The Most Powerful Idea in the World Read online

  To Quillan, Emma, and Alex—

  my most valuable ideas

  (and to Jeanine: my best one)

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue

  ROCKET

  concerning ten thousand years, a hundred lineages, and two revolutions

  Chapter One

  CHANGES IN THE ATMOSPHERE

  concerning how a toy built in Alexandria failed to inspire, and how a glass tube made in Italy succeeded; the spectacle of two German hemispheres attached to sixteen German horses; and the critical importance of nothing at all

  Chapter Two

  A GREAT COMPANY OF MEN

  concerning the many uses of a piston; how the world’s first scientific society was founded at a college with no students; and the inspirational value of armories, Nonconformist preachers, incomplete patterns, and snifting valves

  Chapter Three

  THE FIRST AND TRUE INVENTOR

  concerning a trial over the ownership of a deck of playing cards; a utopian fantasy island in the South Seas; one Statute and two Treatises; and the manner in which ideas were transformed from something one discovers to something one owns

  Chapter Four

  A VERY GREAT QUANTITY OF HEAT

  concerning the discovery of fatty earth; the consequences of the deforestation of Europe; the limitations of waterpower; the experimental importance of a Scotsman’s ice cube; and the search for the most valuable jewel in Britain

  Chapter Five

  SCIENCE IN HIS HANDS

  concerning the unpredictable consequences of sea air on iron telescopes; the power of the cube-square law; the Incorporation of Hammermen; the nature of insight; and the long-term effects of financial bubbles

  Chapter Six

  THE WHOLE THING WAS ARRANGED IN MY MIND

  concerning the surprising contents of a Ladies Diary; invention by natural selection; the Flynn Effect; neuronal avalanches; the critical distinction between invention and innovation; and the memory of a stroll on Glasgow Green

  Chapter Seven

  MASTER OF THEM ALL

  concerning differences among Europe’s monastic brotherhoods; the unlikely contribution of the brewing of beer to the forging of iron; the geometry of crystals; and an old furnace made new

  Chapter Eight

  A FIELD THAT IS ENDLESS

  concerning the unpredictable consequences of banking crises; a Private Act of Parliament; the folkways of Cornish miners; the difficulties in converting reciprocating into rotational motion; and the largest flour mill in the world

  Chapter Nine

  QUITE SPLENDID WITH A FILE

  concerning the picking of locks; the use of wood in the making of iron, and iron in the making of wood; the very great importance of very small errors; blocks of all shapes and sizes; and the tool known as “the Lord Chancellor”

  Chapter Ten

  TO GIVE ENGLAND THE POWER OF COTTON

  concerning the secret of silk spinning; two men named Kay; a child called Jenny; the breaking of frames; the great Cotton War between Calcutta and Lancashire; and the violent resentments of stocking knitters

  Chapter Eleven

  WEALTH OF NATIONS

  concerning Malthusian traps and escapes; spillovers and residuals; the uneasy relationship between population growth and innovation; and the limitations of Chinese emperors, Dutch bankers, and French revolutionaries

  Chapter Twelve

  STRONG STEAM

  concerning a Cornish Giant, and a trip up Camborne Hill; the triangular relationship between power, weight, and pressure; George Washington’s flour mill and the dredging of the Schuylkill River; the long trip from Cornwall to Peru; and the most important railroad race in history

  Epilogue

  THE FUEL OF INTEREST

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Figure 1: Thomas Savery’s pumping machine, as seen in a lithograph from his 1702 book The Miner’s Friend.

  Figure 2: Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 Dudley Castle engine.

  Figure 3: James Watt’s 1765 separate condenser.

  Figure 4: John Smeaton’s 1759 waterwheel experiment.

  Figure 5: James Watt’s 1787 “Rotative Steam Engine.”

  Figure 6: Richard Arkwright’s water frame patent application.

  Figure 7: America’s first working steam “locomotive,” built by Oliver Evans.

  Figure 8: The Penydarren locomotive of Richard Trevithick.

  Figure 9: The Stephensons’ Rocket, as it appeared in 1829.

  PROLOGUE

  ROCKET

  concerning ten thousand years, a hundred lineages, and two revolutions

  ON THE GROUND FLOOR of the Science Museum in London’s South Kensington neighborhood, on a low platform in the center of the gallery called “Making of the Modern World,” is the most famous locomotive ever built.

  Or what remains of it. Rocket, the black and sooty machine on display, designed and built in 1829 by the father and son engineers George and Robert Stephenson, no longer much resembles the machine that inaugurated the age of steam locomotion. Its return pipes are missing. The pistons attached to the two driving wheels are no longer at the original angle. The yellow paint that made it shine like the sun nearly two centuries ago is now not even a memory. Even so, the technology represented in the six-foot-long boiler, the linkages, the flanged wheels, and even in the track on which it rode are essentially the same as those it used in 1829. In fact, they are the same as those used for more than a century of railroading.

  The importance of Rocket doesn’t stop there. While the machine does, indeed, mark the inauguration of something pretty significant—two centuries of mass transportation—it also marks a culmination. Standing in front of Rocket, a museum visitor can, with a little imagination, see the thousand threads that lead from the locomotive back to the very beginning of the modern world. One such thread can be walked back to the first metalworkers who figured out how to cast the iron cylinders that drove Rocket’s wheels. Another leads to the discovery of the fuel that boiled the water inside that iron boiler. A third—the shortest, but probably the thickest—leads back to the discovery that boiling water could somehow be transformed into motion. One thread is, actually, thread: Rocket was built to transport cotton goods—the signature manufactured item of the first era of industrialization—from Manchester to Liverpool.

  Most of the threads leading from Rocket are fairly straightforward, but one—the most interesting one—forms a knot: a puzzle. The puzzle of Rocket is why it was built to travel from Manchester to Liverpool, and not from Paris to Toulouse, or Mumbai to Benares, or Beijing to Hangzhou. Or, for that matter, since the world’s first working model of a steam turbine was built in first-century Alexandria, why Rocket started making scheduled round trips at the beginning of the nineteenth century instead of the second.

  Put more directly, why did this historical discontinuity called the Industrial Revolution—sometimes the “First” Industrial Revolution—occur when and where it did?*

  The importance of that particular thread seems self-evident. At just around the time Rocket was being built, the world was experiencing not only a dramatic change in industry—what The Oxford English Dictionary calls “the rapid development in industry1 owing to the employment of machinery”—but also a transition to industry (or an industrial economy) from agriculture. Combining the two was not only revolutionary; it was unique.

  “Revolutionary” and “unique” are both words shiny with overuse. Every century in human history is, in some sense, unique, and every year, somewhere in the world, something revolutionary seems to happ
en. But while love affairs, epidemics, art movements, and wars are all different, their effects almost always follow one familiar pattern or another. And no matter how transformative such events have been in the lives of individuals, families, or even nations, only twice in the last ten thousand years has something happened that truly transformed all of humanity.

  The first occurred about 10,000 BCE and marks the discovery, by a global human population then numbering fewer than five million, that they could cultivate their own food. This was unarguably a world changer. Once humanity was tethered to the ground where its food grew, settled societies developed; and in them, hierarchies. The weakest members of those hierarchies depended on the goodwill of the strongest, who learned to operate the world’s longest-lasting protection racket. Settlements became towns, towns became kingdoms, kingdoms became empires.

  However, by any quantifiable measure, including life span, calories consumed, or child mortality, the lived experience of virtually all of humanity didn’t change much for millennia after the Agricultural (sometimes known as the Neolithic) Revolution spread around the globe. Aztec peasants, Babylonian shepherds, Athenian stonemasons, and Carolingian merchants spoke different languages,2 wore different clothing, and prayed to different deities, but they all ate the same amount of food, lived the same number of years, traveled no farther—or faster—from their homes, and buried just as many of their children. Because while they made a lot more children—worldwide population grew a hundredfold between 5000 BCE and 1600 CE, from 5 to 500 million—they didn’t make much of anything else. The best estimates for human productivity (a necessarily vague number) calculate annual per capita GDP, expressed in constant 1990 U.S. dollars, fluctuating between $400 and $550 for seven thousand years. The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE3—$543—is virtually identical to the number in 1600. The average person of William Shakespeare’s time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer’s.

  The first person to explain why the average human living in the seventeenth century was as impoverished as his or her counterpart in the seventh was the English demographer Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population demonstrated that throughout human history, population had always increased faster than the food supply. Seeking the credibility of a mathematical formula (this is a constant trope in the history of social science), he argued that population, unless unchecked by war, famine, epidemic disease, or similarly unappreciated bits of news, always increased geometrically, while the resources needed by that population, primarily food, always increased arithmetically.* The “Malthusian trap”—the term has been in general use for centuries—ensured that though mankind regularly discovered or invented more productive ways of feeding, clothing, transporting or (more frequently) conquering itself, the resulting population increase quickly consumed all of the surplus, leaving everyone in precisely the same place as before. Or frequently way behind, as populations exploded and then crashed when the food ran out. Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen might have written humanity’s entire history on the back of a matchbook: “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

  This is why Rocket’s moment in history is unique. That soot-blackened locomotive sits squarely at the deflection point where a line describing human productivity (and therefore human welfare) that had been flat as Kansas for a hundred centuries made a turn like the business end of a hockey stick. Rocket is when humanity finally learned how to run twice as fast.

  It’s still running today. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty-year increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers—not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age); calories consumed; prevalence of infectious disease; average height of adults; percentage of lifetime spent disabled; percentage of population living in poverty; number of rooms per person; percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education; illiteracy; and annual hours of leisure time—the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. And the phenomenon isn’t restricted to Europe and North America; the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years—twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth-century French infant4 would be at significantly greater risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read.

  Think of it another way. A skilled laborer—a weaver, perhaps, or a blacksmith—in seventeenth-century England, France, or China spent roughly the same number of hours a week at his trade, producing about the same number of bolts of cloth, or nails, as his ten-times great-grandfather did during the time of Augustus. He earned the same number of coins a day and bought the same amount, and variety, of food. His wife, like her ten-times great-grandmother, prepared the food; she might have bought her bread from a village baker, but she made pretty much everything herself. She even made her family’s clothing, which, allowing for the vagaries of weather and fashion, was largely indistinguishable from those of any family for the preceding ten centuries: homespun wool, with some linen if flax were locally available. The laborer and his wife would have perhaps eight or ten live offspring, with a reasonable chance that three might survive to adulthood. If the laborer chose to travel, he would do it on foot or, if he were exceptionally prosperous, by horse-drawn cart or coach, traveling three miles an hour if the former, or seven if the latter—again, the same as his ancestor—which meant that his world was not much larger than the five or six miles surrounding the place he was born.

  And then, for the first time in history, things changed. And they changed at the most basic of levels. A skilled fourth-century weaver5 in the city of Constantinople might earn enough by working three hours to purchase a pound of bread; by 1800, it would cost a weaver working in Nottingham at least two. But by 1900,6 it took less than fifteen minutes to earn enough to buy the loaf; and by 2000, five minutes. It is a cliché, but nonetheless true, to recognize that a middle-class family living in a developed twenty-first-century country enjoys a life filled with luxuries that a king could barely afford two centuries ago.

  This doesn’t mean the transformation happened suddenly. A small but vocal minority of scholars doubts the reality of anything revolutionary, or even industrial, about the phenomenon. Recent studies have demonstrated far less growth in productivity and incomes during the period 1760–1820 than once thought, partly because the income of preindustrial Europe was a lot higher than previously believed. And indeed, Europe, from at least the ninth century onward, had urban centers, roads, and huge amounts of trade traveling along the latter to the former.

  On the other hand, the fact that the transformation happened over the course of a century doesn’t make it any less revolutionary. Clearly, something happened.

  Not everyone believes that the something is the contraption sitting in that gallery in the Science Museum. There are, by popular consensus, more than two hundred different theories in general circulation purporting to explain the Industrial Revolution. They include the notion, first popularized by the pioneer sociologist Max Weber, that the Protestantism of Northern Europe was more congenial to innovation than Chinese Confucianism, or the Catholicism of France and Southern Europe. Or that China’s lack of access to raw materials, particularly coal, sabotaged an Asian Industrial Revolution. For those of a certain mindset, there is a theory that England’s absence of internal tariffs and deficiency in landholding peasantry made the leap to industrialization a short one. Was industrialization the result of revenue from overseas colonies? Relatively high labor costs among the lower classes? Relatively large families among the upper classes? Class conflict? The lack of class conflict?

  All of these explanation
s, even when reduced to bumper sticker size, are in some sense true. There are dozens of ways to untie a knot, and many will be referred to in later chapters of this book. Their only real liability, in fact, is that they tend to understate the most obvious explanation, which is that the Industrial Revolution was, first and foremost, a revolution in invention. And not simply a huge increase in the number of new inventions, large and small, but a radical transformation in the process of invention itself.

  Given the importance of mechanical invention to every generation of humanity since some anonymous Sumerians stuck a pole through the center of a hollow tree trunk and rolled the first wheel past their neighbors, it’s somewhat puzzling that it took so long to come up with a useful theory of just what invention is. Contemporary cognitive scientists have proposed a dozen different strategies and typologies of invention, but one of the most influential remains the eighty-year-old theory of an economic historian with the Dickensian name of Abbott Payson Usher.

  Though dense, out of date, and little consulted today, The History of Mechanical Inventions, published by the then forty-six-year-old Usher in 1929, documents, at sometimes exhausting length, the ways in which humanity has engaged in a continuous process of improving life by inventing machines, from the earliest plows used by Middle Eastern farmers to the ships, engines, and railroads of the mid-nineteenth century (though, interestingly enough, not the age of electricity during which Usher wrote). Like Origin of Species, whose theory was buttressed by thousands of examples from the world of nature, The History of Mechanical Inventions contains an imposing list of examples, from the harnesses worn by prehistoric draft animals, Egyptian waterwheels and hand querns, to antique beam presses, medieval grain mills, water clocks, and, of course, the steam engine. But it does more than just chronicle human ingenuity. It also presents what is still the most analytically persuasive historical theory of invention: Usher, more than anyone else, gives us a toolkit that can be used to analyze and describe just how Rocket (and its component parts) was imagined, designed, and constructed.