The extent to which spinning machines actually saved labor has been intensely debated. What is clear is that they saved labor costs and replaced workers who had done hand spinning. The adoption of the jenny, for example, was not merely a matter of substituting capital for labor but also one of replacing relatively expensive adult labor with that done by children. For example, Arkwright wrote about the ample supply of children in the southern Peak District, which probably explains his decision to locate production there. Indeed, early spinning machines were specifically designed to be tended by children (see chapter 5). As the sharp contemporary commentator Andrew Ure noted, “The constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery [is] to diminish the costs by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men.”15
The benefits, of course, went beyond replacing expensive labor with machines and cheaper labor. Another motive was to gain greater control over the factory workforce, which went hand in hand with the employment of children. Many were pauper apprentices who worked in factories far from their families and friends. When they made up the bulk of the workforce, as they often did, they lacked the protection others were given by the mere presence of adult coworkers. They were often consigned to work without wages or rewards. So to control a large number of lawless children, many supervisors and managers resorted to using the stick rather than the carrot. Relative to adult workers, they had very little bargaining power and were easy to enforce the factory discipline on.16 Clearly, as Humphries writes, manufacturers were well aware of the advantages of inventing in ways so “as to bypass artisan practices and controls and so sap resistance to change.”17
All the same, while spinning was turned into a factory system in the late eighteenth century, weaving was still done with hand looms in domestic settings. Therefore, a concern was that after Arkwright’s patent had expired, the number of spinning mills erected would surge to the extent that there would not be enough hands to weave all the cotton that was spun. This was discussed by Reverend Edmund Cartwright and a Manchester gentleman who deemed the construction of weaving mills unachievable. Cartwright set out to prove him wrong. The son of a country gentleman, who as a former Oxford student had until now been preoccupied with nothing but literature, Cartwright used the help of a carpenter and a blacksmith to prove his point. He invested decades and a fortune in constructing his power loom. Together with the Grimshaw brothers, Cartwright set up a factory containing four hundred looms powered by steam. Fearing that they would lose their jobs, however, weavers burned it to the ground. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Cartwright’s loom would almost surely have been banned for fear that it could cause unrest. But at this time, British governments typically sided with innovators. Instead of banning the invention, the government helped fund it. Cartwright successfully petitioned Parliament for a grant in 1809, making the case that his machines were of great importance to Britain’s competitiveness in trade.18
There can be no doubt that the power loom was a significant invention. As power looms improved over the course of the nineteenth century, so did productivity: the economic historian James Bessen has calculated that in 1800 it took a hand-loom weaver using a single loom nearly forty minutes to produce a yard of coarse cloth, while in 1902 a weaver could produce the same amount in less than a minute, operating eighteen automatic power looms.19 But it did so at the expense of the hand-loom weavers it replaced. We shall return to the fate of the hand-loom weaver in chapter 5. For now, it is sufficient to note that with the introduction of the power loom, the triumph of textile mechanization was almost complete.
Iron, Railroads, and Steam
Most people think that the Industrial Revolution was powered by steam. There is surely some truth to this, but steam power was a latecomer to the industrialization process. While the shift from the muscular strength of people and animals to mechanical power was a defining characteristic of the rise of the factory system, the economic impacts of the steam engine became apparent only in the mid-nineteenth century. Without question, steam power had significant advantages over water power, whose use was always constrained by geography. As Marx writes, with the steam engine a prime mover finally arrived, “whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water-wheels, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns instead of, like the water-wheels, being scattered up and down the country.”20 But perhaps more importantly, its application was not confined to any single task or industry: unlike water power, it could be applied in land transportation as well. Like the computer and electricity, the steam engine was an example of what economists call a general purpose technology.
In contrast to other significant technologies of the eighteenth century, which were pure engineering efforts, steam power was a spin-off of the scientific revolution, building on the discovery that the atmosphere has weight. With the steam engine, science first took center stage in technological development, and its importance only continued to grow. Practical use of the discovery of atmospheric pressure began in the late seventeenth century with Thomas Savery, a British Army officer from Cornwall. In its early days, the steam engine—or the fire engine, as it was called—was nothing more than a pump, consisting of a boiler connected to a tank. The engine was developed specifically for the draining of copper mines, but Savery realized its general purpose nature. Beyond mining, he envisioned it being used to supply water to towns and houses, put out fires, and turn the wheels of mills. However, Savery’s invention was not even fit for the purpose of draining mines. It worked only at a depth limited to about thirty feet. As soon as Thomas Newcomen’s engine emerged in 1712, the fire engine was abandoned. But due to its inefficiencies, the Newcomen engine similarly failed to find widespread use. The vast amounts of energy required in production meant that few manufacturers adopted it. As late as 1770, it was almost exclusively used for draining coal mines and in places where coal was very cheap.
Steam power became economically viable only with James Watt’s separate condensation chamber, which allowed condensation to take place without much loss of heat from the cylinder.21 However, it took several decades for the Watt engine to become viable and required a partnership with Matthew Boulton for financial backing. Watt’s steam engine was first used in 1784 in the Albion Flour Mill, in which the Boulton & Watt company had invested for promotional purposes. One year later, it was applied in cotton production and gradually spread to woollen spinning mills, sawmills, malt mills for breweries, pottery manufacturing, food processing, sugarcane mills, and iron and coal mining. Still, the immediate macroeconomic impacts of steam power were fairly limited. Calculating the so-called social savings of the steam engine, comparing it to the next best technology, the economic historian G. N. Von Tunzelmann has estimated that the national income of Britain in 1800 would have been reduced by only 0.1 percent if Watt had not invented the separate condenser.22 Needless to say, such estimates are always only as good as the assumptions underlying them, but it is intuitive that the aggregate economic impacts of the steam engine were negligible before 1800. The available data suggest that a total of 2,400–2,500 steam engines were built in the eighteenth century.23 And the impact of steam on the overall economy was still very slight as late as 1830, as the economic historian Nicholas Crafts has shown.24 Though its productivity contribution accelerated thereafter, especially in the period 1850–70, the economic impacts of steam were modest relative to those of later general purpose technologies like electricity and computers. Many sectors, including agriculture and construction, were left largely untouched. Nor did steam power enter people’s homes. Similar to the economic benefits of electricity and computers, however, the productivity effects of steam were delayed. One reason is that adoption was slow because water power remained cheaper for a long time. There was no equivalent to Moore’s Law operating in steam. Thus, most factories were driven by water power until the 1840s. Only around that time did the fuel consumption of st
eam engines drop sufficiently to make them economically viable.
The economic virtuosity of the steam engine became apparent as it revolutionized transportation during the mid-nineteenth century. Before the railroad, the Industrial Revolution was largely local. Large parts of Britain were left unaffected by it. This is not to discount the advances made in transportation during the eighteenth century: the turnpike trusts, authorized by acts of Parliament to levy taxes and issue bonds for road construction, paved the way for a sizable road network in Britain.25 The growth of the turnpike system during the eighteenth century greatly improved British roads, which together with better stagecoach technology dramatically reduced travel time. In the 1750s, it took some ten to twelve days to travel from London to Edinburgh. By the time of the first railroads in the 1830s, the same distance could be covered by stagecoach in about forty-five hours.26 Still, at no previous point in history had people been able to travel faster than the speed of a horse, and horse travel was a luxury available to only a small percentage of the population. Most of the Britons who were to become train passengers had to walk to their destinations before the invention of the railroad. And relative to the stagecoach, trains were much faster and cheaper. The first trains traveled three times faster than a stagecoach could, and roughly ten times faster than the highest estimates of walking speed.27 By the outbreak of World War I, it would have taken Britons an additional five billion hours to undertake all their train journeys, using only the means of transportation available to them before the railroad.
All the same, the arrival of the railroad was a long journey in itself. Not only did it require steam power, but cheap iron was another enabling technology for the railroad and indeed much of the Industrial Revolution. Iron went into the construction of factories, steam engines, machinery, bridges, and rails. Before the eighteenth century, the pig iron produced in blast furnaces was expensive and fragile. The first breakthrough was made in 1709—three years before the arrival of the Newcomen engine—when Abraham Darby developed a method of producing pig iron in furnaces using coke instead of charcoal. Though Darby cannot be credited with the invention of coke smelting, he made it economical. In the period 1709–1850, the average cost of pig iron is estimated to have declined by 63 percent.28
The path from coke smelting to railroads is best described by the evolution of the Coalbrookdale Iron Company, led by three generations of Darbys. Its story is an intriguing one because it illustrates the interconnectedness of the technologies that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Darby’s method of iron production made cylinders in steam engines (of which Coalbrookdale became a leading producer) more accurate, and it also made steam engines more energy efficient—which helped reduce the cost of producing coke-smelted cast iron. A Bouton & Watt engine was installed in Coalbrookdale in 1774 and upgraded with a newer design in 1805. Over this period the rate of production tripled from fifteen to forty-five tons per day. For the transportation of the tons of materials, Coalbrookdale had a sixteen-mile railroad network by 1757. A decade later, the wooden rails were replaced with rails made of iron, creating the world’s first iron railroad. Darby’s method, in other words, was more than an enabling technology of the railroad. Coke smelting was how iron rails came to be used in the first place.29
While the road to steam-powered passenger rail travel began in Coalbrookdale, the completion of the journey took several decades. The first passenger railroad was opened in 1805, yet the carriages were drawn by horse. Before the railroad, many attempts were made to use steam power for land vehicles, but unpaved roads and tolls imposed by the turnpike acts meant that they failed to gain traction. Richard Trevithick, who built the London Steam Carriage in 1803, was one of the key figures behind the development of the steam-powered railroad. His achievement consisted in making the steam engine lighter and smaller by abandoning the separate condenser, which allowed it to be used more effectively in transportation. However, a number of other significant technologies were also required, including new and better gears, gauges, couplings, and so on. This series of inventions eventually culminated in George Stephenson’s Rocket—the steam locomotive that would be used for travel on the first public and fully steam-powered railroad between Liverpool and Manchester.
The opening day of the Liverpool-Manchester Railway in 1830 was one of the major public events of the year, attended by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and prime minister of Britain, among others. Although a triumph of British engineering, the introduction of steam-powered passenger travel was not without casualties. Against the advice given to passengers to remain on the train, William Huskisson, former cabinet minister and member of Parliament for Liverpool, who had resigned from the government after a disagreement over Parliamentary reform two years earlier, left the train during a scheduled stop and approached Wellington’s carriage, seeking a reconciliation. Caught up in conversation with the prime minister, he saw one of the other locomotives approaching only when it was too late and stumbled on the tracks in front of the train. Because the Rocket was not equipped with brakes, the driver could only bring the train to a halt by shifting into reverse, which was a complex procedure. Huskisson died from his injuries that evening.
Unlike the Hindenburg disaster of the twentieth century, which spelled the end of airship technology, the widely reported Huskisson incident did not reduce railroad frenzy. As people across Britain became aware of this new form of long-distance transportation, there was nothing to hold back its diffusion. The railroad network in Britain expanded to 6,200 miles in 1850 and covered 15,600 miles by 1880. Around that time, the biographer Samuel Smiles described the railroad as “the most magnificent public enterprise yet accomplished in this country—far surpassing all that has been achieved by any Government, or by the combined efforts of society in any former age.”30 Much as the digital technologies of our age have enlarged the world, the railroad allowed people of the nineteenth century to travel beyond their previous horizons. With it, books, letters, newspapers, and people became more mobile, while inventions and ideas traveled at greater speed. Workers could more easily travel in the search for better jobs. And the decline in transportation costs meant expanding markets for manufacturers, which permitted regions to specialize in goods in whose production they held a comparative advantage. As ever-larger factories started to take advantage of economies of scale, local monopolies faced growing competition from outside industrialists. Factories of growing size also found it more economical to adopt steam power in production. In other words, the railroad spurred the adoption of steam in manufacturing, which in turn gave rise to a host of new labor-intensive occupations.
The contribution of the railroad to aggregate growth has been estimated by several economic historians who applied the concept of social savings, comparing the benefits of the railroad to the next best available technology. An early study by Gary Hawke puts the total savings associated with the railroads in the range of 6.0–10.0 percent of GDP in 1865; freight alone accounted for about 4.0 percent of GDP, whereas passenger travel is estimated to have accounted for 1.5–6.0 percent, depending on the value that passengers placed on comfort. However, Hawke’s savings for passenger travel is downward biased, as it does not include any benefit for time savings.31 Accounting for the time saved by passengers, Tim Leunig, an economic historian, estimates that the social savings from passenger travel amounted to some 5 percent of GDP in 1865 and reached 14 percent by 1912, and over that period, railways accounted for a full sixth of aggregate productivity growth.32 To put these figures in perspective, it has been estimated that the social savings associated with the turnpike trusts at the eve of the railroad era added 1 percent to a much lower base of GDP.33 However, the main benefits of the railroad came long after its invention. The economic significance of those benefits grew especially from 1870s onward, as the price of third-class travel was reduced sufficiently to allow people who had previously never been able to travel at all to do so for the first time.34
In other words
, the full benefits of the Industrial Revolution took more than a century to be realized. Parts of Britain were largely unaffected, and the aggregate economic impacts of steam and railroads became significant only in the second half of the nineteenth century. But some places and industries felt the accelerating pace of change much earlier, and the expansion of some of those industries did have an effect on the aggregate statistics after 1800. To be sure, contemporaries took notice of the ascent of industry. In 1835, for example, Sir Edward Baines, a British journalist and member of Parliament, observed that “the causes of this unexampled extension of manufacturing industry are to be found in a series of splendid inventions and discoveries, by the combined effect of which a spinner now produces as much yarn in a day, as by the old processes he could have produced in a year; and cloth which formerly required six or eight months to bleach, is now bleached in a few hours.”35 And nowhere was this more evident than in the cotton city, Manchester.
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