The Age of Wonder
by Richard Holmes · 15 Jan 2008 · 778pp · 227,196 words
Beddoes, a one-time lecturer from Oxford, who had frequently applied to the Royal Society for subsidy. Despite recommendations from the Duchess of Devonshire and James Watt of the Lunar Society, Banks reluctantly turned down these requests, partly on the grounds that these experiments involved human patients breathing various kinds of gas
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new lodger came to stay with Grace Davy, arranged through the ever-solicitous Tonkin. Gregory Watt was the prodigal son of the great Scottish engineer James Watt. At twenty-five he was the youngest member of the Lunar Society, brilliantly clever but physically frail-probably consumptive-and emotionally unstable.25 He had
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or less ill, and in need of gas treatment. But he needed initial capital: he asked Giddy for a gift of £350, got financing from James Watt, applied publicly to Joseph Banks at the Royal Society, and privately to the Duchess of Devonshire. Knowing perhaps that the duchess was not averse to
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whole series of other papers on gases, electricity, heat and-most intriguingly-the universal energy transmitted by starlight. Beddoes read these eagerly, and, encouraged by James Watt, invited Davy-not yet twenty-to join the Institute as an assistant. It is significant that Davy (and his mentor Tonkin) clearly saw this as
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to his Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle, and sent him to visit the Institute’s most influential supporters: the powerful Wedgwood family at Cote House, and James Watt and the Lunar Society in Birmingham. Davy made an excellent impression on everyone he met, and his circle of acquaintances rapidly expanded. Initially Davy boarded
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the new empirical chemistry of Priestley and Lavoisier to test, and if necessary challenge, the Brunonian system of medicine by controlled experiment. He wrote to James Watt, an outstanding engineer, for designs of gasinhaling equipment, including a silken face-mask with a wooden mouthpiece. The masks and gas bags were based on
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Genius’, ‘Saint Michael’s Mount’ and ‘The Tempest’. It was in this same month that Davy first used a portable gas chamber especially designed by James Watt. This device allowed a much longer total exposure to nitrous oxide, and also psychologically isolated the subject from his laboratory surroundings. It was a narrow
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in Researches. For Thomas Beddoes this was a crushing disappointment, particularly as it was exactly what Joseph Banks had always predicted. Banks had written to James Watt: ‘in the case of Dr Beddoes’s project-I do not fully understand it, &…I do not expect any beneficial consequences will be derived from
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‘Inventor of the Capillary Tube Lamp’.100 George Stephenson (1781-1848) was a gifted, self-educated engineer, and later the designer of the early railway steam engine, the famous ‘Stephenson Rocket’ which brought him international fame. He was an inventor of genius, an honest man and no fraud. He was to be
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Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament were illuminated with the new gaslights, ‘most Brilliant’, Banks noted approvingly.8 There were paddle ships powered by steam engines, which could ply the Thames against the tide, and make all-weather crossings to France. These began to appear in Turner’s pictures, and even
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the turnpike road, A thing to counterbalance human woes: For ever since immortal man hath glow’d With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon. Most remarkable of all, in the next stanza Byron light-heartedly connected the discovery and daring of contemporary science
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the first electrical generators, by producing an ‘alternating’ electrical current. This would lead to electrical dynamos that would ultimately revolutionise industry as much as James Watt’s steam engine. His experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanometer (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution’s laboratory on 29
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laws of reflection, and indeed their undulatory theories are perfectly similar.’58 This allows her to discuss the action of sunshine, rain, frost, steam, clouds, steam engines, musical instruments and even ‘squeezing water out of a sponge’ in the same chapter, headed simply ‘Heat’.59 Newton remains the presiding genius of the
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at Birmingham, which met each month on the night of the full moon (in theory so they could walk home safely). A close friend of James Watt and Matthew Boulton, he described much. of the new science of the day in his long and remarkable poem The Botanic Garden (1791). Its extensive
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Shelley, and covered the basics of Romantic science including astronomy, chemistry, electricity, geology and meteorology. JAMES WATT, 1736-1819. Engineer and member of the Lunar Society. In partnership with Matthew Boulton he developed new forms of steam engine, for use in mines and textile manufacture. The international unit of electricity, the watt (a measure
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Niger, 1890 Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America, 1825 William Wordsworth, rejected passage on Mungo Park, from The Prelude, 1805 Humphry Davy Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations on the Medical Use of Factitious Airs, J. Johnson, 1794, British Library catalogue B. Tracts. 489 Henry Brougham, ‘Sir Humphry Davy’, in The Lives
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, May 2006. See also John Allen, ‘The Early History of Varfell’, in Ludgvan, Ludgvan Horticultural Society, no date 45 Golinski, pp157-83 46 Reply from James Watt, Birmingham, 13 November 1799, in JD Fragments, pp24-6 47 HD Works 3, pp278-9 48 HD Works 3, pp278-80; on Davy’s impetuosity
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Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Picador, 2001 49 Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences, vol 1, 1847, p264 50 HD Works 3, pp246-7; James Watt, Birmingham, 13 November 1799, in JD Fragments, pp24-6; equipment partly illustrated in Fullmer, p216 51 Treneer, p72 52 Fullmer, p213 53 Ibid., p214 54
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Fragments, p150 126 Coleridge to Southey, 1803; see Treneer, p114 127 Treneer, p78 128 JB Correspondence 4, letters 1290-6, cover an exchange between Banks, James Watt and the Duchess of Devonshire about the viability of Dr Beddoes’s scheme in December 1794 129 HD Works 3, p276 130 F.F. Cartwright
Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia · 10 Apr 2018 · 927pp · 216,549 words
to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture—the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution—is typically anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses. The British state has little to do in this version of the story. For more than two hundred years, that image
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1859, and saw the giants of the industrial revolution as exemplars of that ethos: he wrote the first biography of Matthew Boulton, of Boulton & Watt steam engine fame, shortly after, in 1865. The myth of self-help has remained at the heart of our understanding of the industrial revolution. To be sure
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’t demarcate modern and premodern industries. Particular processes rather than entire industries were transformed. Karl Marx knew that the machine came from the workshop; the steam engine was produced piecemeal in Soho and in John Wilkinson’s ironworks. The entanglement of large and small, old and new, is what makes short- or
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air, and in 1795 (the year of the scandal around him in the Quaker church) he was a trustee for James Watt for the Soho Foundry’s investments in the manufacture of steam engines. His father and siblings lent Boulton money on a mortgage on Boulton’s shares in the Birmingham Canal Navigation Company
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to create an assay office in town. Both invested in the Rose Copper Company, in Swansea, in 1802. Galton Jr. assisted Boulton and Watt in steam engine orders and other business matters. The wealth acquired from gunmaking had far-flung and important repercussions in the industrial and commercial economy. Farmer and Galton
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for guns was low, skilled smiths might be busily employed in making buttons, buckles, cutlery, spurs, candlesticks, whip handles, coffee pots, inkstands, bells, carriage fittings, steam engines, snuffboxes, lead pipes, jewelery, lamps, or kitchen tools. They were flexible; they had to be, and it was the nature of metalworking. Birmingham’s population
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Boulton not only took gunmakers’ help, he had a stake in their affairs. He leased land from his frequent colleague and Handsworth neighbor John Whateley. James Watt leased a forge and engine from the Whateleys. Boulton introduced Whateley to his business associate William Matthews to supply guns for a ship Matthews was
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near the scale of Birmingham. It was water powered, but the River Ravensbourne proved such an unreliable power source that it was replaced with a steam engine. Lathes, grinders, and other machinery were installed; cottages erected for workmen; and bonuses awarded for good work. A proofhouse was added, and the Tower workshops
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. In 1811, the French traveler Louis Simond visited a Birmingham mill where three hundred men made ten thousand barrels a month with a 120-horsepower steam engine. Small workshops coexisted with and served the large-scale units, like Galton’s, Boulton’s, and the Ordnance Office’s, that emerged out of government
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1820. He was attacked for this, but his machines found less controversial use in producing the tubes used in gas and water pipes, bedsteads, and steam engines. Surplus government musket barrels were also repurposed as service conduits for gas lighting. Birmingham’s gunmakers were in some ways part of the backbone of
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also gave the British government a major role in the creation and employment of arguably the most iconic developments of the industrial revolution, including the steam engine, copper sheathing, and interchangeable-parts manufacturing. Early changes in iron production owed much to the state and to war demand. The first reverberatory furnace was
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and perspective in drawing plans. In this way, the Ordnance Office and John Wilkinson came to play a central role in the history of the steam engine. In 1770, just before Townshend became master general, the office hired Jan Verbruggen, from The Hague, as master founder. Experienced in improving cannon boring technology
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engine at the Royal Brass Foundry to keep up with his furnace capacity. Thus did state establishments “unintentionally nourish” development of the steam engine. The precision Verbruggen introduced made the steam engine more viable. John Wilkinson improved on his machinery, patenting a cannon lathe in 1774. The Ordnance Board canceled the patent a year
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lathe based on his cannon lathe, and it alone could accurately bore the cylinders for James Watt’s steam engines: its importance to Watt’s experiments “cannot be exaggerated.” Wilkinson was already the iron supplier for the Boulton & Watt steam engine enterprise. In typical Birmingham style, Boulton, another government contractor (on which more below), was applying
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the lessons of button manufacture to steam engine manufacture. Wilkinson was also one of the earliest purchasers of Boulton & Watt engines, which he used to raise water from mine shafts. He was the
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to purchase their blowing engine, to blow an iron furnace at his works in Broseley, buying four more in a year. He partnered in the steam engine business: he made the main engine parts—cylinder, condenser, and piston—at his ironworks, and Soho took on the more complicated parts. The alliance lasted
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, Boulton and Watt struggled to get their cylinders made, finally setting up their own boring mill—the beginning of the Soho Foundry. Galton supported their steam engine venture at the turn of the century, too. In the 1780s and 1790s, Richmond expanded the Ordnance Office’s technological pursuits. He originated the Ordnance
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. In 1782, he went to see Boulton and Watt; they promised to mention his work to their partner John Wilkinson. They corresponded about using a steam engine in his experiments. Boulton and Watt also forwarded Cort’s description of his technique to Wilkinson. Cort demonstrated the technique before Midlands ironmasters. He had
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than being bound to forests or rivers. Coal-rich areas like Wales, the Midlands, and Scotland profited; new metal-using trades and iron founders thrived. Steam engines fueled the spread of the puddling furnace. They, too, multiplied as war put pressure on coal mining. In 1796, Boulton determined that little money was
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usefull to the publick.” He advised his son “to confine his persuits to things usefull rather than ornamental.” The war and the expanding market for steam engines underwrote his embrace of utility. After the wars, the influential political economist Thomas Malthus claimed, “In carrying the late war, we were powerfully assisted by
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our steam-engines.” In fact, war had assisted the spread of steam engines. These inventions—steam engines, lathes, the puddling process—facilitated the rise of large-scale industry. They were interdependent and mutually reinforcing, and the state
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-century industry and innovation. In all this, too, the state supported industrial revolution—haltingly, ungraciously, and yet vitally. * * * — Major turning points of industrial revolution—the steam engine, puddling, copper sheathing—were triggered by war and produced by networks of contractor-industrialists. Causal relations between science and industry were not direct, unitary, or
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James Keir arrived in the area around 1770, dreaming of amassing a fortune by experimenting with alkalis. As general manager at Soho, he collaborated with James Watt and other Lunar Society members. His chemical works made key ingredients for pottery, glass, and soap, but he also made metal alloys, specifically out of
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interest in inventing a mode of coin manufacture that would reduce costs and deter counterfeiters. He would adapt the coining press to the rotative steam engine. Moreover, just then, steam engines had made it possible to mine enormous quantities of copper in Cornwall. (This, too, fueled the counterfeiting disease.) From 1785, Boulton owned his
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was also entangled with guns: he turned to gunmakers for pivotal technical expertise and collaboration. He and Watt were already collaborating with Galton on the steam engine business, civic affairs, and the Lunar Society. Boulton was also in frequent touch with the Whateleys. They shared common interests and supported one another’s
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oversaw the modernization and reequipment of the Royal Mint from 1807, a project completed in 1810, a few months after his death. He supplied the steam engine, the bulk of the machinery, and the skilled fitters to supervise it. The first coinage of this reformed Royal Mint was a load of copper
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autobiography he published that year, acknowledging also the kindness of other “famous Birmingham names,” including Galton, Boulton, Priestley, and Garbett. A year later, Galton and James Watt corresponded with a Liverpool slave trader about supplying engines for Trinidad. Galton was not alone in searching for a way to simultaneously pursue the African
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Enfield. They persuaded the master armorer at Harpers Ferry to take charge of Enfield. The factory made locks and bayonets; its waterwheels were replaced by steam engines. It went into full production mode in 1856 as the Royal Small Arms Factory (as Colt’s factory closed in failure). The sixty-odd parts
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wrought iron to work into various goods. Over time, it was employed further back in the chain of production. a “plain Englishman”: Joseph Black to James Watt, 1784, quoted in Coleman and Macleod, “Attitudes to New Techniques,” 602–3. Wilkinson installed fourteen: Birch, The Economic History of the British Iron and Steel
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manufacture of navy biscuits on a production-line basis. Maudslay’s factory at Lambeth set new standards of precision engineering using lathes but also made steam engines; he sold one to the Woolwich Arsenal in 1809. Boulton puzzled over: P. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, 89. In 1775, the Society: Aris’s Birmingham Gazette
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: Mathias, The Transformation of England, 65–66, 82–83. This community also: See, for instance, BCA: MS3782/12/27/102: SGII to Matthew Boulton (and James Watt), [1782]. “culture of apartness”: P. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, 187–88. a range of devices: Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 1:43
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into a national banker. Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation, 228–32. The Spooners evolved: The partners also leased land, a mill, and a steam engine on behalf of James Watt from the Whateleys. BCA: MS3602/295: Lease, December 21, 1817; MS3602/308: Lease, December 7, 1818. two Quaker banks: Price, “The Great Quaker
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copper, 76, 168, 199, 202–3, 205–12 counterfeit, 202–3, 205, 206, 208, 210 meaning of “coin,” 201 silver, 210–11 standardization of, 210 steam engine and, 206, 207, 211 token, 126, 202, 206–8, 210, 211 Cold War, 12, 13, 256, 299, 374–77, 401, 410 Collins, William, 129–30
How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler · 13 Jun 2005 · 218pp · 63,471 words
materials for the boilers were a bit shoddy, and most experiments ended with boiler explosions, a nasty occupational hazard. Most of what I learned about steam engines was from reading Robert Thurston’s book titled “A History of the Growth of the SteamEngine” which he published in 1878, but still remains an
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Back in 1665 Edward Somerset, the second Marquis of Worcester (but he tried harder) was perhaps the first to not only think and sketch a steam engine, but also build one that actually worked. He created steam in a boiler, and had it fill a vessel half filled with water. He then
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the road from where Savery hailed, in Dartmouth, a blacksmith and ironworker by the name of Thomas Newcomen thought he could come up with a steam engine for the nearby mines. It appears he had seen the Savery engine, and must have either seen or heard about Papin’s design. What Newcomen
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combine the best of both, the Savery surface condensation vessel design with the Huygens/Papin cylinder and piston design to create, in 1705, an “Atmospheric Steam Engine”. A boiler would feed steam into a cylinder, until the piston reached the top. Then a valve was turned to cool the outside of the
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1708, the two men struck a deal to co-own the patent. In this way, Savery managed to cut himself in on the lucrative steam engine market even though his own design never really worked. The combination worked wonders. A two-foot diameter piston operated at six to ten strokes a
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He stumbled on the solution while watching a funky new steam engine pumping out his own flooded coalmines. This almost 3.0 steam engine would have a profound influence on industry, but that wasn’t so obvious at first. *** It was, of course, James Watt’s steam engine, but it still wasn’t all that good. Back in
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1763, James Watt was employed at Glasgow University, with the task of
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fixing a Newcomen steam engine. Fifty years after Newcomen’s invention, five horsepower was still not very efficient
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him fresh money to improve his design. In exchange, Roebuck received two thirds of any patent. In 1769, Watt was granted a patent for his steam engine design by Parliament, which had taken over this duty from the King. Of course, Parliament was run by property owners who, not surprisingly, were all
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the venture capitalist of his time. 24 HOW WE GOT HERE Boulton was buddies with Ben Franklin and the two often corresponded about steam and steam engines, even about one of their own. Franklin was probably trying to find a new market for his potbelly stove! In 1768 meanwhile, Watt stopped
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agreed to buy out Roebucks’ two-thirds interest in the patent, but more importantly, to fund Watt’s continued research to improve his external condenser steam engine work and make it work. The plan was to move Watt down to Birmingham, because that is where the demand was, but Watt had some
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member Joseph Banks was president of the Royal Society and had great connections. The bill passed and Boulton and Watt had the patent on Atmospheric Steam Engines (with cool condensers) until 1800, even though it still didn’t work that well. *** The Brits were at war on and off with the
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source of power, water wheels were slow and horses expensive to feed. Wilkinson needed piping hot coals to smelt his iron. He had seen James Watt’s steam engine pumping water out of coalmines, and thought he could use it to run his bellows rather than horses. So Wilkinson went through the hassle of
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Sometimes it’s that simple, and easy to miss. Being a reasonable businessman, he told Boulton and Watt that he could improve their crappy little steam engine by a factor of five, in exchange for the exclusive rights to supply precision cylinders to B&W. Deal. *** Here is the part of the
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What they were missing was a successful business model. It was Matthew Boulton who came up with one. Boulton and Watt didn’t actually sell steam engines since no one could afford one. Most of the early customers were Cornish mines. Beyond a few Parliament-sponsored joint-stock companies, the stock market
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punch. At the end of the night, the mine companies were drained of cash and the miners drained of brain cells. So instead of selling steam engines, Boulton just traveled around to mines (and later mills and factories) and simply asked the miners how many horses they owned. Boulton and Watt would
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then install a steam engine, and charge one third of the annual cost of each horse it replaced, over the life of the patent, that is until 1800. Back
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struck 240 blows per minute. Bet you couldn’t build one of those in your basement today. Also that year, Watt developed the double acting steam engine, which alternately fed steam into each end of the cylinder, kind of a 28 HOW WE GOT HERE push me pull you contraption. But
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pig iron from 12 hours to 45 minutes. It wasn’t until John Wilkinson’s combining of the Darby coke smelting process, the Boulton & Watt steam engine, his own precision cylinders, and the Cort forging process, that we got industrial strength iron, and lots of it. Boulton and Watt brought down the
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years. They had to prove themselves first. *** Did we get anything we need for the computer business? Lots, but most of it came indirectly. That steam engine would be indispensable for generating electricity, but not for a few more decades. Money, and keeping track of money, would become much more important as
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tighten the weft, and move the sword towards the other end of the warp to send the shuttle through the new shed. Got it? Makes steam engines sound simple. 30 HOW WE GOT HERE But looms are actually very simple but extremely labor intensive. A weaver must pay careful attention. In 1733
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no man or mule or horse or even running water could keep up with the power needed to run one of these things. Boulton & Watt steam engines to the rescue. The Spinning Mule was a breakout device. It was just what the textile business needed: cheap, smooth material. And of course,
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or fixed broken thread. He tried to use a waterwheel to operate the weaving mill, but quickly contacted Boulton and Watt and hooked up a steam engine. An experienced hand weaver could, according to Richard Guest’s, Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture 1823, produce “two pieces of nine-eighths shirting
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able to win any suits. Meanwhile, Whitney built bigger and bigger cotton gins. Waterpower replaced the hand crank or horse. America didn’t have any steam engines, and it would be a while until that mode of industrialization took hold. But it did have the ability to turn out more cotton. In
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the time was to solve differential equations. Astronomers who studied the skies needed differential equations to predict orbits. The invention of the steam engine would have gone a lot faster if James Watt had been able to solve differentials in Isaac Newton’s law of cooling. Newton stated that if an object, hot or
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1822, a flamboyant professor in England, Charles Babbage announced that he would build a Difference Engine. The size of a house, it would need a steam engine to operate but it would solve differential equations. Great idea, poor execution. A few small-scale models were demonstrated, but the engine was ahead of
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Crompton Spinning Mule. This guy should get as much 42 HOW WE GOT HERE credit as James Watt. The Mule could only operate under power. Horses wouldn’t do, a water wheel might work, but a steam engine was exactly what was needed to give the mule enough power to stretch and wind, and
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materials up and down American rivers to get to ports to load onto British ships. *** John Fitch was the first to hook up a crude steam engine to paddle wheels. In 1787, he steamed a ship from Philadelphia to Burlington, New Jersey. Sure, this was only 20 miles, but it beat
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for this 44 HOW WE GOT HERE steamboat in 1791, one of the first the new United States granted. But like Watt’s original steam engine in 1770, Fitch’s cylinder and pistons leaked badly, and Fitch didn’t have John Wilkinson to come along with his cannon barrel-boring tool
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3 horsepower engine, had economic problems, as he couldn’t run cargo or passengers cheap enough and soon failed. Back in England, James Watt wasn’t resting on his laurels. His steam engine patent was to expire in 1800, so he kept inventing. As I noted, in 1782, he invented the double acting, non
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River, knowing full well it would be purchased by the U.S. It’s nice to have connections. *** James Watt, meanwhile, was still haunted by the bad rap that the early high-pressure steam engines got when their boilers exploded, and he refused to use high-pressure steam. But others eventually would. High-pressure
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The most important was George Stephenson. In 1803, he was working in a mining pit, and was put in charge of repairing an old Newcomen steam engine, still in use, probably because the mine was too poor to upgrade. There is something oddly magical about these Newcomen engines – as bad as they
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times, the railroads got built, and people and goods were shuffled about. The Industrial Revolution hit its stride. *** Around the same time, these high-pressure steam engines were strong enough and reliable enough for ocean going vessels. Even then, paddle wheels powered the first ocean going steamships. In 1819, the Robert Fulton
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he began to dream about a steam only trip across the Atlantic. There was only one problem, how to carry enough coal to keep the steam engine cranking for that long trip. A self-proclaimed “expert” on the subject, Reverend Dionysius Lardner, proclaimed in 1837 that the longest theoretical distance a
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Archimedes of Syracuse (Greece, not New York) had invented the screw pump to raise water for irrigation back in 220 or so B.C. The steam engine would directly drive a shaft to which a propeller was attached. The screw propeller was more efficient than a paddle wheel, because the moving water
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the 19th Century, steam power had increased by a factor of 1000, on a warship to protect trade routes, trade enabled by those very same steam engines. *** I think the lesson here is not any specific piece part for computing, but instead the parallels of the industrial revolution and the digital revolution
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the ability to constantly lower the price of goods and services, drove the industrial era. So too, the parallels of the microprocessor and networking with steam engines and transportation. They go hand in hand. 56 HOW WE GOT HERE What else? Well, these are 100-year cycles. And it’s really
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Between 1797 and 1821, during the Restriction, England’s economy took off, partially because it was wartime, but also because the industrial age had begun. Steam engines ran mills. The triangle trade ran circles around everyone else in the world. Affordable English goods were in high demand as substitutes for home spun
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out, he lost his funding and the ABC gathered dust. *** Here is where the story gets interesting and starts to resemble the birth of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution. The United States Army and Navy each had a problem. There was a war on, and they were painstakingly assembling artillery
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England needed cannons to put down the insurgency of colonists in America in 1774, cannon-maker John Wilkinson perfected these same coke ovens by adapting James Watt’s steam engine to run his bellows. The need for cannons helped spark the Industrial Revolution, and 175 years later, wars were STILL being fought over coke
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university and industrial company in England. Each built its own version. The British had a lead in computers, much as they had a lead in steam engines. Over time, all the parts needed for the Colossus class computers would be made in England and other parts of the sprawling Empire. Sir William
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115 What? Destroyed? This turned out to be a costly mistake. Because of Turing, they had a shot at repeating the steam engine story. These computers were no different than steam engines, they added value to raw materials, in this case knowledge instead of iron or cotton. But some paranoid bureaucrat cost Britain its
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design and manufacture. Von Neumann’s work had established a computing architecture. But the next move, like all the improvements Watt made to his original steam engine, was to get the hot, power-hungry vacuum tubes out of the loop and make computers commercially viable. And slow relays or a wave sloshing
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If you made it cheaper by half, they would not only come, they would use three times as many. Just like comfortable cloth off a steam engine run Spinning Mule and Power Loom. The transistor I described Hoerni and Noyce making was a bipolar junction transistor. It was a great device for
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you are off and running, producing code to save the aluminum and chemical industry from extinction. The biggest problem facing any new business, be it steam engines or static memory, iron foundries or semiconductor fabs, is finding capital to fund the business. Banks won’t lend money to businesses they don’t
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business? Forget it. Come back when the profits roll in. *** Back in 1769, Matthew Boulton was attracted to James Watt and his steam engine and provided him with risk capital because he understood early how the steam engine could change the manufacturing business. In exchange, he got two-thirds of the business, which reaped him 25
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adjusted for time and risk and competition. Boulton could have cashed out in year three, and many others could have owned his piece of the steam engine franchise. In fact, Watt could have cut out Boulton altogether, and just sold a piece of his business to the stock market, and used that
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computer revolution. He also proved that vacuums exist and that pressure could be measured with a tube of inverted mercury – two phenomena that James Watt needed to get his steam engine working. But Pascal’s rapidly firing mathematical mind would go to other, more near-term pursuits. He was a vicious gambler. He had
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Of course, its timing was spot on, as it now had a big enough home to handle the expansion of trade brought on by the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution. And thus began the modern insurance industry. But to me, something is terribly wrong with the whole business structure. You would
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Line Pioneers, Berkeley Sylla, Richard, 1998, The First Great IPO, Financial History Magazine Issue, 64 Thurston, Robert, 1878, A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine Weightman, Gavin, 2003, Signor Marconi’s Magic Box – The Most Remarkable Invention of the 19th Century and the Amateur Inventor Whose Genius Sparked a Revolution
Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil · 11 May 2017
Alembert 1769–1772]). An average horse of that period could not sustain a steady work rate of one horsepower. James Watt used an exaggerated rating to ensure customers’ satisfaction with his horsepower-denominated steam engines installed to place harnessed animals. Figure 1.4 Charcoaling in early seventeenth-century England as depicted in John Evelyn
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Reproduced from Farey (1827). Figure 5.3 The C Pit of the Hebburn Colliery was a typical English coal mine of the early steam engine era. The mine’s steam engine was housed in the building with a stack and powered the winding and ventilation machinery. Reproduced from Hair (1844). Figure 5.4 Notable
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main lathe workshop of the Stott Park Bobbin Mill in Finthswaite, Lakeside, Cumbria, showing the typical arrangement of overhead belts transmitting power from a large steam engine to individual machines. The mill produced wooden bobbins used by Lancashire’s spinning and weaving industries (Corbis). Figure 6.9 Changing designs of blast
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traditional prime movers remained limited even after the adoption of larger waterwheels at the beginning of the early modern era. The change came only with steam engines of the nineteenth century. Maximum capacities are plotted from prime mover–specific sources cited in this book. Figure 7.3 Approximate estimates chart the
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orders of magnitude (nearly two million times) more powerful than heavy draft horses, the most powerful animate prime movers. Waterwheel ratings were surpassed by steam engines before 1750, by 1850 water turbines had become briefly the most powerful prime movers, and steam turbines have been the most powerful prime movers ever
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work and heat (box 1.3). Power denotes the rate of energy flow. Its first standard unit, horsepower, was set by James Watt (1736–1819). He wanted to charge for his steam engines on a readily understandable basis, and so he chose the obvious comparison with the prime mover they were to replace, a
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Alembert 1769–1772]). An average horse of that period could not sustain a steady work rate of one horsepower. James Watt used an exaggerated rating to ensure customers’ satisfaction with his horsepower-denominated steam engines installed to place harnessed animals. Another important rate is energy density, the amount of energy per unit mass of
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smoke heavily, emit a great deal of sulfur dioxide, and leave a large incombustible residue. An abundance of high-energy-density coal ideal for fueling steam engines (the often used adjective “smokeless” must be seen in relative terms) was clearly a major factor contributing to the British dominance of nineteenth-century
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conversions of the kinetic energies of water and wind (by sails and mills) were the only prime movers in traditional societies before the diffusion of steam engines. Although the subsequent retreat of traditional prime movers was relatively rapid, waterwheels and windmills retained (or even increased) their importance during the first half
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beam attached to a central axle for work in small manufactures requiring steady rotary power, could not deliver much more, and before the introduction of steam engines many of them were replaced by much more powerful waterwheels and windmills. Water Power Antipater of Thessalonica, writing during the first century BCE, left
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and churches. Everything changed, and rather rapidly, only with the diffusion of a much more powerful prime mover and a superior construction material. The steam engine and cheap cast iron and steel revolutionized transportation as well as construction. Moving on Land Walking and running, the two natural modes of human locomotion
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guns, iron cannonballs, and more reliable firearms. These trends were greatly accelerated with the introduction of coke-based iron smelting and the emergence of the steam engine. Warfare Armed conflicts have always had a formative role in history: they require the mobilization of energy resources (often on an extraordinary scale, be
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these advances was the invention, development, and eventually mass-scale diffusion of new ways to convert fossil fuels: by introducing new prime movers—starting with steam engines and progressing to internal combustion engines, steam turbines, and gas turbines—and by coming up with new processes to transform raw fuels, including the
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5.1). Heat released by their combustion can be used directly for cooking, heating, or smelting metals and indirectly for energizing various prime movers. Steam engine became the leading inanimate prime mover of the nineteenth century. Internal combustion engines and steam turbines started to make commercial inroads during the 1890s. Before
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Mt in 1900, laying the foundation for the post-1860 development of the modern steel industry and providing the key metal of industrialization (Smil 2016). Steam Engines Steam engine was the first new prime mover successfully introduced since the adoption of windmills, which preceded it by more than 800 years. The machine was the
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1981). More specifically, British data show that to relate the nineteenth-century economic growth primarily to steam is a misconceived conclusion (Crafts and Mills 2004). Steam engines notwithstanding, “the British economy was largely traditional 90 years after 1760” (Sullivan 1990, 360), and “the typical British worker in the mid-nineteenth century
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fuel led to their proliferation, and thus to a further expansion of mining. Soon the engines also powered winding and ventilating machinery. Watt’s improved steam engine was an almost instant commercial success, and it was easy to see its eventual impact beyond coal mining, in manufacturing and transportation (Thurston 1878;
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for windmills. Watt’s largest units (just over 100 kW) matched the most powerful existing waterwheels. But the location of waterwheels was inflexible, while steam engines could be sited with incomparably greater freedom, particularly near any port or along canals, where cheap transport by ships or boats could bring the requisite
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of a steam carriage In 1777, when he was 23 years old, William Murdoch walked nearly 500 km to Birmingham to take a job with James Watt’s steam engine company. Both Watt and his partner, Matthew Boulton, soon found him a great asset. Boulton’s skilled installations of new machines ensured their efficient
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in the United States. Figure 5.3 The C Pit of the Hebburn Colliery was a typical English coal mine of the early steam engine era. The mine’s steam engine was housed in the building with a stack and powered the winding and ventilation machinery. Reproduced from Hair (1844). All early rivergoing ships
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into universal economic and social reality: steam turbines, transformers, electric motors, and transmission using AC. I have already noted the high mass/power ratios of steam engines and their limited power ratings. These prime movers, which were also bulky and fairly inefficient, were abandoned soon after Charles Parsons (1854–1931) patented
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1870s, also by dynamos (Hunter and Bryant 1991). The high operating cost and limited battery capacity made small DC motors inferior prime movers compared to steam engines. Figure 5.11 Nikola Tesla in 1890. Photograph by Napoleon Sarony. The first commercially successful small DC electric motor (thousands were sold) was also
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floor was the introduction of electric motors powering individual machines, allowing precise and independent control by displacing generations of central drives transmitting the power of steam engines via leather belt and line shafts, but even this fundamental transformation would have had a limited impact if high-speed tools and better-quality
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predicated on reliable and inexpensive transportation and distribution. And, contrary to common belief, the rising availability of coal-derived heat and mechanical power produced by steam engines was not necessary to initiate these complex industrialization changes. Cottage and workshop manufacturing, based on cheap countryside labor and serving national and even international markets
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the next step in the European transition from cottage production to centralized manufacturing. In a number of locations, industrial waterwheels and turbines competed successfully with steam engines for decades after the introduction of the new inanimate prime mover. Nor was mass consumption a real novelty. We tend to think of materialism
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pace of production, and an excessive workload)—is nothing but pure Taylorism (Ohno 1988; Smil 2006). A radically new period of industrialization came when steam engines were eclipsed by electrification. Electricity is a superior form of energy, and not only in comparison with steam power. Only electricity combines instant and effortless
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almost infinite number of growing or changing uses—yet it requires no inventory. These attributes made electrification of industries a truly revolutionary switch. After all, steam engines replacing waterwheels did not change the way of transmitting mechanical energy powering various industrial tasks. Consequently, this substitution did little to affect general factory layout
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main lathe workshop of the Stott Park Bobbin Mill in Finthswaite, Lakeside, Cumbria, showing the typical arrangement of overhead belts transmitting power from a large steam engine to individual machines. The mill produced wooden bobbins used by Lancashire’s spinning and weaving industries (Corbis). The first electric motors powered shorter shafts for
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energy intensity of economic growth Historical statistics show a steady decline in the British energy intensity following the rapid rise brought by the adoption of steam engines and railways between 1830 and1850 (Humphrey and Stanislaw 1979). Canadian and U.S. intensities followed the declining British trend with a lag of 60
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Liberty (EC2) class ships, the dominant U.S. cargo carriers, were not powered by new, efficient diesel engines but by well-proven three-cylinder steam engines supplied by oil-fired boilers (Elphick 2001). Only suggestive approximations are possible in charting long-term patterns of prime mover deployment in the Old World
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and commercialization of new inventions (Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986; Mokyr 2002; Smil 2005). The energy foundations of nineteenth-century advances included the development of steam engines and their widespread adoption as both stationary and mobile prime movers, iron smelting with coke, the large-scale production of steel, and the introduction of
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orders of magnitude (nearly two million times) more powerful than heavy draft horses, the most powerful animate prime movers. Waterwheel ratings were surpassed by steam engines before 1750, by 1850 water turbines had become briefly the most powerful prime movers, and steam turbines have been the most powerful prime movers ever
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fall almost perfectly into the midpoints of Schumpeterian downswings. The first cluster, peaking in 1828, is clearly associated with the deployment of stationary and mobile steam engines, the substitution of coke for charcoal, and the generation of coal-derived gas. The second one, peaking in 1880, includes the revolutionary innovations of
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fantails (patented in 1745 by an English blacksmith, Edmund Lee), floats in domestic cisterns and in steam boilers (1746–1758), and James Watt’s famous centrifugal governor regulating the power of steam engines (1789). Today’s most numerous example in this category is microprocessors controlling the operation of car and jet engines. An indispensable
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Basalla 1982; Smil 2003, 2010a). After millennia of reliance on biomass fuels, many nineteenth-century writers saw coal as an ideal energy source and the steam engine as a nearly miraculous prime mover. Heavy air pollution, land destruction, health hazards, mining accidents, and the need to turn to progressively poorer or deeper
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Western Europe 1600 + Ball bearings in Western Europe 1640 + English coal mining expands 1690 Experiments with atmospheric steam engine (Denis Papin) 1698 Simple, small steam engine (Thomas Savery) 1709 Coke from bituminous coal (Abraham Darby) 1712 Atmospheric steam engine (Thomas Newcomen) 1745 Fantail for automatic turning of windmills 1750 + Intensive canal construction in Western Europe Use
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of coke spreads in English iron making Newcomen’s engine more common in English coal mines 1757 Precision-cutting lathe (Henry Maudslay) 1769 James Watt patents a separate condenser for steam engine 1770s Factories powered by waterwheels 1775 Watt’s patent extended to 1800 1782 Hot air balloon (Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier) 1794 Lamps
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with wick holders and glass chimneys (Aimé Argand) 1800 Electric battery (Alessandro Volta) 1800s Steamboats (Charlotte Dundas, Clermont) High-pressure steam engines (R. Trevithick, O. Evans) 1805 Steam-powered crane (John Rennie) Coal (town) gas in England 1808 Arc lamp (Humphrey Davy) 1809 Chilean nitrates discovered
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(1969), and Chapelle (1988). Volumes on oared ships include Morrison and Gardiner (1995) and Morrison, Coates, and Rankov (2000). Indispensable sources for the history of steam engines and their uses are Farey (1827), Fry (1896), Croil (1898), Dalby (1920), Dickinson ( 1939), Watkins (1967), Jones (1973), von Tunzelmann (1978), Hunter (1979), Ellis (
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first oil well. Journal of Petroleum Technology 59:14–25. Dickinson, H. W. 1939. A Short History of the Steam Engine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickinson, H. W., and R. Jenkins. 1927. James Watt and the Steam Engine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diderot, D., and J.L.R. D’Alembert. 1769–1772. L’Encyclopedie ou dictionnaire
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. Faraday, M. 1832. Experimental researches in electricity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 122:125–162. Farey, J. 1827. A Treatise on the Steam Engine. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green. Faulseit, R. K., ed. 2015. Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies.
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History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing. Hills, R. 1989. Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hindle, B., ed. 1975. America’s Wooden Age: Aspects of Its Early Technology. Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Restorations. Hippisley, J.
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Dynamics of Shifting Cultivation: Myths, Realities, and Policy Implications. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Thurston, R. H. 1878. A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine. New York: D. Appleton Co. Titow, J. Z. 1969. English Rural Society, 1200–1350. London: George Allen and Unwin. Tomaselli, I. 2007. Forests and
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power—an illustrated guide. Industrial Archaeology 4 (2): 81–110. Watt, J. 1855 (1769). Steam Engines, &c. 29 April 1769. Patent reprint by G. E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/James_Watt_Patent_1769_No_913.pdf. Watters, R. F. 1971. Shifting Cultivation in Latin America. Rome
Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes · 28 May 2018 · 653pp · 155,847 words
arena. A Frenchman, Denis Papin, concerned with feeding the poor, whose invention of the pressure cooker prepared the way for the steam engine. James Watt, of course, the Scotsman who gave us the steam engine itself, but also Thomas Newcomen before him, whose great galumphing atmospheric steam machine preceded Watt’s elegant elaboration. I visited a
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making room for natural gas, nuclear power, and renewables. Prime movers (systems that convert energy to motion) transitioned from animal and water power to the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the generator, and the electric motor. We learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, capitalized on their opportunities. The current debate
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pay him for any experimental demonstrations he gave, provided that he submitted his ideas in advance for approval. In 1708 the society leadership referred his steam engine plans to Savery, his primary competitor, for assessment. Unsurprisingly, Savery disparaged Papin’s design. If Papin had dismissed Savery’s grossly inefficient use of unshielded
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. When new technologies falter, reverting to earlier, more dependable systems can sometimes ease the transition, combining the old with the new. The earlier, commercially successful steam engine for mine drainage succeeded by retreating from such ambitious designs as those of Papin and Savery. If the craft skills of the day were inadequate
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of wheel carriages.”18 The demands of his business forced him to set aside this early effort of invention, but by 1763, James Watt had learned enough about existing steam engines to understand something of how they worked.19 That winter, Anderson asked Watt to repair the model Newcomen engine that the university had
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repeatedly pumped most of the air out of a large tank. He had no doubt then “that Mr. Watt had really made a perfect steam engine.”37 Watt’s steam engine was far from perfect. The first engines he built, though much less wasteful of coal than the Newcomen engines that preceded them, were
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industrialist Matthew Boulton. Where Watt was querulous, Boulton was bold; he famously told Watt, who had initially proposed selling Boulton the exclusive right to produce steam engines only for the counties of Warwickshire, Staffordshire, and Derbyshire, “It would not be worth my while to make for three Countys only, but I find
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. Boulton & Watt engines followed that harnessed steam directly, mounted automatic throttles, produced rotary motion, measured output and more. From only pumping mine water, the new steam engines came to blow smelting furnaces, turn cotton mills, grind grain, strike medals and coins, and free factories of the energetic and geographic constraints of animal
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face of these bounties, their unintended consequence, was increasing air pollution: the pollution of domestic and industrial coal smoke and pollution from the processes the steam engine drove. Already in Ireland as early as 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote in the Dublin Weekly Journal, “The physicians in Dublin make it their constant practice
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Matthew Boulton, who showed them through the Boulton & Watt factory at Soho. They dined there that afternoon. After dinner, Boulton reviewed the history of the steam engine, and they examined an early-model engine improved with a new Wilkinson cylinder. “Then an astonishing thing happened,” writes Wilkinson’s biographer. “The four men
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that beginning, the British network of feeder railways grew with the canal network. Three other developments, two of them fortuitous, then stimulated innovative change. James Watt’s steam engine patent expired in June 1800. Its patent protection had discouraged other inventors from exploring improvements. Now, as both Watt and Boulton retired, the field of
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his boot prints onto the ceiling. Such exploits earned him the nickname “the Cornish Giant.” Besides an imposing physical presence, Trevithick was gifted at building steam engines, usually introducing innovations that increased their efficiency. In 1795, when Boulton & Watt enjoined an atmospheric engine Trevithick built at Ding Dong mine in Cornwall for
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their patent attorney, recommended that they have a steam carriage built and exhibit it in London. The patent, for “Methods for improving the construction of Steam engines and the application thereof for driving Carriages and for other purposes,” was granted on 24 March 1802.27 At Coalbrookdale that summer, Trevithick designed and
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Trevithick’s common road steam locomotive turned up no investors interested in supporting its further development. The Cornish Giant concluded that the future of the steam engine wasn’t transporting people but working machinery and hauling coal. He set his engines to work boring brass cannon, pumping water, and blowing furnaces. Along
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deepened to expose new veins of coal or iron ore; expensive horses were less than adequate at lifting water or minerals from deeper levels. Trevithick steam engines—smaller, more efficient, and less expensive than the big atmospheric engines of Boulton & Watt—filled a need. “Whim engines,” they were called: whim a contraction
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there would first drive steamboats. Britain, in contrast, eruptive with steam and braided with canals, looked beyond wagon and water carriage to the railway. “The steam engine meant that coal could be exploited to supply mechanical energy as readily as heat energy,” writes the economic historian E. A. Wrigley, “thus overcoming the
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September 1825. The prospectus for the Liverpool & Manchester line claimed that it would deliver goods much faster than shipment by canal. The unreliability of early steam engines justified questioning that claim, but travel we would not consider rapid today also seemed impossible in a world where no one traveled faster than a
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for the present, until the question respecting the steam engine had been decided, and until we had an opportunity of considering the subject more maturely. Murdoch acquiesced, and nothing was done until 1801.”32 Which was not quite true. In 1794, independent of Murdoch, James Watt Sr. began work under painful circumstances on a
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electricity until late in the nineteenth century. Both were feeble, limited, and expensive compared with the products of the development of steam, the broad-shouldered steam engines that powered factories, raised water, propelled ships, and hauled trainloads of passengers and freight. On a smaller but complementary scale, horses moved goods and passengers
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of electromagnetism. That research paralleled the development of the electric generator and its reverse, the electric motor. Spin the device with mechanical power from a steam engine or a waterwheel, and it output electric current. Input electric current into the device, and it output mechanical power, turning machines such as looms or
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. As do all innovators of new technologies, he faced the larger problem of developing and deploying the infrastructure required to support his inventions. Behind the steam engine, a network of mines and distribution systems supplied coal for its operation. Local generating plants and networks of underground pipes sustained gas lighting. When Edison
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. Motors large and small, all the way down to motors for individual sewing machines, began replacing the shafts and belts that transferred power inefficiently from steam engines. Country people still read and cooked with kerosene, but electric lights went on in the cities of the world. * * * I. One hundred-fifty candlepower is
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generated electricity in downtown Detroit. From farm experience, and from an apprenticeship with a company that built steamships for the Great Lakes trade, he knew steam engines. By 1893, Edison Illuminating had promoted him to chief engineer. Ford began building his first automobile after he moved to Detroit, in a workshop he
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displaced the superannuated horse, and consider whether such a system has general utility or adaptability!”12 Pedro Salom had considered the question. He thought not. Steam engines and electric motors could be run up smoothly from idle to full power without gearing. But to operate without stalling, internal combustion engines had to
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of Mines Synthetic Liquid Fuels Program, 1944–55. Report of Investigations 5506. Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1959. Burn, Robert Scott. The Steam-Engine, Its History and Mechanism, Being Descriptions and Illustrations of the Stationary, Locomotive, and Marine Engines. London: H. Ingram, 1854. Burnett, D. Graham. Trying Leviathan: The
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, Brock. “Sierra Club Involvement in Nuclear Power: An Evolution of Awareness.” Oregon Law Review 54 (1975): 607–21. Evans, Oliver. The Abortion of the Young Steam Engineer’s Guide. Philadelphia: printed for the author by Fry and Kammerer, 1805. Evelyn, John. A Character of England. London: Joseph Crooke, 1659. Early English Books
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Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions. London: Robert Scott et al., 1664. Eyles, Joan M. “William Smith, Richard Trevithick, and Samuel Homfray: Their Correspondence on Steam Engines, 1804–1806.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 43, no. 1 (1970): 137–61. Fanning, Leonard M. The Rise of American Oil. New York: Harper & Brothers
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, 1948. Farey, John. A Treatise on the Steam Engine, Historical, Practical, and Descriptive. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827. Fenger, Jes, O. Hertel, and F. Palmgren, eds. Urban Air Pollution—European Aspects
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Projections.” Renewable Energy for Development 10, no. 3 (1997) (online). Galloway, Robert L. Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade: The Invention of the Steam Engine and the Origin of the Railway. London: Colliery Guardian, 1898. ———. A History of Coal Mining in Great Britain. London: Macmillan, 1882. Galvani, Luigi. Commentary on
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Perfect Engine.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 68 (1997): 85–107. ———. Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. James Watt: Volume 1: His Time in Scotland, 1736–1774. London: Landmark. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. New York: Vintage,
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Together. Surbiton, UK: Medina, 2013. Jungk, Robert. The New Tyranny: How Nuclear Power Enslaves Us. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1979. Kanefsky, John, and John Robey. “Steam Engines in 18th-Century Britain: A Quantitative Assessment.” Technology and Culture 21, no. 2 (1980): 161–86. Kasun, Jacqueline. The War Against Population: The Economics and
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, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. Kemble, Frances Ann. Record of a Girlhood. Vol. 2. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1878. Kerker, Milton. “Science and the Steam Engine.” Technology and Culture 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1961): 381–90. Kerridge, Eric. “The Coal Industry in Tudor and Stuart England: A Comment.” Economic History Review
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20 (1941): 17–28. Lord, Eleanor Louisa. Industrial Experiments in the British Colonies of North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1898. Loree, L. F. “The First Steam Engine of America.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 10 (1931): 15–27. ———. “The Four Locomotives Imported into America in 1829 by the Delaware & Hudson Company.” Transactions
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. 2 (1977): 157–74. Rolt, L. T. C. George and Robert Stephenson: The Railway Revolution. Stroud, UK: Amberley, 2016. ———. Thomas Newcomen: The Prehistory of the Steam Engine. Dawlish, UK: David and Charles, 1963. Rose, Mark H. “Urban Environments and Technological Innovation: Energy Choices in Denver and Kansas City, 1900–1940.” Technology and
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the author, 1878. Strohl, Dan. “Ford, Edison and the Cheap EV That Almost Was.” Wired 6 (2010) (online). Stuart, Robert. Historical and Descriptive Anecdotes of Steam-Engines, and of Their Inventors and Improvers. 2 vols. London: Wightman and Cramp, 1829. Sturtevant, A. H. “Social Implications of the Genetics of Man.” Science 120
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R. “Energy, K-Waves, Lead Economies, and Their Interpretation/Implications.” Social Studies Almanacs online, 2012. Thurston, Robert H. A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine. 2nd rev. ed. New York: D. Appleton, 1884. Tierie, Gerrit. “Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633).” PhD diss., Leiden University online, 1982. Titley, Arthur. “Richard Trevithick and
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1906. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1910. Uppenborn, Friedrich. History of the Transformer. London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1889. Valenti, Phillip. “Leibniz, Papin and the Steam Engine: A Case Study of British Sabotage of Science.” American Almanac online, 1996. Varadi, Peter E. “Terrestrial Photovoltaic Industry—The Beginning.” In Power for the World
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University Press, 2007. Volti, Rudi. “A Century of Automobility.” Technology and Culture 37, no. 4 (1996): 663–85. Waerland, Are. “Marten Triewald and the First Steam Engine in Sweden.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 7, no. 1 (1926): 24–41. Walker, J. Samuel. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective
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. Andriesse, Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle, trans. Sally Miedema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 229. 20. Quoted in Phillip Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine: A Case Study of British Sabotage of Science,” American Almanac online, 1996, n.p. 21. Leibniz report on Von Guericke: Antognazza (2009), 141. 22. Quoted
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in Andriesse, Huygens: Man Behind the Principle, 278. 23. Quoted in Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine,” 3. 24. Quoted and illustrated in ibid., 6. 25. Demonstrators not accorded standing: see Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” American Scientist 77, no. 6 (1989
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of James Watt, with Selections from His Correspondence (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), 136–42, q.v. (1690), 105–6. 27. Ibid., 108–9 (tran. ed.). 28. Landgrave fountain project: Sigvard Strandh, A History of the Machine (New York: A&W, 1979), 115. 29. Quoted in Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine,” 10
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. 30. Ibid. 31. Papin, “A New Method of Obtaining,” in Muirhead, The Life of James Watt, 106. 32. Quoted in Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine,” 10. 33. Papin’s book: Recueil de diverses Pieces touchant quelques nouvelles Machines
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1729. Reprinted in The Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Walter Scott. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, vol. VII, p. 217. 42. John Farey, A Treatise on the Steam Engine, Historical, Practical, and Descriptive (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), 444n. 43. Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining, 301. 44. Frank Dawson, John Wilkinson
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of the Ironmasters, ed. David Lake (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2012), 67. 45. Quoted in Smiles, Industrial Biography, 128. 46. First US steam engine, 1755: L. F. Loree, “The First Steam Engine of America.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 10 (1931): 21; John Fitch: Shagena, Jack L. Who Really Invented the Steamboat? Fulton’s
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson · 15 May 2023 · 619pp · 177,548 words
common understanding of the problem to be solved: to perform mechanical work using heat. Thomas Newcomen built the first widely used steam engine, sometime around 1712. Half a century later, James Watt and his business partner Matthew Boulton improved Newcomen’s design by separating the condenser and producing a more effective and commercially much
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condensed steam creates a vacuum inside the cylinder, allowing atmospheric pressure to push the piston. They also collectively ignored other possibilities, such as high-pressure steam engines, first described by Jacob Leupold in 1720. Contrary to the eighteenth-century scientific consensus, high-pressure engines became the standard in the nineteenth century. The
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early steam engine innovators’ vision also meant that they were highly motivated and did not pause to reflect on the costs that the innovations might impose—for example
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, on very young children sent to work under draconian conditions in coal mines made possible by improved steam-powered drainage. What is true of steam engines is true of all technologies. Technologies do not exist independent of an underlying vision. We look for ways of solving problems facing us (this is
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that technological ingenuity would always come to the rescue. By the 1850s, technology had advanced far beyond what was available in Saint-Simon’s time. Steam engines had been improved to make ever-more-powerful machines, and advances in metallurgy had brought many new and sturdier materials, especially steel, which revolutionized construction
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than any pharaoh, southern planter, or Bolshevik? In the next two chapters we will see that experience during industrialization was indeed different, but not because steam engines or the people in charge had a more natural tendency to be inclusive. Rather, industrialization brought large numbers of people together in factories and urban
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, trade, and finance—that surged up with a suddenness for which it is difficult to find a parallel at any other time or place.” The steam engine allowed a leap forward in human control over nature, and in the lifetime of many visitors to the Great Exhibition, the technologies used in mining
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, as a reliable mining engineer who earned a decent living helping pit operators sort out technical problems. In 1811 he had his breakthrough. A rudimentary steam engine was failing to pump water effectively out of a new mine, High Pit, rendering it useless and even dangerous. All the respectable local specialists had
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known as the Grand Allies. In 1813 he became an independent consulting engineer, still helping the Grand Allies but increasingly building and deploying his own steam engines. The most powerful of these engines could draw 1,000 gallons of water per minute from 50 fathoms (300 feet). He also built underground haulage
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engineers with impressive credentials recommended stationary engines, which were already used to pull carts underground. An improvement but a modest one. Stephenson’s view, that steam engines with metal wheels would easily generate enough traction on iron rails, was quite different from the established wisdom, which maintained that smooth rails would not
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had solved the practical problems standing in the way of producing working engines for railroads. Existing low-pressure or “atmospheric” steam engines, of the kind that Thomas Newcomen had first built, James Watt later significantly improved, and George Stephenson himself had fixed at High Pit, were too bulky and did not generate enough power
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had never been demonstrated to work consistently at scale, let alone pull heavy coal wagons up and down hills every day. Building a high-pressure steam engine that was light enough to move itself was a spectacular challenge; early models leaked, were underpowered, or even blew up with tragic consequences. Wrought iron
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would supply the locomotives. The competition was going to be carried out in public, with clearly specified criteria. By this point, the principles of steam engines, advanced by James Watt in 1776, were out in the public domain for all to build upon. Watt had worked to prevent the development of high-pressure engines
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to pump water out of mines. From the start of the nineteenth century, steam became the main energy source for factories. From the 1820s, putting steam engines on wheels enabled much faster and cheaper transportation over long distances. New ways to raise finance emerged during the nineteenth century, making it easier to
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of the British industrial revolution, led by water-powered textile factories. One study estimated how developed the British economy would have been in 1800 if James Watt’s steam engine had never been invented. The conclusion: the level of development achieved by January 1, 1801, would have been reached by February 1, 1801—a
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of the early entrants include Abraham Darby (pig iron in blast furnaces fueled by coke, 1709), Thomas Newcomen (steam engine, 1712), Richard Arkwright (spinning frame, 1769), Josiah Wedgwood (Etruria pottery works, 1769), and James Watt (much improved steam engine, 1776). These men could not, for the most part, read Latin and did not spend much time
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of a potter. Watt’s father was a shipbuilder, which puts him into a higher social class than the others. But by the time of James Watt’s schooling, his father was seeking work as an instrument maker, his previous business having collapsed. These pioneers, like almost everyone else who shaped technology
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1765, and 300 meters after 1830. Machines also began to have an impact, first using waterwheels and windmills to lift coal and then with Newcomen steam engines pumping water out from mines after 1712. Later in the century there was a large mining sector, including in the Northeast, with coal moved on
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rails from the pithead, pulled by horses. Higher-efficiency steam engines were developed in part to help prevent flooding in deeper mines. Improving the transportation of coal by harnessing steam power on wheels was a major
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powered by water, but after 1800 coal became the fuel of choice for the increasingly ubiquitous steam engines. The largest waterwheels also powered factories, although these could be placed only where there was sufficient water flow. Steam engines meant that factories could be built anywhere—closer to ports, near coal, where workers were available
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cotton mill was built in Manchester in the 1780s, and by 1825, there were 104 such operations. Reportedly, there were 110 steam engines in the city. According to one observer, A steam-engine of 100 horse-power, which has the strength of 880 men, gives a rapid motion to 50,000 spindles, for spinning
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is lost. Seven hundred and fifty people are sufficient to attend all the operations of such a cotton mill; and by the assistance of the steam-engine they will be enabled to spin as much thread as 200,000 persons could do without machinery, or one person can do as much as
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. Indeed, the potential of new machinery to increase efficiency was long recognized in British metal and machine-tool industries. Following Watt’s improvements in the steam engine and using the cotton machinery invented by Arkwright, a British expert noted, The only obstacle to the attainment of so desirable an end [increasing production
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/moderna-coronavirus-vaccine. On February 24, 2020, Moderna announced it had shipped the first batch of mRNA-1273 forty-two days after sequence identification. For steam engines, see Tunzelmann (1978). On the social credit system in China, see www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained. On the 2018 Facebook
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)—see those papers for more on the relevant literatures. Tunzelmann (1978) assesses how developed the British economy would have been in 1800 without Watt’s steam engine. Literacy rates in 1500 and 1800 are from Allen (2009a, Table 2.6, 53). Pomeranz (2001) disputes whether geography favored China, arguing that it lacked
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the record of these people’s experiences by the Coal Mining History Resource Centre, Picks Publishing, and Ian Winstanley. Technical information on coal mining and steam engines is from Smil (2017). Less Pay for More Work. Data on income and consumption are from Allen (2009a), and hours worked are from Voth (2012
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]rison system to punish poverty” is from Richardson (2012, 14). The Entrance to Hell Realized. “A steam-engine of 100 horse-power” is from Baines (1835, 244); he cites “Mr. Farey, in his Treatise on the Steam-Engine.” “The manner in which…” is from Engels (1845 [1892], 74). “[T]he entrance to hell realized
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester · 7 May 2018 · 449pp · 129,511 words
the Publisher List of Illustrations Unless otherwise noted, all images are in the public domain. Difference between Accuracy and Precision John Wilkinson Boulton and Watt steam engine Joseph Bramah Henry Maudslay Maudslay’s “Lord Chancellor” bench micrometer (courtesy of the Science Museum Group Collection) Flintlock on a rifle Thomas Jefferson Springfield Armory
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his case, as Wilkinson is today rather little remembered. He is overshadowed quite comprehensively by his much-better-known colleague and customer, the Scotsman James Watt, whose early steam engines came into being, essentially, by way of John Wilkinson’s exceptional technical skills. History will show that the story of such engines, which were
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, a time when the nation’s sailors and soldiers were being kept exceptionally busy.* John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson, whose patent for boring cannon barrels for James Watt marked both the beginning of the concept of precision and the birth of the Industrial Revolution. John Wilkinson was born into the iron trade. His
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Bersham’s consequent elevation from the local to the world stage, would come the following year, 1775, when he started to do serious business with James Watt. He would then marry his new cannon-making technique, though this time without a brand-new patent, incautiously, with the invention that Watt was just
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would ensure that the Industrial Revolution and much else besides and beyond were powered by the cleverly harnessed power of steam. The principle of a steam engine is familiar, and is based on the simple physical fact that when liquid water is heated to its boiling point it becomes a gas. Because
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doing so, perform real work. The beam could lift floodwater, say, out of a waterlogged tin mine. Thus was born a very rudimentary kind of steam engine, almost useless for any application beyond pumping water, but given that early eighteenth-century England was awash with shallow mines that were themselves awash with
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. The Newcomen engine and its like remained in production for more than seventy years, its popularity beginning to lessen only in the mid-1760s, when James Watt, who was then employed making and repairing scientific instruments six hundred miles away at the University of Glasgow, studied a model of its workings closely
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James Watt in 1765, they were anything but—changed Newcomen’s so-called fire-engine into a proper and fully functioning steam-powered machine. It became in an instant a device that in theory could produce almost limitless amounts of power. A cross section of a late eighteenth-century Boulton and Watt steam engine
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to produce a patent himself (the already noted Number 1063 of January 1774, an exact one hundred fifty patents and exactly five years later than James Watt’s), was no less an inventor than John Wilkinson, ironmaster. By then, Wilkinson’s amiable madness was making itself felt throughout the ferrous community: all
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Invented Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire-Engines.” It was a marriage, it turned out, of both convenience and necessity. James Watt, a Scotsman renowned for being pessimistic in outlook, pedantic in manner, scrupulous in affect, and Calvinist in calling, was obsessed with getting his machinery as
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a damp, hot, opaque gray fog, were billowing clouds of steam. It was this, this scorching miasma of invisibility, that incensed the scrupulous and pedantic James Watt. Try as he might, do as he could, steam always seemed to be leaking, and doing so not stealthily but in prodigious gushes, and most
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problem, and in an equal instant, he knew he had the solution: he would apply his cannon-boring technique to the making of cylinders for steam engines. So, without taking the precautionary step of filing a new patent for this entirely new application of his method, he proceeded to do with the
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in its exactitude in all the remaining parts of this story. This is the figure of 0.1—one-tenth of an inch. For, as James Watt later put it, “Mr. Wilkinson has bored us several cylinders almost without error, that of 50 inch diameter . . . does not err the thickness of an
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was something quite new, and it begins, essentially, with the delivery of that first machine on May 4, 1776. The central functioning part of the steam engine was possessed of a mechanical tolerance never before either imagined or achieved, a tolerance of 0.1 inches, and maybe even better. ON THE FAR
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to long iron axles mounted to the ceiling and that, in turn, were set eventually rotating by an enormous thirty-two-horsepower Boulton and Watt steam engine that roared and steamed and smoked outside the building, in its own noisy and dangerous three-story lair. The Block Mills still stand as testament
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another reason, one with profound social consequences. It was the first factory in the world to have been run entirely from the output of a steam engine. True, earlier machines had been driven by water, and so the concept of mechanization itself was not entirely new. But the scale and the might
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BRITAIN, there was a very real sense that the Western world was changing, and changing fast. The social revolution that had been begun by James Watt and his steam engine had by the middle of the century properly taken hold, and industrialization was affecting everyone’s life, for good or for ill. Cities were
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had designed and created the block-making machinery for the Royal Navy, and was still going strong), and the early and the more refined Watt steam engines themselves. Some other sources of power were on show, waterwheels and windmills most especially, and there were early horse-drawn omnibuses, one with two floors
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-three instruments and tools he had on show during those six months in London, though they may have lacked the luster and swash of big steam engines and thousand-spindle looms, provided a road map to what would become engineering’s future (and won their maker more medals than any other of
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. It is a central part of the Ford origin story that young Henry became especially adept at running and repairing a neighbor’s portable Westinghouse steam engine, and that, in the summer of 1882, he took a three-dollar-a-day wage to drive this doughty little engine from farm to farm
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to popularize motoring and to build the first automotive assembly line in Detroit. Before long, he became the demonstrator and repairman for the local Westinghouse steam engine distributor. Yet, soon thereafter, realizing the one limitation of his beloved threshing engines—no electricity!—he left the world of steam behind to become a
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personnel, realising what this meant, went down to the factory at high speed in varying directions. A few of them took refuge in nearby large steam engine exhaust casings, which made useful shelters. I screwed down the control valve immediately, but this had no effect and the speed continued to rise, but
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to call itself precise was a cylinder, bored from a block of solid metal by a Cumberland ironmaster in 1776, specially made for use in James Watt’s steam engine, and at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Now, the component at the heart of what LIGO’s David Reitze publicly described as “the
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this writing, LIGO has proved the existence of four such waves. Photograph courtesy of Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab. John Wilkinson’s cylinder fit inside James Watt’s steam engine with a degree of precision amounting to the thickness of an English shilling, about one-tenth of an imperial inch. Such precision had never been
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. The mechanics of their making illustrates just how far the idea of precision had come in the century since John Wilkinson, boring his cylinders for James Watt, had come. The need to make the standards as near-perfect as imaginable was to become the stuff of obsession. Fifty international delegates—all of
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. “Faster, Better, Cheaper” in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond. Boca Raton, FL. CRC Press. 2017. Russell, Ben. James Watt: Making the World Anew. London. Reaktion Books. 2014. Rybczynski, Witold. One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. New York. Touchstone
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Blow-Up, 215 Board of Longitude, British, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35–36, 64, 105 Boeing, 269 bokeh (“quality of blur”), 224 Boulton and Watt steam engines, 46, 48, 71 Bragg reflectors, 296, 297 Bramah, Joseph, 53–60, 54, 276 “challenge lock” displayed in window of, 54–55, 112n, 124, 125–27
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, 309–10 lathes made of, rather than wood, 61, 64 machines to manufacture pulley blocks made of, 71 smelting and forging, 40–41, 43, 49 steam engines made of, 46, 48–52 Wilkinson’s cylinder-boring technique for, 42–44, 49–52, 304–6 Iron Bridge of Coalbrookdale, 41 Ito, Tsutomi, 321
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, 260–61 standardization, 86 French weaponry and, 86–93 see also interchangeable parts start-ups, invention of term, 284n steam, figurative use of word, 74n steam engines, 39, 44–52, 304 Boulton and Watt, 46, 48, 71 first factory run entirely from output of, 71–72 invention of precision and, 22, 51
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engine design improved by, 45–47, 46 patent awarded to, 46, 47 personality and demeanor of, 47–48 Wilkinson’s cylinder-boring technique applied to steam engine of, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49–52, 304, 306 weaponry: handmade, physical shortcomings of, 84 with inbuilt GPS systems, 269 nuclear strategic arsenal, 262
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, 40 Wilkinson, John, 23, 38–44, 40, 45, 55, 122, 304–6 cannon making improved by, 41–44, 87 cylinder-boring technique of, applied to steam engines, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49–52, 304, 306 Gainsborough’s portraits of, 38–39 iron smelting and forging and, 40–41, 43, 49 obsessed
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey · 15 Nov 2011 · 1,205pp · 308,891 words
or Steve Jobs’s iPad. Why did Leonardo da Vinci in 1519 conceal many of his (not entirely original) engineering dreams in secret writing, whereas James Watt, of steam-engine fame (famous too for his fiercely defended anti-betterment patents), would in 1825, six years after his death, be honored with a planned statue
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rules of the game—rules designed, unsurprisingly, by the elite in favor of the old rich. The open economy created numerous nouveaux riches, such as James Watt and Robert Fulton. Both eventually failed to protect their monopolies. Fernand Braudel argued to the contrary that capitalism was inherently and permanently monopolistic. But les
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or proletarian, down to the present. Denis (or Dionysius) Papin (1647–ca. 1712) improved in 1688 on the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens’s notion of a steam engine—“The steam cylinders,” he pointed out, “could be used for a great variety of purposes”—and is supposed to have built in 1707, a century
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of hand knitting. (In the event perhaps the lack of a patent was for the better, compared, say, with Watt’s fierce monopoly on the steam engine a century and a half later, or Edison’s monopolizing three centuries on. Knitting by machine in fact spread in the guild-weak lands of
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police and soldiers, the nasty international corporation in the social imaginary of the left looks amateurish in its pursuit of more voluntary customers for its steam engines and steamboats, hamburgers and athletic shoes. Wise up, said Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Get prudent nationally to offset the private interests of a
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the African success of Botswana, in southern Africa, and 94 times richer than the African catastrophe of Zimbabwe next door. From the time of atmospheric steam engines to the present, England and Scotland together have been world centers for invention: modern steel, radar, penicillin, magnetic resonance imaging, float glass, and the World
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Despite Britain’s long relative “decline”—the word is a misapprehension based on biological metaphors and the happy fact that once-British inventions such as steam engines and bicycles and antibiotics have proven over the past two centuries rather easy to imitate—it remains even today, I say again, among the most
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them on Boston Common.) And in any case the autonomy of the Radical Reformation allowed for betterment. John Lienhard instances an early theorist of the steam engine, Denis Papin (1647–ca. 1712, cast out of France as a Huguenot), and the at-last-successful inventor of the engine, the Devonshire blacksmith Thomas
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eventually to political pamphlets, independent newspapers, Puritan courtesy books, epistolary novels, and guides to young men climbing the social ladder. The mere idea of a steam engine with separate condenser, if permitted and if accompanied by skilled machinists trained in making precision scientific instruments and the boring of cannon, and the expiration
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meters laid out in rule books in a most un-Romantic way. Even in Scotland the corporation of Glasgow, to avoid competition, denied a young James Watt license to set up a workshop—he was driven, happily, to apply to the university, and there invented the separate condenser.15 Without permission from
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Industrial Revolution, and especially of its astounding continuation into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The goldsmith John Tuite’s patent of 1742 modifying Newcomen’s steam engine was, according to Margaret Jacob, the first British patent to be granted that says boldly in the application that it will put people out of
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to the Prince of Wales, Jean Desaguliers, of Huguenot origin, was the first person to emphasize in print, Jacob continues, the labor-saving character of steam engines.2 Mokyr concludes that “the British government was by and large unsupportive of reactionary forces that tried to slow down the Industrial Revolution.”3 It
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dear Count, you will admit that if the smoke gets in the eyes of the engineer, or if an idea of putting a high-pressure steam engine on rails inspires the provincial British artisans Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson, then ideas can matter mightily. One can make merry of an ideational history
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one of betterment free from monopolizing guilds or interfering autocrats. The new ideology made wholly honorable the fiddling by ordinary folk with air pumps and steam engines and looms and pottery. It pushed the French to recommend a British and an earlier Dutch respect for individual initiative, at least among a liberal
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. Interchangeable parts. Sewerage in cities. Iron hulls of ships. Assembly lines. Bituminous pavement. The classic case is the steam engine. Although the discovery of the atmosphere clearly played a role in the early steam engine, most of its betterments were matters of tinkering, and high and low skills of machine-making. Eastern science perhaps
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and George Stephenson’s safety lamps in coal mining. Well after the theorizing of the steam engine by Carnot, as Lawrence Joseph Henderson put it in 1917, the science of thermodynamics owed more to the steam engine than the steam engine owed to science. Margaret Jacob argues plausibly for an ideal cause working earlier through a
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material one. The steam engine, itself a material consequence of seventeenth-century ideas about the “weight of air,” inspired new
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ideas in the 1740s about machinery generally. Yet it is doubtful that the inventor of the “atmospheric” steam engine, Newcomen, an artisan familiar with pumps, knew much about high science. Science didn’t make the modern world. Technology did, in the hands of newly
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Diversity: A Comparison of Mitochondrial, Autosomal, and Y-Chromosome Data.” American Journal of Human Genetics 66 (March): 979–988. Joy, Charles A. 1877. “Papin’s Steam Engine.” Scientific American 36. Judt, Tony. 2010. Ill Fares the Land. London: Penguin. Julien, François. 1996. A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking. Trans
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–243. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLeod, Christine. 1988. Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLeod, Christine. 1998. “James Watt: Heroic Invention and the Idea of the Industrial Revolution.” In Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland, eds., Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives, pp. 96–115
How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
by Arthur Herman · 27 Nov 2001 · 510pp · 163,449 words
” William Wallace and Robert the Bruce; the Arbroath Declaration and Mary Queen of Scots; Robert Burns and Bonnie Prince Charlie. They point out how James Watt invented the steam engine, John Boyd Dunlop the bicycle tire, and Alexander Fleming penicillin. Yet no one else seems to pay much attention. Scots often complain that Scotland
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polite, humane, enlightened culture. This intermingling of the practical and the intellectual was in fact a keynote of the Glasgow Enlightenment. It explains why engineer James Watt, who helped build Scotland’s first dry dock at Port Glasgow in 1762, was just as highly regarded by university professors such as Adam Smith
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to get things done. Older attitudes, including a deep-rooted Calvinism, were stronger there, but thanks to its commercial success, it was also more freewheeling. James Watt, engineer and self-taught philosopher, was a natural in Glasgow. He would have seemed a fish out of water in Edinburgh. Edinburgh was more artistic
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to gratify our needs. Eventually, Smith states, the division of labor produces people who do nothing but think about improvements: engineers such as his friends James Watt and Alexander Wilson, scientists such as Joseph Black, and those “whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything”—philosophers, teachers, and
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nation’s memory, and help to nourish its posterity. CHAPTER TWELVE Practical Matters: Scots in Science and Industry Don’t think, try. —John Hunter I James Watt was instrument maker for the University of Glasgow when someone told him about a strange machine created by a Derbyshire man named Thomas Newcomen: a
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the cylinder. . . . I had not walked farther than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.” Contrary to myth, James Watt did not invent the steam engine. Two Englishmen, Newcomen and Thomas Savery, did that. What Watt did was typically Scottish: he perfected something created by someone else, and gave
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it a higher and wider application than its original inventor had imagined. Watt applied to the steam engine the idea of separate condensation, which allowed it to generate a constant motion, which, in 1781, Watt turned into a rotary motion. He had created
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and liberty. But just as in these other cases, the version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving
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, like the ceaselessly moving pistons of Watt’s steam engine. To the Scots, they were the key to modern life, just as they are for us. A rapid succession of Scottish inventors, engineers, doctors, and scientists proved their point to the rest of the world. James Watt, for example, grew up in Greenock, with
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, the question of what happens to the heat after objects are heated and cooled, or what he called “latent heat.” Watt’s work on the steam engine led him to conduct a series of experiments on precisely this problem. Those experiments demonstrated that heat was not a substance but a property of
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matter, just as his description of the principles of the steam engine laid the foundation of modern mechanical engineering. The issue for Watt, though, was always not just how a thing worked, but what to do with
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English ironmaster Matthew Boulton of Birmingham. Their partnership, formed in 1775, gave them a complete monopoly over steam engine construction for the next quarter-century. Together they transformed Britain’s economic life. They turned the steam engine from primarily a water pump into a way to supply power for every conceivable industry, from John
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greater and larger quantities than ever before. At almost the same moment as Watt and Boulton were setting up their factory and producing their first steam engine, Adam Smith was writing that the division of labor was the key to creating wealth. Watt’s invention revealed that the future of the division
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-on diagnosis, and thinking of objects such as the human body as a system—not so different from the practical approach of engineers such as James Watt. In fact, science and medicine were probably more closely linked in Scotland than any other European country. Together with mathematics, they formed the triangular base
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simply moving the enormous quantities of earth the construction of each lock required. He designed a huge dredging machine, powered by one of Watt’s steam engines, that could bring up eight hundred tons of mud a day. His friend and fellow poet Robert Southey saw it in operation when he came
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society, and now industrial society. The next logical step was to improve the means of transport on those thoroughfares, with the help of Watt’s steam engine. Strangely, Watt himself was reluctant to do this. He seems to have believed the tremendous power generated by his invention would make any ship or
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religious dissent and austere poverty, but high levels of literacy and a tendency to turn out ambitious, self-made men. George fell in love with steam engines while working as a teenager in the West Moor Mines. Stephenson took up a Cornishman’s invention, a locomotive engine powered by steam, and used
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to wait for another century, and another form of power—gasoline rather than steam.30 III There was one other unforeseen consequence of Watt’s steam engine, which many contemporaries missed, but which a perceptive German observer named Karl Marx did not. Steam power allowed a factory or mill owner to build
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emerging scientific industrial culture his fellow Scots had done so much to create. He wrote an admiring biography of Thomas Telford; his great heroes were James Watt and James Nasmyth, inventor of the industrial steam hammer. He was also a doctor, trained at Edinburgh medical school. In Smiles, in fact, all the
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the South Pacific and remote corners of Latin America. Nor should one forget the more than a half-million Scots who, like Henry Brougham and James Watt and Thomas Telford, packed their bags and headed for new horizons and new careers in London or Birmingham or Liverpool. The great Scottish diaspora followed
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1790s the incipient American industrial base came to rely on Scottish engineers, mechanics, and workers to set up its cotton mills, maintain and repair its steam-engine pumps, and operate its power looms. A textile worker from Paisley quickly discovered that he or she could work the same hours in a factory
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hardworking Scots, not as gold prospectors. Peter opened a steamship line carrying prospectors and other immigrants between San Francisco and Sacramento. He built the first steam engine for a U.S. Navy vessel on the West Coast, and the first steam locomotive in California. James and Michael became partners in the Union
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Iron Foundry, and while James retired, rich and satisfied, Michael opened another major foundry in Davenport, Iowa, with a sideline in steam engines and agricultural machinery. Meanwhile, Scottish engineer Andrew Hallidie designed and built San Francisco’s cable car network in 1873, a symbol of the city to
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optimism and intellectual energy, as well as a belief in education as the foundation of democracy. In 1848 new power looms driven by Watt’s steam engine were replacing the old hand looms, so the Carnegie family left for America. Andrew was twelve when they settled in the former Fort Pitt at
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items such as cooking utensils and sewing machines. The British had dominated the steel industry for more than a century, thanks in large part to James Watt’s steam engine and J. B. Neilson’s blast furnace. Now an English scientist named Henry Bessemer had developed a new way of forging steel directly out
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head. Before Carnegie, business had to wait for technological advances by scientists such as Charles Macintosh (the inventor of vulcanized rubber) and engineers such as James Watt to create new products or increase production. Now the demands of production themselves would force technological change. The manager, not the engineer or the foreman
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where certain quotations and facts came from, and what books are particularly useful for the discriminating reader. I have relied on two sturdy classics on James Watt: John Lord’s Capital and Steam Power, first published in 1923 and reprinted in a second edition in 1965, and Thomas Marshall’s 1925 biography
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey · 17 Jun 2019 · 626pp · 167,836 words
of industrialization, however, living standards for many regressed. Our vocabulary bears witness to the changes that signify the century after 1750. Words like “factory,” “railroad,” “steam engine,” and “industry” first emerged then. But so did “working class,” “communism,” “strike,” “Luddite,” and “pauperism.” What began with the arrival of the first factories ended
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associate with the Industrial Revolution could have been developed and put into widespread use long before the eighteenth century, yet they were not. Besides the steam engine, the eighteenth century didn’t witness any breakthroughs that would have “puzzled Archimedes.”2 The preindustrial history of technology illustrates an important point: resistance to
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the public clock a turning point in Western society.49 And the historian Lewis Mumford has gone so far as to suggest that not the steam engine but the mechanical clock was the machine that made the industrial age.50 While this might seem exaggerated, there can be no doubt that the
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factory system, with its fixed working hours. The coordination of factory work rested on regularity, routine, and accurate time measurement. And many later advances in steam engines and other machinery required the precision lathes and measuring tools that were developed during the Renaissance to produce scientific and navigational instruments. The close connection
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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
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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
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with Galileo—assuredly facilitated more such interaction and later technological developments. In particular, the discovery of atmospheric pressure was essential for the development of the steam engine that eventually replaced water power as the engine of the Industrial Revolution. Yet other technologies of the Industrial Revolution could have been invented and put
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to mind, including the Manhattan Project, set up by the U.S. government to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could do so; the steam engine developed by Thomas Savery to pump water out of British coal mines; and the interchangeable parts pioneered by Eli Whitney to “substitute correct and effective
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Evangelista Torricelli discovered that the atmosphere has weight, he could not have predicted the chain of events that would culminate in the invention of the steam engine. The view that new technology creates its own demand implies that the lack of preindustrial growth was primarily a consequence of obstacles to the supply
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no doubt that the oppression of science by the Latin Church was an obstacle to some inventive pursuits, early industrialization had no scientific basis. The steam engine was a latecomer to the industrialization process. Science became a pillar of economic progress only in the nineteenth century. As Mokyr writes, “Many of
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Around that time, many of the defining inventions of the Industrial Revolution emerged, including Arkwright’s water frame and Watt’s separate condenser for the steam engine, both of which were patented in 1769. The absence of an economic revolution is no mystery. The simple existence of better technology does not inevitably
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a factory setting. Some equipment required large plants and thus was simply too large and complicated to fit into the living rooms of workers’ cottages. Steam engines, iron-puddling furnaces, silk-throwing mills, and so on all required factories.5 The development of the factory system was therefore a process of technological
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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most factories were driven by water power until the 1840s. Only around that time did the fuel consumption of steam 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
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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
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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
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tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him,” Dickens’s fictional descriptions of the industrial landscape of Coketown, where “the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness,” stress the repetitive aspect of factory work, portraying
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all classes of laborers employed in aid of machinery are well remunerated for their work. He added: “Instead of workmen being drudges, it is the steam-engine which is their drudge.”33 Examining data on 237,000 workers employed in cotton mills, Baines suggested that their wages were sufficient to buy not
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working people. 6 FROM MASS PRODUCTION TO MASS FLOURISHING When Thomas Jefferson visited Britain in 1786, America was a young republic and a technological backwater. James Watt’s steam engine was the technological wonder of the time and proof of Britain’s relative technological progressiveness. It is “simple, great, and likely to have extensive
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matter of substituting streetlights and trolleys for gaslight and horsecars, electrifying the factory was more than a simple substitution of motors for water wheels and steam engines.”18 Electrification, reorganization, and modern management were all part of the same process. As Paul David has noted, the main boost to American manufacturing productivity
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them to their final destination.45 One reason horse technology predominated long after the Industrial Revolution is that steam power failed to revolutionize intracity transportation: “Steam engines could not be used on city streets because of fear of fires started by sparks, deafening noise, thick smoke, and heavy weight that shook foundations
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personal transport—and thus the automobile. Efforts to develop motor carriages had already begun in the eighteenth century, using steam engines. However, despite decades of experimentation, steam cars never reached the mass market. Steam engines were too heavy, unsafe, and inefficient to revolutionize personal transportation. The automobile revolution would have to await the development
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since the domestication of animals to substitute for human muscle. During the nineteenth century, the mechanization of farming lagged behind that of manufacturing simply because steam engines were unsuitable for unstructured environments and too expensive for most farmers.64 Even breakthrough inventions of the nineteenth century like Cyrus McCormick’s reaper were
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used only to drain mines, and they did not even do that particularly well. Yet Thomas Savory, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt, all realized that the steam engine was a GPT, and they conceived many applications for it. As noted above, AI is another GPT, and it is already being used to perform
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, the economy goes through an adjustment process with slow productivity growth. * * * The Industrial Revolution in Britain was exceedingly similar. As Nicholas Crafts has shown, James Watt’s steam engine delivered its main boost to productivity some eight decades after it was invented.86 When John Smeaton examined Watt’s invention, patented in 1769, he
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the progress of manufactures in Great Britain within the last thirty years without wonder and astonishment. Its rapidity … exceeds all credibility. The improvement of the steam engines, but above all the facilities afforded to the great branches of the woollen and cotton manufactories by ingenious machinery, invigorated by capital and skill, are
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beyond all calculation.”88 Yet water power remained a cheaper source of energy for some time, so that the contribution of the steam engine to productivity growth remained absent. Had Malthus been given the modern statistical apparatus in 1800, he would not have found much suggestive of the coming
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technological progress was about to come to an end. As the industries that constituted the key drivers of the Industrial Revolution—textiles, rail transport, and steam engineering—started to slow at the end of the nineteenth century, some observers asserted that the capitalist system had broken down.1 In a similar spirit
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to work in workers’ interests, and consequently laborers quite rightly came to regard it as the engine of their good fortune. The adoption of the steam engine and, later, electrification created new and better-paying jobs for workers, who eventually acquired the skills required to run the machines. But another reason is
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Crown), 2:135–36. 67. On Bauer, Zonca, and Drebbel, see Mokyr, 1992a, The Lever of Riches, chapter 4. 68. Ibid., 58. 69. On the steam engine, see R. C. Allen, 2009a, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), chapter 7. 70. F. Reuleaux, 1876, Kinematics of Machinery
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other later applications even went beyond his envisioned uses. While in doubt about the use of steam in shipping, the Boulton & Watt company later displayed steam engines for ocean steamers at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, some three decades after Watt’s death. 22. G. N. Von Tunzelmann, 1978, Steam
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Power and British Industrialization to 1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 23. J. Kanefsky and J. Robey, 1980, “Steam Engines in 18th-Century Britain: A Quantitative Assessment,” Technology and Culture 21 (2): 161–86. 24. N. F. Crafts, 2004, “Steam as a General Purpose Technology
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took almost half a century for steam to displace sail. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the coal requirements of steam engines had fallen enough for steamships to cover the distance between China and Britain. 35. E. Baines, 1835, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great
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The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 165. 63. Epstein, 1928, The Automobile Industry, 16. 64. Wayne Rasmussen writes: “In general the task for which steam engines proved to be most useful was threshing grain. The engines were too heavy and cumbersome for most other farm work. The peak in the manufacture
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of steam engines for agriculture came in 1913, when 10,000 of them were made” (1982, “The Mechanization of Agriculture,” Scientific American 247 [3]: 82). 65. On
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Review 88 (3): 363–87. Kaldor, N. 1957. “A Model of Economic Growth.” Economic Journal 67 (268): 591–624. Kanefsky, J., and J. Robey. 1980. “Steam Engines in 18th-Century Britain: A Quantitative Assessment.” Technology and Culture 21 (2): 161–86. Karabarbounis, L., and B. Neiman. 2013. “The Global Decline of the
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; mechanical clock as enabling technology for, 47; railroad, arrival of, 108; rise of machines, 99–105; silk industry, beginnings of, 99; social savings of steam engine, 107; steam engine, economic virtuosity of, 107; working class, 98 Fairchild Semiconductor, 359 Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 200 farming: disappearance of jobs, 197, 203; mechanization of
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, 50; movable-type printing press, 47; nailed horseshoe, 43; navigable submarine, 52; personal computer (PC), 231; power loom, 105; spinning jenny, 102; steam digester, 55; steam engine, 52, 76; stirrup, 43; stocking-frame knitting machine, 54, 76; submarine, 73; telescope, 59; transistor, 231; typewriter, 161–62; washing machine, 27; water frame, 102
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segregation, 26 Solow, Robert, 4, 180, 206, 325 speech recognition technology, 306 Spence, Michael, 292 spinning jenny, 102 spousal employment, 240 Sprague, Frank J., 152 steam engine: development of, 73; economic virtuosity of, 107; impact of on aggregate growth, 136; universal application of, 249 steel production, changed nature of, 13 Stephenson, George
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