INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

(This review appeared in the April 11, 2009 edition of the Wall Street Journal)
Inventing a New World
By JOHN STEELE GORDON
The Industrial Revolutionaries
By Gavin Weightman
Grove, 422 pages, $27.50
There are technologies and then there are technologies. Some are trivial, such as Ziploc plastic bags. They're handy, to be sure, but they don't change the world. Some are extraordinarily simple but profound, such as the stirrup, which came along only after men had been riding horses for well over a thousand years. Nothing more than a ring of metal hung from a leather strap, the stirrup made cavalry the dominant force on the European battlefield and therefore made the mounted knight the dominant force in European society for several hundred years. As Gavin Weightman's "The Industrial Revolutionaries" reminds us, inventions on the level of the stirrup's importance seemed to come every other month during the late 18th and 19th centuries -- what Mr. Weightman calls "the most remarkable period of practical inventiveness in world history." When Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in the 17th century that the great majority of the population led lives that were "nasty, brutish and short," he was describing an agrarian society that was, in its essence, unchanged since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years earlier. Ownership of land was the basis of wealth. Hobbes had no reason to think that the situation would change any time soon. But it did: A rapidly accelerating development of world-transforming technologies, subsumed under the rubric of "the Industrial Revolution," began in Britain and within 100 years had molded the modern world. The factory system, first deployed on a large scale in the British cloth industry, greatly increased productivity as machines came to do some of the tasks that humans had done -- or allowed workers to do their tasks more efficiently. Originally powered by falling water, the factories sprang up where the water was, often deep in the countryside. The steam engine, first made practical by Thomas Newcomen and then made vastly more fuel efficient by James Watt, made work-doing energy cheap for the first time in human history. With the steam engine, factories could be located where labor was most available, and Britain's urban industrial cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, quickly expanded. Soon after the turn of the 19th century a new type of steam engine, using high pressure, proved far more powerful per unit of weight than Watt's engine. "In one of the most remarkable coincidences in the history of invention," Mr. Weightman writes, two versions of the high-pressure steam engine were developed "almost at the same time," in Britain by Richard Trevithick -- "a giant of a man with immense energy" -- and in America by Oliver Evans. (Mr. Weightman dismisses lingering suspicions that one of the men stole the idea from the other.) At first, the new steam engines were employed to power ships, because the machinery was too heavy for the tracks used by horse-drawn railways. "Commercial steamship services," Mr. Weightman notes, "got going a good twenty years before steam railways, which had to await the manufacture of wrought-iron rails." By 1830, though, the high-pressure engines had been adapted for railroads, the seminal invention of the 19th century. View Full ImageBridgeman Art Library/Getty ImagesBritish engineer Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) built the first working steam locomotive in 1804. His portrait, painted in 1816, is by John Linnell.Before the railroad, bulky goods, such as coal, moved by water or they did not move at all. Thus there were innumerable local economies, with each town supplying most of its own needs. Production was small-scale. The railroad made possible national markets -- and huge economies of scale that brought down prices and increased demand. Goods that had once been reserved for the rich -- carpets, wallpaper, china, books -- became common objects in middle-class homes. The synergy of the new industrial era was remarkable. As factories grew, so did the demand for labor. And the new agricultural machinery that was built in factories -- such as the reaper developed by the American Cyrus McCormick -- freed countless agricultural laborers for factory work. The collapse in the price of steel -- thanks to Henry Bessemer, the Englishman whose process allowed steel to be produced by the ton -- greatly increased the demand for iron ore and coking coal. That in turn spurred demand for steel railroad tracks and rolling stock. The new railroad routes proved the perfect place to string telegraph lines, which, in turn, fostered communication that allowed the trains to run more efficiently. Thus, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, economies began to grow far more rapidly than before, generating far more wealth. Pre-industrial economies grew at a rate that averaged 1% per year, thus taking 72 years to double in size. Industrial economies grew at a rate that averaged 4% per year, doubling in just 18 years. As a young novelist, Benjamin Disraeli coined the word "millionaire" in 1827 to describe members of the burgeoning class that created the new industrial wealth. This swift economic growth, of course, profoundly changed the world. A person born in, say, 1780 came into a world that his grandparents, great-grandparents and even great-great grandparents would have found familiar. But a mere lifetime later the world had been utterly transformed, and every generation since has had a similar experience. Mr. Weightman, a Briton, has written books on different aspects of the Industrial Revolution, such as the development of the Marconi wireless telegraphy system, and on the ice trade (ice in the mid-19th century was the largest American export after cotton). "The Industrial Revolutionaries" has a far larger sweep: the panoply of industrial development up to World War I. View Full ImageScience Museum/SSPLFrance's first major railroad line, between Paris and Rouen, opened in 1847. It was built by British engineers.He concentrates on the individual inventors, industrialists and engineers who made the Industrial Revolution possible. Some are still household names, such as Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison. Some are now obscure, such as John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson and Jacob Perkins, whose inventions included a machine that both cut nails and put heads on them. With some justification, Mr. Weightman devotes much of his attention to the contributions of his countrymen -- Britain, after all, was the crucible for innumerable advances -- but he casts a wide net. He is especially interested in Japan and its eager embrace of a "crash course in industrialism" in the 1860s after the country, still "almost medieval in its economy and industry," was visited by steamships and exposed to Western technology. Mr. Weightman also provides a welcome corrective to the folklore that persists regarding many of the major players in "Industrial Revolutionaries." Watt was not inspired by the steam pouring from his mother's tea kettle. Samuel Morse was not the first to invent the telegraph. Indeed, Charles Wheatstone had a working telegraph along a section of the Great Western Railway in 1839, five years before Morse sent the message "What hath God wrought!" from the Capitol Building in Washington to Baltimore. As Mr. Weightman makes clear, it was Morse's system as a whole, especially his marvelously efficient code, that made him the central figure in the history of the telegraph. “There were spies everywhere in eighteenth-century Britain. Though they disguised themselves in a variety of ways, they all had one ambition – to unearth the secrets of Britain's industrial success.” Read an excerpt from "The Industrial Revolutionaries"The author's Anglocentric account has some advantages: Readers in the U.S. will learn of much British invention and development that is often missing from American accounts. There was a growing oil industry in Scotland, for instance, more than a decade before Edwin Drake first drilled for oil in western Pennsylvania in 1858. Perhaps inevitably, Mr. Weightman is less strong on matters American. One cannot take a train from New Jersey to New Brunswick. Thomas Jefferson was hardly reluctant to make the deal for the Louisiana Purchase. And in 1793, Alexander Hamilton was rather more than an "aide-de-camp to George Washington." Aides-de-camp don't end up pictured on the currency. Also inevitable, I suppose, is the omission of some significant and interesting people in "The Industrial Revolutionaries." Charles Parsons, for instance, goes unmentioned. Parsons -- whose father, an Irish earl, built the world's largest telescope in the 1840s -- invented, among much else, the steam turbine that is central to both ship propulsion and electrical generation. What's also missing from this otherwise entertaining and informative book is an overview of the Industrial Revolution itself. That revolution, while it made the lives of everyone better in the long run, was hardly costless. Especially in its early days, labor conditions in the new factories were often horrifying, and the lives of those who worked in them were just as nasty, brutish and short as had been the lives of the peasantry in Thomas Hobbes's world. The Industrial Revolution revolutionized more than just the global economy: It transformed politics and society. A world divided between a handful of aristocrats and millions of peasants was transformed into a world dominated by the middle class, where wealth is widely distributed and the franchise universal.