- [“still a shadow”]
-
“But before the experiment with the wheel-engine could be tried at Soho,
the financial ruin of Dr. Roebuck [who had invested £3,000 in
Watt’s machine] brought matters to a crisis. He was now in the hands of
his creditors, who found his affairs in inextricable confusion. He owed
some £1,200 to Boulton, who, rather than claim against the estate,
offered to take Roebuck’s two-thirds share in the engine patent in lieu
of the debt. The creditors did not value the engine patent as worth one
farthing, and were but too glad to agree to the proposal. As Watt himself
said, it was only ‘paying one bad debt with another.’ Boulton wrote to
Watt requesting him to act as his attorney in the matter. He confessed
that he was by no means sanguine as to the success of the engine, but,
being an assayer, he was willing ‘to assay it and try how much gold it
contains.’ ‘The thing,’ he added, ‘is now a shadow; ’tis merely ideal,
and will cost time and money to realise it. We have made no experiment
yet that answers my purpose, and the times are so horrible throughout the
mercantile part of Europe, that I have not had my thoughts sufficiently
disengaged to think further of new schemes.’
[...]
[In May, 1774] Watt had now been occupied for about nine years in
working out the details of his invention. Five of these had passed
since he had taken out his patent, and he was still struggling with
difficulty. Several thousand pounds had been expended on the engine,
besides much study, labour, and ingenuity; yet it was still, as Boulton
expressed it, ‘a shadow, as regarded its practical utility and value.’ So
long as Watt’s connexion with Roebuck continued, there was indeed very
little chance of getting it introduced to public notice. What it was
yet to become as a working power, depended in no small degree upon the
business ability, the strength of purpose, and the length of purse,
of his new partner.”
Lives of Boulton and Watt:
Principally from the Original Soho Mss.,
Comprising also:
A History of the Invention and Introduction of the Steam-Engine,
Samuel Smiles,
John Murray, 1865, pages 196-199.
- [Jamie’s fire-engine]
-
To his friends and family, Watt was known familiarly as ‘Jamie.’ Also,
at the time, what we today call ‘steam engines’ were called ‘fire engines.’
Watt’s patent for “[A] new Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam
and Fuel in Fire Engines,” was granted on January 5th, 1769, but Watt
only enrolled its description at the High Court of Chancery on April 29th,
1769. It was patent number 913.
Watt first worked with John Roebuck in Scotland, then Matthew Boulton in
England.
- [1772-1773 Scottish banking crisis]
-
James Watt’s investor at the time was John Roebuck, who ran the Carron iron
works, one of the hardest hit by the banking crisis, in which 15 private
bankers in Edinburgh failed.
At the time, Adam Smith was working on what would become his Wealth
of Nations. On June 27th, 1772, David Hume wrote to Smith: “We are
here in a very melancholy Situation: Continual Bankruptcies, universal
Loss of Credit, and endless Suspicions. There are but two standing
Houses in this Place, Mansfield’s & the Couttses: For I comprehend not
Cummin, whose dealins are always very narrow. Mansfield has pay’d away
40,000 pounds in a few days; but it is apprehended, that neither he nor
any of them can hold out till the End of next Week, if no Alteration
happen. The Case is little better in London. It is thought, that Sir
George Colebroke must soon stop; and even the Bank of England is not
entirely free from Suspicion. Those of Newcastle, Norwich, and Bristol
are said to be stopp’d: The Thistle Bank has been reported to be in
the same Condition: The Carron Company is reeling, which is one of the
greatest Calamities of the whole; as they gave Employment to near 10,000
people. Do these Events any-wise affect your Theory? Or will it occasion
the Revisal of any Chapters?”
The Letters of David Hume,
Volume II,
1766-1776,
J. Y. T. Greig (editor),
Oxford University Press, 1932, page 263.
See also:
“Upon Daedalian wings of paper money:
Adam Smith and the crisis of 1772,”
H. Rockoff,
Working Paper 15594,
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2009.
Bank of Scotland:
A History, 1695-1995,
Richard Saville,
Edinburgh University Press, 1996, page 162.
“Crises of 1763 and 1772-1773,”
E. S. Schubert,
in:
Business Cycles and Depressions, an Encyclopedia,
David Glaser (editor),
Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997.
Scottish Banking:
A History, 1695-1973,
S. G. Checkland,
Collins, 1975, page 237.
“Scotland’s Balance of Payments Problem in 1762,”
H. Hamilton,
The Economic History Review, New Series,
5(3):344-357, 1953.
- [colonists ... ]
-
By 1773, colonists in British America weren’t angry
about the tax on tea—Britain had lowered it to below that of smuggled Dutch
tea—they were upset about a variety of things to do with power and
competition when seven East India
Company ships carrying tea took sail heading for the British colonies.
The ship heading for New York was delayed by bad weather, then sent back;
the two heading
for Philadelphia and Charleston were each impounded and sent back;
one of the four ships heading for Boston shipwrecked on Cape Cop;
only three of the four ships heading for Boston landed successfully.
Some of the protest was motivated by the Boston smugglers of Dutch tea.
Others were concerned about the monopoly power of the East India Company.
Discussion raged over layalty to Britain, or rather, britain’s parliament,
versus representation over control.
1774:
The Long Year of Revolution,
Mary Beth Norton,
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,
2020.
- [an offer from Russia]
-
Watt had several offers from Russia, starting in April 1771, when he
was invited to become “Master Founder of Iron Ordnance to her Imperial
Majesty.” In 1773, his friend John Robison tried again. In 1775, the
offer was for £1,000, and was for Watt a princely sum.
France, too, tried to entice him away from Britain (in 1787-88),
as did the Netherlands, the Austrian Empire, and Spain.
Competing engine makers in Britain also tried to bribe away
his workers. They also tried to place apprentices there to learn what
they could. In at least one case, they also bribed workers to sabotage
the works.
The Lunar Men:
A Story of Science, Art, Invention and Passion,
Jenny Uglow,
Faber & Faber, 2002, page 251.
By the Banks of the Neva:
Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British
in Eighteenth-century Russia,
Anthony Cross,
Cambridge University Press, 1997, especially page 258.
Partners in Science:
Letters of James Watt and Joseph Black,
Eric Robinson and Douglas McKie (editors),
Harvard University Press, 1969, page 24.
See also
James Watt and the Steam Engine,
H. W. Dickinson and Rhys Jenkins,
Oxford University Press, 1927, page 35.
- [many eyes would light up...]
-
One book from 1824 puts it this way:
“To take away to-day from England her steam-engines would be to take
away at the same time her coal and iron. It would be to dry up all her
sources of wealth, to ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short,
to annihilate that colossal power. The destruction of her navy, which
she considers her strongest defense, would perhaps be less fatal.”
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat,
From the Original French of N.-L.-S Carnot,
Graduate of the Polytechnic School,
Accompanied By
An Account of Carnot’s Theory
by Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin),
Sadi Carnot,
translated and edited by R. H. Thurston,
1824,
John Wiley & Sons, Second Revised Edition, 1897, page 40.
A book from 1840 sums it up this way:
“That the history of invention of mechanism, and the description of its
structure, operation, and uses, should be capable of being rendered the
subject matter of a volume, destined not alone for the instruction of
engineers or machinists, but for the information and amusement of the
public in general, is a statement which at no very remote period would have
been deemed extravagant and incredible.
Advanced as we are in the art of rendering knowledge popular, and
cultivated as the public taste is in the appreciation of the expedients
by which science ministers to the uses of life, there is still perhaps
but one machine which such a proposition can be truly appreciated:
it is needless to say that that machine is the STEAM ENGINE.”
The Steam Engine Explained and Illustrated:
With an Account of Its Invention and Progressive Improvement,
and Its Application to Navigation and Railways;
Including Also a Memoir of Watt,
Dionysius Lardner,
Taylor and Walton, 1840, pages 3-4.
The author goes on to expound at length, and start into what would become
the hagiography of Watt, who was by then dead, but mainly though, in
hindsight it seems clear that the reason for all the excitment was not
how the steam engine worked, or what physical principles it depended
on to work, but what the steam engine did—namely, by that point,
mass audiences cared about it because it affected masses of people in
factories and on railways and elsewhere. The same was true (and is still
true) of computers from the 1980s and beyond. Interest in them will wane
for the same reason that interest waned in steam engines.
- [Ivan Polzunov’s steam engine]
-
His machine was a double-cylinder rotary atmospheric steam engine built to
work in low water conditions. He built it with the aid of dozens of hired,
largely illiterate helpers from nearby towns for the Kolyvano-Voskresensky
mines, in Barnaul, in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southwestern
Siberia. He died May 16th, 1766. His machine was first tested on May 23rd,
then was built out enough to support four bellows pairs feeding three
furnaces. It ran from August 7th to November 10th, then its boiler,
made of thin copper sheets riveted together, sprang a leak, and the
engine stopped working. (Polzunov had intended the thin sheets only
for a test boiler.) It was abandoned for a decade, then dismantled in
1782 and forgotten. Russia then went back to waterwheels and forced
labor for its minework. It was rediscovered in 1882 when A. N. Voyeykov
accidentally stumbled over his papers in Barnual.
Сыны
Алтая
и
Отечества.
Ч.2:
Механикус
Иван
Ползунов:
Жизнь
и
творчество
выдающегося
теплоэнергетика
XVIII
в.,
Н.
Я.
Савельев.
Алтайское
книжное
издательство,
1988.
[transliterated:
Syny Altaya i Otechestva.
Part 2: Mekhanikus Ivan Polzunov:
Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo vydayushchegosya teploenergetika XVIII veka,
N. YA. Savel’yev.
Altayskoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1988.]
[The Sons of the Altai and Motherland:
Part II:
Mechanicus Ivan Polzunov:
The Life and Creative Work of an Outstanding Thermal Power Engineering
Specialist of the 18th Century,
N. Ya. Savelyev,
The Altai Publishing House, Reprint Edition, 1988.]
For English references, see:
The History of the Machine,
Sigvard Strandh,
translated by Ann Henning,
Dorset Press, 1989, pages 118-120.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
A. M. Prokhorov (editor),
Macmillan, 1973-1983.
The Origins of Feedback Control,
Otto Mayr,
The MIT Press, 1970, pages 77-78.
“The History of Technology in Soviet Russia and Marxist Doctrine,”
D. Joravsky,
Technology and Culture,
2(1):5-10, 1961.
Also, in the 1740s, a generation before Watt and Polzunov, something similar
happened to Joseph Karl Hell (Jozef Karol Hell, or Höll, 1713-1789)
compared to John Smeaton. Hell, in Slovakia, was mostly alone and
industrial infrastructure was lacking there, while Smeaton, in England,
laid foundations that Watt was to later build on.
The Maze of Ingenuity:
Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology,
Arnold Pacey,
The MIT Press, Second Edition, 1992, pages 152-156.
- [the Saint Petersburg fountains]
-
The steam engine powering the tsar’s fountains were built in 1717-1718 by
the French-born English engineer John Desaguliers. (Who, incidentally,
had been Isaac Newton’s assistant in his secret alchemical researches.)
It was the first steam engine Britain ever exported. The tsar at the time,
Peter I, had wanted something to compare with Louis XIV’s fountains at
Versailles. He’d built his Summer Garden on the Dvortsovaya Embankment
in Saint Petersburg (which he’d founded in May, 1703, in a marshy area
he took from Sweden after a war).
- [silver output decreasing]
-
By 1758, the year of Polzunov’s first trip to Saint Petersburg, the
Barnaul seams were depleting. As recently as 1751 they had produced
about 13,000 pounds of silver, but by 1760 they would be down to about
9,600 pounds.
Catherine the Great, Russia’s empress after 1761, promised Polzunov
400 rubles to build his machine. (After his promotion, November 19th,
1763, his yearly salary was then 240 rubles.)
- [Russian versus Scottish serfs and feudalism]
-
In Russia, about the only thing a lord couldn’t do to his serfs was
kill them outright (although many still died from the lash). Russian
serfs were emancipated only in 1861. Even down to the time of Tolstoy
(1828-1910) Russian peasants were still basically serfs.
Not that miners in Scotland were all that better off. For example, the
first colliery in Scotland that the Newcomen steam engine was sold to
in 1720 was in Elphinstone (in Stirlingshire). A ‘colliery’ is a coal
mine where mining is done by ‘colliers’ (coal miners) who, from 1606
until 1800, were serfs bound not to land but to coal mines. While a
laird couldn’t be as brutal to a collier as a lord could be to a serf
in Russia, a bound collier was a piece of property. He or she couldn’t
be sold individually, but in valuing the mine, he and his family were
ranked with any other article attached to the mine. Colliers could move,
but once bound to a pit, they couldn’t move, and if they tried, they could
be brought back and punished. Colliers were expressly excluded from the
Habeas Corpus Act of 1701. Collier status was so low that other workers
would refuse to marry a collier’s daughter, and a criminal might sometimes
be condemned to life as a collier. These bonds were loosened only in 1775,
and removed entirely only in 1800, and only because that was the only
way that mine owners could entice others to come work the mines to meet
rising demand for coal. And women and young children were barred from
being colliers, whether in Scotland or Wales or England, only after 1842.
The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century,
T. S. Ashton and J. Sykes,
Manchester University Press, 1929, Chapter 5.
- [“nothing more foolish than inventing”]
-
“By this time [1769]
Roebuck was becoming embarrassed with debt, and involved in
various difficulties. The pits were drowned with water, which no existing
machinery could pump out, and ruin threatened to over take him before Watt’s
engine could come to his help. He had sunk in the coal-mine, not only his
own fortune, but much of the property of his relatives; and he was so
straitened for money that he was unable to defray the cost of taking out
the engine patent according to the terms of his engagement, and Watt had
accordingly to borrow the necessary money from his never-failing friend,
Dr. Black. He was thus adding to his own debts, without any clearer
prospect
before him of ultimate relief. No wonder that he should, after his apparently
fruitless labour, express to Small his belief that, ‘of all things in life,
there is
nothing more foolinsh than inventing.’
The unhappy state of his mind
may be further inferred from his lamentation expressed
to the same friend on the 31st of January, 1770.
‘To day,’ said he, ‘I enter the
thirty-fifth year of my life, and I think I have hardly yet done
thirty-five pence worth of good in the world; but I cannot help it.”
Lives of Boulton and Watt:
Principally from the Original Soho Mss.,
Comprising also:
A History of the Invention and Introduction of the Steam-Engine,
Samuel Smiles,
John Murray, 1865, pages 150-151.
- [James Watt’s first commercial engine]
-
Was for Bloomfield Colliery near Tipton, which at the time was 14 miles
(22.5 kilometers) away from Birmingham, in Staffordshire.
An Early Experiment in Industrial Organisation:
Being a History of the Firm of Boulton and Watt, 1775-1805,
Eric Roll,
Longmans, 1930, pages 27-29.
- [the parable of the sower]
-
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow;
And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came
and devoured them up:
Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith
they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:
And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no
root, they withered away.
And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:
But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an
hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.”
The Bible,
The King James Version,
Matthew 13:3-8.
- [James Watt and physics — Joseph Black]
-
Joseph Black,
mentor, teacher, investor,
and friend, of Watt’s, was a chemistry professor who had worked out
latent and specific heat. But why? Was it sheer genius or immense hard
work? Maybe. But his discovery came when trying to reduce the fuel
needs of local whiskey distillers.
Watt and Black were connected in several ways. Watt was an employee at
Glasgow university while Black was a professor there. Black funded Watt’s
first venture (and was later bought out by Roebuck). Black helped Watt with
experiments. And Black explained latent heat to Watt when Watt stumbled
upon one of its aspects in his own experiments while trying to improve a
model of Newcomen’s machine as part of his job for the university.
In 1769, when Watt was 33, before he built a functioning machine and two
years before he even got his first patent, and when Black was still alive,
he had this to say, in some notes titled ‘A Plain Story’:
“A boiler was constructed which showed, by inspection, the quantity
of water evaporated in any given time, and thereby ascertained the
quantity of steam used in every stroke by the engine, which I found to
be several times the full of the cylinder. Astonished at the quantity
of water required for the injection, and the great heat it had acquired
from the small quantity of water in the form of steam which had been
used in filling the cylinder, and thinking I had made some mistake,
the following experiment was tried :— A glass tube was bent at right
angles; one end was inserted horizontally into the spout of a tea-kettle,
and the other part was immersed perpendicularly in well-water contained
in a cylindric glass vessel, and steam was made to pass through it
until it ceased to be condensed, and the water in the glass vessel was
become nearly boiling hot. The water in the glass vessel was then found
to have gained an addition of about one-sixth part from the condensed
steam. Consequently, water converted into steam can heat about six times
its own weight of well-water to 212°, or till it can condense no more
steam. Being struck with this remarkable fact, and not understanding the
reason of it, I mentioned it to my friend Dr. Black, who then explained to
me his doctrine of latent heat, which he had taught for some time before
this period (summer 1764); but having myself been occupied with the
pursuits of business, if I had heard of it I had not attended to it, when
I thus stumbled upon one of the material facts by which that beautiful
theory is supported.”
The Life of James Watt:
With Selections from His Correspondence,
James Patrick Muirhead,
John Murray, 1858, pages 78-79.
However, in 1814, when he was 78, highly successful and very well established,
and when Black was dead, he had this to say in a letter:
“Here it was my intention to have closed this letter, but the
representations of friends whose opinions I highly value, induce me to
avail myself of this opportunity of noticing an error into which not only
Dr. Robison, but apparently also Dr. Black, has fallen, in relation to
the origin of my improvements upon the steam-engine; and which,
not having been publicly controverted by me, has, I am informed, been
adopted by almost every subsequent writer upon the subject of Latent Heat.
Dr. Robison, in the article ‘Steam-engine,’ after passing an encomium
upon me, dictated by the partiality of friendship, qualifies me as the
‘pupil and intimate friend of Dr. Black;’ a description which not
being there accompanied with any inference, did not particularly strike
me at the time of its first perusal. He afterwards, in the dedication
to me of his edition of Dr. Black’s ‘Lectures upon Chemistry,’ goes the
length of supposing me to have professed to owe my improvements upon the
steam-engine to the instructions and information I had received from that
gentleman, which certainly was a misapprehension; as, although I have
always felt and acknowledged my obligations to him for the information
I had received from his conversation, and particularly for the knowledge
of the doctrine of latent heat, I never did nor could consider
my improvements as originating in those communications.”
Watt’s hagiographers were pleased to trot out that particular paragraph
by the 1840s, when he was long dead, the steam engine was hugely
important, and his hagiography began in earnest, but somehow loath to
print the coda to it in the very same letter:
“Although Dr. Black’s theory of latent heat did not suggest
my improvements on the steam-engine, yet the knowledge, upon various
subjects, which he was pleased to communicate to me, and the correct
modes of reasoning and of making experiments, of which he set me the
example, certainly conduced very much to facilitate the progress of my
inventions; and I still remember, with respect and gratitude, the notice
he was pleased to take of me when I very little merited it, and which
continued throughout his life.”
The Life of James Watt:
With Selections from His Correspondence,
James Patrick Muirhead,
John Murray, 1858, pages 496-497 and 500.
- [Watt’s personal network]
-
Watt was also encouraged in his work by his personal circle. Nearly all of
them were natural philosophers, inventors, merchants, or manufacturers:
John Roebuck, William Murdock, Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph
Priestly, William Small, James Keir, Samuel Galton, Erasmus Darwin
(grandfather of Charles Darwin), and even Benjamin Franklin—who
corresponded from British America. (The United States did not yet exist.)
The Lunar Men:
A Story of Science, Art, Invention and Passion,
Jenny Uglow,
Faber & Faber, 2002.
- [networks of early industrialists in Britain]
-
Here’s the original version of the Watt network (as opposed to
name-redacted version in the text):
Watt’s machine was intricate; many of its parts depended on other parts,
which depended on yet other parts. He built it on an engine common
in England, but rare in Russia. It was common because of work done by
Thomas Newcomen, John Calley, John Smeaton, Thomas Savery, and others. To make it more
useful he had to increase its power, and for that he needed to understand
the physics of heat; he got some of that insight from Joseph Black. To
build it at all, he needed cylinders that could withstand high pressure
(which he got from Abraham Darby and John Thomas). To make it cheaply
enough, he needed cheap iron for his cylinders instead of costly brass
(Abraham Darby II and Thomas Goldney III). To machine those cylinders
precisely enough, he needed high-grade iron (John Wilkinson). To cut
those precision-ground cylinders and pistons, he needed crucible steel
(Benjamin Huntsman). To run it cheaply enough, he needed cheap fuel, which
he got from coke—that is, coal cooked to remove impurities—instead of
wood or charcoal (Abraham Darby). To do anything at all, he needed money
(Joseph Black, John Roebuck, Matthew Bolton). And so on.
Britain also needed ever-improving
steam engines (Richard Trevithick, William Murdock, Joseph Bramah,
Jonathan Hornblower, Arthur Woolf). Then it needed ever-improving machine
tools (Jesse Ramsden, Edward Nairn, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Joseph
Whitworth, James Nasmyth). Plus it needed ever-growing canal transport
(Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, William Small, Samuel
Galton, Thomas Telford, John Rennies). It needed ever-expanding markets
(Richard Trevithick, John Smeaton, Isambard Brunel). And it needed
ever-expanding rail networks (Richard Trevithick, George Stephenson,
John Wilkinson, Henry Cort).
Also, all the changes catalyzed yet another network of tools made by
another network of early industrialists in Britain (Thomas Highs,
John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton,
Edmund Cartwright). They built the early machines of Britain’s textile
industry. That then became one of the next killer apps, outside of mining,
of the new steam tech. Also, all those people needed yet another network
of people (Jethro Tull, Robert Bakewell, Joseph Foljambe, Robert and
Charles Colling, and others). Their farm innovations helped Britain
raise its food supply until it could almost feed itself.
- [more networks and religious repression in Britain]
-
Nor is even that all. For instance, for Watt’s engine to succeed, not only
did he need others to help him build it, he also needed others to help
him sell it. To do so, he needed heavy advertising (Matthew Boulton). He
needed a ready market (Richard Arkwright, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew
Boulton). He needed banking credit (Sampson Lloyd, James Barclay). And
to do anything at all, he needed money (first Joseph Black who lent him
£1,000, then John Roebuck who invested £3,000, then Matthew
Boulton who took over all debts).
Further, none of that might have happened had
he not been a Presbyterian. In the eyes of the state, which had won the
previous civil war, that made him a heretic—a Dissenter who refused to
join the Church of England. Several of Britain’s early industrialists were
Dissenters. For example, Wilkinson was a Presbyterian, Newcomen (Baptist),
Roebuck (Independent), Wedgwood (Unitarian), and Huntsman, Darby,
Goldney, Lloyd, and Barclay were Quakers. As Dissenters, they couldn’t
stand for Parliament, hold public office, join the army, or attend Oxford
or Cambridge. Barred from high-status posts—along with other riffraff,
like Catholics, Jews, Greek Orthodox, and Gypsies—they went into lowly
ones: trade and industry. There they stewed. With nowhere else to go,
they did deals with one another. That’s partly what welded together
Britain’s early industrial reaction network in the first place. So when
Watt fled Scotland for England, it was tiny Britain, not huge Russia,
that happened to have large pools of both skilled machinists and skilled
financiers. Nobody arranged that. In some sense, our swarm did.
- [religious repression in Britain in the 1660s]
-
The Corporation Act (1661), the Act of Uniformity (1662), the Conventicle
Act (1664), the Five-Mile Act (1665), collectively known as the Clarendon
Codes—named after Charles II’s chief minister Edward Hyde, 1st Earl
of Clarendon—and the Test Acts (1673, 1678), followed on the end of
the civil war in 1651.
The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley:
A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773,
Robert E. Schofield,
Pennsylvania State Press, 1997, pages 202-205.
- [Dissenters and religious repression in Britain]
-
The argument that religious affiliation solely, or even mostly,
explains industry in Britain, is unsupported by data. See:
Men of Property:
The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution,
W. D. Rubinstein,
Taylor & Francis, 1981, especially Chapter 5.
However, it is indeed true that several early industrialists in Britain
were Dissenters, that is, Protestants who refused to take Church of
England vows—which included Quakers, Unitarians, Baptists, Methodists,
Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, among others. Of the ones listed
in the text, the hardest to pin down is John Roebuck, who is cited as
an Independent in:
The Industrial Revolution:
A Study in Bibliography,
T. S. Ashton,
A. & C. Black Ltd., 1937.
But his children appear to have all been baptised at the New Meeting
Unitarian Church on Moor Street, Birmingham. Also, Joseph Black might
have been baptized Catholic, according to his entry in:
Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008.
But perhaps that’s because he was born in France (not Scotland, where
his parents emigrated from), since he was buried at Greyfriars Kirk in
Edinburgh, Scotland, which is Covenanter—a branch of Presbyterianism.
In Britain, non-Protestants, like Catholics, Jews, and Greek Orthodox,
were a different matter. For example, England had kicked out its Jews
entirely from 1290 to 1650. By the 1760s they were a tiny portion of
the population (about 0.3 percent).
Further, Britain wasn’t unique in its religious repression. Russia was
equally good at it. Russia, though, was much more of a peasant economy.
It forced its religious minorities, primarily Jews, into finance,
peddling, and shopkeeping instead of trade and industry—that is,
when not running active pogroms against them. (A peasant uprising
in 1768, during the partitioning of Poland, lead to massacres of both
Jews and Catholics. Perhaps 20,000 were herded into their places of
worship and killed. A century before, a Cossack idea of fun was to
ride into a village and kill every male and take every female there.)
Similarly, France had slaughtered or exiled most of its Protestants,
the Huguenots. (Two important steam pioneers in Britain, Denis Papin
and John Desaguliers, for example, had fled France for Britain. They
were Huguenots). Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria—all have poor
tolerance records as well. For long periods of recent European history,
only the Netherlands was tolerant of variant religious belief systems.
Britain in the 1770s was then merely one of the less-intolerant nations.
(Incidentally, England’s history of its treatment of Jews is also quite
varied. For example, while it accepted them in the 1100s, it persecuted
and ejected them in the 1200s.)
So Russia in the 1700s was still running pogroms against its Jews—and
would continue to do so for another 170 years. But while that pressure
forced Russia’s Jews together, they had even fewer outlets than Britain’s
Dissenters did. Europe’s repression also forced much of its financial and
trade expertise—largely in the form of Jews—out of Spain, Portugal,
and France and into the Netherlands, and later to Britain.
- [“aversion to monopolies”]
-
“I do not think that we are safe a day to an end in this enterprising
age. One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them. It looks
as if Nature had taken an aversion to monopolies, and put the same thing
into several people’s heads at once, to prevent them; and I begin to
fear that she has given over inspiring me, as it is with the utmost
difficulty that I can hatch anything new.”
Letter to Boulton, February 14th, 1782.
“From the many opponents we are like to have, I fear that the engine
business cannot be a permanent one; and I am sure that it will not in
any case prove so lucrative as you have flattered yourself.”
Letter to Boulton, February 20th, 1782.
From:
The Life of James Watt:
With Selections from His Correspondence,
James Patrick Muirhead,
D. Appleton and Co., 1859, pages 316-317.
See also:
Lives of Boulton and Watt:
Principally from the Original Soho Mss.,
Comprising also:
A History of the Invention and Introduction of the Steam-Engine,
Samuel Smiles,
John Murray, 1865, page 300.
Watt didn’t even know about Polzunov.
- [if Watt had died young... parallel inventions]
-
A more general case has been made before. However, note that
here there is strong survivorship bias: that is, analysis is based only on
inventions that succeeded (ideas that were thought up, built, deployed, and
were adopted) not all ideas (any idea that faltered anywhere along that
set of hurdles failed to appear and thus be considered). So Watt is
counted, but Polzunov is ignored. Darwin and Wallace are counted, but
Mendel is (for 35 years, at least) ignored. Who knows how much has been
lost?
“Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution,”
W. F. Ogburn, D. Thomas,
Political Science Quarterly,
37(1):83-98, 1922.
See also:
What Technology Wants,
Kevin Kelly,
Viking, 2010, Chapter 7.
- [Newcomen’s first engine in Tipton, Staffordshire]
-
“A confirmation of the location of the 1712 ‘Dudley Castle’
Newcomen engine at Coneygree, Tipton,”
J. H. Andrew, J. S. Allen,
International Journal for the History of Engineering and
Technology,
72(2):174-182, 2009.
- [first steam engine patent in 1698, first vacuum in 1643,
James Watt’s ancestors]
-
Thomas Savery patented the steam engine idea in 1698:
“A new invention for raising water and occasioning motion to all sorts
of mill work by the impellent force of fire, which will be of great use
and advantage for drayning mines, serveing houses with water, and for
the working of all sorts of mills where they have not benefitt of water
nor constant windes.”
The Miners Friend; or an engine to raise water by fire, described,
and the manner of fixing it in mines, with an account of the several uses
it is applicable unto; and an answer to the objections made against it,
by Thos. Savery, Gent,
London, 1702.
Evangelista Torricelli made the first vacuum in 1643 while creating the
first barometer (following the prompting of Galileo).
The Edge of Objectivity:
An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas,
Charles Coulston Gillispie,
Princeton University Press, 1960, page 100.
Denis Papin published his 1676-1679 work with Robert Boyle on
his ‘steam digester’ in 1680.
“Papin, Denis (1647-1712?),”
Anita McConnell,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004.
James Watt was born on January 19th, 1736.
James Henry Watt, James Watt’s father, was born January 28th, 1699,
in Greenock, Scotland.
(He married Agnes Muireheid, and died August 1782.)
National Records of Scotland, OPR (Old Parish Register) 564-3/1, page 108.
Thomas Watt, James Henry Watt’s father, was born in 1642 and christened
April 16th, 1643, in Aberdeen, Scotland.
(He married Margaret Shearer, and died February 27th, 1734.)
- [early steam power]
-
The story of steam is largely forgotten today, but once upon a time
it was all anyone talked about, and not just in Britain, or even just
in Europe. That didn’t begin with James Watt. Long before him, Thomas
Newcomen’s engines had been in use, and had been slowly improved,
all over Britain (and elsewhere) for well over half a century. It was
that kind of engine that so excited Polzunov (and Watt). They both
saw that they could improve it—in theory. It seems likely that the
reason why Watt is so much remembered is less to do with what he did
in comparison to anyone else who worked on steam but what his engine
did—it went on to be a part of mass production, so it had a direct
impact on mass life. Early steam engines were far more niche—mostly
for mining—and so were entirely ignorable by the general public.
For example, about five hundred engines were built in 1735-1775, or 13
per yer, while another 850 were built in 1775-1800, or about 34 per year.
That’s hardly that earth-shaking changes that came after 1830.
The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen,
L. T. C. Rolt and J. S. Allen,
Review by: Charles K. Hyde,
The Journal of Economic History,
38(3):813-815, 1978.
- [Newcomen’s engine]
-
“At the beginning of the eighteenth century every element of the modern
type of steam‑engine had been separately invented and practically applied.
The character of atmospheric pressure, and of the pressure of gases, had
become understood. The nature of a vacuum was known, and the method of
obtaining it by the displacement of the air by steam, and by the
condensation of the vapor, was understood. The importance of utilizing the
power of steam, and the application of condensation in the removal of
atmospheric pressure, was not only recognized, but had been actually and
successfully attempted by Morland, Papin, and Savery.
Mechanicians had succeeded in making steam-boilers capable of sustaining
any desired or any useful pressure, and Papin had shown how to make them
comparatively safe by the attachment of the safety‑valve. They had made
steam‑cylinders fitted with pistons, and had used such a combination in the
development of power.
It now only remained for the engineer to combine known forms of mechanism
in a practical machine which should be capable of economically and
conveniently utilizing the power of steam through the application of now
well‑understood principles, and by the intelligent combination of physical
phenomena already familiar to scientific investigators.
Every essential fact and every vital principle had been learned, and every
one of the needed mechanical combinations had been successfully effected.
It was only requisite that an inventor should appear, capable of perceiving
that these known facts and combinations of mechanism, properly illustrated
in a working machine would present to the world its greatest physical
blessing.
The defects of the simple engines constructed up to this time have been
noted as each has been described. None of them could be depended upon for
safe, economical, and continuous work. Savery’s was the most successful of
all. But the engine of Savery, even with the improvements of Desaguliers,
was unsafe where most needed, because of the high pressures necessarily
carried in its boilers when pumping from considerable depths; it was
uneconomical, in consequence of the great loss of heat in its
forcing‑cylinders when the hot steam was surrounded at its entrance by
colder bodies; it was slow in operation, of great first cost, and expensive
in first cost and in repairs, as well as in its operation. It could not be
relied upon to do its work interruptedly, and was this in many respects a
very unsatisfactory machine.
The man who finally effected a combination of the elements of the modern
steam‑engine, and produced a machine which is unmistakeably a true
engine—i.e., a train of mechanism consisting of several elementary
pieces combined in a train capable of transmitting a force applied at
one end and of communicating it to the resistance to be overcome at
the other end was THOMAS NEWCOMEN, an ‘iron‑monger’ and blacksmith
of Dartmouth, England. The engine invented by him, and known as the
‘Atmospheric Steam Engine,’ is the first of an entirely new type. [...]
In a very few years after the invention of Newcomen’s engine it had been
introduced into nearly all large mines in Great Britain; and many new
mines, which could not have been worked at all previously, were opened,
when it was found that the new machine could be relied upon to raise the
large quantities of water to be handled. The first engine in Scotland
was erected in 1720 at Elphinstone, in Stirlingshire. One was put up in
Hungary in 1723.”
A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine,
Robert H. Thurston,
D. Appleton and Company, 1878, pages 55-57, and 68.
However, for the practical engineering concerns and all the difficulties
that Newcomen had to have faced and overcome, see:
Power from Steam:
A History of the Stationary Steam Engine,
Richard L. Hills,
Cambridge University Press, 1989, Chapter 2, especially pages 22-30.
His last, and most crucial, and most copied, insight—that of cold water
injection—is described on page 25.
- [the power of accident—learning from each other]
-
“The process by which fundamental change comes about at times has nothing
to do with diligence, or careful observation, or economic stimulus,
or genius, but happens entirely by accident. There were hundreds of
clock-makers like Huntsman all over Europe who were equally dissatisfied
with the quality of the springs in the clocks they were making. Many of
them must have cast about for the answer to their dilemma, but nothing
suggested itself. Everywhere, the technique for making steel at the
time was the same: alternate layers of charcoal and iron were piled
up, covered with a layer of fine sand, and kept red hot for several
days. During this time the carbon in the charcoal diffused into the iron,
forming a surface layer of steel which was then hammered off. Many of
these layers were then hammered together to produce layered, laminate
steel: good enough for knives, but liable to snap or deform when bent
into springs. Huntsman happened to live near a glass-making community,
and at a time when Abraham Darby had discovered the high temperatures
that could be obtained with coke. The glass-makers were using coke to
fire their ovens, and lining the ovens with Stourbridge clay from local
deposits. This clay reflected heat back into the ovens, raising their
temperature even further. Huntsman also saw that the furnace men mixed
their raw materials for making glass with chips of old glass, which
because of the high furnace temperatures would become molten and run
together with the freshly made glass.”
Connections,
James Burke,
Macmillan, 1978, page 140.
On Darby I (there were three ‘Abraham Darby’s, father, son, and grandson):
Dynasty of Iron Founders:
The Darbys and Coalbrookdale,
Arthur Raistrick,
Longmans, Green, & Co., 1953, pages 23-25.
Note:
Allen cites King (unread reference) as developing an argument that
Darby I was predated by Shadrach Fox, the ironmaster who preceded
him at Coalbrookdale, who apparently may be the real inventor of coke
smelting. That’s certainly possible, but even so, coke wasn’t viable
by itself. Darby also added sand casting, which he got from Netherlands
practice. Even then, charcoal competed with coke for half a century.
It was only when combined with the steam engine to pump water back up for the
bellows pump that the cost really began to fall.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective,
Robert C. Allen,
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
The Iron Trade in England Wales, 1500-1850:
the charcoal iron industry and its transition to coke,
Peter Wickham King,
doctoral thesis,
University of Wolverhampton, 2003.
- [imagining a vacuum]
-
Aristotle thought a vacuum, or void, couldn’t exist because motion in it
would be impossible or undefined. For him, a void was ‘place in which
there is no body.’ He presented several arguments that such a thing
couldn’t exist, refuting beliefs proposed in his time by Eleatics like
Melissus that a void could exist, by arguing that if one did, objects in
motion would persist in motion forever (that is, he was saying that what
would become Newton’s First Law couldn’t possibly be true), and with no
‘up’ nor ‘down’ (he means that in a void, soil would feel no force to
move downward to the center of the universe, and flame would feel no
force to move upward, toward the heavens, so objects in motion could
have no defined direction, and so on.
Perhaps he came by such ideas via pure logic (he presented his reasoning
in his Physics, see citation). That’s how Plato’s pupils were
supposed to discover truth, since to Plato, the senses can lie (consider
the allegory of Plato’s cave), so only the mind can plumb the depths
of reality. But perhaps it was also because he thought (to put it in
today’s terms) that a body fell in a medium at a speed proportional to its
weight, and inversely proportional to the amount that the medium resists
its fall. So for him, if we dropped a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias
from space, the whale would hit first. (His reasoning was more complex
than that, but that’s the basic idea.) Perhaps he guessed that after
seeing a pebble falling slowly through olive oil, faster through water,
and fastest through air. Maybe then in a void it would fall infinitely
fast. And that, he declared, was impossible. So a void couldn’t exist.
(Actually, in his thought experiment argument, he concluded that its
speed would be indeterminate, and that was impossible.)
Today we know that while his arguments were accepted for two millennia,
they don’t stand up because the assumptions they were based on were false.
To see why, drop three marbles of equal weight. They hit at the same
time. Now glue two together, then drop all three again. They still hit
at the same time. Yet, were Aristotle right, the two that were glued
together, being heavier, would hit first. But none of us back then did
any such test. Otherwise, we would have laughed at him. So his guess
became dogma for us—for over two millennia.
Aristotle’s physics is still intuitive for most of us today, including
first-year university physics students. Newtonian physics is still
counter-intuitive to most of us today. For example, most of us
believe that a constant force applied to a body will produce constant
velocity. That’s wrong. (It will accelerate). And Einsteinian relativity
is still completely unknown, not to say counter-intuitive, to most of us today.
“Intuitive Physics,”
D. R. Proffitt, M. K. Kaiser,
in:
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science,
Lynn Nadel (editor),
Nature Publishing Group, 2003, pages 632-637.
The Unnatural Nature of Science,
Lewis Wolpert,
Harvard University Press, 1993.
Uncommon sense:
The Heretical Nature of Science,
Alan Cromer,
Oxford University Press, 1993.
Matter, Space and Motion,
Richard Sorabji,
Cornell University Press,
1988, chapter 9, pages 142-159.
“Common Sense Concepts about Motion,”
I. Halloun, D. Hestenes,
American Journal of Physics,
53(11):1056-1065, 1985.
Much Ado about Nothing:
Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages
to the Scientific Revolution,
Edward Grant,
Cambridge University Press, 1981.
The Works of Aristotle,
Volume II:
Physica,
Book IV, Parts VI-IX,
J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross (editors),
translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye,
Oxford University Press, 1952, pages .
What we take to be ’Aristotelian physics’ today is a sort of
reinterpretation in mathematical terms of what Aristotle might have
believed had he any mathematical talent. For example, around
1328 Thomas of Bradwardine, an English philosopher and theologian, wrote
a book on motion based on what he understood to be Aristotle’s beliefs
about motion. Bradwardine showed that Aristotle’s theory of motion was
inconsistent. First, Aristotle claimed that a body could be in motion
only when the force acting on it exceeded the resistance to its motion
through the medium. Second, Aristotle claimed that a body’s velocity was
proportional to the force acting on it divided by the resistance of the
medium it moved through. Bradwardine showed inconsistency between these
two Aristotelian tenets by assuming an initial force and resistance, then
asked what would happen if the resistance were continually increased while
keeping the force constant. At some point the resistance would exceed
the force so the body cannot move. But its velocity, which supposedly was
its acting force divided by the resistance, could not then also be zero.
Thomas of Bradwardine, his Tractus de Proportionibus:
Its Significance for the Development of Mathematical Physics,
H. Lamar Crosby, Jr. (editor and translator),
University of Wisconsin Press, 1955.
- [the backstory behind the steam engine is long]
-
Early steam engines created a partial vacuum in a piston cylinder
when an outside weight (the thing the steam engine is designed to move,
for example, water in a mine) pulls up the piston against the weight of
air surrounding the cylinder. That vacuum then fills with steam from the
boiler. Injecting a little cold water condenses the steam to water vapor,
which creates a partial vacuum in the piston cylinder, which collapses
under the weight of the air surrounding the cylinder, which pulls down
the piston, and the cycle repeats.
Before we could make a vacuum, and thus one day a steam engine, Beeckman
in the Netherlands, Baliani, Galileo, Berti, Magiotti, Benedetti, Viviani,
and Torricelli in Italy; Stevin in Belgium; Pascal in France; and others,
first had to refute Aristotle’s argument that a vacuum couldn’t exist.
Some of them built on William Gilbert in England—who, in 1600, simply
guessed that outer space was a vacuum. But knowing that a vacuum could
exist didn’t then mean that we could build a machine that harnessed
one. Before there could be a Watt in Scotland there was a Guericke in
Germany; a Papin and de Caus in France; a della Porta and Branca in Italy;
a Boyle and a Hooke in England.
Dressing for Altitude:
U.S. Aviation Pressure Suits, Wiley Post to Space Shuttle,
Dennis R. Jenkins,
United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2012, pages 15-17.
Measuring the Natural Environment,
Ian Strangeways,
Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2003, pages 91-94.
“Air Weight and Atmospheric Pressure from Galileo to Torricelli,”
R. Zouckermann,
Fundamenta Scientiae,
2(2):185-204, 1981.
De Magnete magneticisique corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure;
Physiologia nova, plurimis et argumentis et experimentis demonstrata,
William Gilbert of Colchester, London, 1600.
Further, after all of those names came a whole slew of more names to
make practical machines to do something that someone was willing to pay
for—like pump water out of mines. Only long after that did it occur
to anyone that maybe such machines might be useful for something other
than their first use, and for that they had to be changed, which required
even more gestation and thus even more names.
- [an efficient steam engine millennia ago?]
-
Why did an efficient steam engine arise in the 1700s and not before?
It’s not uncommon to say that ‘steam engines’ existed in Rome (or Roman
Egypt) two millennia ago then cite the aeolipile. But the aeolipile
(perhaps invented by Vitruvius, then definitely a century later, by Hero
of Alexandria, and also known as Hero’s engine) isn’t a steam engine. It’s
a steam turbine. It doesn’t create, nor does it use, a vacuum.
The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria, from the original Greek,
translated and edited by Bennet Woodcroft,
Taylor Walton and Maberly, 1851, page 72.
One possible source of confusion may be that the translation from the Greek
was ‘steam-engine’, but that it was not.
One commonly accepted general argument about slaves and steam in popular
science books goes as follows: “[T]he slave economy of the ancient
world... discouraged any association of science and technology.... With
cheap slave labor in plentiful supply, there wasn’t any incentive to
develop labor-saving technology.”
Gravity’s Arc:
The Story of Gravity, from Aristotle to Einstein and Beyond,
David Darling,
John Wiley and Sons, 2006, pages 29-30.
The same goes for some research papers: “in [societies] based on slavery,
there was no demand for steam power.”
From:
“The Long-Term Evolution of Social Organization,”
S. van der Leeuw, D. Lane, D. Read,
in:
Complexity Perspectives in Innovation and Social Change,
David Lane, Sander Ernst Van Der Leeuw, Denise Pumain,
and Geoffrey West (editors),
Springer, 2009, pages 85-116.
Even in careful and detailed history books,
it’s not unusual to see the following:
“The precondition for progress was
probably a reasonable balance between human labour and other sources
of power. The advantage was illusory when man competed with machines
inordinately, as in the ancient world and China, where mechanization was
ultimately blocked by cheap labour. There were slaves in Greece and Rome,
and too many highly efficient coolies in China. In fact, there is never
any progress unless a higher value is placed on human labour. When man
has a certain cost price as a source of energy, then it is necessary to
think about aiding him or, better still, replacing him.”
Civilization and Capitalism,
15th-18th Century,
Volume I,
The Structures of Everyday Life,
Fernand Braudel,
translated by Siân Reynolds,
Harper & Row, 1981, page 339.
By such arguments, we didn’t have a steam engine in, for example, the
early Roman Empire, because we didn’t need a steam engine—because we
had a large slave pool.
Other variants of roughly the same argument go as follows:
“[Peter Levi]: What technology is nowadays expected to accomplish is
the concentration or the transference of energy. And we know from
the raising of obelisks that the practical mathematics were quite
highly developed. It’s quite clever to raise a monolithic column or
an obelisk. But I take it that what went wrong with the Hellenistic
rulers’ exploration of different techniques is that they had too much
man power—they had too many slaves. To have slaves is, apart from
being wicked, inefficient, because you may use a million men where
one machine could have done the job.”
[...]
“[Peter Green]:... It’s not so much that slaves were available, which
indeed they were. No, the ruling classes were scared, as the Puritans said,
of Satan finding work for idle hands to do. One of the great things about
not developing a source of energy that did not depend on muscle power was
the fear of what the muscles might get up to if they weren’t kept fully
employed. The sort of inventions that were taken up and used practically
were the things that needed muscle power to start with, including the
Archimedean screw.”
From the Discussion section following:
“ ‘The Base Mechanic Arts’?
Some Thoughts on the Contribution of Science (Pure and Applied) to the
Culture of the Hellenistic Age,”
K. D. White,
in:
Hellenistic History and Culture,
Peter Green (editor),
University of California Press, 1993, pages 234 and 236.
As an example, perhaps the only clearly documented one, see:
“Free Labour and Public Works at Rome,”
P. A. Brunt,
The Journal of Roman Studies,
70:81-100, 1980.
Brunt cites Suetonis, who mentions an incident in the life of Vespasian:
“mechanico quoque, grandis columnas exigua impensa
perducturum in Capitolium pollicenti, praemium pro commento non
mediocre optulit, operam remisit, praefatus sineret se plebiculam
pascere.”
(“To a mechanical engineer, who promised to transport some heavy columns to
the Capitol at small expense, he gave no mean reward for his invention, but
refused to make use of it, saying: ‘You must let me feed my poor commons.’
”)
This he gives as evidence that keeping the populace happy was more important
than new invention.
Such ideas are old, still current, and widely accepted:
“[Schneider] traced the early path of the slavery/stagnation/blockage
view from Diels in the 1920s through Ferrero, Rostovtzeff, and Lefebvre de
Noëttes to Finley, Pleket, and Lee in the 1970s, and its perpetuation
by Gille in the 1980s.”
See:
“Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World:
M. I. Finley Re-Considered,”
K. Greene,
The Economic History Review,
53(1):29-59, 2000.
But there’s something wrong with all such sorts of explanations.
“[T]he importance of slavery should not be exaggerated. The ancient slave
owner had at least two good reasons to want to reduce his dependence on
slave labor if he possibly could, for slaves were quite expensive to feed
and they could be difficult to control.”
Greek Science After Aristotle,
G. E. R. Lloyd,
W. W. Norton, 1973, page 108.
Similarly:
“[S. M. Burstein]: The common wisdom that cheap slave labor inhibited the
development of technology in antiquity should probably be reconsidered
for two reasons. First, slaves are expensive, not cheap. Second, as
the history of the antebellum American South indicates, the use of slave
labor is not incompatible with the development of labor-saving technology,
provided—and it is an important proviso—that the technology increases
the productivity and value of the slaves.”
From:
“ ‘The Base Mechanic Arts’?
Some Thoughts on the Contribution of
Science (Pure and Applied) to the Culture of the Hellenistic Age,”
K. D. White,
in:
Hellenistic History and Culture,
Peter Green (editor),
University of California Press, 1993, pages 236-237.
All the fairy tales fall apart once it’s seen that
slave labor is free labor, but it’s not labor for free. Slave dealers
didn’t simply give slaves away. They cost something to capture, feed,
clothe, house, and guard. Further, if a plentitude of slaves or coolies
is the reason we didn’t build a steam engine, why then did we ever bother
to invent labor-saving tools like sails and waterwheels? Or bother to
use animal power (horses, oxen, asses, camels) to turn capstans and
such? Slaves would’ve sufficed, and often did suffice when the oxen or
horse died, for those needs
as well. If the waterwheel broke, get the slaves to grind the maize. If
the sea’s winds died, get the slaves to row. It seems that using such
an argument is ‘just-so’ history.
Yet further, the ‘fact,’ originally stated most forcefully by
M. I. Finley in 1965 (and in his widely read 1973 book, The Ancient
Economy,), and so widely accepted even today, that the Roman empire
didn’t make use of watermills is now debunked.
“[S]ubsequent research has revealed numerous water-mills from Hadrian’s
Wall to north Africa and to Palestine, and has demonstrated that Italy
was not excluded from this phenomenon.”
See:
“Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World:
M. I. Finley Re-Considered,”
K. Greene,
The Economic History Review,
53(1):29-59, 2000.
It also seems unlikely that we didn’t build a steam engine because we
were idiots. For example, in the early Roman Empire we had more flexible
financial tools than those we had in eighteenth-century France. So
we likely weren’t any stupider then than we are today. However,
those tools weren’t as flexible as those we had in eighteenth-century
Britain. In Rome, we didn’t have a national debt or a central bank
or paper currency, so there was a limit to how much capital we could
amass for new enterprises, like building a steam engine. But such tools
can’t be all we needed because the Netherlands, and Italy before it,
had financial tools about as flexible as those that Britain had.
See:
“Financial Intermediation in the Early Roman Empire,”
P. Temin,
The Journal of Economic History,
64(3):705-733, 2004.
Also:
“Contrary to Finley, who asserted, ‘[A]ncient slavery... co-existed
with other forms of dependent labor, not with free wage-labor,’ and
Schiavone, who added recently that ‘slavery... led to the eventual
stagnation of the [Roman economic] system, blocking off other paths,’
the analysis herein finds that free hired labor was widespread and that
ancient slavery was part of a unified labor force in the early Roman
empire, not a barrier to economic progress.”
From:
“The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire,”
P. Temin,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
34(4):513-538, 2004.
In sum:
“The last twenty-five years have seen a radical overhaul of views on the
level and importance of technological development achieved in the Roman
world. From the 1960s to the 1980s the view prevailed that ancient
technology in general, and Roman technology in particular, was stagnant and
contributed little to the economy. Since then a number of studies have
argued for a much higher level of ancient technological development, and a
more rapid and widespread uptake of that technology. Ancient technology
has re-entered the debate on the economy, and the task is now to assess
what contribution technological developments might have made to economic
growth.
[...]
[I]t looks increasingly difficult to deny the importance of technological
developments to the achievement of per capita economic growth.”
From:
“Quantifying the Roman Economy:
Integration, Growth, Decline?”
A. Bowman, A. Wilson,
in
Quantifying the Roman Economy:
Methods and Problems,
Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson (editors),
Oxford University Press,
2009, pages 3-86, especially pages 33-38.
It thus seems unlikely that in Rome we didn’t invent a steam engine
because we loved slavery, or because we couldn’t imagine living without
slaves, or because we needed to keep slaves employed to thus avoid
revolution, or because we were stupid. It seems more likely that it was
because we didn’t know enough metallurgy, engineering, and physics. We
couldn’t make the high-grade iron we would
have needed to build a safe and efficient one.
And considering what was to happen to both
Polzunov in Siberia and Watt in Scotland, we likely didn’t have the
skilled machinists we would have needed to maintain a high-precision
one, even if an alien spaceship had simply dropped one off in
the forum. In the early Roman Empire we didn’t have the tools we would
have needed to make the tools we would have needed. We didn’t even have
the ideas we would have needed to make the ideas we would have needed. In
short, it seems likely that developing all the many tools and skills and
knowledge that let us build an efficient steam engine took millennia
of accident. All that came together only in the 1700s,
and it happened first in Britain.
It would be interesting exercise in alternate history to try to work out
how all that could
have happened in Italy or China two millennia ago, or Egypt or Iraq four
millennia ago.
- [digesting fructose via glycolysis]
-
Principles of Biochemistry and Biophysics,
B. S. Chauhan,
Firewall Media, 2008, Chapter 12.
- [at least 3,000 metabolic reactants]
-
“Metabolomics is a new technology that applies advanced separation and
detection methods to capture the collection of small molecules that
characterize metabolic pathways. This rapidly developing discipline
involves the study of the total repertoire of small molecules present in
the biological samples, particularly urine, saliva, and blood plasma.
Metabolites are the byproducts of metabolism, which is itself the process
of converting food energy to mechanical energy or heat. Experts believe
there are at least 3,000 metabolites that are essential for normal growth
and development (primary metabolites) and thousands more unidentified
(around 20,000, compared to an estimated 30,000 genes and 100,000 proteins)
that are not essential for growth and development (secondary metabolites)
but could represent prognostic, diagnostic, and surrogate markers for a
disease state and a deeper understanding of mechanisms of disease. Of
particular interest to metabolomics researchers are small, low-molecular
weight compounds that serve as substrates and products in various metabolic
pathways.”
From:
“Navigating the Human Metabolome for Biomarker Identification and Design of
Pharmaceutical Molecules,”
I. Kouskoumvekaki, G. Panagiotou,
Journal of Biomedicine & Biotechnology,
2011:525497, 2011.