The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (23 page)

A Scientific Revolution

Not all the desire in the world can produce a new idea. As the saying goes, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Because we know that a handful of inventors developed some marvelous machines, we are tempted to believe that if we can supply a motive for them, we have explained why they stepped up to the mat. But machine designing requires more than a good motive and, in this case, more than talent. Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt went beyond adding ingenuity to experience; they drew upon knowledge that had not previously been known. Technology met science and formed a permanent union. At the level of biography, Galileo met Bacon.

In 1632 the Italian Inquisition forced Galileo Galilei to abjure his belief that the sun is the central body around which the earth and other planets revolve. Having already had a long and distinguished career as a mathematician and astronomer, Galileo had conceived accurate laws of motion and improved the refracting telescope before he was silenced. He had also infected an English contemporary. Francis Bacon, though a lawyer and judge, was enraptured with Galileo’s observations and his inductive reasoning. In his
Advancement of Learning
, written to promote the acquisition of useful knowledge, Bacon argued that experiments, not theories, were the linchpins of the new science that was taking shape across the European continent, though it would be more accurate to call it natural philosophy, for the term “scientist” was not commonly used until the mid-nineteenth century.

Objective knowledge became the great desideratum, to be gained through forming hypotheses about forces in nature and then designing experiments that could test the hypotheses. Bacon had heard a lot of sounding off in his long career at court, so he had come to value facts over opinions. Nature, he said, talks back, by which he meant that if someone’s opinions about the order of things were false, experiments would not substantiate them. Opinions, on the other hand, continued circling unabated because there was usually no way to disconfirm them. Bacon endorsed the wide dissemination of the new knowledge. This too was a departure, for knowledge had long been treated as a body of secrets to be passed on to a select group. The practice of openly sharing observations and analyses widened the ambit of investigation. Published findings acted like a magnet, bringing the filings of curiosity from all over to bear on particular problems.

Across Europe the finest mathematicians and philosophers engaged with Galileo’s agenda about the laws of motion, and of optics, and the use of models. Throughout the seventeenth century scientific curiosity fermented, especially in England, but was evident in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and France as well. From two Englishmen, Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, came the experiments that were going to have the greatest impact on industrial inventions. Newton was born the year, 1642, that Galileo died; Boyle was fifteen years old at the time. A succession of seers followed.

The reigning paradigm in natural philosophy had come from Aristotle, who had lived twenty centuries earlier. Aristotle described the world through the dichotomy of matter and form. While his work was astounding in its breadth, it described and defined things in nature rather than explain them. The behavior of matter differed according to its essence or form; the four basic elements of air, water, earth, and fire conveyed the qualities of dry, wet, cold, and hot. Heavy objects fell to the ground because it was an inherent quality of their heaviness. Newton’s theories about the operation of gravity introduced an entirely new principle into the operation of matter. Heavenly bodies as well as those on earth were subject to gravitational pull. More than mere principles, these laws could be expressed mathematically. They could be demonstrated, though only a handful of people could do the math at the time Newton’s
Principia
was published in 1689.

Aristotle had also said that nature abhorred a vacuum. Responding to this Aristotelian challenge, Galileo experimented with suction pumps. Robert Boyle, working with his air pump and bell jar, demonstrated conclusively the existence of a vacuum that meant that the atmosphere had weight. Because of the open character of English public life, knowledge moved from the esoteric investigations of natural philosophers to a broader community of the scientifically curious. The fascination with air pressure, vacuums, and pumps become part of a broadly shared scientific culture that reached out to craftsmen and manufacturers in addition to those of leisure who cultivated knowledge. Religious toleration, the free circulation of ideas through publications and discussions, and the easy mixing of ordinary citizens with members of the educated elite created a broad receptivity to these theories about the world that were overturning centuries of learning.
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Galileo had been defeated by authority, the authority of the church, but slowly a new authority was being created, that of a community of philosophers who read one another’s writings, copied one another’s experiments, and formed a consensus of experts. England was much more hospitable to this new mode of inquiry than was the Vatican. The Royal Society, founded in 1662, promoted and protected experimentation. In the Baconian spirit of producing useful knowledge and probably to justify its royal support, the society initially surveyed farming practices across England. It sponsored as well a study of the use of the potato as food. Far more important, it brought together in the same room the people who were most engaged in physical, mechanical, and mathematical problems. Its members soon discovered how difficult it was to turn useful “knowledge” into useful practices, but they did initiate a lecture series that took this knowledge to the provinces, where others might actually figure out how to make it useful.
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Of course none of this would have had any impact on the world of work where people sweated near blast furnaces and toiled at weaving looms had not the physical laws they studied affected the actions of lifting, pushing, and rotating. The two important discoveries for the invention of the steam engine, the pivotal innovation of the century, were the existence of a vacuum and the measuring of air pressure. And even this knowledge might have remained locked up in air pumps and bell jars had there not been a diffused conviction, since Newton wrote that nature could be made to work for human beings, that its forces could be understood and controlled.

On the Continent, where the Catholic Church was strong, Newtonian thought was suspect, treated almost as occult. Even in England, churchmen feared that too much study of nature might lead men and women to become materialists, the eighteenth-century equivalent of atheists. But in the Netherlands and England, little note was paid to these objections. Men whom we might call tutors to the world wrote books simplifying the physics that went through many editions in several languages. A participatory society had taken form with a plethora of civic organizations, self-improvement societies, bookstores, periodicals, pubs, and plays. There were popular guides to Newton, even ones written for children, and they found a ready audience. A teenage Benjamin Franklin, visiting London to learn the mechanics of printing, discovered Newtonian physics. About the same time, a young man destined to be the signature philosopher of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, spent three years in England and pronounced Newton’s theory a human triumph.
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The Church’s opposition to learning the new physics added another charge against France’s old regime among critics like Voltaire. France, bogged down with so many problems throughout the eighteenth century, came late to industrialization, but its intellectuals were fascinated by both Newtonianism and its application. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert published in 1751 a magnificent encyclopedia that wedded the speculative with the practical. The editors, both philosophers, visited dozens of workshops to write the seventy-two thousand entries about the useful arts, ranging from clockmaking to centrifuges. From it, Adam Smith apparently picked up his famous description of the division of labor.
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Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedia was but the grandest of a genre that had already found publishers in England who foresaw the appeal of conveniently organized sources for technical information.

Enough curiosity existed in England to sustain fairly expensive adult courses on the new physics. Coming to the capital from the province, Thomas Paine availed himself of such classes, which later paid off when he designed an iron bridge. Young men circulating through London distributed the most sophisticated ideas of the age through the country. Soon itinerant experts were offering lecture series in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and lesser towns. They lugged with them hundreds of pounds of air pumps, orreries, levers, pulleys, hydrometers, electrical devices, and models of miniature steam engines. With these instruments they could demonstrate Newton’s laws of “attraction, repulsion, inertia, momentum, action, and reaction.”
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Mechanics’ institutes started with the specific goal of teaching working men how the new machines actually worked and—significantly—why.

The Inventors and Their Inventions

The pervasiveness of human inventiveness around the world demonstrates that no country, race, or continent has a lock on it. The Arabs and Chinese made critical advances in sciences long before Europeans. They also developed complicated hydraulic systems. In sub-Saharan Africa craftsmen skillfully mined and made artifacts in gold, copper, tin, and iron. Pre-Columbian Mayans, Incans, and Aztecs constructed impressive buildings without the benefit of iron or wheels. Examples like these tell us that it is not a civilization’s superior intelligence that led to the Industrial Revolution, but rather the propitious linkage of technological curiosity to economic opportunities and a supportive social environment. Put simply, it took intelligence and knowledge operating in a society that offered incentives for applying both to production processes. The ambience also had to give scope of action to individuals to experiment. Or more accurately, authorities did not have the power to divert inquiring minds from areas of inquiry and did not punish by law or through prejudice people who undertook innovations that would disturb the traditional workplace.

Two pioneering blacksmiths, Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, were the first to exploit the new knowledge of atmospheric weight, using it to force steam to run an engine. Effective in pumping water from mine shafts, Newcomen’s 1705 invention also pumped life into a number of unprofitable colleries. Those in the know advised mineowners, who might be the Church of England, an Oxford college, or noblemen whose land had mineral deposits, to buy a steam engine. Around the same time Abraham Darby figured out how to use coke, a solid derivative of burning coal, instead of carbon from wood in blast furnaces. In a nice symbiosis, his steam engines used coal under their boilers and were used to pump water from the mines that were producing the coal. As with so many other inventions, it took almost a half century before cast iron could be made easily with coke, using the pumping action of steam engines to blast air into the furnaces.
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Newcomen’s steam engine replaced both waterwheels and bellows in mining and ironmaking, the first of an endless succession of substitutions. The machines were profligate with fuel, but England had a lot of coal. It did mean that steam engines had to be used near the coalfields in the center of England. Economists call this concentration of enterprises around coal deposits the economies of agglomeration. By that they mean that workshops, if they are clustered together, will be able to draw on a pool of skilled laborers, specialized services, and raw materials at lower prices, an unintended and beneficial consequence of what was really a limitation.
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By 1800, sixteen hundred Newcomen engines were in operation in England; one hundred in Belgium; and forty-five in France. The Netherlands, Russia, and Germany had a few; Portugal and Italy, none.
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Something new was needed to make steam engines economically viable in places where coal was scarce, but in the meantime the success of Newcomen’s machines in solving the drainage problems of coal mines turned England into Europe’s principal mining center with 81 percent of its tonnage.

James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker, entered the picture when he was given a Newcomen engine to repair. This encounter inspired him to become a mechanical engineer. Though largely self-taught, Watt drew on the knowledge from the savants he knew in Glasgow. He remained an avid reader and book collector throughout his life.
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Experimenting with the precision of a laboratory scientist, Watt puzzled over the terrible waste of steam during the heating, cooling, and reheating of the cylinders in Newcomen’s engines. For this problem, he designed a condenser to send the exhaust to a separate, but connected, chamber. He patented this invention in 1769. Like the use of steam as a force to move objects, the condenser drew upon a basic property of nature, in this case atmospheric pressure. Through a long career of making steam engines and training steam engineers, much of it spent at his factory in Birmingham, Watt continued to work on his design, transforming it, as one scholar recently noted, from “a crude and clumsy contraption into a universal source of industrial power.”

The average capacity of Watt’s late-eighteenth-century models was five times that of waterwheels, and they could be located anywhere.
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A horse could expend ten times more energy than a man. Watt started with that statistic to specify a unit of artificial energy. One “horse power” measured the force needed to raise 550 pounds one foot in a second, or about “750 Watts.” Among those industrialists who saw the possibilities of the steam engine was Watt’s son. Assiduously guided through mathematics and physics by his father, the young Watt applied himself to designing engines for ships, as did a cluster of Americans eager to find a way to carry passengers and freight up the Hudson and through the lower Mississippi rivers in the first decade of the nineteenth century. From steamships to railroads was an obvious next step, performed by George Stephenson in the 1820s. Watt and his partner, Matthew Boulton, turned out hundreds of engines for every conceivable manufacturing application, more than a thousand by 1819, the year of Watt’s death. They fiercely protected their patents, and unlike the many inventors who earned little from their ingenuity, they prospered. The process for getting a patent often operated like an obstacle course. Even more surprising, Watt’s contemporaries recognized the portentousness of his accomplishments.