The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  The royalist-leaning Frenchman was enthusiastically welcomed by the new republic. On the recommendation of two of his fellow passengers, he almost immediately won a job to survey a land grant near Lake Ontario and drew up plans for a canal between Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. Once he took on U.S. citizenship, he was named chief engineer for the City of New York, building foundries, laying out roads, and planning for the defense of the city’s harbor, which was the job he held when the subject of block making was broached at the dinner with Hamilton.

  In Brunel’s later recollection, the flash of insight that followed struck him as he was “roaming on the esplanade of Fort Montgomery.”14 Just as with James Watt’s stroll on Glasgow Green, a machine had appeared to him, more or less fully formed, in which the mortises in the blocks could be cut by chisels moving up and down in series “two or three at a time”15 as the blocks were conveyed along a moving line.

  On January 20, 1799, Brunel sailed for Britain armed with a letter of introduction from Hamilton to the First Lord of the Admiralty* and a patent specification for his machine. The First Lord arranged an immediate introduction to Samuel Bentham, by now Inspector General for Naval Works, but it took two years before he finally received a patent for his “New and Useful Machine for Cutting One or More Mortices Forming the Sides of and Cutting the Pin-Hole of the Shells of Blocks, and for Turning and Boring the Shivers.”

  Brunel had broken block making into a series of steps that synchronized a dozen different woodworking processes. During one of those steps, machine-driven chisels—between one and four—cut out slots in a rectangular block of wood, while their reciprocating motion drove a gear that moved the block laterally the length of the needed mortise. In another, sheaves—the pulleys intended to fit inside the mortises—were made by a rounding saw that made a circular disc while simultaneously cutting a groove in the middle. Bentham’s own designs were ingenious enough, but the machines specified in his 1793 patent operated independently; each one could typically complete only a single step. Brunel’s plan, in essence, took the motion imparted by one machine and used it to drive another. By requiring that each step in any procedure be driven by the preceding one, he effectively automated the entire block-making system.

  In the same year that the patent was awarded, Brunel persuaded Samuel Bentham to put his ideas to work at the navy’s largest dockyard, in Portsmouth. For that, he needed a toolmaker. Someone like, for example, Henry Maudslay, whom Bentham hired in 1802 to turn Brunel’s drawings into machines.

  Or, more accurately, to revise them. The brilliance of Brunel’s patented idea was the manner in which it coordinated the different cutting and drilling movements, but their very coordination demanded precision that could be measured in thousands of an inch. The design, however, specified16 the use of wood for dozens of components, and vibration alone introduced errors larger than that. Maudslay, who by then knew more than anyone else living about eliminating vibration, did so by translating Brunel’s designs into cold iron. His machines—he ended up building forty-five or so—included power saws17 for roughing out pieces of elm into useful sizes; drills, mortising chisels, and scorers; rotary saws for the sheaves; and even forging machines to make the iron pins and bushings. And they were all, in the end, made of the same cast iron that had become so reliably available.

  Maudslay’s fee for constructing the machines18 came to the very handsome sum of £12,000—considerably more than $1 million in current dollars—which made sense only given the contract that Brunel had executed with Bentham and the Admiralty. That agreement guaranteed19 that the machinery would allow six men to do the work of sixty, with annual cost savings in the neighborhood of £24,000, which would be used to calculate his own payment. The final accounting is almost incomprehensible—in 1808, the Mills produced 130,000 blocks at a nominal price of £54,000, but the figures that were used to calculate the annual “royalties” payable to Brunel came out anywhere between £6,691 and £26,000—and, perhaps predictably, Brunel had to chase down the money he was owed. He didn’t come close to recouping20 his own investment until 1810, when the Admiralty settled on a single payment of a bit more than £17,000.

  By then, the Portsmouth Block Mills had become Britain’s most advanced industrial factory and among its most important defense plants. On the day in 1805 that Horatio Nelson left Portsmouth in search of the French fleet he would eventually find at Trafalgar, his last stop was the Mills. Three years after Nelson’s death, the Portsmouth Block Mills was producing “an output greater21 than that previously supplied by the six largest dockyards.” Just as important, it had become Britain’s best advertisement for the virtues of industrialization. The Portsmouth Block Mills was extraordinarily public, and deliberately so. Bentham had hoped to publicize the machine age by making the mills open to the public (a cause for much complaint by the engineers), and he encouraged articles about it in numerous journals and encyclopedias, including six consecutive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To the degree that the machines of the Industrial Revolution depended upon awareness of, and inspiration from, other machines, Henry Maudslay’s saws, drills, and chisels earned Portsmouth Block Mills its place on the pilgrimage route.

  So did the engines that drove them.

  Even before Bentham had put Brunel’s ideas and Maudslay’s hands to work, he had shown a powerful affection for novelty in both naval tactics—he is justly famous as an early advocate for replacing solid shot with explosive shells in naval combat—and engineering. In 1798, he introduced at Portsmouth the Royal Navy’s first stationary steam engine, a relatively small “table engine” built and installed by James Sadler, a member of Bentham’s staff, to drive one of the early rotary saws. That one was supplemented in 1800 by a Boulton & Watt beam engine housed in a separate building, despite the Navy Board’s nervous belief that these newfangled machines would “set fire to the dockyards22 [and] would occasion risings of artificers, and so forth.”

  Though the first engine to drive Maudslay’s saws and chisels came from the Soho Foundry, it wasn’t to be the last. The year it was installed, 1800, was also the year that the patent for the separate condenser finally expired, thus in theory opening the marketplace to competition; and indeed, in 1807, the Royal Navy replaced its Boulton & Watt machine with a more powerful substitute from the company’s most serious challenger, Matthew Murray.

  MURRAY WAS THEN ABOUT forty years old, like so many others a product of the apprentice system—in his case, to a “whitesmith” or tinker in his home of Newcastle-on-Tyne—who become a journeyman mechanic and inventor, first in the employ of a linen manufacturer named John Marshall, then in partnership with two friends named James Fenton and David Wood. In 1797, the new company, Fenton, Murray, and Wood, patented a brilliant new steam engine design, one that used a horizontal cylinder and incorporated a new valve, designed by Murray, that dramatically improved engine efficiency.

  By this time, an awful lot of the big stuff in steam engine design—the separate condenser, the double-acting engine—had already been introduced, patented, and seen those patents expire. Each time this happened, the innovation in question lost its competitive advantages, with the result that the search for smaller and smaller improvements was well under way. Even so, some small improvements resulted in large profits, and one was certainly Murray’s D-valve (so called for its shape), which controlled the flow of steam. Earlier self-acting valves had been relatively heavy and required a not inconsiderable amount of the engine’s own steam power to lift—and every bit of energy that went into lifting a valve was not available for any other work. The lighter the valve, the more efficient the engine, and the D-valve weighed less than half as much as its predecessor. The valve’s shape was likewise a cost saver: it absorbed less heat than its predecessor, thus increasing engine efficiency, since every bit of heat used to heat the engine parts was no longer available to make steam.

  There was no doubt of the originality of the D-valve, but in 1802, Murray patented �
�new combined steam engines23 for producing a circular power … for spinning cotton, flax, tow and wool, or for any purpose requiring circular power,” and this one was challenged in court by Boulton & Watt. Their victory (on a technicality: Murray had included dozens of improvements in the same patent application, and the law provided that if any one of them was not completely original, it invalidated the entire application) did not endear them to Murray. After his loss, he spent large sums advertising his originality, attempting to persuade Britons that his ideas weren’t stolen from Watt. The experience enriched the newspapers but soured him on the patent system, which he rarely used again. Even so, the conflict continued; he and his partners planned to expand their factory in Leeds, only to find out that Murray’s conflict with his Birmingham competitors did not improve with time; the planned expansion24 of Fenton, Murray, and Wood’s four-story-high circular factory—the famous “Round Foundry” in Leeds—was thwarted when Boulton & Watt bought up every surrounding acre. It soon became clear that the cultural and legal revolution that had transformed ideas into an entirely new sort of valuable commodity had created a new sort of conflict as well. The availability of patent protection was, predictably, motivating inventors to make more inventions; it was also motivating them to frustrate competing inventions from anyone else.

  The argument between those who believe legal protection for inventions promotes innovation or retards it continues to this day. For both sides of the debate, Exhibit A is often the litigation between James Watt and Jonathan Hornblower.

  HORNBLOWER, THE SON OF a onetime steam engine mechanic (the steam engines in question were reputedly Newcomen’s) and nephew of another,* followed them into the family business when he hired on with Boulton & Watt to install engines in Cornwall in the late 1770s. By 1781, either by native ingenuity or careful observation, he was able to draft a patent for a revolutionary new kind of steam engine that coordinated two separate cylinders, one at higher pressure than the other, and used the pressure exhausted from one cylinder to drive the other. This both increased the machine’s output by as much as a third, and, by running each cylinder in a sort of syncopated rhythm, reduced the “dead spots” where the piston reversed direction (this is known as “smoothing out the power curve”). In addition, Hornblower’s “compound engine” also incorporated a couple of less revolutionary items: a separate condenser and air pump, both of which were still protected by Watt’s original patent, to say nothing of the 1775 extension.

  The new design did not catch on immediately. The patent itself was vague enough that most of what was known about the Hornblower engine was little more than speculation. It wasn’t until 178825 that Watt caught wind of a speech given by Hornblower to a group of Cornish miners, in which his onetime employee reputedly said that Watt had not even invented the separate condenser, and that they were in consequence paying Boulton & Watt an unnecessary royalty. The speech offended Watt, but it did not, by itself, threaten the dominant position of his engine design. Three years later, however, Boulton & Watt were growing concerned about both potential competition and actual infringement. In November of 1791 Watt wrote to Boulton that “the ungrateful, idle, insolent Hornblowers26 [there were three Hornblower brothers, none of whom had particularly endeared himself to Watt] have laboured to evade our Act, and for that purpose have long been possessed of a copy of our specification.” In 1796, they sued Hornblower and his partner, David Maberley, asserting infringement on the separate condenser patents.

  The most illuminating aspect of the entire affair was the difference in the way that Watt and Boulton viewed it. For Watt, the theft (as he saw it) of his work was a deeply personal violation. In 1790, just before realizing the extent of what he perceived as Hornblower’s theft of his own work, he wrote,

  if patentees are to be regarded27 by the public, as … monopolists, and their patents considered as nuisances & encroachments on the natural liberties of his Majesty’s other subjects, wou’d it not be just to make a law at once, taking away the power of granting patents for new inventions & by cutting off the hopes of ingenious men oblige them either to go on in the way of their fathers & not spend their time which would be devoted to the encrease [sic] of their own fortunes in making improvements for an ungrateful public, or else to emigrate to some other Country that will afford to their inventions the protections they may merit?

  Despite his own confidence, he was aware of the complicated public relations aspect of his situation: “Our cause is good,”28 he wrote, “and yet it has a bad aspect. We are called monopolists, and exactors of money from the people for nothing. Would to God the money and price of the time the engine has cost us were in our pockets again, and the devil might then have the draining of their mines in place of me…. The law must decide whether we have property in this affair or not” (emphasis added).

  In the event, the law did decide against Hornblower, and in favor of Boulton & Watt (though not until January 1799, only a year before the expiration of Watt’s patent) notwithstanding the testimony of none other than Joseph Bramah, the lockmaker, who stated under oath that Watt’s separate condenser offered no improvement on Newcomen’s engine, referring to the 1769 innovation as “monstrous stupidity,”29 which rubbed Watt very raw indeed. Boulton, who had only money at risk rather than pride, recommended keeping an even keel: “I think we should confine our contentions30 to the recovery of our debts, and in that be just, moderate and honourable, for sweet is the bread of contentment.”

  The lessons to be derived from the Hornblower litigation are probably fewer than generally thought. The lawsuit has been used to underline the many contemporaneous perspectives on intellectual property; the abusive character of patent law; and even the geopolitics of eighteenth-century Cornwall. It certainly is not an object lesson in the wages of patent theft; despite numerous citations that find him ruined and even jailed for his troubles, Jonathan Hornblower actually ended up quite wealthy, and continued to pursue patents for steam engine improvements on his own for years.

  If the case informs anything, it is actually the great virtue of an environment that recognized the value of intellectual property. Whatever the failures of any specific judicial remedies, a society that wants good ideas to triumph over bad—for superior technology to replace inferior—must promote the creation of as many ideas as possible. In the end, the compound engine was fairly rapidly “rediscovered” by a onetime carpenter named Arthur Woolf, who patented, in 1804, a new method of using steam in an expansive engine, this time by raising the temperature of the steam within the cylinder instead of the boiler, thus creating “a sufficient action against the piston31 of a steam engine to cause the same to rise in the old [Newcomen] engine … or to be carried into the vacuous parts of the cylinder in [Watt’s] improved engines.” That is, it discharged steam directly from a higher-pressure cylinder into a lower-pressure one, thereby compounding the power stroke. With the separate condenser now in the public domain, he was free of the risk of litigation.

  By 1808, a compound engine had made its way to the Portsmouth Block Mills, though both Brunel and Maudslay had moved on to other ventures. The former ultimately went bankrupt, despite being paid more than £17,000 by the Navy, and in 1821 was incarcerated as a debtor. He had once again gone to the patent well, in August 1810, with a machine for mass-producing shoes and boots for the army, and when peace came after Waterloo in 1815, he was left with truckloads of unsold footwear, a reminder of the fickle nature of a fortune built on government contracts. His most ambitious endeavor, a tunnel under the Thames, would ultimately be completed by his even more famous son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.* Maudslay, on the other hand,32 would eventually build engines for forty-five naval ships, including HMS Lightning, the Royal Navy’s first steamship, and HMS Enterprise, the first to steam to India.

  Maudslay’s lasting fame, however, came from his work on his beloved lathes, where he applied the precision of one-at-a-time scientific instrument making to engineering for mass production—or what passed
for mass production in the eighteenth century. While the world of British invention was forming up on the pro- versus anti-Watt debate, Maudslay stayed above it, respected, even beloved, by everyone. His 1831 epitaph read, “A zealous promoter of the arts and sciences,33 eminently distinguished, as an engineer for mathematical accuracy and beauty of construction, as a man for industry and perseverance, and as a friend for a kind and benevolent heart.”

  By then, the biggest transformation of all was well under way in Britain’s steam-driven economy: In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the factories that Boulton had promised to power with Watt’s engines were manufacturing not iron, or wood, but cloth.

  * Estimating the present-day value of the amount in question—of any monetary amount from the period—is problematic. The historical purchasing power of the pound sterling can be calculated either by compounding the changes in the retail price index or as a fraction of average earnings in Britain. Using the first method, the prize was worth a little less than £12,000 in 2009 currency; the second, more than £160,000. Put another way, the cost of a loaf of bread has increased by about sixty times; but the hour that a laborer had to work to earn the money to buy that loaf is now only five minutes. The huge discrepancy between the two calculations is in itself a powerful reminder of the transformative power of industrialization.

  * In Yorkshire, extraordinarily precise lathe work was being performed by the scientific instrument maker Jesse Ramsden, who was able to cut a screw with an awe-inspiring 125 turns per inch—that is, a Ramsden screw rotated 125 times before it traveled a single inch, which allowed for very fine adjustments—but his achievements in telescopes and quadrants, like those of clockmakers, though known to Maudslay, were peripheral to industrialization.

  * Compulsively, and often brilliantly. A single one of Roberts’s cotton spinning machines warranted no fewer than eighteen separate patents. His plate punching machine, operated by the same Jacquard system originally used for weaving, was the first digitally operated machine tool.