The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  Lincoln, the only American president ever awarded a patent, had a long and passionate love for things mechanical. He made his living for many years as a railroad lawyer and appears to have absorbed something of the fascination with machines, and with steam, of the engineers with whom he worked. In his first public speech, in 1832, he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the need for navigable rivers and canals to accommodate steamboats. In the middle of the Civil War, he signed, on July 1, 1862, the Pacific Railway Act, the authorizing legislation for what would become America’s transcontinental railroad. Even more revealing, in 1859, after his loss in the Illinois senatorial race against Stephen Douglas, he was much in demand for a speech entitled “Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements” that he gave at agricultural fairs, schools, and self-improvement societies.

  The speech—decidedly not one of Lincoln’s best—nonetheless revealed an enthusiasm for mechanical innovation that resonates powerfully even today. “Man,” Lincoln said, “is not the only animal who labors,12 but he is the only one who improves his workmanship … by Discoveries and Inventions.”

  The speech goes on to offer a brief history of civilization as seen through the lens of one invention after another:

  We can scarcely conceive the possibility of making much of anything else, without the use of iron tools…. the boat is indispensable to navigation [though] it is not probable that the philosophical principle upon which the use of the boat primarily depends—to-wit, the principle that anything will float, which cannot sink without displacing more than its own weight of water—was known … the plow, of very early origin; and reaping and threshing machines, of modern invention, are, at this day, the principal improvements in agriculture…. Take any given space of the earth’s surface—for instance, Illinois; and all the power exerted by all the men, and beasts, and running water, and steam, over and upon it, shall not equal the one hundredth part of what is exerted by the blowing of the wind over and upon the same space. And yet no very successful mode of controlling, and directing the wind, has been discovered….

  Lincoln concluded:

  The advantageous use of Steam-power is, unquestionably, a modern discovery. And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt. What appears strange is that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as a toy…. in the days before Edward Coke’s original Statute on Monopolies, any man could instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention…. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery of new and useful things.

  There’s something appealing about starting a book in a museum in London and ending it in one in Washington. However, the real ending takes place just to the north of the National Museum of American History, at another Washington landmark: the United States Department of Commerce, a huge pile of limestone known since 1983 as the Herbert C. Hoover Building. Since 1995, it has housed the White House Visitor Center on its street level, in the same space that was once home to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

  Incised in the stone over the Herbert C. Hoover Building’s north entrance is the legend that, with Lincoln’s characteristic brevity, sums up the single most powerful idea in the world:

  THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED

  THE FUEL OF INTEREST

  TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS

  * In 1861, Ericsson, who had emigrated to the United States in 1839, designed and built the revolutionary ironclad steamship the Monitor.

  * Reams of Ph.D. theses have explored why industrialization was greeted with such a different attitude on the other side of the Atlantic, where Emerson, Whitman, and Hart Crane could all celebrate the new nation’s bridges and railroads. It’s not unrelated to America’s early displacement of Britain as the world’s premier economic power.

  * This is an argument starter,5 but not a particularly original one. Andrew Roberts argues in his controversial History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900 that the distinction between the period of British ascendancy and of American is roughly the same as that between imperial Rome and its republican ancestor, i.e. not much of a difference at all. The Indian economic historian Deepak Lal believes the rise to predominance of the English-speaking world is the most important event of the last thousand years.

  * Not without some envy; Goethe wrote that Germans “regard discovery and invention10 as a splendid personally gained possession, but the clever Englishman transforms it, by a patent, into a real possession…. One may well ask why are they in every respect in advance of us?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing may be a lonely business, but it is not a solitary one. Like the steam engine itself, creating The Most Powerful Idea in the World depended on the work of hundreds if not thousands of people, but—as with the steam engine—only a few can be adequately recognized. Life isn’t fair.

  We are not yet at the moment in history where research can be performed entirely via Internet access, and I am small-l luddite enough to be grateful for the need to spend time in libraries, large and small. As always, the guidance of Elizabeth Bennett at Princeton University’s Firestone Library has been indispensable; so indeed has the Princeton Public Library, and I am delighted to recognize the help of Leslie Burger and her staff. I am also profoundly in debt to the Birmingham Central Library, which has maintained—and microfilmed—the Boulton and Watt Archive, and the Matthew Boulton Papers. A special debt of gratitude is similarly owed to Tom Vine, at London’s Science and Society Picture Library.

  I am likewise happy to recognize the enormous help of two people who signed on to help me to enforce quality-control standards on specific chapters of the manuscript for The Most Powerful Idea: Dan Swain and Paul Anderson. Each is responsible for saving me from hundreds of embarrassing errors, and neither can be blamed for any that crept in after their work was done. As both were found through the good offices of Princeton University, my advice to all authors remains: Live in a college town.

  The subtitle to this book reads “A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention,” and the use of the indefinite article is no accident. The story of humanity’s climb out of its Malthusian trap has been told from a hundred different perspectives, and all of them have something useful to say. The scholars, living and dead, who have traveled this road before me are recognized in the endnotes that follow these Acknowledgments, but the work of nine didn’t supply merely historical examples but inspiration: Joel Mokyr, David Landes, Gregory Clark, Eugene Ferguson, John Lienhard, Lynn White, Samuel Florman, David Warsh, and—most of all—Abbott Payson Usher. Friends and colleagues who read this book in various draft forms have given service above and beyond the call of duty: John Rosen, Michel Debiche, Frank Ryle, Joyce Howe, Holly Goldberg Sloan, Gary Rosen, and David Jacobus. While I was writing this book, Lewis Lapham and Adam Garfinkle were both kind enough to offer me the chance to write for their respective publications, for which I am happy to publicly thank them.

  Thanks are due also to this book’s editors. At Jonathan Cape, Ellah Allfrey was this book’s first champion, and her editing added immeasurably to it before she passed the baton to Alex Bowler, who has gracefully seen it through to publication. Tim Bartlett at Random House immersed himself in the manuscript of The Most Powerful Idea with a level of detail and care that I have never seen surpassed—and as a onetime editor myself, this is no small feat. There are literally thousands of places in this text that have his imprint. I promised Tim that I would immunize him from any criticisms of this book’s editing, and do so cheerfully: Its many remaining infelicities appear, without fail, in areas where I disagreed with Tim’s extraordinarily perceptive edits. Thanks are also due to Tim’s un
failingly helpful assistant, Jessie Waters. The book’s production editor, Janet Wygal, and its copy editor, Emily DeHuff, delivered work at the very highest level of professionalism, and The Most Powerful Idea is better for their labors. A special thank-you is owed to Jennifer Hershey, who has consistently shown her support for this project.

  My agents, Eric Simonoff of William Morris Endeavor, and Anne Sibbald at Janklow & Nesbit, have never done anything but surpass the highest expectations of what a literary agent can be: immediate response to questions, intelligent evaluations of work, determined promotions of the interests of author and book. It is one of the joys of my life to count them as friends and advocates.

  Most important, I am grateful to my wife, Jeanine, and to my children: Quillan (one of the book’s very first readers), Emma, and Alex. I am no treat to live with, even when I am not writing a book, and their love and support is the only thing that makes the life of a writer even possible.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE: ROCKET

  1 “the rapid development in industry” George N. Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution (Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Company, 1953).

  2 Carolingian merchants spoke different languages This has been conclusively demonstrated by dozens of studies, of which the most recent is Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  3 The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE Michael Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3, Fall 1993. The figures in question are J. Bradford deLong’s slightly different estimates.

  4 The nineteenth-century French infant Numbers from UN and CIA Factbook.

  5 A skilled fourth-century weaver Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution—Lessons for the Computer Age (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

  6 But by 1900 In 1900, the average U.S. hourly wage was $0.22, and a loaf of bread cost about a nickel; in 2000, the average wage was $18.65, and a loaf of bread cost less than $1.79.

  7 “[a]bout 1760, a wave of gadgets swept over England” T. S. Ashton, Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  8 “fizzled out” Joel Mokyr, “The Great Synergy: The European Enlightenment as a Factor in Modern Economic Growth,” April 2005, online article at http://faculty.weas.northwestern.edu/∼jmokyr/Dolfsma.pdf.

  CHAPTER ONE: CHANGES IN THE ATMOSPHERE

  1 No other steam engines were inspired by it T. P. Tassios, “Why the First Industrial Revolution Did Not Take Place in Alexandria,” in 10th International Symposium on Electrets, 1999, IEEE, eds. (Athens: IEEE, 2002).

  2 “if a light vessel with a narrow mouth” Hero of Alexandria, Joseph George Greenwood, and Bennett Woodcroft, The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria (London and New York: Macdonald and American Elsevier, 1971).

  3 “very satisfactory theory” Marie Boas, “Hero’s Pneumatica: A Study of Its Transmission and Influence,” in Otto Mayr, ed., Philosophers and Machines (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976).

  4 Aleotti’s work, and subsequent translations Ibid.

  5 It is testimony to the weight of formal logic Graham Hollister-Short, “The Formation of Knowledge Concerning Atmospheric Pressure and Steam Power in Europe from Aleotti (1589) to Papin (1690),” History of Technology 25, 2004.

  6 “What is so intricate” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, cited in Boas, “Hero’s Pneumatica.”

  7 Torricelli had not only invented W. E. Knowles Middleton, “The Place of Torricelli in the History of the Barometer,” Isis: Journal of the History of Science in Society 54, no. 1, March 1963.

  8 “technical wonders of its time” Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

  9 As the air was pumped out of the chamber Arnold Pacey, The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology (London: Lane, 1974).

  10 A dispute between King and Parliament H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  11 “the leading pumping engineer in England” Allan Chapman, “England’s Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the Art of Experiment in Restoration England,” Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 67, 1996.

  12 to anything, in short Ibid.

  13 “those two grand and most catholic principles, matter and motion” “Robert Boyle” in Noretta Koertge, ed., New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Detroit: Scribner’s, 2008).

  14 halfway to atheism “Robert Boyle” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  15 “engine philosophy” Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Including a Translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus physicus de natura aeris by Simon Schaffer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

  16 England’s most gifted mathematician Chapman, “England’s Leonardo.”

  17 “the best Mechanick this day in the world” Ibid.

  18 “Gentleman, free, and unconfin’d” Ibid.

  19 made him the first scientist in British history Ibid.

  20 It took until 1665 “Robert Hooke” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  21 “mere Empiricks” Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

  CHAPTER TWO: A GREAT COMPANY OF MEN

  1 In 1671, he got the chance Cornelis D. Andriesse, Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  2 In the 1686 issue of Philosophical Transactions White, Medieval Technology and Social Change.

  3 “Since it is a property of water” Milton Kerker, “Science and the Steam Engine,” Technology and Culture 2, no. 4, Autumn 1961.

  4 By the time he built a demonstration submarine Richard S. Westfall, The Galileo Project (Rice University), at http://galileo.rice.edu/.

  5 “to Raise Water from Lowe Pitts by Fire” Pacey, Maze of Ingenuity.

  6 “was responsible for the design and fabrication” Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation: Bureaucrats, Families, and Heroes in the Early Industrial Revolution, As Foreseen in Bacon’s New Atlantis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).

  7 “a place of resort for artists, mechanics” A 1640 letter to Robert Boyle, cited in ibid.

  8 “at a potter’s house in Lambeth” Ibid.

  9 to refill the boiler at least once a minute Richard L. Hills, Power from Steam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  10 “Mr. Savery… entertained the Royal Society” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society XXI, p. 228.

  11 “one of the great original synthetic inventions” Eugene S. Ferguson, “The Steam Engine before 1830” in Kranzberg and Pursell, eds., Technology in Western Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

  12 The 1712 engine of Thomas Newcomen Howard Jones, Steam Engines: An International History (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1973).

  13 (sometimes a plumber) David Richards, “Thomas Newcomen and the Environment of Innovation,” Industrial Archaeology 13, no. 4, Winter 1978.

  14 of the latter’s progress Kerker, “Science and the Steam Engine.”

  15 “could he [Papin] make a speedy vacuum” Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954); also Samuel Smiles, Men of Invention and Industry (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885). The story of the Newcomen-Hooke correspondence dates from 1797, when it was reported by Dr. John Robison, a friend of James Watt, whose other recollections have almost uniformly proven valid. In the absence of corroborating documentary evidence, however, some scholars accept it, others not—though much of the doubt seems to come from the belief that the fifty-two-year-old Hooke would have
had little to say to a twenty-four-year-old ironmonger; in short, retroactive snobbishness.

  16 For purposes of the experiment Martin Triewald’s 1734 Short Description of the Atmospheric Steam Engine, quoted in Hills, Power from Steam.

  17 “not being either philosophers” “Thomas Newcomen” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  18 Newcomen and Calley replaced Usher, History of Mechanical Inventions.

  19 “the Air makes a Noise” Hills, Power from Steam.

  20 “the valve still functioned perfectly” Ibid.

  21 They also tell of the years he spent Sir William Fairbairn, The Life of Sir William Fairbairn (London, 1877), quoted in Cohen.

  22 Now imagine producing such a fitting Joseph W. Roe, English and American Tool Builders (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916).

  23 “partly because they were equipped” David Wolman, A Left-hand Turn Around the World: Chasing the Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005).

  24 The hand has led the brain to evolve Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  25 “It is only with Leonardo” Usher, History of Mechanical Inventions.

  26 “Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets” E. S. Ferguson, “The Mind’s Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology,” Science 197, no. 4306, August 1977.

  27 “both dead and living” Usher, History of Mechanical Inventions.