The Most Powerful Idea in the World Read online

  Before Usher, historians of science hadn’t wandered very far from the same two paths that general historians had trod before them. The first is popularly known as the “Great Man” theory of history, in which events are understood through the actions of a few major actors—in this context, the “Great Inventor” theory—while the second perceives those same events as consequences of immutable laws of history; for the history of science and technology, this frequently meant explaining things as a sort of evolution of inventions by natural selection. Usher hated them both. He was, philosophically and temperamentally, a small-d democrat who was utterly convinced that the ability to invent was widely distributed among ordinary people, and that the impulse to invent was everywhere.

  If the phenomenon of invention were as natural as breathing, one might expect that it would—like breathing—behave pretty much the same whether it occurred in second-century Egypt or eighteenth-century England, and so indeed it did for Usher. To him, every invention inevitably followed a four-step sequence:

  Awareness of an unfulfilled need;

  Recognition of something contradictory or absent in existing attempts to meet the need, which Usher called an “incomplete pattern”;

  An all-at-once insight about that pattern; and

  A process of “critical revision” during which the insight is tested, refined, and perfected.

  Usher is an invaluable guide to the world of inventing, and in the pages that follow, his step-by-step description of the inventive process will be referred to many times. But precisely because his sequence applies to everything from Neolithic digging sticks to automated looms, it cannot explain why—in the unforgettable line of the imagined schoolboy introducing T. S. Ashton’s short but indispensable history of the Industrial Revolution—“About 1760, a wave of gadgets swept over England.”7 If the process of thinking up “gadgets” was, at bottom, the same for Archimedes, Leonardo, and James Watt, why did it take until the middle of the eighteenth century for a trickle to become a wave?

  Even defining the Industrial Revolution as a wave of gadgets doesn’t, by itself, place steam power—Rocket’s motive force—at the crest of that wave. After all, the early decades of European industrialization were largely driven by water and wind rather than steam. As late as 1800, Britain’s water mills were producing more than three times as much power as its steam engines, and this book could, conceivably, have begun not with Rocket, but with another display in the “Making of the Modern World” gallery: Richard Arkwright’s cotton spinning machine, known as the “water frame” because of its power source.* Nonetheless, the steam engine was the signature gadget of the Industrial Revolution, though not because it represented a form of power not dependent on muscle; both waterwheels and windmills had already done that. Nor was it the steam engine’s enormous capacity for rapid improvement—far greater than either water or wind power.

  The real reason steam power dominates every history of the Industrial Revolution is its central position connecting the era’s technological and economic innovations: the hub through which the spokes of coal, iron, and cotton were linked. The steam engine was first invented to drain the mines that produced the coal burned in the engine itself. Iron foundries were built to supply the boilers for the steam engines that operated forges and blast furnaces. Cotton traveled to the British Isles on steamships, was spun into cloth by steam-powered mills, and was brought to market by steam locomotives. Thousands of innovations were necessary to create steam power, and thousands more were utterly dependent upon it, from textile factories—soon enough, even the water frame was steam-driven—to oceangoing ships to railroads. After thousands of years of searching for a perpetual motion machine, the inventors of the steam engine at Rocket’s heart created something even better: a perpetual innovation machine, in which each new invention sparked the creation of a newer one, ad—so far, anyway—infinitum.

  Perpetual technological innovation is so much a part of contemporary life that it is difficult even to imagine the world without it. It is the modern world, however, that is historically anomalous. Hundreds of different cultures had experienced bursts of inventiveness and economic growth before the eighteenth century—bursts they were unable to sustain for more than a century or so. Imagine, for example, how different the last eight hundred years might have been had the Islamic Golden Age—whose inventors were responsible for everything from crankshaft-driven windmills and water turbines to the world’s most advanced mechanical clocks—survived the thirteenth century. Instead, like all the world’s earlier explosions of invention, it, in the words of one of the phenomenon’s most acute observers, “fizzled out.”8 One unique characteristic of the eighteenth-century miracle was that it was the first that didn’t.

  The other one, and the real reason that the threads leading from Rocket form such a challenging knot, is that the miracle was, overwhelmingly, produced by English-speaking people. Rocket incorporates hundreds of inventions, small and large—safety valves, feedback controls, return flues, condensers—to say nothing of the iron foundries and coal mines that supplied its raw materials. If one could magically edit out those steam engines invented in Italy, or Sweden, or—more important—France, or China, Rocket would still run. If the same magic were applied to those invented in England, Scotland, Wales, and America, the platform in the Science Museum would be empty.

  That is a puzzle for which there is no shortage of proposed solutions (see Industrial Revolution, Theories of, above). The one proposed by the book you hold in your hands can be boiled down to this: The best explanation for the preeminence of English speakers in lifting humanity out of its ten-thousand-year-long Malthusian trap is that the Anglophone world democratized the nature of invention.

  Even simpler: Before the eighteenth century, inventions were either created by those wealthy enough to do so as a leisure activity (or to patronize artisans to do so on their behalf), or they were kept secret for as long as possible. In England, a unique combination of law and circumstance gave artisans the incentive to invent, and in return obliged them to share the knowledge of their inventions. Virginia Woolf’s famous observation—that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed”—was not only cryptic, but about a century off. Or maybe two. Human character (or at least behavior) was changed, and changed forever, by seventeenth-century Britain’s insistence that ideas were a kind of property. This notion is as consequential as any idea in history. For while the laws of nature place severe limits on the total amount of gold, or land, or any other traditional form of property, there are (as it turned out) no constraints at all on the number of potentially valuable ideas. The result was that an entire nation’s unpropertied populace was given an incentive to produce them, and to acquire the right to exploit them.

  OBSERVE ANY GROUP OF people, and you can, if you’re so inclined, find clues to their ancestry in their hair or skin color. Examine blood or skin cells under a microscope, and you can learn still more; sequence your subjects’ DNA, and you’ll know quite a bit indeed, including the portion of the planet where their many-times great-grandparents lived, and genetic relationships between and among them.

  Stand in front of Rocket, and you’ll likely see “only” a rather complicated machine. But examine it with a historian’s microscope, and it will become clear that the “genetic sequence”* of the locomotive, and of the Industrial Revolution it exemplifies, comprises a hundred lineages taken from a dozen different disciplines, as ornate and as complicated as the family tree of a European royal family. The birth of steam depended on a new understanding of the nature of air, and its absence; on an empirical, not yet scientific, understanding of thermodynamics; and on a new language of mechanics describing how matter moves other matter. It was utterly dependent on a new “iron age” inaugurated by several generations of a single English family; a change in the understanding of national wealth, itself a contribution from the Scottish Enlightenment, and of the special character of water as a medium for storing and releasing heat
. Perhaps the most important father of the steam engine was the notion that ideas were property, itself the progeny of one of England’s greatest jurists, and her most famous political philosopher. The threads tied to Rocket lead back to an Oxford college and a Birmingham factory, to Shropshire forges and Cornish mines, to a Yorkshire monastery and a Virginia flour mill, to a Westminster courtroom and a Piccadilly locksmith. Those threads end at some of history’s great eureka moments: an Edinburgh professor’s discovery of carbon dioxide; an expatriate American’s demonstration that heat and motion are two ways of thinking about the same thing; even a Greek fisherman’s discovery of a first-century calculating machine. All of them—metallurgy and legal advocacy, chemistry and kinematics, physics and economics—are on display in the pages that follow.

  But most of these pages are about invention itself. No one can stand in front of Rocket for long without pondering the history of this peculiarly human activity, its psychology, economics, and social context. The narrative of steam may be constrained by the limits of mechanics, but it is defined by the behavior of inventors, and the pages that follow attempt to explore not only what inventors actually do, but what happens inside their skulls while they do it, touching on recent discoveries in neurobiology, cognitive science, and evolutionary sociology.

  Ever since humanity became bipedal, it has invented things. Stone tools in east Africa 2.4 million years ago, pottery in Anatolia eight thousand years ago. Five thousand years later, Archytas of Tarentum described the pulley, and Archimedes—probably—invented the lever, screw, and wedge. For a thousand centuries, the equation that represented humanity’s rate of invention could be plotted on an X-Y graph as a pretty straight line; sometimes a little steeper, sometimes flat. Then, during a few decades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in an island nation with no special geographic resource, a single variable changed in that equation. The result was a machine that changed everything, up to and including the idea of invention itself. The components of Rocket, and therefore the Industrial Revolution, are not gears, levers, and boilers, but ideas about gears, levers, and boilers—the most important ideas since the discovery of agriculture.

  But here is the difference: Many societies discovered agriculture independently, from the Fertile Crescent to the Yangtze to the Indus River Valley. The miracle of sustainable innovation has a single source, a single time and place where mankind first made the connection between invention, power, and wealth, and discovered the most powerful idea in the world.

  * The term didn’t really start to get traction until 1884, when a collection of lectures given by the economic historian Arnold Toynbee (the uncle of the famous one) at Balliol College starting in 1878 was posthumously published under the title Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century in England, Popular Addresses, Notes, and Other Fragments. This post hoc designation does have some arbitrariness to it; the most frequent textbook dates for the Industrial Revolution, 1760–1820, are a consequence of the fact that Toynbee’s ostensible lecture subject was George III, whose regnal dates they are.

  * “Geometric” and “arithmetic” are Malthus’s terms; the modern equivalents are “exponential” and “linear.”

  * For more about Arkwright—much more, in fact—see chapter 10.

  * The term is a favorite of A. P. Usher.

  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

  TO GET TO CROFTON from Birmingham, you take the M5 south about sixty miles to Brockworth and then change to the A417, which meanders first east, then southwest, then southeast, for another forty-six miles, changing, for no apparent reason, into the A419, and then the A436. In Burbage, you turn left at the Wolfhall Road and follow it another mile, across the railroad tracks and over the canal. The reason for making this three-hour journey (not counting time for wrong turns) is visible for the last quarter-mile or so: two red brick buildings next to a sixty-foot-tall chimney.

  The Crofton Pump Station in Wiltshire contains the oldest steam engine in the world still doing the job for which it was designed. Every weekend, its piston-operated beam pumps twelve tons of water a minute into six eight-foot-high locks along the hundred-mile-long Kennet and Avon Canal. The engine itself, number 42B—the figure “B.42” is still visible on the engine beam—is so called because it was the second engine with a forty-two-inch cylinder produced by the Birmingham manufacturer Boulton & Watt. It was entered in the company’s order book on January 11, 1810, and installed almost precisely two years later. Except for a brief time in the 1960s, it has run continuously ever since.

  First encounters with steam power are usually unexpected, inadvertent, and explosive; the cap flying off a defective teakettle, for example. No surprise there; the expansive property of water when heated past a certain point was known for thousands of years before that point was ever measured, and to this day it’s what drives the turbine that generates most of our electricity, including that used to power the light by which you are reading this book. The relationship between the steam power of a modern turbine and the kind used to pump the water out of the Kennet and Avon Canal is, however, anything but direct. By comparison, the mechanism of engine 42B is a thing of Rube Goldberg–like complexity, with levers, cylinders, and pistons yoked together by a dozen different linkages, connecting rods, gears, cranks, and cams, all of them moving in a terrifyingly complicated dance that is at once fascinating, and eerily quiet—enough to occupy the mechanically inclined visitor, literally, for hours. When the engine is “in steam,” it somehow causes the twenty-six-foot-long cast iron beams to move, in the words of Charles Dickens, “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in melancholy madness.”

  There is, however, something odd about the beams, or rather about the pistons to which they are attached. The pistons aren’t just being driven up by the steam below them. The power stroke is also down: toward the steam chamber. Something is sucking the pistons downward. Or, more accurately, nothing is: a vacuum.

  Using steam to create vacuum was not the sort of insight that came an instant after watching a teakettle lid go flying. It depended, instead, on a journey of discovery and diffusion that took more than sixteen centuries. By all accounts the trip began sometime in the first century CE, on the west side of the Nile Delta, in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, at the Mouseion, the great university at which first Euclid and then Archimedes studied, and where, sometime around 60 CE, another great mathematician lived and worked, one whose name is virtually always the first associated with the steam engine: Heron of Alexandria.

  The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for Heron—occasionally, Hero—is somewhat scant on birth and death dates; as is often the case with figures from an age less concerned with such trivia, it uses the abbreviation “fl.” for the latin floruit, or “flourished.” And flourish he did. Heron’s text on geometry, written sometime in the first century but not rediscovered until the end of the nineteenth, is known as the Metrika, and includes both the formula for calculating the area of a triangle and a method for extracting square roots. He was even better known as the inventor of a hydraulic fountain, a puppet theater using automata, a wind-powered organ, and, most relevantly for engine 42B, the aeolipile, a reaction engine that consisted of a hollow sphere with two elbow-shaped tubes attached on opposite ends, mounted on an axle connected to a tube suspended over a cauldron of water. As the water boiled, steam rose through the pipe into the sphere and escaped through the tubes, causing the sphere to rotate.

  Throughout most of human history, successful inventors, unless wealthy enough to retain their amateur status, have depended on patronage, which they secured either by entertaining their betters or glorifying them (sometimes both). Heron was firmly in the first camp, and by all accounts, the aeolipile was regarded a
s a wonder by the wealthier classes of Alexandria, which was then one of the richest and most sophisticated cities in the world. Despite the importance it is given in some scientific histories, though, its real impact was nil. No other steam engines were inspired by it,1 and its significance is therefore a reminder of how quickly inventions can vanish when they are produced for a society’s toy department.

  In fact, because the aeolipile depended only upon the expansive force of steam, it should probably be remembered as the first in a line of engineering dead ends. But if the inspirational value of Heron’s steam turbine was less than generally realized, that of his writings was incomparably greater. He wrote at least seven complete books, including Metrika, collecting his innovations in geometry, and Automata, which described a number of self-regulating machines, including an ingenious mechanical door opener. Most significant of all was Pneumatika, less for its descriptions of the inventions of this remarkable man (in addition to the aeolipile, the book included “Temple Doors Opened by Fire on an Altar,” “A Fountain Which Trickles by the Action of the Sun’s Rays,” and “A Trumpet, in the Hands of an Automaton, Sounded by Compressed Air,” a catalog that reinforces the picture of Heron as antiquity’s best toymaker) than for a single insight: that the phenomenon observed when sucking the air out of a chamber is nothing more than the pressure of the air around that chamber. It was a revelation that turned out to be utterly critical in the creation of the world’s first steam engines, and therefore of the Industrial Revolution that those engines powered.

  The idea wasn’t, of course, completely original to Heron; the idea that air is a source of energy is immeasurably older than science, or even technology. Ctesibos, an inventor and engineer born in Alexandria three centuries before Heron, supposedly used compressed air to operate his “water organ” that used water as a piston to force air through different tubes, making music.