The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  If the Levellers were the radicalized members of the Parliamentary party, the Diggers, an agrarian communist movement that emerged in 1649, were the radical edge of the Levellers. Their concept of legitimate property was far different, as were their demands, including the right to common land: a return to the state of nature before the appropriation of that land by others. Gerard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, a onetime cloth merchant who lost his livelihood, and then his family’s land, as a side effect of the Civil War, is remembered as being violently opposed to the very idea of property. In the Digger manifesto, a “Declaration from the Poor Oppressed of England,” he pulled no punches, telling the gentry, “You and your ancestors got your propriety25 [i.e. property] by murder and theft, and you keep it by the same power from us.” But his understanding of property was almost completely limited to that special form known as real estate. This made sense, of course; at a time when virtually everything of value, in Britain and everywhere, was either land or the produce of land, property and land were functionally synonymous. And since the amount of land was essentially fixed, it could be possessed by one man only if he dispossessed another.

  Enter John Locke, whose central premise was that man has no right to own the work of God—to own land—but that rightful property is derived from the labor of man mixed with that of God. That is, when man combines his labor with the goods of the earth, he has created a natural right to the product. The right predates government, law, or kings, and is therefore present in his hypothetical state of nature. By deriving the right from the biblical grant by God to Adam of the earth for his subsistence, Locke reasoned his way to the idea that the earth is no good to any particular man unless someone labors to make it so. Locke thus triangulated between the democratic Levellers (and the Diggers who shared an enthusiasm for inventors and inventing: Winstanley wrote, in 1652, “Let no young wit be crushed26 in his invention…. Let every one who finds out an invention have a deserved honour given him”) and the status quo, arguing that the then current division between haves and have-nots was legitimate so long as the cause of the division was labor.

  THE PATIENT READER IS now asking, “What does this have to do with steam power?” (The impatient ones asked it twenty pages ago.) This: By equating labor with a property right, Locke found a right to property anywhere labor is added. The defining characteristic became the labor, not the thing. And labor, in Locke’s formulation, was as much of mind as of muscle. “Nature furnishes us only with the material,27 for the most part rough, and unfitted to our use; it requires labour, art, and thought, to suit them to our occasions…. Here, then, is a large field for knowledge, proper for the use and advantage of men in this world; viz. to find out new inventions of despatch to shorten or ease our labour, or applying sagaciously together several agents and materials, to procure new and beneficial productions fit for our use, whereby our stock of riches (i.e. things useful for the conveniences of our life) may be increased, or better preserved: and for such discoveries as these the mind of man is well fitted.”

  So, while Edward Coke’s Statute on Monopolies established England’s first patent law, the general acceptance of the notion of what we would now call intellectual property awaited its articulation by John Locke.* It is scarcely surprising28 that the Copyright Law of 1710 appeared so soon after Locke’s works, followed by the 1735 Engraver’s Act, which granted the same rights to prints as the Copyright Act did to literary works.

  This does not mean that Locke’s ideas swept all earlier ones away, any more than the Statute on Monopolies caused an immediate explosion in patent grants. Ideas, and the institutions that promote them, take some time to take root. Locke’s own protégé, David Hume, was never persuaded that property rights derived from natural law. Eighty years after Locke’s death, conservatives like Edmund Burke, and progressives like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, were still uncomfortable with Locke’s idea of natural laws; Bentham called them “nonsense on stilts.”29 The final victory, however, was Locke’s; in 1776, Adam Smith was virtually channeling Locke’s Second Treatise, writing in The Wealth of Nations, “The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.” Smith’s French counterpart, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, echoed him: “God … made the right of work30 the property of every individual in the world, and this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most imprescriptible of all kinds of property.”

  Recognition of a property right in ideas was the critical ingredient in democratizing the act of invention. However imperfectly, Coke’s patent system, combined with Locke’s labor theory of value, offered a protected space for inventive activity. The protected space permitted, in turn, the free flow of newly discovered knowledge: the essence of Francis Bacon’s program. Once a generation of artisans discovered they could prosper from owning, even temporarily, the fruits of their mental labor, they began investing that labor where they saw the largest potential return. Most failed, of course, but that didn’t stop a trickle of inventors from becoming a flood.

  The reason that that flood would, eventually, find its way to engine 42B and Rocket—and would become a river instead of a lake—was an unprecedented fusion of theory, experiment, and measurement, which is explored in the next chapter.

  * In different parts of the world, the two functions of legal professionals—advising on the law and advocating before judges—are either split or fused. In the English tradition, the first function was traditionally performed by professionals known as solicitors, the latter by barristers, so named because of the literal bar that separated students from practitioners in the Inns of Court. In the United States, and increasingly in the United Kingdom (even to the point of permitting solicitors to wear powdered wigs), the functions are performed by the same lawyers.

  * Probably very cold. In 1602, all of Europe was still experiencing the so-called Little Ice Age, during which the Thames froze over so frequently that Elizabeth I took her daily walks there.

  * As distinguished from “Lorraine glass” or sheet glass, which was made from cylinders that were melted and formed into squares, Normandy glass was made from circles, or disks, and was later known as “crown glass.” Aren’t you glad you asked?

  * For more about the Netherlands, see chapter 11.

  * Coke was neither the first, nor the last, to accept “national security” exceptions to his principles.

  * Some of that recollection includes theories that can charitably be said to be on the fringe. It is impossible to write about Bacon without mentioning Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Consider them mentioned.

  * Despite the title, England’s Solicitor General is almost always a barrister, not a solicitor. The position is really that of the Attorney General’s chief lieutenant.

  * The remarkable Lady Masham was not simply Locke’s first biographer and friend but the first Englishwoman to publish philosophical writings on her own account, and a regular correspondent with, among others, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

  * Or probably the manuscript. From internal evidence—references to “King James” rather than “James II” suggest that at least portions of the Treatises were written before James II’s accession in 1685—it seems safe to assume that tucked away in the onetime exile’s luggage were the draft treatises. Scholars still debate whether they were written in the heat of the controversy over the Exclusion Bill, a statute introduced by Shaftesbury to exclude the now publicly Catholic James II from the throne. If so, they are a powerful argument that engagement in the rough-and-tumble of political life is no barrier to producing original and hugely influential political philosophy.

  * Three hundred years later, a group of mathematically minded economists would distinguish between tangible and intellectual property in much the same way, as we shall see in chapter 11.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A VERY GREAT QUANTITY OF HEAT

  concerning the di
scovery of fatty earth; the consequences of the deforestation of Europe; the limitations of waterpower; the experimental importance of a Scotsman’s ice cube; and the search for the most valuable jewel in Britain

  THE GREAT SCIENTIST AND engineer William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, made his reputation on discoveries in basic physics, electricity, and thermodynamics, but he may be remembered just as well for his talent for aphorism. Among the best known of Kelvin’s quotations is the assertion that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting” (while one probably best forgotten is the confident “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”). But the most relevant for a history of the Industrial Revolution is this: “the steam engine has done much more for science1 than science has done for the steam engine.”

  For an aphorism to achieve immortality (at least of the sort certified by Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations), it needs to be both true and simple, and while Kelvin’s is true, it is not simple, but simplistic. The science of the eighteenth century didn’t provide the first steam engines with a lot of answers, but it did have a new, and powerful, way of asking questions.

  It is hard to overstate the importance of this. The revolution in the understanding of every aspect of physics and chemistry was built on a dozen different changes in the way people believed the world worked—the invariability of natural law, for example (Newton famously wrote, “as far as possible, assign the same causes [to] respiration in a man, and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun”) or the belief that the most reliable path to truth was empirical.

  But scientific understanding didn’t progress by looking for truth; it did so by looking for mistakes.

  This was new. In the cartoon version of the Scientific Revolution, science made its great advances in opposition to a heavy-handed Roman Catholic Church; but an even larger obstacle to progress in the understanding and manipulation of nature was the belief that Aristotle had already figured out all of physics and had observed all that biology had to offer, or that Galen was the last word in medicine. By this standard, the real revolutionary manifesto of the day was written not by Descartes, or Galileo, but by the seventeenth-century Italian poet and physician Francesco Redi, in his Experiments on the Generation of Insects, who wrote (as one of a hundred examples), “Aristotle asserts that cabbages produce caterpillars2 daily, but I have not been able to witness this remarkable reproduction, though I have seen many eggs laid by butterflies on the cabbage-stalks….” Not for nothing was the motto of the Royal Society nullius in verba: “on no one’s word.”

  This obsession with proving the other guy wrong (or at least testing his conclusions) is at the heart of the experimental method that came to dominate natural philosophy in the seventeenth century.* Of course, experimentation wasn’t invented in the seventeenth century; four hundred years earlier, while Aquinas was rejiggering Aristotle for a Christian world, the English monk Roger Bacon was inventing trial-and-error experimentation—in Europe, anyway; experimentation was widely practiced in medieval Islamic cities from Baghdad to Córdoba. Bacon was, however, a decided exception. The real lesson of medieval “science” is that the enterprise is a social one, that it was as difficult for isolated genius to sustain progress as it would be for a single family to benefit from evolution by natural selection. Moreover, even when outliers like Friar Bacon, and to a lesser degree the era’s alchemists, engaged in trial-and-error tests, they rarely recorded their results (this might be the most underappreciated aspect of experimentation) and even more rarely shared them. A culture of experimentation depends on lots of experimenters, each one testing the work of the others, and doing so publicly. Until that happened, the interactions needed for progress were too few to ignite anything that might be called a revolution, and certainly not the boiler in Rocket’s engine.

  It took a massive shift in perspective to create such a culture, one in which a decent fraction of the population (a) trusted their own observations more than those made by Pliny, or Avicenna, or even Aristotle, and (b) distrusted the conclusions made by their contemporaries, at least until they could replicate them. In the traditional and convenient shorthand, this occurred when “scientific revolutionaries” like Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, and Newton started thinking of the world in purely material terms, describing the world as a sort of machine best understood by reducing it to its component parts. The real transformation, however, was epistemological: Knowledge—the same stuff that Locke was defining as a sort of property—was, for the first time in history, conditional. Answers, even when they were given by Aristotle, were not absolute. They could be replaced by new, and better, answers. But a better answer cannot be produced by logic alone; spend years debating whether the physics of Democritus or Leucippus was superior, and you’ll still end up with either one or the other. A new and improved version demanded experiment.

  If the new mania for scientific experimentation began sometime in the sixteenth century, with Galileo—even earlier, if you want to begin with René Descartes—it took an embarrassingly long time to contribute much in the way of real-world technological advances. Francis Bacon might have imagined colleges devoted to the material betterment of mankind, in which brilliant researchers produced wonders that might allay hunger, cure disease, or speed ships across the sea; but the technology that mostly occupied the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was improving scientific instruments themselves (and their close relations, navigational instruments). Science did build better telescopes, clocks, and experimental devices like von Guericke’s hemispheres, or Hooke’s vacuum machine, but remarkably little in the way of useful arts. The chasm that yawned between Europe’s natural philosophers and her artisan classes remained unbridged.

  Describing how that bridge came to be built has been, for decades, the goal of an economic historian at Northwestern University named Joel Mokyr, who knows more than is healthy about the roots and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. In a series of books, papers, and articles, Professor Mokyr has described the existence of an intellectual passage from the Scientific Revolution of Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton to the Industrial Revolution, which he has named the “Industrial Enlightenment”—an analytical construct that is extraordinarily useful in understanding the origins of steam power.

  The beauty of Mokyr’s analysis is that it replaces an intuitive notion—that the Industrial Revolution must have been somehow dependent upon the Scientific Revolution that preceded it—with an actual mechanism: in simple terms, the evolution of a market in knowledge.

  The sixteenth and seventeenth century’s Scientific Revolution was a sort of market, though the currency in which transactions occurred was usually not gold but recognition: Gaspar Schott saw Otto Gericke’s vacuum experiments and wrote about them; Boyle read his account and published his own. Huygens, Papin, and Hooke all published their own observations and experiments. They had an interest in doing so; as a class, they generally sought pride rather than profit for their labors, and were therefore paid with notoriety, along with some acceptable sinecure:3 professorships, pensions, patronage. They even sometimes, as with Hooke’s attempt to turn his discovery of the Law of Elasticity into a balance spring mechanism for a marketable timepiece, showed decided commercial impulses. But the critical thing was that a structure within which scientists could trade their newly created knowledge had been evolving for nearly a century before it was widely adopted by more commercially minded users.

  Their need for it, however, was enormous. Prior to the eighteenth century, innovations tended to stay where they were, since finding out about them came at a very steep price; in the language of economists, they carried high information costs. For centuries, a new and improved dyeing technique developed by an Italian chemist would not be available, at any affordable cost, to a weaver in France, both because the institutions necessary for communicating them, such as transnational organizations like the Royal Society, did not exist, and because
the value of the innovation was enhanced by keeping it secret.

  For a century, that was how things stood. Europe’s first generation of true scientists produced a flood of testable theories about nature—universal gravitation, magnetism, circulation of the blood, the cell—and tools with which to understand them: calculus, the microscope, probability, and hundreds more. But this flood of what Mokyr calls propositional knowledge did not diffuse cheaply into the hands of the artisans who could put them to use, since the means of doing so depended on a sophisticated publishing industry producing books in Europe’s vernacular languages rather than the Latin of scientific discourse, and on a literate population to read them.

  An even bigger problem was this: as the seventeenth century wound down, scientific knowledge was becoming a public good, partly because of what we might call the Baconian program. Francis Bacon’s vision of investigators and experimenters working in a common language for the common good had inspired an entire generation; and, to be fair, the extraordinary number of related discoveries in mathematics, physics, and chemistry had indeed benefited everyone. But partly it was a matter of class. Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though a highly inventive bunch, were members of a fraternity that depended on allegiance to the idea of open science—so much so that even Benjamin Franklin, clearly a man with a strong commercial sense, did not as a matter of course take out patents on his inventions. The result was what happens when work is imperfectly aligned with rewards: Science remained disproportionately the activity of those with outside income. Predictably, Bacon’s New Atlantis model, which worked so well for the diffusion of scientific innovations, had built in a limit on the population of innovators.