Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  Eureka Moment: Thomas Newcomen

  ‘For ten consecutive years Mr Newcomen worked at this fire-machine which never would have exhibited the desired effect, unless Almighty God had caused a lucky incident to take place. It happened at the last attempt to make the model work that a more than wished-for effect was suddenly caused by the following strange event. The cold water, which was allowed to flow into a lead-case embracing the cylinder, pierced through an imperfection which had been mended with tin-solder. The heat of the steam caused the tin-solder to melt and thus opened up a way for the cold water, which rushed into the cylinder and immediately condensed the steam, creating such a vacuum that the weight, attached to the little beam, which was supposed to represent the weight of the water in the pumps, proved to be so insufficient that the air, which pressed with a tremendous power on the piston, caused its chain to break and the piston to crush the bottom of the cylinder as well as the lid of the small boiler. The hot water which flowed everywhere thus convinced the very senses of the onlookers that they had discovered an incomparably powerful force which had hitherto been entirely unknown in nature, – at least no one had suspected that it could originate in this way.’

  Marten Triewald, 17345

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  Despite the positive factors for inventors, barriers to innovation remained. The horrendously complex and imprecise patent law (see Chapter 3) was a difficulty, as were the restrictions enforced by worshipful companies in industries like wool, silk, printing, instrument-making and cutlery production, which guarded their special privileges closely. Because cotton was an undeveloped industry it could thrive and innovate in the unincorporated city in Manchester, while mining and smelting and casting of metals were historically relatively unregulated.

  Obstacles to innovation came from legal and social restrictions. In the late sixteenth century William Lee left England for France because of resistance to his stocking frame. In 1638 ribbon looms were banned by the Crown and in 1701 and 1720 restrictions and punitive tariffs were brought in on sales of cotton cloth and printed calico in order to protect the native wool industry. Although all of these restrictions were later overturned or amended, some hostility to innovation remained throughout the eighteenth century: the flying shuttle was effectively repressed for thirty years by threats of violence and there were fierce riots in Lancashire in 1779 and in 1792; most notoriously from 1811 to 1816 the so-called Luddites destroyed machinery throughout Britain’s industrial areas. However, these attempts to halt mechanisation were ultimately unsuccessful; more and more mills were built and machines installed, and mill-workers were not inclined to support hand-spinners and weavers in their protests. And, although the list of disturbances is long, new machinery was installed for the most part remarkably calmly.

  Legal attempts to resist technology were also generally unsuccessful, with courts and Parliament taking the side of the industrialists – in 1769 Parliament passed a law making destruction of machinery punishable by death. Petitions from hand-cotton-spinners in 1780 and wool-combers in 1794 to ban new machinery failed, and in 1809 ancient laws governing the wool industry were repealed. 1814 saw the repeal of the Statute of Artificers (1563), which had regulated the supply of labour, made apprenticeships mandatory and restricted movement of workers, though this was really a recognition of changed practice.6

  A further impetus to innovation came through the growing acceptability of Nonconformism in the north of England, the Midlands, Wales and Scotland. Congregationalists, Unitarians, Quakers and Presbyterians grew steadily more influential, while their beliefs and their outlook – hard work, lack of ostentation, seriousness of purpose, implicit trust – suited the new mix of commercialism and manufacturing that was burgeoning, particularly in the northern towns and the Midlands.

  Unitarians and Congregationalists were predominant in the Manchester cotton industry while famous iron-trade names such as Rawlinson, Lloyd, Pemberton, Spooner, Parker, Fidoe, Hodgetts, Manster and Huntsman were all Quaker families. The outstanding example is the Darby family: as well as the three generations of Abraham Darbys, the managers Richard Reynolds and Richard Ford were also Quakers. The Friends were also prominent in brewing through the Barclays, Trumans, Perkinses and Hanburys, and in banking through the Lloyd, Barclay, Bevan and Gurney families.

  Each denomination offered a network of mutual support and investment. People knew and trusted other members of their chapel, meeting house, congregation or sect. They invested in each other’s businesses, took on each other’s sons as apprentices and became suppliers and customers to one another. The old saw about marrying the boss’s daughter was common enough, and for good reason: family firms depended for their continuation on male heirs or, if there were none, sons-in-law to carry on the business. Connections helped in practical ways too: Thomas Newcomen was a Baptist in Devon and his first engine was commissioned through the Baptist church in Bromsgrove.

  The traditional education system had little to offer budding innovators. Grammar schools were originally attached to cathedrals and were dedicated to teaching Latin by rote (Shakespeare learned Latin and Greek at Stratford Grammar School). By the eighteenth century this had changed only a little, with new schools being founded by endowments or by guilds, as feeders for universities. Pressure was brought by parents and others to widen the curricula, and some schools began to teach arithmetic and modern languages. Here again Nonconformism stood out. As Dissenters (as Nonconformists called themselves) were barred from England’s two universities they set up their own Dissenting Academies from the 1660s, and from the mid-eighteenth century large-scale academies were founded through public subscriptions, as at Warrington, or by trust funds as at Daventry. These academies provided high-quality instruction in a range of subjects, including commercial and scientific studies, to generations of Nonconformists.8

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  Eureka Moment: James Watt

  ‘It was in the Green of Glasgow. I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street – had passed the old washing house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time and had gone as far as the Herd’s house when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder.

  ‘I then saw that I must get quit of the condensed steam and injection water, if I used a jet as in Newcomon’s [sic] engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. First the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an offlet could be got at the depth of 35 or 36 feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump; the second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and air . . . I had not walked further than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.’

  James Watt7

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  In Scotland too education was quite different from the traditional English model and it is not surprising that many inventors and entrepreneurs were Scottish. Universities founded at Glasgow, St Andrews and Aberdeen in the fifteenth century were joined in the following century by the University of Edinburgh and a second university in Aberdeen – the granite city had as many universities as the whole of England. While these started as training grounds for the clergy, from the mid-seventeenth century they offered a broad curriculum based on philosophy, chemistry, sciences, economics and medicine; by the eighteenth century Scotland had become the main centre for medical education in Britain.

  The most direct effect of Scottish education was the preponderance of chemists; here networking took on a distinct character through the presence of Joseph Black, professor of medicine at Glasgow University from 1757. Black seemed to know, advise and inspire every scientist and technical innovator who passed within fifty miles of him. These included John Roebuck, an Englishman educated in Edinburgh, who invented the industrial manufacture of sulphuric acid and was involved in many Scottis
h industrial ventures, including the Carron ironworks and James Watt’s early experiments in engine design. Charles Mackintosh, inventor of waterproof fabrics, attended Black’s lectures, while Archibald Cochrane, who opened up the iron fields of Scotland, was a close friend of Black. Francis Home, an early pioneer of vaccination, was a colleague, and James Keir, perhaps the most important chemist of the Industrial Revolution, studied medicine under Black at Edinburgh, where he also taught.

  The Scottish academic network, in great contrast to that in England, encouraged discussion of sciences and their practical applications; so, while James Watt was never enrolled as a student, he had many conversations with Joseph Black, John Leslie and others on the science of heat and steam. When Watt went south to Birmingham in the 1770s he found the city well supplied with fellow Scottish engineers, and others like William Murdoch and William Brunton followed later. Scotland itself was a thriving centre of industrial innovation. Rapid industrial development in the coal, iron and textile industries, as well as in the lucrative Atlantic shipping trade were the prelude to Scotland becoming the world centre of shipbuilding and marine and civil engineering.9

  Innovators benefitted from other networks including clubs in Britain’s expanding urban centres. Many of these were based on the old trade guilds, giving services to members in return for subscriptions; some were more educational, often owning libraries and museums; others, like the celebrated Lunar Society of Birmingham, were informal gatherings of like-minded people. Literary and Philosophical Societies (or Lit and Phils as they were commonly known) sprang up in industrial towns and cities, providing meeting places for commercial and industrial men, and also forums where the old landed gentry could meet the new breed of entrepreneur and inventor. They played an important role in spreading information about innovation: George Stephenson first demonstrated his miners’ lamp at the Newcastle Lit and Phil, established in 1793.

  We take it for granted that modern inventors are motivated by the prospect of financial returns, and although eighteenth-century inventors did not write much about their motives, it is clear they were mainly economic. Thomas Newcomen, James Watt and Henry Cort were not conducting experiments simply to amuse themselves or to add to the sum of human knowledge; they each worked in a trade (or in Watt’s case several) and they wanted to improve their business in order to make a better return. Of course the success of their technological innovations gave these men a great thrill, but without an economic impetus they would not have come to fruition.

  This economic imperative was crucial in what is the most important aspect of the industrial innovation – its continuation. From the 1770s onwards, thanks to the ever-growing market for manufactured goods, particularly in the cotton trade, there was a continual financial incentive to innovate to produce goods quicker, cheaper and better. Some innovations were at a local, workshop or factory level, while others spread across industries. The spinning mule, for example, was improved in small ways by almost every mill-owner who used it: Henry Stone installed toothed gearing and metal rollers; others added parallel scrolling, gears and a clutch to better control the tension and produce finer thread; in 1825 Richard Roberts patented the self-acting mule, which allowed the powered machine to work continuously with a minimum of human intervention.

  In this new climate of commercial demand for technology, inventors became professionals, developing devices and processes for use in a variety of industries, and using the patent system to sell rights to their innovations. William Bundy took out ten patents from 1796 to 1830, including a cooling device, a comb-maker and a pin-making machine; John Leigh Bradbury, an engraver and calico printer, was awarded six patents from 1807 to 1824, which included an improved pin-maker, fibre spinners and engravers. Lemuel Wright, an American living in London, took out twenty patents from 1820 to 1849 for such devices as machines for making bricks and tiles, steam engines, bleaching devices and a mechanical sweeper. By the mid-nineteenth century established inventors like Henry Bessemer were being commissioned by companies to come up with solutions to problems, while big manufacturers bought up multiple patents in order to dominate their sector – Price’s, for example, the biggest candle-maker in the world, bought any patent that impinged on candle manufacture.

  As we have seen, inventors didn’t have to sell their inventions, they could licence them. While manufacturers wanted exclusive licences in order to outdo their competition, inventors preferred to have multiple licencees, all paying a royalty.10 Boulton & Watt and Richard Arkwright were able to dictate terms because their machines were essential to all the entrepreneurs in their industries. Arkwright, in particular, was a master at manipulating licences, restricting each licencee to a total of 1,000 spindles and thereby preventing any one mill-owner from challenging his dominance, while at the same time getting good royalties from his invention. Typically, Arkwright bent the rules by granting ‘exclusive’ licences to a number of neighbouring mill-owners.

  So, by the eighteenth century, Britain had absorbed lessons in technological innovation from Continental Europe, and began to use the base of prosperity from the wool trade, and the plentiful supply of cheap coal and iron ore, to diversify into craft industries. The consequent demand for goods, coupled with cheap energy and high wages, gave financial incentives for inventors, particularly in the cotton industry, which was unregulated and carried the potential for enormous expansion. All this gave opportunities for inventors. And at the same time Britain’s craft trades, with their tradition of time-served apprenticeships, combined with the special qualities of Nonconformism culture and Scottish education, as well as a fluid social environment, provided the human capital needed to exploit those opportunities. This was a unique combination and, while it may have come about through chance, it still took the immense dedication of a small number of technical geniuses, aided by a generation of tens of thousands of artisans, to bring about the inventions that transformed the world.

  3. Navigating the Patent System

  NOWADAYS PATENTS EXIST to protect the interests of inventors, to test whether their inventions are genuinely original, and then to ensure that no one can exploit them without the permission of the inventor. So we would expect patents to have been key elements in encouraging the surge of inventions that changed the industrial landscape in the late eighteenth century. And indeed they were, at least sometimes. But patents were not the friends to inventors that they might have been. In fact the patent system had been designed and was used for entirely different reasons – and it was the inventors themselves who forced the system to adapt.

  A letter patent is literally an open letter granting certain rights to its recipient. This openness is important, as it enables the public to access its contents, and informs everyone that the recipient is being granted special legal status. This status could be the sole right to exploit an invention, or the monopoly over a particular craft or industry.

  The granting of protection through letters patent became the centre of English industrial policy under Elizabeth I’s Lord Treasurer and chief advisor Lord Burghley (William Cecil) who used patent protection to attract foreign manufacturers to England from the 1560s. Burghley was acutely aware that England was an industrial backwater, while manufacturing processes were being developed apace in the Netherlands, Italy, France and the German states. He offered twenty-one-year monopolies to foreign makers using techniques unknown in Britain; consequently new ways of making glass, soap, paper, silk cloth and for refining ores were introduced. Immigrants were expected to teach native workers their techniques, while applicants stressed the benefit to the commonwealth rather than their own claim to have invented a new device or process. Burghley set the tone for all English patents up to the Industrial Revolution – he had no interest in the intellectual property rights of the applicant; a patent was granted in order to benefit the country and the Exchequer.1

  Unfortunately for later inventors, patents and monopolies became fatally entangled, particularly as Stuart kings used the sale of mo
nopolies in processes like alum-making to raise the funds that Parliament would not deliver, or handed them out to court favourites. Though Parliament enacted a Statute of Monopolies in 1624 in an attempt to clean the system, abuses continued, leaving craftsmen barred from their own trades by the corrupt granting of monopolies. Nevertheless the 1624 Act did provoke the Chief Justice Edward Coke to codify the conditions under which a patent might be granted. The three most important were: first, that the protection would be granted for fourteen years, twice the length of an apprenticeship, so an apprentice could not immediately steal his master’s secrets; second, that the applicant must be the original and true inventor; and third, that the technique should not already be in use by someone else.

  However, while we might assume that the granting of a patent would give legal authority to the holder, this was not the case. The Patent Office had no role in the enforcement of patents, so the process and granting of a patent was, in every case, open to legal challenge. This meant that if someone copied an invention the patent-holder had to go to court and not only prove that there was duplication, but also that the patent itself was valid in the first place. The burden was on the patent-holder continually to enforce his rights.

  Consequently by the eighteenth century patents, while still the only form of protection for inventors, were widely regarded as an obstruction to fair trade, and were essentially granted on the basis of government gain rather than the novelty of an invention. To give just one example, in the 1720s there were three separate attempts to patent methods of making candles from tallow. But tallow candles were charged duty at 1d per pound and wax candles at 8d per pound; improved tallow candles would therefore represent a serious threat to government revenue, and the patents were refused. Only in the 1760s did the excise begin to lose its power to intervene in technical inventions, while financial reforms brought in by William Pitt in the 1780s meant that the excise became less protective of its sources of income.