Consider, for example, a single element of the Newcomen design: the Y-valve. It was utterly essential to the stable functioning of the engine, but to do its job, it needed to be precise both as to shape and to weight; it would only work if it rocked back and forth on its base as the piston rose, which meant that it needed to be balanced with exactly the same mass on each “arm” of the Y.
Now imagine producing such a fitting22 when the only tools available were a hammer, a chisel, and a file, and perhaps a set of calipers for measurement; no lathes (at least, no lathes that could work metal), no drills, and certainly no powered tools, all of which were decades in the future. The only way to “machine” such a valve was by hand, and the hands in question had to be as sensitive, and as precise, as those of a violinist. Newcomen could perhaps imagine the shape of his valves by eye, but he needed to feel their weight, and their texture, with his hands.
For centuries, certainly ever since Immanuel Kant called the hand “the window on the mind,” philosophers have been pondering the very complex way in which the human hand is related to the human mind. Modern neuroscience and evolutionary biology have confirmed the existence of what the Scottish physician and theologian Charles Bell called “the intelligent hand.” Stephen Pinker of Harvard even argues that early humans’ intelligence increased “partly because they were equipped23 with levers of influence on the world, namely the grippers found at the end of their two arms.” We now know that the literally incredible amount of sensitivity and articulation of the human hand, which has increased at roughly the same pace as has the complexity of the human brain, is not merely a product of the pressures of natural selection, but an initiator of it: The hand has led the brain to evolve24 just as much as the brain has led the hand. The hands of a pianist, or a painter, or a sushi chef, or even, as with Thomas Newcomen, hands that could use a hammer to shape soft iron, are truly, in any functional sense, “intelligent.”
This sort of tactile intelligence was not emphasized in A. P. Usher’s theory of invention, the components of which he filtered through the early twentieth-century school of psychology known as Gestalt theory,* which was preeminently a theory of visual behavior. The most important precepts of Gestalt theory (to Usher, anyway, who was utterly taken with their explanatory power) are that the patterns we perceive visually appear all at once, rather than by examining components one at a time, and that a principle of parsimony organizes visual perceptions into their simplest form. Or forms; one of the most famous Gestalt images is the one that can look like either a goblet or two facing profiles. Usher’s enthusiasm for Gestalt psychology explains why, despite his unshakable belief in the inventive talents of ordinary individuals, he devotes an entire chapter of his magnum opus to perhaps the most extraordinary individual in the history of invention: Leonardo da Vinci.
Certainly, Leonardo would deserve a large place in any book on the history of mechanical invention, not only because of his fanciful helicopters and submarines, but for his very real screw cutting engine, needle making machine, centrifugal pumps, and hundreds more. And Usher found Leonardo an extraordinarily useful symbol in marking the transition in mechanics from pure intuition to the application of science and mathematics.
But the real fascination for Usher was Leonardo’s straddling of two worlds of creativity, the artistic and the inventive. No one, before or since, more clearly demonstrated the importance to invention of what we might call “spatial intelligence”; Leonardo was not an abstract thinker of any great achievement, nor were his mathematical skills, which he taught himself late in life, remarkable. His perceptual skills, on the other hand, developed primarily for his painting, were extraordinary; but they were so extraordinary that Usher could write, “It is only with Leonardo25 that the process of invention is lifted decisively into the field of the imagination….”
Seen in this light, Usher’s attention to Leonardo makes perfect sense. What the great artist-inventor “saw,” in Gestalt terms, was determined as much by what was inside his head as by what was in front of his eyes. Leonardo’s gifts, his education, and his history constrained his perceptions, but also gave them direction. Any inventor’s moments of insight, certainly including Newcomen’s and supremely Leonardo’s, are primarily visual; as a modern scholar puts it, “Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets26 exist not because of geometry, theory of structures, or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture—literally a vision—in the minds of those who built them … technology has a significant intellectual component that is both nonscientific and nonliterary.”
There is, however, something missing from Usher’s pure Gestalt explanation of the process of invention. For while it seems reasonable to suppose that most insights are visual, the equally creative process of critical revision is almost overwhelmingly tactile. Leonardo’s hands—holding a brush or a pen, or building a model—were as important as his eyes.
This had obviously been true for a thousand generations of craftsmen and artists, including Praxiteles, Mozart, and, once again, Leonardo. But with the beginning of the eighteenth century, the implications changed, and the reason was an unprecedented enthusiasm for scale models.
The eighteenth century’s need for mechanical models that could be enlarged by orders of magnitude while still performing as they did in their miniaturized form has no precedent in history. Before then, except for the work of a few outliers like Leonardo, mechanical objects that were built by “intelligent hands” were usually as large as they were ever going to get; only with the advent of scale modeling, frequently performed in stages during which a device could grow from the size of a suitcase to that of a house in several steps, were those hands employed in improving mechanisms bigger than toys, or, as was the case with Hooke and Boyle, scientific apparatuses. Thereafter, the critical revisions that Usher described were going to be performed by, and improved by, the hands of trained artisans. The intelligent hands of Thomas Newcomen made him eighteenth-century England’s first important craftsman-inventor. He would not be the last.
This was because Usherian critical revision is a social process, in which the insight of one inventor is revised and reinforced by others. The inventor, in Usher’s words, “lives in the company of a great company of men, both dead and living.”27 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, a literate artisan class, trained in practical mathematics and engineering, was exhibiting a never-before-seen passion for revising and reinforcing one another’s inventions. The size of that “great company of men” and therefore the potential for cross-fertilization—for critical revision—had exploded.
SO IT WAS THAT while only Thomas Newcomen and John Calley arrived at the Conygree mine a mile east of Dudley Castle that day in 1712, a “great company of men” from different times and places accompanied them, observed the construction of the sturdy machine on site, and (metaphorically) applauded when the boiler was fired up, the steam was injected into the cylinder, and the beam rocked on its pivot for the first time. Every stroke of Newcomen and Calley’s engine lifted ten gallons of water out of a 50-meter-deep mine, and did so at a rate of twelve strokes per minute. “During the up-stroke,28 the water was drawn up into the pump cylinder as the bucket [at the end of the connecting rod] was being raised. Valves in the bottom of the bucket opened on the down-stroke to let the water pass through to the upper side … and was then lifted on the next up-stroke.”
The inventive power is inherent in the idea that a column of air has weight in the same way as does a column of bricks, and that if some “bricks” of air are removed from the bottom of the column, the top will move downward. Newcomen’s cy
linder removed the bricks by condensing steam into water, under the watchful, if figurative, eyes of Galileo, Torricelli, Boyle and Hooke, Denis Papin, Heron of Alexandria, Otto von Guericke, and a thousand others. What was on display was, even by their elevated standards, genius.
Yet there is an even more important way in which the engine on display at Conygree in 1712 was a work of genius. In its original Latinate meaning, the word is defined as the guardian spirit of a particular household, or tribe: a gens; and the genius responsible for the machine at Conygree was, indeed, from a very particular tribe. In Newcomen’s case, he was the first (or very nearly) and clearly the most important member of a tribe of a very particular, and historically original, type: the English artisan-engineer-entrepreneur. His great invention was not merely an ingenious toy but a profitable one, whose great virtue was not only its productivity but its simplicity and ruggedness. Like another century’s AK-47 assault rifle, it survived the ministrations of even the most technically inept users. It was forgiving, requiring no real precision in alignment, and could be built (except for the cylinder) by local craftsmen using local materials. It truly deserves its description, given by Abbott Payson Usher himself, as “the greatest single act of synthesis29 in the history of the steam engine, and must be regarded as one of the primary or strategic inventions” of all time.
Unfortunately for Newcomen, one of the “company of great men” present at Conygree in spirit had a legal interest in the proceedings. Thomas Savery would live only three years after Newcomen’s demonstration, but his patent survived. What this meant for Thomas Newcomen was that in order to exploit his invention—and he clearly wanted to: in a 1722 lawsuit, he described himself from the beginning as “designing to turn his engines30 or part of them into cash”—he was compelled to make his peace with Savery, or rather, Savery’s heirs. There was little question that the 1712 engine represented an enormous advance over the 1698 “Miner’s Friend”; the Savery engine had found only a few customers, and of those he had installed, most, including the engine used by the York Buildings Company to pump water to its London customers and the one used to drain the Broad Waters pool in Staffordshire, showed a disconcerting tendency to blow up. But Savery still owned an exclusive on the concept, and (because of a special Act of Parliament) would continue to do so until 1733. This was eighteen years after Savery’s death, but his exclusive rights survived. And so, therefore, did a method for earning money from those rights; at Savery’s death in 1715, his partners created a company named “The Proprietors of the invention for raising water by fire.” According to an adviser to one of those Proprietors, the lawyer Sir Thomas Pengelley, Savery “divided the profit to arise31 by his invention into 60 shares … after his death, his executors sold the rest. One Mr. Newcomen having made considerable improvements to the said invention, the Proprietors in 1716 came to an agreement amongst themselves and with the said Newcomen and by indenture in pursuance of articles made between Savery and Newcomen, they agreed to add 20 shares to the 60 which were to be had by Newcomen in full of his improvement and of the said agreement.”
THOUGH NEWCOMEN’S TAKE32 FROM the sale of the engines was “only” one-quarter—twenty shares out of eighty—they were enough to guarantee his prosperity, since the new company charged up to £300 a year just to license the machine; one coal miner paid the Proprietors £200 plus half his yearly profits—and that was in addition to paying for building the engine itself. The year the company was founded, an article appeared in the London Gazette with the following teaser:
Whereas the invention for raising water33 by the impellent force of fire, authorized by Parliament, is lately brought to the greatest perfection, and all sorts of mines, &c., may be thereby drained and water raised to any height with more ease and less charge than by the other methods hitherto used … these are therefore to give notice that if any person shall be desirous to treat with the proprietors for such engines [i.e. Newcomen and Calley; all the examples given in the article are of their installed engines] attendance will be given for that purpose every Wednesday at the Sword Blade Coffee House in Birchin Lane, London.
Within three years, more than a hundred Newcomen-style engines were pumping away in various parts of England, all of them helping the onetime ironmonger and Baptist lay preacher to “turn his engines into cash.” He owed his success in doing so to predecessors making discoveries as far away as Tuscany and as close as Oxford; but the most important occurred only about three miles west of Birchin Lane, on the banks of the Thames, in sight of Westminster Abbey.
* It is impossible to do justice to Leibniz with anything less than a full biography. He was simultaneously one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of the eighteenth century, with a list of achievements ranging from the calculus (the notation we use today is his, not Isaac Newton’s) and binary logic to metaphysics, philology, and both basic and highly speculative physics.
* Even more famous, and earlier, was the arsenal of the Republic of Venice, founded in 1104, which covered sixty acres and employed more than a thousand artisans, and which inspired even Galileo, who opened the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences by complimenting the Venetians whose “famous arsenal suggests to the studious mind a large field for investigation, especially that part of the work which involves mechanics, for in this department all types of instruments and machines are constantly being constructed by many artisans.”
* Gestalt, for those preparing for a midterm on the history of cognitive science, was an attempt to explain, or at least describe, the way in which the mind integrates perception with cognition, developed by Germans Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka, who were in turn strongly influenced by the work of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, who will crop up again in chapter 8.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FIRST AND TRUE INVENTOR
concerning a trial over the ownership of a deck of playing cards; a utopian fantasy island in the South Seas; one Statute and two Treatises; and the manner in which ideas were transformed from something one discovers to something one owns
IN THE YEAR 1602, what would be the last full year of the reign of the first Elizabeth, her kingdom’s capital was one of the world’s largest and most vibrant cities, but it would be largely unfamiliar to the modern Londoner. A century before Newcomen began crafting the world’s first steam engine, St. Paul’s Cathedral was still awaiting the fire that would consume its predecessor, and the consequent opportunity to rebuild it. No Buckingham Palace. Hampton Court might be half-familiar, like a poorly remembered dream; most of the modern incarnation was rebuilt after the fire by Christopher Wren for its new owner-occupants, William and Mary. Moreover, for every building in modern London not yet built in the year 1602, there is another from 1602 that no longer stands.
Of the Houses of Parliament, only Westminster Hall remains. Built by William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, and rebuilt by Richard II, who added the great oak hammer-beam roof sometime between 1395 and 1399, it still impresses today, partly because of its scale. The hall was, and is, a huge space, two hundred and fifty feet long by seventy feet wide, with nothing to divide its many functions one from the other—a nontrivial characteristic for a place that England’s monarchs were as likely to use to play tennis as to announce vital decisions about state policy.
Even so, the really impressive aspect of Westminster Hall was that it was, until the 1673 construction of the Old Bailey, the most important courtroom in the realm. This was where William Wallace was tried and found guilty of treason in 1305. In January 1606, it was the site for the trial of Guy Fawkes, Robert Winter, and the other conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot; and, most famously of all, it was the place where, in 1649, Charles I was charged and found guilty of treason and other high crimes. Less well known, but just as historically significant—more significant, from the standpoint of Rocket—is the case sometimes recalled as the Case of Monopolies, the lawsuit that marks the ideological transformation that would, decades hence, create the Industri
al Revolution. In one of history’s odder twists, some of the track on which Rocket would one day ride was laid by a lawyer.
Not just any lawyer, to be sure. His name was Edward Coke (pronounced “cook”), and he was, as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth, the most prominent, successful, and honored lawyer in England. Before he turned forty, Coke had served as a Member of Parliament, as the Speaker of the House of Commons, and as England’s Attorney General; by the early 1600s, his reputation, already enormous, reached rarefied heights—or at least the height of the Tower of London, the site of the execution of the Earl of Essex, prosecuted by Coke for treason against Elizabeth, and the imprisonment of Walter Ralegh for treason against her successor, James I.
Coke had also, by the time of the accession of James, acquired more than a reputation. Though already in possession of an income1 estimated at £12,000 a year, as large as any in the kingdom, he hatched a plan to solicit “every man of estate” to sue the incoming monarch for a pardon, for the fee of £5 a head. Apparently enough prominent Englishmen were worried about the accession of the first non-Tudor king in more than a century that staggering numbers of them bought into what looks suspiciously like a protection racket; at least one estimate puts Coke’s take at £100,000.2
Coke may not have come by his wealth honestly, but he earned his reputation as the most influential English jurist of all time. His 1628 “Petition of Right,” which enumerated the limits on the power of the king, is not only one of the so-called “Fundamental Laws” of England, but was a precipitating cause of the Civil War. However, neither Coke’s great wealth, his brilliant forensic talent, nor his centuries-long influence on Anglo-American political institutions explain his presence in the middle of a history of the steam revolution.
The Most Powerful Idea in the World Page 6