by Ben Russell
These five building blocks of making – product, materials, organization, techniques and marketing – suggest that artisans were as much endowed with entrepreneurial and commercial skills as they were with practical ability. Making things came hand in hand with managing debt and credit, keeping an eye on the bottom line, managing a possibly unruly workforce, seeking out customers and maintaining links in the trade. This high degree of innovation and resourcefulness went beyond that simply associated with new techniques.
The second key aspect of making things concerns not just the question of ‘how?’, but those of ‘what?’ and ‘why?’, too. This analysis has its starting point in the idea of ‘path dependency’, which contends that if, for example, Britain had plentiful supplies of coal and iron ore, it would be more likely to adopt new technologies which burned coal and smelted iron ore than those that exploited water power or timber resources. Proceeding down a particular path made future new technologies more likely to stick to that path. Path dependency has always been part of a formal analysis of economic trends as the economy industrialized. The intention here is to explore the influence not just of science but of culture on what things were made, and why.
The baseline for this analysis is that in Britain the practical contribution made by craftsmen and artisans was highly valued. In 1718 Guy Miege wrote of the English that ‘None has been more industrious to improve the Mechanick Arts; and the World to this Day, is obliged to ’em for many of their useful Inventions and Discoveries.’19 In the 1730s the art critic Jean-Bernard, Abbé le Blanc, commented: ‘’Tis not in great works alone that the English excel, the most common trades here seem to partake of the perfection of arts . . . The English artisan has the quality, extremely commendable, and peculiar to him which is, never swerve from the degree of perfection in his trade which he is master of.’20 Jean Ryhiner, a Swiss calico printer, wrote in 1766 how ‘Everyone knows this nation whose industry and stubborn patience in overcoming every kind of obstacle are beyond imagination. They cannot boast of many inventions, but only having perfected the inventions of others.’21 In 1803 the economist and businessman Jean-Baptiste Say wrote how ‘the enormous wealth of Britain is less owing to her own advances in scientific acquirements, high as she ranks in that department, as to the wonderful practical skills of her adventurers in the useful application of knowledge and the superiority of her workmen in rapid and masterly execution.’22 These examples illustrate British workers’ recognized prowess, not necessarily at generating original ideas, but at turning ephemeral ideas into tangible products.
Beyond the innate instinct for technological creativity that motivated these craftsmen and artisans, other factors as well as science influenced the paths that making things would advance along. The first is steam power. Paradoxically, despite it becoming an emblem of Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial prowess, many, if not most, industrial processes were not steam-powered.23 Until large-scale, steam-driven production became more widespread later in the nineteenth century, the engine was as much the product of a manufacturing process as any of the other products explored in the book. Rather than stimulating quantitative change in the economy, engines were the catalyst for qualitative change in how machines were built. By building them, machine makers worked out how to make other pieces of industrial mechanism more easily: production machinery for factories, self-propelled road vehicles, trains, steam at sea, were all in prospect. And in doing so they created a new profession of engineering from a diverse range of trades: clock-and instrument making, blacksmithing and millwrighting. The possibilities for new machines, and the opportunities presented by an emerging profession, spurred those who could make things to new endeavours.
The tremendous demand for consumer goods also influenced what products were made. People’s material possessions were changing fast as the eighteenth century progressed. As the historian David Landes wrote, ‘the Englishman of the 1750s was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren.’24 It was not just the quantity of possessions present in households that changed but their sheer range, the choice of materials and how they were branded, packaged and sold as well. Rather than being passed down from one generation to the next, many peoples’ possessions were entirely new and modern, reflecting growing prosperity. A booming middle class wanted to display its affluence, and did so by spending money on things which gave an impression of distinction and newness, or modernity. The producer who could satisfy those desires stood an excellent chance of success.25 It is telling that many of those industries that saw the greatest technological feats, and that inspired the most comment from those who saw them – cotton, ceramics and metalwares, for example – had the consumer firmly in their sights, and for this reason consideration of new consumer goods has to come alongside that of new technologies and ways of making things.26
The third factor influencing which things were made was a widely held fascination with precision. There was a considerable demand for products, both for consumers and producers, which were made as accurately as possible. The clockmaker John Harrison’s chronometers were accurate to within one second every month, attaining unprecedented levels of horological accuracy given the limitations of existing technology. Matthew Boulton knew that, with his new coin-minting machinery, eight tuppenny pieces laid end to end would measure exactly twelve inches in length, providing a useful means of identifying counterfeits. From making steam cylinders accurate to ‘within the thickness of an old shilling’ in 1776, engineers progressed to measuring to one ten-thousandth and later even one-millionth of an inch.27 Projects that exploited precision were more likely to progress than those that did not.
Finally, the classical world exerted considerable sway on the products that were made. Learning Latin, and the history and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, occupied a central place in education. Industrialists mined antiquity for inspiration: the potter Josiah Wedgwood made vases one of his main product lines, kickstarting what Matthew Boulton hailed as ‘vasemania’ – ‘an epidemical madness . . . for vases, which must be gratified’.28 In Watt’s workshop there survive moulds for making plaster casts of antique figures. Classical influences were incorporated into designs for machinery; we can say that the steam engine became the first industrial machine to have as much attention paid to its aesthetic appearance as, say, one of Wedgwood’s vases. Products which referenced the antique were desirable, indicating refinement and civility, and this influenced what things were made and why.
It is difficult to treat these factors in a linear way. For instance, exploration of the engine’s development is most obviously about power, how it was harnessed and its applications; but Watt’s engine was also a large precision machine, and it was developed within the context of manufacturing fashionable consumer goods like cotton wares and metal buttons. Similarly, consideration of Watt’s early career as a scientific-instrument maker is most closely tied to the attainment of high precision – but it also took place against the backdrop of accelerating consumer demand for such instruments. We will sidestep debate over a causal relationship between consumer demand and technical innovation, except to say that the power of the engine and the power of consumers is the central motor of the narrative that follows. The relationship between the two was broadly underpinned by increasing precision in manufacture of all types and by the application of antique influences, in terms of how people were educated, but also with regard to what we now call product design. The relationship between these factors was dynamic, and to trace it over time, the book follows a rough chronology based around James Watt’s life and some of the many projects that he was associated with. It is to Watt that we now turn.
James Watt’s high standing was based on his personal reputation and that of the engine, and both are closely intertwined. For his nineteenth-century successors, Watt became the personal benefactor of the changes being seen across the country. At a London meeting in June 1824 to call for a public monument to commemorate Watt, the Earl of Liverpo
ol wrote that
by his steady perseverance, by the sagacity of his mind, by his patient thinking . . . he was enabled to apply the profoundest principles of science to the practical purposes of life; and . . . augment incalculably the resources of his own country, and even of the whole world.29
At the same meeting, the chemist and inventor Sir Humphry Davy proclaimed of Watt,
If you seek his monument, look around you . . . Look round the metropolis; our towns . . . our dock-yards, and our manufactories; examine the subterraneous cavities below the surface, and the works above; contemplate our rivers and our canals, and the seas which surround our shores, and every where will be found records of the eternal benefits conferred on us by this great man.30
Such words quickly consolidated Watt’s reputation as a colossus of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
The centrality of Watt and his engine has long continued to fascinate historians. In 1948 the engine was described by the historian T. S. Ashton as ‘the pivot on which industry swung into the modern age’, and more recently Watt was called ‘a symbol of . . . everything that was progressive and innovative in Britain’ during the eighteenth century.31 Interpreting the nature of Watt’s achievement has filled a library of books. For a long time the main focus was on Watt the craftsman and engineer, who ‘affirmed the identity of those . . . who constructed and tended the machines of the workshop of the world’.32 Most recently, Richard Hills’s biography of Watt has made the most comprehensive assessment yet of his surviving papers and correspondence, David Miller has appropriated Watt as a chemist, Christine MacLeod has placed Watt within the context of the heroic age of the inventor in Victorian Britain and Peter Jones has tackled Watt as one small part of the wider Enlightenment movement. The Watt genre shows no signs of fading away; rather it is diversifying in its approaches and output.
How, then, to carve out a niche in this busy marketplace? The tendency has been to think about Watt in vertical slices: Watt the engineer, craftsman or chemist, or example. If the argument of this book is accepted, Watt was all of these things; they were not mutually exclusive. What underpinned all of these different identities was his ability not just to think but to do: to use tools, techniques and materials, to create tangible things across a range of activities. Rather than cutting the Watt ‘cake’ vertically, we are examining one of its horizontal layers. Britain depended for its movers and shakers on its doers and makers, and Watt stands for all of them, regardless of their specific trade or profession.
The major issue to be overcome here is avoiding what John Griffiths described as ‘Wattolatry’: the worship of Watt.33 An element of this is unavoidable: the Science Museum has four Watt engines and his library in its collection, and his voluminous personal and business papers are preserved at Birmingham. The path dependency of how we write history depends on what sources have survived, and this is skewed heavily towards Watt rather than many of his colleagues. However, in writing about the hows, whys and whats of making things, I have tried to use Watt as a lens to focus on the question in hand, but then to peer over his shoulder, to find out what others were doing at the same time, calibrating one against the other. Watt was not alone in being inquisitive and resourceful, making his way, recording progress and what he found; quite the opposite. Alongside Watt we can read what many others thought of the new world of industry emerging before their eyes in Britain. Some commentators, like Josiah Wedgwood, John Robison or Matthew Boulton, Watt knew extremely well, and we have briefly touched on some of the practitioners whose writings can also be drawn upon. There are many others, from Daniel Defoe to Louis Simond, whose accounts help paint the bigger picture of a growing industrial economy. They are joined by a host of overseas travellers. Jabez Maud Fisher journeyed from North America, building links for his family business. Brothers François and Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld travelled to further their education but had a good eye for identifying and describing Britain’s ‘vital interests’, which were often industrial in nature.34 Johann Conrad Fischer was a pioneering Swiss steel-maker who made contact with many of England’s eminent industrialists and manufacturers. Still others wrote broad and detailed accounts of particular towns and cities – James Gibson in Glasgow, John Aikin around Manchester and Sophie von La Roche in London, for instance.
What comes across from many of these accounts is the impact of the processes of making, and the products that were created, on the contemporary imagination.35 The British military officer and author George Head wrote how there was no spectacle
more grateful to the heart of an Englishman than, viewing the interior of a manufactory of machinery, to observe the features of each hard-working mechanic blackened by smoke, yet radiant with the light of intelligence . . . and to reflect that to such combination of the powers of mind and body England owes her present state of commercial greatness.36
Later commentators agreed, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed the English had successfully ‘impressed their direct-ness and practical habit onto modern civilisation’.37 The Industrial Revolution quickly came to be regarded as one of the great periods in Britain’s history. One writer has it that Patrick O’Brien’s naval stories of the Napoleonic Wars acquired a life of their own when he realized that they were ‘the Englishman’s Troy tales, as historically and mythically rich, and imaginatively exploitable as the story that produced The Iliad’.38 And there is certainly something Homeric in Josiah Wedgwood’s facing down of a competitive threat to his pottery thus:
Stand firm my friend, & let us support this threatened attack like Veterans prepar’d for every shock, or change of fortune that can befall us – If we must fall . . . let us not sell the victorie too cheap, but maintain our ground like Men, & indeavour, even in our defeat to share the Laurels with our Conquerors.39
This is more blood-and-guts stuff than the abstractions of science, economic theorizing and epistemologies of knowledge that seem to have tied up so much history of the Industrial Revolution: here is a bold new world filled with people, places and objects.
To return to the dust in Watt’s workshop, it represented the long, multifaceted and highly productive career of one man. But it was upon such (metaphorical) dust that scientific and technological discovery depended. In workshops like Watt’s, successive generations of skilled artisans, men, women and children, working in chemistry, ceramics, instrument making, engineering, the toy trade and countless other areas of endeavour, made a new world of material objects. The workshop and, by extension, Watt’s work as represented within it give us a unique lens through which to explore that world. In asking ourselves whether we want the dust, the answer surely has to be – yes!
ONE
Sensible, Ingenious and Enterprising Men, 1736–56
THE CITY OF LONDON played a pivotal role in James Watt’s early career. On 18 June 1755 he arrived in the city, having travelled on horseback for 470 miles from Greenock, Scotland. Tired and saddle-sore, he found himself transplanted from a maritime town of 3,000 souls 22 miles west of Glasgow into the heart of the biggest city on earth, ‘a Prodigy of Buildings, that nothing in the World does, or ever did, surpass’, containing one in eight of Britain’s entire population, consuming every year 2,957,000 bushels of flour, 700,000 sheep, 238,000 pigs and 100,000 oxen, burning 590,000 tonnes of coal and drinking 7 million barrels of beer.1 A day after arriving in the city, Watt ventured to Wapping in the East End to reclaim the chest containing his belongings, which had travelled separately. He described Wapping as ‘an ugly and confused place. The streets here are most of them very crooked and dirty.’2 Samuel Johnson also visited between 1767 and 1770, describing how ‘men of curious enquiry might see in it such modes of life as very few could even imagine.’3 And the German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg had expressed in April 1770 how he ‘could not possibly describe what strange figures’ he saw, ‘half-naked men and women, children, chimneysweeps, tinkers, Moors and men of letters, fishwives and females in grand array’.4 Wapping was an excelle
nt place for Watt to encounter some of the wilder parts of eighteenth-century British society.
Wapping was a marine community, huddled on the north bank of the Pool of London, the centre of a global shipping network. The author Daniel Defoe counted the vessels he could see at any one time in the Pool and ‘found about 2,000 sail of all Sorts, not reckoning Barges, Lighters, or Pleasure-boats, and Yachts; but of Vessels that really go to Sea’.5 It contained timberyards, wharves, warehouses, victualling stores, brothels and gin shops. Perhaps, as he walked around, Watt’s nostrils were accosted by the stench of the leather tanneries operating in Bermondsey, just south of the river, and his clothes were dirtied by the smoke of countless coal fires that led more particular inhabitants to change their linen twice daily.6 But away from the quays and narrow streets frequented by out-of-work labourers, sailors, foul-mouthed watermen, prostitutes and street children, Wapping was also home to many respectable and successful mariners.7 That the area, with its reputation for lawlessness, should also encompass middle-class affluence and relative prosperity indicates the polarized nature of the society Watt found himself living in.
London in 1748, seven years before Walt’s arrival in the city, as portrayed by Joshua Walker for the Universal Magazine.
The amount of drinking which went on, as recorded in accounts of the time, is amazing. The French author François de La Rochefoucauld noted in 1784 the ‘fine inns where it is accepted that men go for prolonged bouts of wine-drinking’.8 Samuel Johnson recalled that ‘all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of.’9 The German author Karl Philipp Moritz, travelling in England in 1782, observed that it was
not uncommon to see on doors in one continued succession, ‘children educated here’, ‘shoes mended here’ . . . and ‘Funerals furnished here’. Of all these inscriptions, I am sorry to observe, that ‘Dealer in foreign spirituous liquors’ is by far the most frequent.10