Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  England’s Industrial Revolution was rescued by two catalytic water engineering breakthroughs. The first was an unforeseen inland transport canal building boom, spontaneously generated and financed entirely by England’s burgeoning private sector, which swiftly created a national waterway network unique in the world outside China that greatly stimulated economic expansion. The pioneer of Britain’s canal age was a youthful aristocrat, Francis Egerton, the Duke of Bridgewater, who financed and built the short, but influential Bridgewater Canal between 1759 and 1761. Bridgewater’s inherited estates had included a large coal mine, from which he earned a contentedly handsome income. However, when Bridgewater lost his much-beloved wife to another man, he rechanneled his ardor to the personal dream of building a transport canal from his colliery to the growing industrial mills of Manchester. He calculated that such a canal would enable him to slash the price of his coal in half and thereby garner him a much-larger share of the local coal market.

  Although Manchester was only 10 miles distant, the landscape posed complicated hydraulic challenges for the construction of a canal. The terrain was hilly. There were few local streams to provide enough water to float barges. But he had little doubt as to the canal’s technical feasibility because as a young man on his continental Grand Tour, Bridgewater had visited France’s Languedoc region and witnessed firsthand the most wondrous canal in European history, the Canal du Midi. Built between 1666 and 1681 with the endorsement of King Louis XIV, who was then trying to expand the French navy, the 150-mile-long Canal du Midi created a secure, domestic inland waterway shortcut that united France’s Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts without any need to sail through Gibraltar and around Spain. The interior region it crossed soon throbbed with new economic activity. The canal was an engineering marvel, later hailed by Voltaire as a glorious achievement, that ascended and descended a summit elevation of 620 feet above sea level; accomplishing this feat required some 328 structures, including 103 locks, dams to furnish water for the channel, the bridges, and a 500-yard canal tunnel, Europe’s first. Bridgewater thus knew that his more modest canal, although difficult, could be built. Moreover, he was ready to risk his entire fortune to accomplish it.

  One main challenge of building any canal was to maintain slow water current so that barges could be towed along easily in either direction. One engineering approach was to follow nature’s topographical contours, as China’s founding Ch’in dynasty had done 2,000 years earlier with the Magic Canal. But that required an accommodatingly gentle landscape and a much longer canal. The ancient Assyrians and Romans had devised aqueducts to maintain steady, gravity-flow gradients across hilly landscapes. A more modern solution, widely used in hilly regions, was to artificially divide the canal into a series of stepped segments with an adjustment mechanism to raise or lower canal barges between the differing water levels of each segment. Through early medieval times, societies had often erected single, flat gates—flash locks—between canal segments. As a downstream canal barge approached, the lock gate was opened and the boat flashed through the resulting rapids. Travel upstream was much harder, requiring manual hauling of barges with ropes and windlasses by labor gangs of men and animals; often the barge was dragged up a slipway from the waterway below the level of the lock and returned to water at the higher level. China’s monumental Grand Canal had originally relied wholly on simple flash locks and massive amounts of brute manpower to lift boats, dredge channels, and maintain embankments until the 984 innovation of the double-gated pound lock which exploited water’s buoyancy properties to lift or lower barges as water filled or was released within the two gates. In Europe, navigation canals with locks had been built in the Low Countries in the fourteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci took a keen interest in Milan’s extensive network of canals, including the 18-lock Berguardo Canal of 1485 that ascended 80 feet, and designed a version of the modern chamber lock with efficient, upstream-facing gates that closed in a V shape so that the water pressure from the downstream current helped seal the lock against wasteful leakage. Leonardo’s design facilitated the building of a stairway of successive chamber locks capable of climbing and descending long, steep hillsides. By the seventeenth century, canal engineering leadership had passed to France, which was still confident enough of its hydraulic skills in the nineteenth century to take on the building of the Canal du Midi’s historical heir, the Suez Canal.

  Thus when the Duke of Bridgewater embarked on his canal, native English know-how still lagged far behind. As a chief engineer Bridgewater selected James Brindley, a self-taught expert who learned his skills by wit and experience garnered at various jobs since youth, including as a machinery maintenance man at regional water mills. Brindley and Bridgewater opted for a no-lock design with an aqueduct bridge to maintain the steady gradient. To supply the water needed to fill the canal, they also tapped the troublesome, high water tables that often flooded the coal mine and had to be drained anyway. Through his ultimate success on the Bridgewater Canal, Brindley would come to epitomize the new, self-made man of the era and eventually be renowned as Britain’s leading canal engineer. Yet while the 400 laborers were toiling on the pioneering canal, faith in its success at times sank so low that it seemed as if Bridgewater would run through his personal fortune before the technical challenges were overcome. Many whispered that he had gone mad. At the lowest moment, banks in Manchester and Liverpool refused to honor the Duke’s £500 check. In the end, however, the success of the Bridgewater Canal became one of the inspiring marvels of the age. People traveled long distances to see it, especially its three-arched, elevated segment that transported 12-ton coal barges 200 yards above the River Irwell. Out of public view was another of the canal’s marvels—many miles of underground channels dug deep into the mine itself to expedite the loading of freshly excavated coal at source onto barges. In the end Bridgewater’s coal was delivered to Manchester even more inexpensively than the Duke had originally calculated. Soaring coal sales made the Duke of Bridgewater one of England’s richest men.

  The Bridgewater Canal ignited a frenzy of English canal building. Within a mere few decades, the private-canal boom created an extensive, economical inland waterway network to move coal by barge among all the mining and industrial districts of the Midlands, North, Thames Valley, and the nation’s seaports. Bridgewater and Brindley themselves went on to finance and construct a canal from Manchester to Liverpool and one from the Trent River to the Mersey, which cut a waterway across Britain’s middle from the North Sea to the Irish Sea. In all, the canal frenzy added 3,000 miles of navigable inland waterways to Britain’s existing 1,000-mile network.

  That the canal boom was driven by private barge and toll operating companies that raised capital from London’s growing financial markets helped excite the capitalist “animal spirits” across Britain’s burgeoning laissez-faire economy, whose still unfamiliar, self-regulating “invisible hand” and wealth-creating mechanisms were just beginning to be expounded, most famously by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. The canal boom whet the risk appetite of London’s financiers to underwrite further industrial investments, which in turn stimulated greater capital accumulation and a new cycle of low-cost lending and investment. A half century later Britain’s canal boom would be replicated—with remarkably similar, stimulating effects—across the Atlantic in the eastern United States with the completion in 1825 of the 363-mile-long Erie Canal.

  The first rapid improvement in British transport since Roman times provided by the new canal network was a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for overcoming the country’s fuel famine and launching its Industrial Revolution. Britain first needed an antidote for the mine flooding that constrained the volume of coal that could be excavated. Removing floodwater was a problem that had long vexed mine operators in the tin regions of Cornwall as well as the coal fields of the Midlands and the North. Among the many methods tried, the most effective was the application of waterwheel-powered pumps. Yet waterwheels required a dependable ne
arby source of swift running water, something lacking at most British mines. Thus another solution was needed. In the event, the invention of the steam engine, spurred by profit-seeking market forces, would deliver the seminal breakthrough that unlocked Britain’s natural resource wealth and propel the creation of a radically new society based on mass industrial power and production.

  Although water was the only common substance on Earth to exist in nature as a liquid, a gas, and a solid over a wide temperature range, civilizations heretofore had utilized it primarily in its liquid state. The expansive force of steam—water in its heated, gaseous form—had been understood in antiquity going back to Hero of Alexandria nearly two millennia earlier. Leonardo da Vinci had drawn sketches of a theoretical steam-powered bellows and cannon. Yet no one had actually tried to apply the scientific knowledge about steam to a practical technology. Only in the late seventeenth century, following new scientific discoveries about atmospheric pressure, did Denis Papin, a French-born physicist who had worked in London with physicist Robert Boyle, invent a practical steam pressure cooker and write conceptually about some of the basic designs upon which the first steam engines would be based. In 1698, a British military engineer, Thomas Savery, built the first functioning steam pumps to remove water from the Cornish tin mines, although they were highly unstable and tended to explode.

  Credit for building history’s first successful atmospheric steam engine belonged to Thomas Newcomen, a Dartmouth blacksmith who worked for a time forging Savery’s pump. Installed at a coal mine in 1712, the Newcomen engine lifted about 10 gallons of water 153 feet at each stroke. The Newcomen steam engine, however, had many drawbacks that limited its usefulness. It was huge—requiring its own two-story-tall building to house it—and it generated little more horsepower than a good waterwheel. Moreover, it burned prodigious amounts of coal to heat the water into steam, and thus could be profitably used only at a coal mine. It was also thermally very inefficient. With the coal market still impeded by the pre-canal-boom transport bottleneck, Newcomen’s engines diffused too slowly to overcome the coal shortage and Britain’s fuel famine. By 1734, there were less than a hundred pumping water from English coal mines.

  The historic breakthrough that would power the takeoff of the Industrial Revolution awaited the invention of a steam engine superior to Newcomen’s. That steam engine was first patented in 1769 by a thirty-three-year-old Scotsman, James Watt, and began to be installed commercially in 1776. One of the first ways it was put to use was pumping water from a coal mine, where in its first hour it emptied a pit containing 57 feet of water. About the same time, another was put to work powering the bellows that forced air into the iron furnaces of prominent ironmaster John Wilkinson, foreshadowing the momentous impact it was soon to have on iron casting. The surpassing historical import of his steam engine made Watt one of the most celebrated luminaries of the remarkable eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment that included philosopher David Hume, political economist Adam Smith, geologist James Hutton, chemist James Black, and poet Robert Burns. Watt also became the object of an adulatory biography by no less than late nineteenth-century industrial-age U.S. steel baron (and Scottish emigrant) Andrew Carnegie, and was immortalized for all posterity by the naming of a common measure of electrical energy after him—the watt.

  A mathematical instrument maker and land surveyor with a scientific mind and conversant with many scientists at the University of Glasgow, Watt was the son of a shipbuilder, architect, and maker of nautical devices. By his midteens Watt was making models of instruments, and soon went off to London as an apprentice instrument-maker. He returned to Glasgow and in 1757 opened his own instrument-making shop at the university. In 1763, he was asked to repair the university’s lab-scale model of the Newcomen engine. Struck by the engine’s wasteful loss of four-fifths of its heat, Watt began to investigate how to improve its efficiency. The heart of the Newcomen steam engine was a cylinder, which when filled with steam pushed out an attached piston. Cooling the cylinder condensed the steam into water, creating a vacuum. The piston was pushed back into the cylinder by atmospheric pressure. Anything attached to the piston, such as a pump, could thus move up and down to perform useful work. Through trial and error experimentation, Watt discovered that the main source of the Newcomen engine’s inefficient waste of steam was the need to directly cool the heated cylinder between each stroke. His inspirational breakthrough came in 1765: using a separate condenser for the steam allowed the cylinder to remain continuously hot, more than doubling the efficiency of the engine. He soon had a design that quadrupled the Newcomen engine’s output. Watt’s design was also far more compact, and therefore maneuverable, than Newcomen’s behemoth.

  Watt’s revolutionary modern steam engine accelerated mining of British coal and tin by removing floodwater, while the discharged mine water was put to productive use as a supplemental source of supply for the new transport network of canals. Indeed, Watt’s decade-long delay from design to installing his first commercial steam engine was due, in part, to his being frequently called away to work as a land surveyor during the canal boom that had just begun. He had commercial and technical problems too. His first business partner, John Roebuck, who had commissioned him to build a steam engine to help pump water from his coal mine but never got much benefit from it because the iron workmanship available in Scotland at the time proved inadequate to the precision, quality machining required by its large cylinder and tightly fitting pistons, went bankrupt. Eventually, Roebuck sold his partnership interest in 1775 to Matthew Boulton, a well-to-do buckle and button maker from Birmingham to where Watt had relocated in search of more skillful iron making. Watt soon found the necessary quality in the shop of ironmaster John Wilkinson, who produced Watt’s precision cylinder with the new boring machine tool he used to make cannons for the British navy. Armed with a twenty-five-year patent extension granted by an act of Parliament, Boulton and Watt began business in 1775.

  The partnership of Boulton and Watt was one of the most remarkable in business history. Boulton’s business acumen complemented Watt’s technical ingenuity. Boulton’s integrity allowed both to prosper, without the rapacious exploitation of the inventor by the entrepreneur so common in early business history. Indeed, Boulton went to great pains to shield his easily distressed and risk averse partner from the many financial stresses of the business, especially in its first dozen years. Both became active members of Birmingham’s famous arts and sciences Lunar Society, and in 1785 were elected fellows in the Royal Society.

  Boulton brilliantly promoted their steam engines with the flair of a natural-born pitchman: “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have: Power.” In a foreshadowing of the organizational science-industrial systemization of the innovation process, the scientist Watt devised new steam engine designs to meet market opportunities identified by Boulton. On June 21, 1781, Boulton exhorted Watt to devise what would become the second great development in the Watt engine—rotary motion. Urgently, he wrote to Watt: “The people in London, Manchester and Birmingham, are Steam Mill Mad…I dont mean to hurry you into any determination, but I think in the course of a Month or two we should determine to take out a patent for certain methods of producing Rotative Motions.” The original engine’s up and down motion was fine for pumping water out of mines or from rivers to deliver larger volumes of freshwater to growing cities. But Boulton saw a much larger market arising among the new waterwheel-driven cotton and other manufactories springing up around crowded waterwheel sites on England’s small rivers. The convergence of Watt’s 1782 rotary steam engine with the independently arising factory system of mechanized production hurtled England’s Industrial Revolution into accelerated gear.

  The factory system was the direct descendant of the water-powered, medieval Mechanical Revolution. History’s first modern factory was the water frame cotton spinning machine mill opened in 1771 at Nottingham by Richard Arkwright. Its nine horsepower waterwheel drove 1,000 spindles and turned out cot
ton thread of superior quality, and in far greater volume and productivity than any traditional, home-based handicraft producer. It was an immediate success. Arkwright was not an inventor, but a guileful entrepreneur with a genius for organizing production and sales and in raising capital. As an enterprising Lancashire wigmaker and traveling barber in the textile districts where small batch work was still done from cottages, he had spotted his main chance with the water frame—and was not about to miss it. The textile industry had been undergoing rapid growth from the combined stimulus of design improvements in hand-powered spinning machines and the availability of cheap raw cotton from India. Arkwright’s water frame was inspired by the model of an early eighteenth-century Darby silk-stocking factory powered by a 13-foot-diameter waterwheel and spinning machines whose design had been pirated from Italy. The water frame was the brainchild of an obscure inventor whom Arkwright promptly discarded and severed from any share of his ample rewards, which included becoming one of England’s wealthiest men and the honor of knighthood.

  Once established in business, Arkwright moved adroitly to dominate the booming early English cotton industry. Within a decade, his water-powered factories were running day and night with several thousand mechanically driven spindles and over 300 workers, most of whom were docile, low wage women and children performing specialized functions overseen by a few male supervisors. Despite aggressive sanctions against British technology exports, the early Arkwright water frame mill design was soon smuggled into the United States in the lucid memory of a fortune-seeking English textile employee where it became the technology backbone for launching New England’s vibrant waterwheel-powered textile industry. The steam power threshold in textiles manufacturing was crossed in 1785 when Arkwright installed a Boulton and Watt engine to open the world’s first steam-powered cotton mill. In 1790 Samuel Crompton’s even more powerful, larger, hybrid-function spinning mule was adapted for steam power, and became the new standard for cotton spinning factories.