JETHRO TULL’S ‘DRILL’ AND THE

MINER’S FRIEND

1701

LIKE MANY AN INNOVATOR, JETHRO TULL was something of a crank. In 1701 he got annoyed when the labourers on his Oxfordshire farm refused to follow his instructions for planting sainfoin, a clover-like fodder plant that took its name from the French – literally, ‘wholesome hay’. Educated at Oxford University and trained as a barrister, Jethro reckoned he had the wit, as he later put it, to ‘contrive an engine to plant St Foin more faithfully than [paid] hands would do’. Machines, unlike ‘hands’, did not answer back. ‘[So] I examined and compared all the mechanical ideas that ever had entered my imagination.’

This gentleman farmer found his inspiration in the soundboard of a musical instrument – an organ, whose grooves and holes suggested to him a way that sainfoin seeds could be channelled into the earth at a controlled rate. To the rear of this device Jethro added the spikes of a harrow that would rake soil over the seed, and he named his new machine a ‘drill’ – ‘because,’ he explained, ‘when farmers used to sow their beans and peas into channels or furrows by hand, they called that action drilling’.

Jethro Tull was ahead of his time. It would be a century and a half before factory-made mechanical seed drills were a common sight on English farms. Some of Jethro’s theories actually held back farming progress – he opposed the use of manure, for example, on the grounds that it encouraged the spread of weeds. But Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, the book that he wrote to publicise his inventions, encouraged England’s farmers to think in scientific and mechanical terms, and this made an important contribution to the movement that historians would later call the ‘Agricultural Revolution’.

The efficient production of low-priced food meant that the typical eighteenth-century English family did not have to spend nearly everything it earned on bread, as was the case in France before 1789. They had spare money for shopping. Economists have identified this surplus purchasing power as one of the factors contributing to Britain’s so-called Industrial Revolution, with people spending their spare cash on the consumer goods that started to emerge from the growing number of ‘[manu]factories’.

Many of these new factories would come to depend on the efficiencies made possible by harnessing the power of steam, and this breakthrough was first announced in the year after Jethro invented his drill.

The year 1702 saw the publication in London of The Miner’s Friend – or a Description of an Engine to raise Water by Fire by Thomas Savery, a Devonshire naval engineer who devised a means of powering ships by mechanical paddles. The navy turned down Savery’s suggestion for a paddle-boat, but he had more luck with his ‘Miner’s Friend’, a machine he devised to improve the efficiency and safety of Cornwall’s tin mines. A coal-fired boiler heated water to produce steam. When cooled, the steam created a vacuum that drew up water from the mineshaft as a primitive pump.

This pumping action was improved a few years later by another Devonshire inventor, Thomas Newcomen, who collaborated with Savery and added a piston to his process. Newcomen’s piston dramatically increased the volume of water that could be brought to the surface, and by the time of his death in 1729 more than a hundred such steam pumps were working in British tin and coal mines. Standing at the head of the pit shaft, Newcomen’s heavy beam, rocking to and fro to the sighing of the steam and the creaking of the piston, was the technological marvel of the age.

But Newcomen did not die a wealthy man – the canny Savery had taken out a patent extending to 1733, which covered all engines that ‘raised Water by Fire’. Like Jethro Tull, Newcomen furthered technological progress, but scarcely profited from it.