A TIMELINE FOR THE PLANET click for Home Page
The Industrial
revolution
The Industrial revolution started in
Why did it start in Britain? The Modern Industrial revolution
Or did it start in
The oldest stone tool that I’m aware of is 2½ million years old (more).
It’s little more than a crude cutting edge, and nothing like the sophisticated blades I’ve
shown. It’s 
difficult to
imagine such a crude implement making much difference to one’s life. And yet it must have transformed it for
people who had nothing at all to cut with before!
The story of the stone age is one of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ as the
experts say. A much improved toolkit
appeared fairly soon afterwards, the Oldowan toolkit. But it was more than a million years before
there were any further improvements.
Then the Acheulian toolkit, pictured, suddenly appeared with
considerably greater capabilities. This
kit seems to be associated with a significant advance in the complexity of
life. So people’s lives clearly achieved
another significant leg-up.
And so it goes on (for more, click on above link).
Closer to our own time, around 5½ thousand years ago, we have the Copper
age – followed almost immediately by the Bronze age. Copper is too soft to be much use on its
own. You get on much better when you add
a bit of tin to it, to produce bronze.
Incidentally, these days we usually add zinc instead, to produce brass.
We know that the Bronze age transformed people’s lives because there’s a
lot of archaeological evidence. It
triggered a great flowering of culture throughout the Mediterranean
region. But technical advance seems to
have been stopped in its tracks for 4 thousand years. Why?
The Mediterranean Bronze-age societies were rich enough to throw up a
new caste of political and religious leaders. And they regarded technological
advance as a threat. On reflection,
maybe we ordinary folk would have been little better off! (Civilisation, good or bad?)
Then somewhere around 2 thousand years ago the wheel was invented. It would be difficult to over-estimate the
benefits that the invention of the wheel will have brought. But it seems to have been made somewhere away
from the centres of civilisation. Reports
differ on when, or even where, this huge breakthrough was made.
It was only during the so-called Dark ages that technology started
advancing again. I’ve read a couple of
reports suggesting that even these advances were courtesy of those of us living
at the edge of ‘Civilisation’. We
carried on exploiting the new-fangled Iron age and other technologies. The Romans came and went. And eventually even the Mediterranean region
caught up.
Why did the modern Industrial revolution start in Britain?
In theory it could have started anywhere, from China through India and
Arabia to anywhere in Europe. It has
been claimed that we were able to revolutionise industry using booty from
exploited countries. There’s no doubt
that we did some bad things during our heyday as a superpower – in common of
course with all other superpowers down the ages.
But the truth of the matter is the opposite.
Britain has always been a rich country.
Our fertile and well-watered land enabled us to export grain to Rome
well before they eventually invaded us.
Our position on the edge of a tectonic
plate gave us important minerals that the Phoenicians and others needed –
and that later we were able to exploit ourselves.
We are an industrious and inventive people. Our island position on the edge of western civilisation enabled us to go our own way more
than those living near the centre.
We invented modern democracy.
This enabled us to run the country much better, and to curb the excesses
of our kings. Our limited religious
toleration attracted skilled craftsmen from all over Europe; to our immense
advantage. In particular it attracted
weavers from Flanders. It’s believed
that our ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ had a lot to do with it too. It made hard work virtuous.
The modern Industrial revolution
The following is a gross oversimplification, and I freely admit it. Wikipedia has a much more comprehensive
account.
The modern Industrial revolution started with woollen cloth. The history of wool is, like so many of these
innovations, lost in the mist of time.
But in 1331, Flemish weavers were invited in to England by the
King. They give English cloth a major
fillip, and we became a significant exporter of woollen cloth. In the 1500s, Huguenot weavers, driven out of France, expanded the
trade. And England began to surpass
Flanders. By the end of the century,
woollen manufacture comprised 2/3rds of the value of our exports.
The skill of British breeders also had a part to play, stemming mainly
from the 1700s. And our wool, of
itself, became a prized commodity.
But the weavers couldn’t keep up with demand. And this was where the Industrial revolution
proper started.
In 1733 John Kay invented the Flying Shuttle. This sparked off a number of other
improvements, which enabled better cloth to be produced much more cheaply. Demand went through the roof.
But then the spinners couldn’t keep up.
So in 1764, John Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny. (Or maybe somebody else did. Opinions differ.) This sparked off other improvements in
spinning machinery, leading to better and much cheaper yarn.
All this early machinery had to be made out of wood. Iron was far too scarce and expensive to be
used for anything but small key components.
This severely limited the size that machines could be made to.
The Quaker iron-master Abraham Darby started out making thinner and
better cooking pots than anybody else.
He realised that his smelting technique could be scaled up to an
industrial scale. So in 1709 he set up a works on the upper reaches of the
River Severn, in the wilds of Shropshire, to start the mass production of cast
iron. He needed plenty of water power,
and plenty of wood to make charcoal with.
The Quakers tended to think big, as we discuss elsewhere,
so they were ideally suited to these entrepreneurial times. Darby was the first to use coke instead of
charcoal for smelting his iron, much to the relief of the local forests. The
quality of the iron went up, and the price dropped through the floor.
This enabled the spinners and weavers to build much larger and more
efficient machines, and to bring the price down even further. But wood-working techniques were no good for
iron. So a machine-tool industry had to
be created. This made it practical to
use iron in many other applications as well.
The early ‘manufactories’ also had to be built where there was plentiful
water. So they were in out-of-the-way places
too. These early manufactories were the
‘Dark Satanic Mills’ featured in Blake’s Jerusalem. And dreadful places some of them were. But the farms that their workers came from
probably weren’t much better.
On the whole however the country, and later much of the world, benefited
enormously. Cheap iron led directly to
cheap textiles and cheap clothes. I once
saw a picture of farm labourers toiling in the fields, sporting fine cotton
shirts and top hats.
The early iron was cast iron, which still contains a lot of carbon from
the smelting process (up to about 4% I think).
This makes it brittle and limits its uses. This didn’t however prevent Darby’s grandson
spending much of his career building the world’s first iron bridge, around
1780. It quickly became one of the wonders of the world. This picture comes from the Ironbridge
website.
The next big breakthrough was the mass production of wrought iron. Wrought iron has been processed to bring the
carbon content down to 0.15% carbon or less.
It is very much better for most purposes. Wrought iron had been around since the middle
ages. But it was made by
cottage-industry processes and was expensive.
So in 1784 John Colt invented his
‘Puddling’ process. This enabled
wrought iron to replace cast iron for a wide range uses..
And so it went on.
By that time, In 1775, James Watt had already invented a new steam
engine. It wasn’t the first but it was a
great 
improvement on
anything that had gone before. More
important, he was the first to employ the crankshaft in modern steam
engines. (According to Wikipedia, the
crankshaft was actually invented by al-Razzaz al-Jazari, in northern
Mesopotamia in the 12th century.)
A crankshaft converts the up-and-down motion of the piston (on the left
of the picture) into rotary motion for driving machinery. You have one in your car.
Watt’s new engine freed the manufactories from the tyranny of water
power. And it swept the world.
Steam reached industry before it reached transport, because size, weight
and efficiency were less of an issue.
And it enabled factories to be built much closer to centres of
population. But the high cost of transport
remained a serious limitation. The
Ironbridge region is still not a terribly easy place to get to even now. Only when the railways brought the cost of
transport down (more) could the Industrial revolution
really take off.
Iron is an excellent material, but steel is even better. Again steel had been around since the middle
ages, but again it was made by slow and laborious cottage-industry. It was far too expensive for anything much
except swords.
In 1856, Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer converter for producing
high grade steel on an industrial scale.
This one lives at the Kelham Island museum in Sheffield. It was in regular use until 1973.
Steel needs a certain amount of carbon, but the amount has to be very
carefully controlled. The Bessemer
process blasts air through this massive crucible of molten iron, burning off
all the carbon and other impurities.
Then carefully measured amounts of carbon and other alloying materials
are poured in, and mixed thoroughly.
Bessemer was able to set up in Sheffield, a central location and already
on a good railway line.
I’ve seen Bessemer’s invention described as bringing in “the second
industrial revolution, the steel age”. I
think that’s pushing it. But it is such
an improvement on iron that it quickly took over almost completely. You hardly hear of iron these days, except
for wrought-iron gates!
So the Industrial revolution really dragged itself up by its own
bootstraps. Advances brought better
quality and lower prices – which funded more advances and so on. Unsavoury money of various kinds probably
speeded these advances up. But they
weren’t necessary. The huge domestic
benefits that the Industrial revolution brought, coupled with perfectly
legitimate exports, were perfectly capable of funding an explosive growth on
their own.
Today we take cheap transport and cheap mass-produced goods for
granted. That’s fine. But we should remember how lucky we are to be
able to.
© C B Pease, January 08