III.

The First Industrial Revolution

There is no single date to attach to the beginning of the British Industrial Revolution. Nor can a single date be given for the invention of the steam engine. A sharp rise in the production of coal, iron, and cotton textiles during the 1780s points to this decade as the most exciting burst of activity in what was a long process that needs to be studied across time, in conjunction with the Agricultural Revolution. Yet it was in 1754 that a Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce had been created in London to encourage “invention”, and there were many examples of invention long before that. Even in 1700 there were pockets of industry—”proto-industry” as it is now called—before the introduction of steam power.

A terminal date cannot be given for the Industrial Revolution either. Even in the mid-19th century, when Britain was hailed as the workshop of the world, many areas of the country, and indeed many forms of economic activity, had been left untouched. In 1860 only 30 per cent of people in a greatly expanded population were employed in occupations that had been radically transformed in their techniques during the previous 80 years. More was to change in the rest of the 19th century and, of course, in the 20th century.

Industrialization, another new 19th-century term, like “industrial revolution” and “industrialism”, had proved to be a dynamic but uneven process, involving continuing change, some of it in bursts, with the essence of development to be found in fluidity in techniques of production and in allocation of resources. The term “Second Industrial Revolution” has been used subsequently to describe British industrial development in an age not of iron and steam but of steel and electricity. With the intervention of computers and robots, the slogans now are “post-industrial society”, “information age”, “digitalization”, and “globalization”.

Nonetheless, however far-reaching recent transformations may be, what happened during the 1780s seemed once and for all, and the excitement of that decade when much else was happening, including the loss of the American colonies in 1783, and the French Revolution, is still infectious. It was then that Watt, working in Birmingham, in its early stages of growth as an industrial city, invented—in stages—a reverberatory steam engine capable of powering machinery. This was a genuine breakthrough, yet a century earlier there had already been increasing interest in the power of steam, and in the first decade of the 18th century Thomas Newcomen, a blacksmith, had built a steam engine capable of driving a pump, a source of power that made it possible to clear coal mines of water. In the same decade, Abraham Darby had smelted iron for the first time in history using coke instead of charcoal in his furnace. Changes in cast-iron refining in the forge followed later. Further development of iron manufacture again took place in stages. Encouraged by military demand in times of war, sometimes to the point of over-expansion, it was an industry subject to sharp fluctuations as well as open to innovation. It was during the 1780s that Henry Cort made possible the cheaper production of wrought iron, iron that could be forged and shaped while hot. The molten iron in his new reverberatory furnace, kept separate from raw coal, and, therefore, more pure, was “puddled”, that is to say, stirred with an iron bar. Cort also took out a patent for rolling—the idea was not a new one—that extended the uses of iron, now the master material of the first Industrial Revolution. Cast-iron rails were introduced in the 1770s. The world’s first cast-iron bridge, Ironbridge, was constructed in the Midlands across the River Severn in 1777-1779 near the Darbys’ ironworks at Coalbrookdale, a place whose name speaks for itself and which has been called “the cradle of the Industrial Revolution”. Even the gravestones in the local churchyard were made of iron.

The widespread application of steam power depended on an increase in the production both of iron and coal, which was facilitated by improved pumping of water. Methods of working coal differed regionally, with north-eastern England a key area. Already by 1765 there were 100 steam engines at work in the coal mines there. Steam power was used at Coalbrookdale too. A Newcomen engine, installed by the Darbys in 1776, remained in use for 100 years, and two Watt engines were built by the Darbys in 1787 and 1789 from drawings supplied by Watt himself.

By then, the cotton textiles industry had undergone substantial transformation, at first mainly using not steam but water-power. Richard Arkwright, pioneer of the factory system, who started life as a barber, used horses in his first cotton-spinning mill, but in 1771 turned to water at a handsome and impressive new mill at Cromford. The cotton industry, using a raw material imported from abroad that was hailed as a “magic shrub”, developed faster than any other industry in the economy. This was under the stimulus of growing foreign markets. “We want as many spotted Muslins and Fancy Muslins as you can make”, a northern cotton spinner was addressed by his London agent in 1786, “You must look to Invention. Industry you have in abundance ... As the Sun shines let us make Hay.”

A sequence of inventions followed. John Kay‘s flying shuttle for weavers in 1733, followed in 1764 by James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, encouraged interrelated invention in weaving and printing, although the development of the power loom, first invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1785, was relatively slow. It was estimated that there were not more than 2,300 of these in 1813. The older woollen industry developed far less rapidly than the cotton industry, which centred on Lancashire. The patenting of inventions, including the steam engine itself, was a complex process and generated legal disputes, while among the other problems confronting inventors was labour resistance. Kay had to flee the country. In the early 19th-century Luddite Rising, Luddites, named after a mythical King Ludd, smashed machines. The machines’ makers, mechanics, constituted a new skilled labour force, what one writer in the 1840s called “a new race of men”. By then, they were employing a whole new range of machine tools. The so-called “father of the machine tool industry”, Henry Maudsley, a blacksmith by original occupation, made the first all-metal lathe and fitted it with a slide rest that held the tool in the best position. He went on to devise a micrometer screw gauge that could measure thickness down to a ten-thousandth of an inch by turning a screw. One of the men who worked with him for seven years, Sir Joseph Whitworth, set up his own business in Manchester and carried forward Maudsley’s work, inventing a self-acting planing machine that could cut metal in both directions and a micrometer that could measure down to a hundred-thousandth of an inch. He also worked out a standard system of screw sizes, based on the number of threads to each diameter of screw, known as the Whitworth standard, which was being used by the end of the 1850s in most engineering works. The need for precision had become as important in industry as the provision of power.

So had the need for improved transport. In the 18th century, industry had depended on canals. The great invention of the 19th century was the railway. The first person to use high-pressure steam to power a vehicle was Richard Trevithick in 1801, but the first engineers to usher in the railway era were a father and son, George Stephenson and Robert Stephenson. By 1855 there were over 12,870 km (8,000 mi) of track, and all the great cities, some of them—such as Birmingham, Sheffield, and Manchester—industrial centres, had been linked. The railway linked smaller cities and other towns also, and ran through hitherto open countryside. Everyone felt the consequences, and more people owned railway shares than had ever before had a stake in industrial ownership. It was not easy, however, during the 1840s the years of railway boom, to distinguish between speculation and investment, and many people lost money.

Railways depended on engineering skill as well as on finance. “We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world,” wrote the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, “are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark,” locomotives were “iron horses” with dazzling power. The tracks, cutting through tunnels that required not only engineering skill but teams of unskilled workers to construct, had provided a national network. Two running parallel to each other constituted a system, complete with signals, serving the needs of passengers as well as of the movement of freight, much of it heavy or perishable. It was a system that, like the factory system, rested on a new sense of time. Workers were called to their factories by hooter at regularly precise times. Railways ran according to timetables. By the 1850s, railways were taken for granted, as were machines in factories and the routines necessary to work them. By then, indeed, many of the once-and-for-all consequences of the first Industrial Revolution were apparent. Ways, not only of producing but of living, thinking, and feeling, had been remoulded. Markets had expanded in an age of competition. Landscapes had been transformed. Systems of transport, banking, and insurance had evolved. The new industrial cities and towns, some completely new like Middlesbrough and Crewe, appeared on the map. Agriculture lost labour to industry. New structures of business and, equally significant, of labour emerged: they included trade unions. Technologies themselves continued to change, with new industrial revolutions dependent not on coal, iron, and steam, but on steel and electricity.

The successful making of cheap steels—there was soon to be a whole range of them—marked a turning point in the history of the first Industrial Revolution. Henry Bessemer, subsequently knighted as Arkwright had been, developed a new process in 1855 for converting crude iron into steel. Air was blown through Bessemer blast furnaces to burn away impurities. British inventors developed other processes that, ironically, were more quickly adapted to overseas iron fields than to those in Britain. The United States, with huge deposits of raw iron and other metals, now forged ahead. Steel was a more adaptable metal than iron, and its efficient production came to depend increasingly on applied science. The role of science was enhanced also as the uses of electricity multiplied. The scale of organization in both industries grew, and it was within this new context that management, by then separate from ownership, became more specialized. Britain now seemed to be a country of “old industries” such as textiles (Japan became the main competitor in the 20th century) and coal. Exports of coal sustained the British economy long after other countries had gone through the early stages of their own industrial revolutions. By 1914, the year of the outbreak of World War I, which was to greatly increase world demand for metals, both Germany and the United States were producing more steel than Britain, the United States almost four times as much.

In retrospect, the climax of the British Industrial Revolution had been reached in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition of All the Nations in the Crystal Palace, when Victorian Britain was proudly described as “the workshop of the world”, and the benefits of new machines and of the application of steam power were extolled. Industrialization, it was claimed, had made possible both the “conquest of Nature” and “the betterment of the species”. The popular writer Samuel Smiles, who, like most of his mid-Victorian contemporaries, did not use the term “industrial revolution”, wrote proudly in his Lives of the Engineers (1861) that: “England was nothing, compared with continental nations, until about the middle of the last century when a number of ingenious and inventive men ... succeeded in giving an immense impetus to all the branches of national industry ... We are an old people but a young nation.” By 1914 there were more, still younger nations, including Germany, newly united following German unification, which had added new chapters to the story.