The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  * Or it would be if the Mills wasn’t actually still part of the naval base itself and consequently off-limits to most visitors.

  * Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon,” a multilevel prison with a central core from which guards could watch every move each prisoner made, and which has become a metaphor for the modern surveillance state, is one of his best-remembered, if creepiest, ideas. Less well known is that the original Panopticon was designed by Samuel Bentham, for use in supervising laborers at Krichev, the estate of Prince Vasiliy Potemkin.

  * Earl Spencer of Althorp, a direct ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales.

  * Uncle Josiah emigrated to America in 1753, where he became a judge and speaker of the House of Assembly in New Jersey before dying in Belleville, New Jersey, in 1809.

  * Isambard Kingdom Brunel is so famous, in fact, that a 2002 BBC poll to select the one hundred greatest Britons placed him second, behind Winston Churchill, but ahead of Shakespeare, Darwin, and Newton (to be fair, so was Princess Diana; Watt came in eighty-fourth, behind such immortals as Michael Crawford, David Beckham, and Boy George). One result is that his father, who preferred being called Isambard during his own lifetime, is now known as Marc.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TO GIVE ENGLAND THE POWER OF COTTON

  concerning the secret of silk spinning; two men named Kay; a child called Jenny; the breaking of frames; the great Cotton War between Calcutta and Lancashire; and the violent resentments of stocking knitters

  THE CITY OF LIVORNO sits at the northern end of Italy’s resort-spotted Etruscan coast, overlooking the Ligurian Sea. At its center is the original town: a walled compound, made up of two separate forts that in the year 1715 were enough for Livorno to serve as one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean. Livorno’s walls, its fortifications, even its streets and canals, were a sixteenth-century bequest from the city’s Florentine rulers, the Medici family, who had also bequeathed to the city its cosmopolitan air and legendary hospitality to foreigners. The city’s constitution of 1606 granted privileges and immunities to immigrants, including Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Dutch, and Muslims; it even attracted a large number of traders and artisans from England, who, in the distinctive manner of English away from home, renamed it Leghorn.*

  The name stuck, in Anglophone countries, for centuries—a style of hat and breed of chicken still carry the name—because of Livorno’s large and well-known expatriate community. The profile of that community was probably never higher than in 1822, when both Byron and Shelley were residents, but a hundred years before, another Briton had made himself at home in the city, with less publicity, but more significance. John Lombe was his name; and what brought him to Livorno was silk.

  LOMBE WAS THE SON of a woolen weaver1 from Norwich, and a onetime apprentice to another weaver in Derbyshire, where in 1702 he took employment as a mechanic for a small silk mill owned by a lawyer named Thomas Cotchett. England by then had tried and failed half a dozen times to start up its own silk industry, less from any deficiency in raw materials than from lack of the technology required to make its production economical. But neither Cotchett nor Lombe was prepared to give up on the profits to be made from selling silk cloth and garments—profits far greater than for any other fabric.

  By the eighteenth century, silk had been commanding high prices for millennia; during the eighth century BCE, silk was one of the Zhou Dynasty’s most widely cultivated “crops,” with tens of thousands of farmers feeding white mulberry leaves to domesticated silkworms with the Linnaean moniker Bombyx mori before the chrysalis stage, then steaming or boiling the cocoons and pulling, or “reeling,” the filaments that emerged into strands of silk. Those strands were not only very long but triangular in cross-section, which gave silk thread its distinctive reflective quality; the combination of length and lustrousness made the stuff easy to weave, and even easier to sell.

  The reason this is a matter of note in the history of industrialization, however, has less to do with the beauty of the fiber—a fiber is, technically, anything with a length at least one hundred times its diameter—than with its structure. Virtually all textiles, from linen to rayon, are made using the same step-by-step process. First, foreign materials, if any, must be removed, or carded, from the raw fiber; then individual strands must be separated, with those of uniform length combed, or aligned in parallel. The carded and combed fiber is then twisted into yarn, or spun, and ultimately woven by interlacing yarns at right angles.

  Or so the sequence goes with staples, such as wool, linen, or cotton, which must be drawn at an angle so that the relatively short fiber twists into a longer and stronger yarn. But reeled silk is a filament: a very long filament. A single cocoon of B. mori2 holds only a few grams of silk’s two constituent proteins, fibroin and sericin, but they form threads, one-twentieth the diameter of a human hair, that can reach the length of ten football fields. The result is that silk produces yarn without either combing, or carding, or drawing; all it needs to be is tightly twisted and it’s ready to serve as the warp on a silk loom.

  Silk from Chinese looms3 started appearing in Egypt as early as 1000 BCE, but it didn’t really take off as an article of trade until 50 CE, when the Han emperor made a “gift” of ten thousand rolls of the stuff to pacify the western nomads known as the Xiongnu—silk that would eventually be shipped westward across the Central Asian desert along the not yet named Silk Road to Persia and the Mediterranean empire of Rome.

  China remained a major supplier of silk to Europe for centuries, but with the breakup of the Mongol empire in the fourteenth century and the rise of the Ottomans, silk production shifted west. The Turkish city of Bursa4 was shipping more than 100 metric tons annually by the beginning of the sixteenth century, most of it carried by Armenian merchants to either Italy or southern France. When the cities of Toulon and Marseille imposed a series of confiscatory tolls on west Asian silk in the 1650s, the free port of Livorno was happy to step into the breach and almost immediately became the entrepôt of choice for silk. In 1665, five Dutch ships5 left the Turkish port of Smyrna (now Izmir) for Livorno carrying five hundred bales of silk; in 1668, they carried twenty-five hundred.

  The dramatic increase was driven by technology. The unique characteristics of silk fibers made them uniquely easy to weave by machine, and the demand for such machines was greatest in the triangle formed by the “silk cities” of Pisa, Lucca, and Livorno. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century, an engineer from Padua named Vittorio Zonca had designed the first machine to turn silk fiber into silk cloth. It was Zonca’s machine,6 which consisted of two frames, one inside the other, with the outer one holding spindles and reels and the inner one rotating around a central vertical post that held the silk by friction—a machine that had been kept a secret in the Piedmont district for more than a century—that drew John Lombe to Livorno. Or, more exactly, the plans for the machine, which he had traveled from Derbyshire to acquire.

  It’s not known how he got them; bribery is a good guess. But when Lombe left Livorno in 1716, he had a set of plans for Zonca’s mill,* and two years later, something even better. In 1718, having figuratively filed the serial numbers off his smuggled plans, he received patent number 422 for his invention of “three sorts of engines never before made7 or used in Great Britaine [sic], one to winde the finest raw silk, another to spin, and the other to twist the finest Italian raw silk into organzine in great perfection, which was never before done in this country.” That’s about as specific as the application got, and it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the vagueness was deliberate, along with the decision to include a lot of Italian, apparently so that the process would remain exclusively Lombe’s even after the patent expired.

  In 1719, John Lombe joined with his brother, Thomas, a mercer (that is, a dealer in fine, usually imported cloth) and a member of the London guild known as the Mercer’s Company,* to build their own mill. The site they chose was in Derbyshire, on the same island in the River Derwent used by Cotchett, and
for the same reason: the water flowing past could easily be used to power their new silk mill. The “Italian Works,” as the Lombe mill was locally known, was a five-story structure, 100 feet long by 37 feet wide, set on pillars over an undershot waterwheel that drove a single vertical shaft operating machines on each of the five floors. The mill, which employed more than two hundred men,8 was able to produce so much silk that Thomas Lombe’s investment, reported at £30,000, had increased by 1732 to more than £80,000.

  Lombe neglected to point out this seemingly pertinent fact when he petitioned Parliament for an extension of his 1718 patent, arguing that “he has not hitherto received the intended benefit9 of the aforesaid patent, and in consideration of the extraordinary nature of [the] undertaking.” Moreover, he was then locked in litigation with a group of potential competitors eager to get into the silk business, who introduced a suit, The case of the manufacturers of woolen,10 linnen, mohair, and cotton yarn … with respect to a bill for preserving and encouraging a new invention in England by Sir Thomas Lombe. He must have been a persuasive advocate on his own behalf, because even though the Crown declined to reward him with a patent extension, it did dismiss the suit, and paid him £14,000 in the bargain. Lombe would go on to become an alderman and a sheriff of a ward of the City of London; in 1739 he died, leaving an estate of £120,000, a poor moral lesson about the hazards of theft.

  Lombe’s career is even more telling, a reminder that mechanization was a necessary but not sufficient component of national industrialization. No matter how efficient the Zonca/Lombe machine, it was still spinning yarn for a fabric whose appeal was restricted to the elite of English society. This simple fact placed the same ceiling on expansion that had limited the potential of every other innovation since Heron started making toys for Alexandria’s nobles. Only one silk spinning factory11—the Lombe mill at Derby—was established in England before 1750, and obviously waterpower was sufficient for all its needs. The true industrialization of Britain, and subsequently, the world, depended on a commodity that could attract consumers not by the thousands but by the millions. Something that could be produced in such quantity that hundreds of factories would need steam power not only to manufacture but (remember Rocket) to transport it.

  Something like, for example, cotton.

  TODAY, THE SEED FIBER of plants belonging to the genus Gossypium is the world’s most important nonfood agricultural product, with something in the neighborhood of 115 million bales, or twenty-eight million tons, produced annually. All of that production comes from the plant’s boll, or seed pod, which appears after the plant blossoms and, as it matures, grows “hair” in the form of fibers from two to three inches in length. Since not all bolls mature at the same time, for most of the crop’s history, handpicking has proved to deliver the highest yields; this has resulted in a number of well-known consequences, including the durability of the institution of slavery, from Egypt in 3000 BCE to the American South until 1865 or so. Abusive labor practices and cotton appear together pretty much everywhere, in fact, that the climate is temperate, with a lot of moisture during the growing season and a hot and dry harvesting season. Which describes the banks of not only the Nile and the Mississippi, but the Hooghly: the river that runs past Calcutta, home to the world’s first great multinational corporation.

  The international venture that would ultimately be known as the Honourable East India Company was created by a royal charter—a letter patent—issued by Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600, providing a fifteen-year monopoly on trade with the so-called Spice Islands. Soon enough, the charter, and the ambitions of the Company, were to embrace south Asia and the Indian subcontinent; its scale was enough to make twenty-first-century multinationals hide their heads in shame. From about 1608 until 1757, the Company merely dominated India’s economy; from 1757 until 1858, it ruled nearly half the subcontinent as sovereign, with its own tax collectors, police force, and army.

  India had many attractions for the Company, but by far the largest was that India could produce more cotton more cheaply than anywhere else on the planet. Even before the Company chose the village of Calcutta12 on India’s east coast as its trading post in 1690, they were in the cotton business; shipments of Indian “calico”—named not for Calcutta, but for the Malabar Coast entrepôt known as Calicut—rose twentyfold between 1620 and 1625 and another fivefold between 1625 and 1690.

  Production increased to meet demand, and demand for Indian cotton rose because it was not only cheaper than cotton from elsewhere, but better—the result not of superior technology but of a gigantic labor pool with centuries of expertise. English cotton thread was not only pricier than Indian, but too weak to be used on its own; because weaving used the vertical threads of the warp to hold the lateral threads of the weft in a lattice, the warp fibers needed to be both longer and stronger. This obliged English weavers to use local cotton only in combination with much stronger linen, to make the cloth known as fustian. Even then, it made for a very rough weave13 indeed, not nearly smooth enough to accept the printed designs demanded by Britain’s aristocrats, or the increasingly prosperous British middle class.

  As Indian cotton began to crowd out not only domestic cotton but all domestic cloth, British textile manufacturers predictably sought protection from imports. They did not count any large number of cotton weavers, given the small part that the fiber was then playing in the English economy; but they did include politically powerful weavers of wool, and especially of silk. In particular, the hand silk weavers of Spitalfields, a hamlet in the East End of London, pressured Parliament to pass the first of what would be known as the Calico Acts.

  The Calico Acts (the first was passed in 1700, the second, more restrictive one twenty years later) prohibited both the import and ownership of Indian printed cottons. It was a decisive victory for the large but dispersed English textile industry against the single largest joint stock corporation in the kingdom. But if the Acts were originally drafted to favor manufacturing at the expense of trade, they failed miserably. In one of history’s most significant validations of the law of unintended consequences, the Acts, which originated as protection for Britain’s woolen, silk, and linen manufacturers, sheltered the nascent cotton industry even better. The results were, to understate the case, startling, beginning with the creation of the most valuable export industry in human history. Between 1700 and 1750,14 British export trade in textiles doubled; by 1800 it had trebled, and, with two-thirds of the total generated by cotton goods, British manufactured exports amounted to 40 percent of national income—the largest percentage ever enjoyed by any nation before or since.

  The explosive growth in the output of Britain’s textile manufacturers was fueled by the equally explosive growth in the number of potential consumers for their products. The market for cotton,15 in fact, was so avid that only extraordinary increases in productivity could satisfy it. Since the domestic market could expand only as fast as the population itself, really fast growth needed to harness colonial policy to the export-friendly protectionist philosophy that would come to be called mercantilism. Thus the policy of conquering large territories was justified not because of a colony’s mineral wealth, but because of its consumers.

  Those overseas consumers were needed16 badly, because while the domestic market was growing (the British economy trebled in the century following the passage of the first Calico Act, mostly because of population growth, but partly because per capita GDP grew by a third, twice as fast as anywhere else in Europe), it wasn’t growing nearly fast enough.

  Not all of the increase was even measurable. Hundreds of studies of probate show dramatic increases in the inventories of furniture, clothing, household tools, and so on that Britons were bequeathing to their heirs, which strongly suggests that the stock of material goods was exploding. Even those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British households that were seeing no increase in their cash income were nonetheless able to reallocate that income to purchase more market-supplied goods in preferenc
e to homemade. They were the ones who were able to attract the attention17 of a generation of inventors eager to replace their homespun with something better, or at least prettier.

  And they didn’t just substitute market-bought commodities for homemade; they also replaced them with products never before imagined. Throughout Britain, members of the middle and even working classes even looked different, once they were widely able to replace dyed wool with cotton prints.

  In order to make cotton fabric from domestic yarn smooth enough to accept prints, however, Britain’s textile manufacturers needed to master the other half of the clothmaking equation. The industry’s next world-changing invention was intended not to spin fiber into yarn, but weave yarn into cloth.

  With the exception of flaking stone into useful shapes (a skill that seems unlikely to return to the vocational curriculum), weaving is humanity’s oldest craft. People in Mesopotamia and Turkey wove both baskets and cloth around 8000 BCE, and the first technique, simple over-and-under latticework, remained pretty much the only technique for at least four millennia. By 2000 BCE,18 however, far more complex weaving was being practiced, as is evidenced by models of looms found in Egyptian tombs. These frame looms had replaced the temporary “looms” made by either hanging fibers from tree branches or stretching them across a hole in the ground, making it possible to use heddles (the cables or wires used to separate the threads that form the warp of a piece of woven cloth) and permitting a shuttle to carry the weft laterally. A fabric’s texture and design are created by simultaneously lifting the heddles to create a space, or shed, and interlacing the warp with different weights and colors of weft. The more heddles in a loom, the more combinations possible.