The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  And they were doing so in an environment in which standardization was very highly valued, and strictly enforced. Possibly because it achieved status as a coherent nation-state centuries before England, to say nothing of Britain, France has a far longer history of activism in setting national standards; the Académie Française, as a case in point, has been protecting the purity of the French language since 1634. The project of synthesizing the knowledge held tightly in the hands of French artisans, mechanics, and craftsmen began only forty years later, when the Académie des Sciences—France’s equivalent of the Royal Society—began a national “Description des arts et métiers” intended to establish standard versions of hundreds of apparatuses. Among other things, the project provided Diderot34 and his Encyclopédie with more than 150 drawings and engravings of water pumps, looms, and forges. In the following century, the French government explicitly took on the responsibility of educating and training engineers with the founding of several schools focused on applied science, including the École des Ponts et chaussées in 1774; the École polytechnique was founded by a graduate of Ponts twenty years later, in part to impose technical standards on industry with the same rigor that the Académie governed the French language. The Encyclopédie itself promised “to offer craftsmen the chance to learn35 from philosophers, and thereby hopefully to advance further toward perfection.”

  In Great Britain, on the other hand, inventions were much more of a haphazard process, performed by onetime wheelwrights and carpenters competing, rather than collaborating, with one another. Their success did not go unnoticed in France, nor unremarked. In 1824, an École polytechnique graduate named Sadi Carnot wrote Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance—the first theoretical explanation of the thermodynamics of steam power—essentially out of dismay that the great achievements of British engineering had been produced by men, like Watt, with no formal schooling. The snobbery served French science well; less well French innovation. If one secret to sustaining an inventive culture was making inventors into national heroes, it was a secret that didn’t translate well into French. Between 1740 and 1780,36 the French inclination to reward inventors not by enforcing a natural right but by the grant of pensions and prizes resulted in the award of nearly 7 million livres—approximately $600 million today*—to inventors of largely forgotten devices, but Claude-François Jouffroy d’Abbans (inventor of one of the first working steamboats), Barthélemy Thimonnier (creator of the first sewing machine), and Aimé Argand (a partner of Boulton and friend of Watt whose oil lamp became the world’s standard) all died penniless. Other than Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the creator of the eponymous loom, and perhaps the Montgolfiers, the French did not lionize their inventors.37

  This didn’t mean they didn’t understand the strategic importance of technology. Carnot himself wrote, “to deprive England of her steam engines,38 you would deprive her of both coal and iron; you would cut off the sources of all her wealth, totally destroy her means of prosperity, and reduce this nation of huge power to insignificance. The destruction of her navy, which she regards as the main source of her strength, would probably be less disastrous.” Competition with Britain alone might have allowed French industrialization to survive the haughtiness that made the nation elevate pure science over its commercial applications, if not for an unfortunate bit of timing. The same year that Joseph Bramah was hiring Henry Maudslay to help build his locks at 124 Piccadilly, several thousand citizens of Paris marched down the Rue Saint-Antoine to the nearly empty prison known as the Bastille. The same year that the British government was certifying a grant of incorporation for Boulton & Watt to design and sell steam engines, the French government was beheading Antoine Lavoisier, the chemist whose research on heat was central to the theory behind those engines.

  It was not immediately apparent that the French Revolution would be hostile to invention or inventors. The first law protecting intellectual property in France was passed in 1791, in ringing language that declared,

  every novel idea39 whose realization or development can become useful to society belongs primarily to him who conceived it, and that it would be a violation of the rights of man in their very essence if an industrial invention were not regarded as the property of its creator.

  Unfortunately for the cause of innovation, the law was abrogated only two years later, as a side effect of the extreme violence of the Terror. And while it was reinstated in 1794, nobody seems to have told the French patent office. They were already playing catch-up in 1792, when Britain granted 85 patents, and France, with a population twice as large, issued 29. In 1793, that number fell to 4. From 1793 to 1800, in fact,40 Britain issued 533 patents to France’s 65. In addition to all their other world-historical effects, the French revolutionists, and the Corsican emperor whose wars were the Revolution’s last chapter, constitute the most important reasons that Britain and America established a thirty-year lead on all other European nations in the development of steam power. As Jeff Horn, whose study of French industrialization is very close to the last word on the subject, put it, “When the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars ended41 in 1815, the British were approximately a generation ahead in industrial technology and in the elaboration of the mechanized factory.”

  Looked at through the history of ideas, the French attitude toward invention, and even its revolutionary spirit, share a common origin. To the same degree that Britain’s beliefs about property are traceable to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, France’s can be found in the Discourses of the onetime engraver, writer, musician, and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.* In his First Discourse, for example, Rousseau shared his discomfort with technical progress, which he associated with decadence and moral decline; his Second Discourse argued that the invention of any technology, by demonstrating that some are more gifted than others, promotes inequality and eventually tyranny: “Astronomy was born from superstition … physics from vain curiosity” (First Discourse, volume I). In his “treatise” on education, Émile, Rousseau attacked what has come to be known as amour propre: the invidious striving after excellence in the eyes of one’s fellows. Rousseau’s fetish for compassion and equality have made him a powerful influence on generations of Marxists, but his earliest, and most consequential, impact was on the revolutionaries of eighteenth-century France. When in 1793 the Jacobins closed the Académie des Sciences on the logic that “the Republic does not need savants,”42 they were channeling Rousseau.

  And they were hampering their Republic in the race to technological mastery. The finish line for the first stage of that race had been the use of condensed steam to convert atmospheric pressure into the reciprocating motion of Newcomen’s pumps. For the second stage, it was converting the expansive power of steam into rotary motion able to drive dozens, and then hundreds, of spinning and weaving machines.

  The third stage was converting steam power into motion. Locomotion.

  * This is a particularly strong argument against a belief in progress.

  * David Warsh points out, in his own Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (which has inspired much of this chapter), that Smith’s book was the first of only four dominant textbooks the field has ever known; the only one until Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, which was followed by Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics and eventually by Paul Samuelson’s Economics. The pattern of successively shorter titles seems finally to be at an end.

  * In fact, the same process works in reverse, though at the expense of the pyramid metaphor. Not only does a larger population result in more inventions, the wealth created by those inventions permits even more population growth, and yet another Malthusian trap.

  † In units called Geary-Khamis dollars, each of which is equivalent in purchasing power to a U.S. dollar in 1990, and which is the benchmark “currency” of choice for really long time ranges.

  * Perversely enough, nineteenth-century Russia was both too big and too small.
In 1766, the brilliant Ivan Polzunov, inventor of the world’s first two-cylinder engine, died of tuberculosis, and when his engine, which operated the bellows in Russia’s largest forge, needed repair three months later, no one could be found who understood how to reassemble it.

  * It is even harder to calculate the current value of eighteenth-century French currency than British. From 1726 on, an ounce of gold was set equal to 92.5 livres; during the same period, an ounce of gold cost £4.10. Seven million livres, therefore, equaled about £310,000. Using the index of average earnings, this is more than £400 million today.

  * The Locke versus Rousseau debate remains one of academe’s almost preternaturally popular, used to explain everything from the differences between modern and medieval perspectives to the reason for Britain’s reluctance to adopt the euro.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  STRONG STEAM

  concerning a Cornish Giant, and a trip up Camborne Hill; the triangular relationship between power, weight, and pressure; George Washington’s flour mill and the dredging of the Schuylkill River; the long trip from Cornwall to Peru; and the most important railroad race in history

  THE CAUSE OF THE ACCIDENT at Poldory Mine in January 1784 is not precisely known, nor is its date; some accounts have it occurring on the sixteenth, others on the nineteenth. Its effect on the mining families of Cornwall’s Gwennap Valley, about two miles from the town of Redruth, was depressingly routine: tragic for the six families that lost their breadwinners, a reminder to everyone else of the dangers of mining—cave-ins, floods, fires, and suffocation.

  The risk of each hazard increased in direct proportion to the mine’s depth, and by 1784, Cornwall’s copper was being carved from seams several hundred feet below the surface. This made Poldory, and its neighbor, the Ale-and-Cakes,* utterly dependent on the Boulton & Watt engine pumping the water out of the two mines and into the Great County Adit that drained a good portion of central Cornwall. If the engine didn’t work, neither did the miners.

  The reliance on steam power, however, had introduced a new danger: catastrophic failure of the engine itself. Not all steam engine failures are catastrophic—complete and sudden. Valves can stick, or beams crack, harming only the engine itself. A failure of the engine’s cylinder housing or boiler is different. The sudden release of steam under pressure is literally explosive, sending shards of metal flying outward at several hundred feet per second, driven by jets of scalding steam. It was precisely this sort of accident that killed three miners, and maimed several more, at Poldory, and when the news reached the engine’s designer and builder, his reaction was predictable. On January 24, James Watt wrote to Thomas Wilson, a mine owner living in the town of Truro in Cornwall,

  I am exceedingly shocked1 at the account of the accident at Poldory and should have been Glad to have had some particulars. They must certainly have had a very strong steam otherwise, the people would have had time to escape. Please also to advise who the people were and how so many came to be about the boiler; Copper tubes must be entirely given up without men can be found more carefull [sic] in the management of them. If any of the families of the deceased or the surviving persons who were scalded are in distressed circumstances, I am sure that Mr. B[oulton] will Join me in being pleased that you should give a small matter for their immediate relief as if of your own accord without mentioning our names …”

  The phrase “strong steam” is telling. By 1784, Watt was decades removed from his first experience with Newcomen engines, but those decades had done nothing to ease his fear of the caged power of steam under pressure. Some of the concern dates to his earliest experiments: two years of sealing materials that failed to seal, tubing that leaked, and cylinders with seams that burst. The larger part, however, was an analytical blind spot, one that he shared with the most sophisticated scientists of the eighteenth century.

  That blind spot, about the nature of the relationship between heat and motion, was no longer the belief that phlogiston was released whenever anything was burned. The failure of phlogiston theory to account for any number of observed phenomena had opened the door for another, more useful though still flawed, to take its place. This was the idea that heat remained a substance, but a weightless one, called caloric. The Scottish philosopher William Cleghorn, another protégé of Joseph Black, theorized that this “subtle fluid” (in the words of Lavoisier, who also coined the word “caloric”) was a gas whose properties included varying levels of attraction to different types of matter, thus explaining why the heat capacity of coal was different from that of glass. The theory further held that caloric could be neither created nor destroyed, but only changed from Black’s latent heat—the potential locked up in a combustible substance—to sensible heat, and then back again, with the total amount of caloric in the universe staying constant.

  Caloric theory remained the conventional wisdom for sixty years or more for a simple reason: It explained, better than any alternative, dozens of physical phenomena. Hot fluids cool, in caloric theory, because caloric repels itself, thus diffusing from an area of high concentration to a lower one. It explains heat radiation and Boyle’s Law, and even formed the basis, forty years after Poldory, for Sadi Carnot’s Réflexions, and the first working theory of steam engines: that their capacity depended only on the difference between high temperature and low temperature, which, in Watt’s steam engine, was the difference between the temperature of the boiler and that of the condenser.

  This didn’t mean that no one was thinking outside the caloric box. There was, for example, the thoroughly remarkable Benjamin Thompson of Massachusetts, a loyalist American who, after backing the losing side in the Revolutionary War, moved, first to England (where in 1779 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society), and four years later, apparently on a whim, to Bavaria. There he found himself, on behalf of the Prince-Elector2 Karl-Theodor, running an espionage network that stole design sketches from the Soho Manufactory and spirited them out of England. For this and other services (including the invention of Rumford Soup, a concoction of peas, barley, potato, and old beer intended to meet the nutritional needs of Europe’s poor) he was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1791.

  Seven years later, Count Rumford (as he had styled himself, after the New Hampshire town where he had been a schoolmaster) performed an experiment investigating the nature of heat, inspired by his observation of Bavarian metalworkers boring out a brass cannon barrel, which generated enough heat from friction that the barrel was too hot to touch. Lavoisier’s theory predicted that the caloric associated with drilling should have melted the brass shavings into which it presumably had been transferred. Since it did not, Rumford tested it, rather cleverly, by boring a cannon barrel underwater. The borer’s friction produced enough heat to keep the water boiling—and the water continued boiling as long as the borer was spinning, thus disproving the idea that caloric was a property contained within matter, since it was never exhausted.

  If caloric was not a fluid, it had to be something else. Rumford’s monograph, An Experimental Enquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat Which Is Excited by Friction, argued that the “something else” was actually motion: that heat and motion are essentially the same thing. This was critical, and surprisingly slow in coming. It is, after all, not hard to find places outside the laboratory where mechanical work creates heat: rubbing two Boy Scout–approved sticks together, for example. John Locke himself observed the heat produced by the mechanical energy of a wheel rubbing against its axle.

  But even though Count Rumford shot a very large hole in the idea of caloric, theories are overturned only by better theories, and he didn’t really have one to offer. So long as caloric theory was still an effective way of approximating physical reality, it wasn’t going away. This was a real obstacle to engineers, since a key element of caloric theory confused the nature of work in steam engines. Caloric theory held that heat was latent3 within combustible materials and was simply converted from latent to sensible, which “proved” that there c
ould be no advantage to a high-pressure engine, which would simply increase sensible heat at the expense of latent heat.

  This was confounded by another blind spot: Until the middle of the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers alike widely believed that the source of a steam engine’s work was the pressure of expanding steam on a moving piston. More pressure, therefore, equaled more work. So far, so good. But the analogy they used as a model was waterpower, and that was not so good. A waterwheel produces the same amount of work when relatively little water flows over a long distance as it does when a lot of water flows over a short distance; a waterwheel will make as many revolutions when it catches a trickle that has fallen a thousand feet as when it is driven by a river falling a few inches. By the same token, they reasoned, a steam engine would be just as efficient using low pressure to drive a long beam as high pressure to drive a shorter one—and steam, as the families of the Poldory miners would certainly testify, is a lot safer at low pressure.

  Reasoning by analogy is always suspect. What was missing in this example was an understanding that it was not the pressure that mattered, but the heat—heat energy and mechanical energy were just different forms of the same thing. The heat needed to raise one pound of water a single degree is equivalent to lifting 772 pounds one foot, and vice versa: lifting 772 pounds one foot generates an equivalent amount of heat.* The slow realization of this relationship is explained largely by the low efficiency of the early engines. If you’re converting only 2 percent of the heat energy into work, you’d be hard pressed to notice its absence. And even when they noticed it, the blind spot endured. No matter how many times engineers observed4 more work being done with more heat, they were unable to make any sense of the results.