Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  Britain’s first census of 1831 shows that while this process was well under way, it still had a long way to go. Just 10.4 per cent (314,106) of working men over twenty were employed in manufacturing, compared to 32.6 per cent (980,750) working in agriculture, and 32.0 per cent (964,177) in retail trade and handicrafts.4 Over the following decades steam-powered machinery found its way into more and more trades, and while this took time to work through, by the 1830s the conversion to a mineral-based economy was progressing apace. Crucially, it was clear to inventors, investors and industrialists that continual technical innovations were the key to industrial success.

  British inventors of the late eighteenth century were primarily from an artisan background, able to build devices in small workshops and with few resources, and needing little theoretical knowledge to support their practical genius. But the world moved on and further improvements in technology required a more sophisticated theoretical understanding. On the other hand scientists who were traditionally concerned with studying the natural world began to give serious attention to the new forces that industrial technology had unleashed. In 1824 the French scientist Nicolas Sadi Carnot published his Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which gave birth to the science of thermodynamics, and a basic understanding of this new discipline became essential for all mechanical engineers; by the 1830s Michael Faraday was following up his discovery of electromagnetism to produce both electromagnetic induction and an electric motor. Science and technology were increasingly married to the benefit of both.

  Much has been written about Britain’s lead in bringing industrialisation to the world, and its subsequent decline as an industrial nation. The dominant pre-industrial culture of the nation was certainly commercial, but it was centred on world trade flowing through London, and was intricately tied up with the established social hierarchy of court and counties. Industrialisation emerged from an entirely different British culture, centred around Nonconformists who had been excluded from the establishment. Once the industrialists were brought into the fold they too succumbed, sending their children to schools and universities where they studied Ovid and Seneca at the expense of Faraday and Carnot. It wasn’t all like this of course, and the tradition of British engineering endured for another generation through the likes of Isambard Brunel and Robert Stephenson. Nevertheless the dominant culture was preserved and emulated by the newly empowered. The British middle classes distinguished themselves from those beneath by looking to the disdain of the old aristocracy, rather than the inventiveness of their industrialists, for social guidance. This attitude did not hold in America or Germany, each of whom, by the late nineteenth century, had overtaken Britain.

  The central argument of this book is that the Industrial Revolution was, in essence, the transition from an organic economy to an economy based on energy derived from fossil fuels, as well as being the beginning of a sustained period of innovation that has lasted to the present. The importance of that transition will not be lost on readers for whom population growth and climate change represent a potential catastrophe for humankind. Understanding the Industrial Revolution should at least enable us to appreciate the central role that energy holds in every aspect of modern life. Life before industrialisation was, for most people, a continual struggle to survive; without reliable sources of energy we cannot live secure and comfortable lives. Any answer to the twin problems of global resources and climate change must begin with that stark truth.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Restoring a balance with nature is now seen as a necessary element in humanity’s future; we should be aware that in the past this was achieved by extremely high infant mortality and stillbirth, disease and famine. See Wrigley (2004) Chapter 12, ‘Population’. See also Diamond (1997) p. 197 et seq.

  2 Zinsser (1934) p. 10: ‘Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have been devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of a tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.’ On p. 8 Zinsser argues that in the precarious balance with nature ‘man may be defined as a parasite on a vegetable’.

  3 See Thomas (1971).

  4 Matthias (1983) pp. 1– 3. Ashton (1948), Wrigley (1988), Allen (2009), Mokyr (1990) and most scholars of the period discuss this problem from different points of view.

  5 For example, Colquhoun (1815) p. 68.

  6 This central argument, and the separation of the organic economy supplemented by coal for thermal energy, from the industrial economy which uses coal for mechanical energy, was first proposed by Wrigley (1988). Modern scholarship on the economic history of the Industrial Revolution stems from Wrigley’s insight.

  Prologue: Britain on the Verge

  1 Figures: Allen (2000) pp. 8–9; quoted in Allen (2009) Table 1.1.

  2 Figures: Matthias (1983) pp. 87–8, Table IV.

  3 See Morriss (2011).

  4 Defoe (1726) p. 208.

  5 R. Floud & D. N. McCloskey (1981) p. 64.

  6 Allen (2009) p. 18.

  7 Wrigley (1988) p. 13.

  8 Wrigley (1988) p. 50 et seq.

  9 Wrigley (1988) p. 54 quoting Unger (1984).

  10 See Hatcher (1984–93) Vol. 1.

  11 DeVries (2008) pp. 92–104.

  12 Brown (2011), Chapter 6 and 7.

  13 Matthias (1983) pp. 142–3.

  14 Walvin (1999) p. xii. The first Atlantic slave voyage was made by Sir John Hawkins in 1562–3; the Society for the Abolition of Slavery was founded in 1787 and slave trading across the Atlantic abolished by Britain and the United States in 1807. Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865 and in Brazil in 1888.

  15 Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in An Inquiry, Franklin Papers 17, 341–2, quoted in Uglow (2002) pp. 167–8. The exact date of writing and of Franklin’s recollections are not known.

  16 Allen (2009) pp. 12, 259–62.

  17 Allen (2009) pp. 54–5.

  18 Thomas (1971) Chapter 14, ‘Witchcraft in England: the Crime and its History’.

  19 See Richards (1929).

  20 Hatcher (1984–93) pp. 419–20.

  21 Visit www.glassmaking-in-london.co.uk/​ravenscroft.

  22 Defoe (1726) pp. 212–13; Ginsburg (1991) p. 53.

  23 Each of these four has been given prime importance by a different scholar in recent years. For full discussions of each see Wrigley (1988), Mokyr (1990), De Vries (2008) and Allen (2009).

  24 See Humphrey et al. (1998).

  25 Mokyr (1990) Chapter 9, ’China and Europe’. By the fourteenth century China had adjustable iron ploughs, seed drills, rakes, harrows, insect and pest control and veterinary medicine; iron production using blast furnaces had been running for nearly 2,000 years; a plethora of devices and materials were used in China that were virtually unknown in Europe, including draw-looms, cotton gins, water-powered trip hammers, water clocks, compasses, cavel-built ships with multiple masts, rudders and buoyancy chambers, porcelain, wheelbarrows, lacquer, crossbows, horse collars, matches, umbrellas, paper, moveable type, and so on. But the arrival of the Ming dynasty in 1368 saw a long period of ‘orderly’ government. Technical innovation halted and then went into reverse and by 1600 China was not just behind Europe, but behind where it had been 200 years before. Ming China was prosperous and fostered great engineering projects like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, but there was a technology retreat. Ocean-going ships were no longer built, clocks disappeared, and machines used for reeling silk had disappeared by the eighteenth century.

  26 The Albion Mill powered by steam engines was near William Blake’s home in London; the ‘dark satanic mills’ in the poem ‘Jerusalem’ (written around 1804) may, though, refer to the churches of the established Angl
ican order which Blake disdained, or even to the megaliths of Britain’s pagan past. See Porter (1974) p. 198.

  1. The Watershed

  1 The opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway in 1830 was attended by national figures including the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington. This was the symbolic acceptance by the ruling class that industrialisation was of vital importance to the nation.

  2. Inventors and Inventing

  1 The term proto-industrialisation, coined by Mendels (1972), is widely used to describe these eighteenth-century developments. The word is controversial since it implies a direct line of development to the industrial economy that followed and I have avoided it. For arguments against the concept, see Coleman (1983). See also Matthias (1983) p. 15; Allen (2009) Chapter 5.

  2 Mandeville (1714, 1724) quoted in Allen (2009) p. 251.

  3 Allen (2009) Table 10.4; see also Mokyr (2002) Chapter 5 and 10.

  4 Dutton (1984) pp. 104–8.

  5 Triewald (1734) quoted in Rolt (1963) p. 56.

  6 See Mokyr (2002) Chapter 10 on obstacles to change.

  7 Quoted in Hart (1856).

  8 Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, Queen Mary, University of London at www.english.qmul.ac.uk/​drwilliams.

  9 See Whatley (1997).

  10 Dutton (1984) pp. 132–40.

  3. Navigating the Patent System

  1 For patent developments up to 1800 see MacLeod (1988); for developments during the Industrial Revolution see Dutton (1984).

  4. Fuelling the Revolution

  1 See Hatcher (1984–93) Vol. 1 for exhaustive detail on the pre-industrial development of coal. Figures in this chapter are from Hatcher.

  2 Allen (2009) Table 4.1.

  3 Addy (1969) pp. 19–20.

  4 Defoe (1724) Letter 1, p. 66.

  5 Plattes (1634) quoted in Hatcher (1984–93) p. 428.

  6 Harrison (1577) Chapter 8.

  7 Quoted in Carey (1987) pp. 280–1.

  8 Wrigley (1988) pp. 53–5. Readers interested in the analysis of industrialisation through the production and use of energy should read Wrigley (2010).

  9 Wrigley (2004) pp. 78–9.

  10 Wrigley (1988) p. 79(n), quoting Ubbelohde p. 63.

  11 For contemporary illustrations see Addy (1969) pp. 59–61.

  12 Davy (1816).

  5. Watermills and Wheels

  1 Allen (2009) Table 7.1, p. 173.

  2 Gimpel (1976) p. 1.

  3 See Brown (2011).

  4 Addy and Power (1976) p. 27.

  5 Fairbairn (1861, 1863). The Catrine Mills and all aspects of water power are covered extensively in Brown (2011).

  6. Steam before Newcomen

  1 Humphrey et al. (1998).

  2 Ramsay’s son William wrote of him that James I ‘sent into France for my father, who was then there, and made him page of the bedchamber and groom of the privy chamber, and keeper of all his majesties’ clocks and watches’. Wm. Ramesay, Astrologia Restaurata (1653) p. 28.

  3 Published in 1663 as part of ‘A Century of the Names and Scantlings of the Marquis of Worcester’s Inventions’, quoted in Rolt (1963) p. 25.

  4 Patent No. 175, awarded to Morland on 14 March 1674.

  5 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 16 Dec 1682.

  6 Desaguliers, Experimental Philosophy (1744) quoted in Rolt (1963) p. 39.

  7 Switzer (1729) quoted in Rolt (1963) p. 40.

  7. The Newcomen Engine

  1 See Lidstone (1871).

  2 See Rolt (1963) and Preston (2012) for modern biographies of Newcomen; also Stuart (1824) p. 55 et seq.

  3 Triewald (1734) translated and quoted in Rolt (1963) p. 51.

  4 Pole (1844) p. 12.

  5 Triewald (1734) translated and quoted in Rolt (1963) p. 61.

  6 Ibid. p. 61.

  7 Switzer (1729) quoted in Stuart (1824) p. 56.

  8 Hutchinson (1794) quoted in Rolt (1963) p. 68.

  9 Stukeley (1776) p. 52.

  10 Quoted in Kirke (1913).

  11 Quoted in Raistrick (1953) p. 135.

  12 Rolt (1963) p. 122.

  13 Monthly Chronicle, Vol. II, p. 169.

  14 See Smiles (1861–2) and Skempton (2002).

  8. James Watt’s Revolution

  1 James Watt lacks a full modern biography. Elements of his life have been compiled from his own writings and those of John Robison, David Hart, John Stuart and others in the eighteenth century and George Williamson in the nineteenth. Fellow Scot Andrew Carnegie weighed in, while H. W. Dickinson’s biography dates from 1936 and L. T. C. Rolt’s from 1962. His story is told in some detail in Uglow (2002). The papers of James Watt and his family formerly held at his home Doldowlod House (referred to as the Doldowlod Papers) are now at Birmingham Central Library. Selected letters quoted can be found in Tann (1981).

  2 Defoe (1724) Letter 12, p. 604 et seq.

  3 Quoted in Dickinson (1936) p. 18.

  4 James Watt, Notebook of Experiments on Steam, Doldowlod Papers.

  5 Quoted in Rosen (2010) p. 106.

  6 Roebuck to Watt, 30 Oct 1768, quoted in Uglow (2002) p. 133.

  7 Sketchley’s Birmingham Directory, 1767, quoted in Uglow (2002) p. 17.

  8 The different Soho buildings can cause confusion; the Soho Manufactory was built in 1761; the Soho Foundry was built for the production of engines in 1795 by the firm of Boulton & Watt; Soho House was Matthew Boulton’s family home from 1766 to 1809.

  9 Boulton to Watt, 17 Feb 1769.

  10 Watt to William Small, 28 April 1769.

  11 Watt to William Small on his thirty-fifth birthday, 19 Jan 1771.

  12 Watt to William Small, 11 Dec 1773.

  13 William Small to Watt, 5 Feb 1769.

  14 Soon after he arrived in Birmingham Watt joined the Lunar Society (they met on the full moon to make it easier to travel home). Members of this famous gathering included Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, William Small, James Keir, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Galton, Josiah Wedgwood, William Withering, Joseph Priestley, Jonathan Stokes and John Whitehurst. The importance of the group was not just their meetings but their continual correspondence and support for each other. See Uglow (2002).

  15 Quoted in Rolt (1962) pp. 63–4. Joseph Harrison was senior mechanic at Boulton & Watt’s works at Soho; Isaac Perrins was an independent engine erector.

  16 Boswell (1791), Vol. II, p. 459.

  17 J. Hornblower Snr, 23 Dec 1776.

  18 Addy (1969) pp. 16–17.

  19 Boulton to Watt, June 1781.

  20 Watt to James Watt Jnr, 1808.

  21 Watt to Boulton, Sept. 1786.

  22 P. Drinkwater to Boulton & Watt, 20 Oct 1791; see Fitton (1989) p. 65.

  23 James Watt brought the Berthollet method of producing chlorine to Britain; this was a fundamental process in the chemical industry of the following century.

  24 Boulton to Watt, 28 May 1788. The governor had a long practical legacy in engines and other mechanical devices. Its theoretical legacy is even more interesting, since James Clerk Maxwell used its example to explore dynamic feedback systems in his 1868 paper ‘On Governors’ (Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, pp. 270–83). Natural dynamic feedback is at the heart of analyses of ecosystems.

  25 Jonathan Hornblower was the elder son of the Jonathan Hornblower who befriended Watt in Cornwall; the younger son was Josiah.

  26 Boulton to Watt, 7 July 1781.

  27 Watt to Boulton, late 1782.

  9. Richard Trevithick: Steam into Motion

  1 See Hodge (1973) for details of Trevithick’s life and work.

  2 Wilson to Watt, 1784; Rosen (2010) Chapter 12.

  3 Ferguson (1980) p. 54.

  4 See Bathe (1935).

  5 Watt to Boulton, Sept. 1786.

  6 Stephen Williams is the passenger; see Burton (2011) p. 70.

  7 Hodge (1973) p. 18.

  8 Ibid. pp. 20–1.

  9 Ibid. p. 21. There is now a Trevithick Trail, which follows the l
ine of the world’s first steam locomotive run, just south of Merthyr Tydfil.

  10. The Rise of Cotton

  1 Figures: Allen (2009) Chapter 8.

  2 For history of the wool trade see the following:

  Lloyd (2005); Mantoux (1928) pp. 47–74 and throughout; Power (1941); Keen (1968) p. 90 et seq. refers to wool from England, Scotland and Spain being woven in Flanders.

  3 See Raistrick (1953a).

  4 Harrison (1577).

  5 Pepys, Diaries, 5 Sept. 1663 and 1 July 1661.

  6 Collinges (1675).

  7 The parish church of St John’s in Halifax has a grave in the south porch, dating from 1150, marked with a pair of croppers’ shears; this is the earliest evidence of wool trade in the area.

  8 Defoe (1724) Letter 8, p. 495. Shalloon is a lightweight worsted fabric used for coat linings; from the French chalon, after Chalons-sur-Marne.

  9 See Baines (1985).

  10 The cotton trade is detailed in every major work on the Industrial Revolution. See esp. Allen (2009) pp. 182–216; Fitton (1989); Matthias (1983); Berg (1985); Mantoux (1928) pp. 197–271; Power (1969).

  11 Roberts (1641) p. 17.

  12 Stripes and checks could be woven into the cotton so were not covered by the prohibition on printed cloth.

  13 British imports of raw cotton reached 8.2 million kg in 1785 and 360 million kg by the 1850s. See Matthias (1983) Appendix, Table 34.

  14 Bamford (1844) p. 1.

  15 Radcliffe (1828) p. 65.