Though the printing industry itself was too small to drive aggregate growth, there can be no doubt that printing experienced a Schumpeterian transformation, as scribes, who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of printing, found their skills being rendered redundant. So why was the printing press adopted so enthusiastically in the West when people who face displacement usually oppose new technologies? In 1397, for example, when tailors protested, the city of Cologne banned the use of machines that automatically pressed pinheads. And in 1412, in response to resistance by silk spinners’ guild to the adoption of a silk-twisting mill, the city declared that “many persons who earn their bread in the guild in this town would fall into poverty, for which reason the town council agreed that neither this mill nor in general any similar mill shall be made or erected, either now or in future.”60
Why, then, didn’t the scribes oppose the printing press in the same way? One reason might be that printing with movable type was a largely unregulated infant industry. As the historian Stephan Füssel has pointed out, in the early days of the industry, people in most cities were free to invent without restrictions imposed by the guilds or government regulations.61 As we shall see, in places and industries where the guilds got stronger, they often tried to restrict replacing technologies, and printing was no exception: in the sixteenth century, the scribes’ guild of Paris triggered a revolt against labor-replacing printing technology.
To be sure, everyone was not content with the advent of Gutenberg’s invention in the fifteenth century. We know of some episodes of labor unrest accompanying its adoption, like the protests of professional writers in Genoa in 1472, the opposition from the card makers of Augsburg in 1473, and uprisings among the stationers of Lyons in 1477. But on the whole, the rapid diffusion of the printing press suggests that resistance was weaker than one might have expected. In an article titled “Why Were There No Riots of the Scribes?,” Uwe Neddermeyer argues that the reason is simple: for the most part, the scribes benefited from the arrival of the printing press. The majority of handwritten manuscripts had been produced by people writing books for themselves without commercial motives. Few scribes and religious communities made their living by reproducing books. Thus, for most people affected, the printing press did not mean any loss of income. And for those who did see their incomes disappear, there were mostly good alternative options: “Many professional scribes continued to be in a position to earn their living from writing documents, inventories, letters, minutes, etc.—i.e. texts that were uneconomical to be reproduced by printing.”62 Perhaps more importantly, the printing press, which created an ever-growing demand for books, also created new jobs from which many scribes themselves benefited.
Contemporaries did not fail to take notice. In Expositiones in Summulas Petri Hispani, published around 1490 in Lyons, the editor Johann Treschel writes that as the new art of printing ends the careers of scribes, “they have to do the binding of books now.”63 Indeed, during the closing decades of the fifteenth century, many monasteries whose scriptoria had long churned out new books shifted their focus to cover design and bindings. Some even set up their own printing presses. Hence, some scribes even celebrated the new art of printing, which relieved them of tedious writing and allowed them to specialize in the design and binding of books. As Neddermeyer writes, if “asked whether they approved of the new craft, most scribes in the era of Gutenberg would have replied with a definite Yes.”64 As will be discussed in chapter 8, one reason resistance to labor-replacing technologies was so feeble in the twentieth century was that workers for the most part had good alternative job options, much thanks to the steady expansion of manufacturing operations. But clearly, that was not always the case.
All the same, on balance, the technical advances of the Middle Ages probably did more to foster trade than they did to save labor. In particular, advances in shipbuilding and navigation—including the three-master ship, the development of the movable rudder to replace the steering oar, and the invention of the mariner’s compass—constituted enabling technologies for the age of discovery and the surge in international trade associated with it. What’s more, so-called caravel construction culminated in the Portuguese caravel ship in the fifteenth century, the type of ship that was used by Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan, to discover new trade routes. By that time, Europe had gone some way toward catching up with previously more advanced Islamic and Oriental civilizations. And while Europe was still an imitator of foreign technologies, despite some sparks of technological brilliance, it was soon to turn from imitator to innovator.65
Inspiration without Perspiration
Between 1500 and 1700, the technological gap between the West and the rest widened. Europe was no longer a technological backwater. It was expanding the frontiers of technology long before the Industrial Revolution. The bridge between the Middle Ages and the industrial era was built by the Renaissance, which started in medieval Italy and gradually spread across Europe. Although it began as a cultural movement, it was equally a force of profound technological change. Still, as we shall see, hardly any of its key inventions served to replace workers. And when those inventions did, they were fiercely opposed.
The technological advances of the Renaissance owed much to one of the late medieval inventions: Gutenberg’s printing press. For the first time, a vast technical literature emerged, containing detailed descriptions of dams, pumps, conduits, and tunnels and making technical knowledge more communicable and cumulative. This literature clearly shows that the practical relevance of machines was well understood among some of the Renaissance’s leading figures. Leonardo da Vinci—who among other things was responsible for many inventions—refers to mechanics as “the paradise of the mathematical sciences, because it is in mechanics that the latter find their realization.”66 But the gap between best practice and the machines that were adopted and put into widespread use was large, and few inventions recorded in the stream of technical writings therefore had any significant impact on economic growth. For example, in De Re Metallica, Georg Bauer wrote extensively on various mining machines, and Vittorio Zonca describes an astoundingly sophisticated silk-throwing machine—which almost a century later inspired John Lombe to travel to Italy to discover the precious secret. However, like most machines described in the technical literature, they did not become standard equipment in Renaissance Europe. Similarly, while working for the British Royal Navy, the Dutch engineer Cornelis Drebbel built the first navigable submarine and demonstrated it to King James I in 1624, more than two centuries before the technology would be put into use. But although it was tested several times in the Thames, the vessel didn’t generate sufficient enthusiasm for the idea to be further developed.67
The suggestion of Thomas Edison that invention is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration was evidently not true of Renaissance Europe. It was rather the other way around. Few ideas and drawings were ever translated into prototypes. Indeed, the Renaissance is best described as an age of novel technical ideas and plenty of imagination, but little realization. As Joel Mokyr points out, “If inventions were dated according to the first time they occurred to anyone, rather than the first time they were actually constructed, this period may indeed be regarded just as creative as the Industrial Revolution. But the paddlewheel boats, calculating machines, parachutes, fountain pens, steam-operated wheels, power looms, and ball bearings envisaged in this age—interesting as they are to the historian of ideas—had no economic impact because they could not be made practical.”68
The best that can be said about Renaissance technology in economic terms is that it paved the way for one of humanity’s most important technological breakthroughs to date: the steam engine. The science of the steam engine started with Galileo and his secretary Evangelista Torricelli, who developed the first barometer. In 1648, Torricelli discovered that the atmosphere has weight. A number of subsequent experiments by Otto von Guericke in 1655 showed that the weight of air can be use
d to do work: von Guericke found that if air is pumped out of a cylinder, this pushes the piston down into it, allowing it to lift a load of weights. Denis Papin discovered that filling a cylinder with steam and then condensing it could achieve the same effect, and he built the first, albeit very simple, steam engine in 1675. This series of discoveries eventually culminated in Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine, whose design built on the insight that the atmosphere has weight. No single discovery of the Renaissance would be more important to later industrial development, but it was by no means the only scientific achievement with applications in industry.69
From the viewpoint of the history of machines, Galileo’s theory of mechanics was another landmark achievement. During antiquity, Archimedes had made some progress in describing the principles of the lever, but he had not considered more complex machines in motion. Galileo’s theory of mechanics, in contrast, showed that all machines—systems of pulleys, gears, and so on—have the common function of applying force as efficiently as possible. Before Galileo, each machine had a unique description, as the general laws governing all machines had not yet been recognized. The significance of this shift is pointed out by Franz Reuleaux, the father of kinematics, who suggests that “in earlier times men considered every machine as a separate whole, consisting of parts peculiar to it; they missed entirely, or saw but seldom, the separate groups of parts we call mechanisms. A mill was a mill, a stamp a stamp and nothing else, and thus we find the older books describing each machine separately, from the beginning to the end.”70 What’s more, before the theory of mechanics, machines could be evaluated only qualitatively; after, they could be evaluated quantitatively. What makes Galileo’s theory of mechanics particularly interesting from an economic point of view is that it aims at efficiency. The function of a machine is to deploy and use the powers that nature makes available—such as water, wind, and animal power—to do a certain amount of work in the most efficient way.71 But at the time, this intuition was rarely put into practice. The frequent confusion between mechanics and magic suggests that the principle of using the powers of nature to perform mundane tasks was typically not well understood. Machines were widely regarded as devices for cheating nature and the machine maker as a person with the power of the magician. The legend of the mechanic magician would last for a long time—for example, it was perpetuated in the character of the inventor Spallanzani in Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman.72
In terms of productivity-enhancing technological improvements, the Renaissance was largely a continuation of the Middle Ages in that most technologies seemingly saved more capital than labor. Some progress was made in mining, including the introduction of underground rail transport and a variety of pumping devices.73 Mining was probably the industry that benefited the most directly from scientists and science. Galileo as well as Isaac Newton were concerned with many mining engineering problems, ranging from air circulation to the raising of coal, but their insights did nothing to reduce the number of workers required in the mines. All the same, agriculture still constituted the largest sector of the economy, and improvements in farming techniques had the largest impact on aggregate productivity. The most important agricultural invention was the new husbandry—including the introduction of stalls for feeding cattle, new crops, and the elimination of fallowing—which allowed farmers to maintain more cattle and produce animal products in larger quantities. But few inventions served to reduce the number of workers in farming. The new iron plows, for example, reduced the number of animals required for plowing, and thus probably saved more capital than labor. Other agricultural inventions, such as the modern seed drill—whose invention is commonly attributed to Jethro Tull around 1700—similarly saved more capital by improving the use of farmland in terms of ensuring a more even distribution of seeds.74
When worker-replacing technologies emerged, as they did in the textile industry, they were typically subject to opposition and were frequently blocked by political authorities. The gig mill, for example, which is estimated to have allowed one man and two boys to do the work of eighteen men and six boys, was prohibited in Britain by a statute of 1551, although almost a century later, King Charles I issued another proclamation against them, which suggests that some of the mills were still in use and that penalties for employing them were being avoided.75 The landmark labor-replacing invention of the time—the stocking-frame knitting machine, invented by the clergyman William Lee in 1589—faced considerable opposition, too. Queen Elizabeth I refused to grant Lee a patent, claiming: “Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”76 The queen’s decision reflected the hosiers’ guild’s opposition to the new technology: the hosiers feared that their skills would be rendered redundant. The guild’s opposition to Lee’s invention was so intense that he had to leave the country.
There is no shortage of examples of resistance to worker-replacing technologies. Beyond the textile industry, the Privy Council commanded the abandonment of a needle-making machine in 1623 and ordered the destruction of any needles made with it. Similarly, nine years later, Charles I banned the casting of buckets, suggesting that it might ruin the livelihoods of the craftsmen that were still making buckets the traditional way.77 Elsewhere in Europe opposition was just as fierce. Many cities across Europe issued edicts against automatic looms during the seventeenth century, and the city of Leiden experienced riots in 1620 because of their use.78 In Germany, automatic looms were prohibited entirely between 1685 and 1726. And as is well known, in 1705, Papin’s steam digester was smashed by angry Fulda boatmen:
At that time, river traffic on the Fulda and Weser was the monopoly of a guild of boatmen. Papin must have sensed that there might be trouble. His friend and mentor, the famous German physicist Gottfried Leibniz, wrote to the Elector of Kassel, the head of state, petitioning that Papin should be allowed to “pass unmolested” through Kassel. Yet Leibniz’s petition was rebuffed and he received the curt answer that “the Electoral Councillors have found serious obstacles in the way of granting the above petition, and, without giving their reasons, have directed me to inform you of their decision, and that in consequence the request is not granted by his Electoral Highness.” Undeterred, Papin decided to make the journey anyway. When his steamer arrived at Münden, the boatmen’s guild first tried to get a local judge to impound the ship, but was unsuccessful. The boatmen then set upon Papin’s boat and smashed it and the steam engine to pieces. Papin died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave.79
Craft guilds, like that of the boatmen of Fulda, controlled apprenticeship and production across cities and townships in preindustrial Europe. In London in the mid-sixteenth century, for example, roughly 75 percent of workers belonged to a guild.80 According to Sheilagh Ogilvie, an economic historian, “During the eight centuries before European industrialization, guilds were central institutions setting the rules of the game for economic activity.”81 And they blocked the introduction of replacing technologies, sometimes legally and sometimes violently, to safeguard their skills and self-interest. Indeed, while economic historians disagree about the attitudes of the guilds toward new technologies, there is an emerging consensus that their attitudes depended on how the technologies affected their skills. Guilds did not seek to slow down the march of technology in general, but they did forcefully resist it when it threatened their members’ jobs.82 They quietly accepted the new technologies they benefited from but bitterly fought against those that might affect them adversely, though there were instances when opposition failed. For example, the economic historian Stephen Epstein has argued that technologies that merely saved capital or made workers’ skills more valuable were not frowned upon, while replacing technologies were more likely to be resisted.83 But in practice, Epstein points out, the reaction of individual guilds was often the outcome of political rather than market forces: “There was a fundamental difference
in outlook between the poorer craftsmen, who had low capital investments and drew their main source of livelihood from their skills, and who therefore (frequently in alliance with the journeymen) opposed capital-intensive and labor-saving innovations, and the wealthier artisans who looked on such changes more favourably.”84
Pathbreaking work by Ogilvie that traces craft guilds and their activities over the centuries also shows that there were circumstances when the political economy of technological change was such that a new technology was adopted, even if it meant that some craftsmen lost out. At times, if a more powerful branch of a guild stood to benefit from the technology, it was adopted at the expense of the weaker faction. Sometimes craft guilds were overruled by powerful merchants. And there were cases when the political authorities granted a privilege to an inventor for economic gain—either because they would receive a direct payment for the benefits conferred or because they expected a share of the profits. But for the most part, guilds vehemently and successfully resisted technologies that they perceived threatened their skills and rents. Ogilvie explains:
Guilds blocked horse-driven machines where they took work from guild masters, as in Cologne where horse-powered twisting-wheels were banned in 1498 because they threatened masters of the linen-twisters’ guild. The multi-shuttle ribbon frame was successfully banned by most guilds in early modern Europe, but spread in the Northern Netherlands after 1604 thanks to vigorous support by factions inside Dutch ribbon-weavers’ guilds. It also spread in London after 1616 thanks to its adoption by a minority of politically connected liverymen inside the Weavers’ Company before the hostile guild yeomen could mobilize resistance.85
The Technology Trap Page 7