The Industrial Revolution was not confined to a single industry and affected a significant number of products and processes. However, change was uneven, with some parts of the manufacturing sector or even some processes in the same industry subject to mechanization and technological progress at different rates and times. By 1850, a substantial number of industries had been transformed. Some had moved early, whereas others were but lightly affected by the changes around them. The full modernization of industry moved into high gear during the so-called second Industrial Revolution, which is generally reckoned to have started around 1860 or so. The industries affected by the second Industrial Revolution were steel, electricity, chemicals, mass-produced interchangeable-parts production engineering. The possibilities that improvements in these areas held for the economy were already perceived in the first half of the nineteenth century, but they were still out of reach in 1850. All the same, it is conceivable that these advances could have been realized without the foundations laid before 1850.
In the popular mind, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century is most widely associated with steam power. This is both correct and misleading. It is correct, because the steam engine was one of the most revolutionary inventions ever made by humans, and one that was to have enormous consequences in later years. It was seen as such by contemporaries, and its symbolic significance is wholly deserved. The great French scientist Sadi Carnot, widely regarded as the founder of the science of steam power (now known as thermodynamics), wrote in 1824 that “to take away England's steam engines today would amount to robbing her of her iron and coal, to drying up her sources of wealth, to ruining her means of prosperity and destroying her great power” (Carnot, 1824, p. 4). The steam engine was an Enlightenment machine par excellence. It was a spectacular device. It demonstrated the power that could be harnessed thanks to the control that people could exercise over nature, and it stimulated the popular imagination by its force, its noise, and the sheer novelty it represented. With the benefit of nineteenth-century physics we can acquiesce: it constituted the first controlled conversion of heat into work and opened up an unprecedented opportunity for harnessing minerals that supplied motive power to production instead of just heat. Very little in human history comes close in terms of its sheer impact on the human material condition.
The steam engine, then, remains in our mind the defining invention of the Industrial Revolution. It had the power to relieve workers from the drudgery of hard, repetitive, physical labor as well as make the people who introduced it more prosperous. Consumers, facing lower prices and eventually better goods and services, may have secured the greatest benefits. In the very long run, there can be little doubt that they did so, as steam helped drive much of large-scale manufacturing as of 1850, as well as an increasing proportion of transport. It is important to stress, however, that during the classic years of the Industrial Revolution the immediate impact of steam power on industry and productivity was fairly limited. Much of what steam did before 1830 could have been (and to a large extent was) readily carried out by alternative sources of inanimate power, especially water power. Calculations measuring the so-called social savings (the net economic benefit of steam compared to the next best technology) have shown that the impact of steam power on the overall economy was slight before 1830 (von Tunzelmann, 1978; Crafts, 2004).
These statements are only contradictory if we expect technological progress to consist of radical innovations that have a major impact on a wide segment of the economy. Such “General Purpose Technologies” are rare, but when they occur they tend to affect much of the economy because they can be combined with a large number of existing techniques in addition to spawning many novel uses. The best example is perhaps the microprocessor, which has entered our lives in a myriad ways, whether as consumers or producers. Some historians have thought of steam as such a technology. Steam was definitely a multi-purpose technology, used in a number of industries (mining, textiles, pottery, sawmills, and food processing) and later in railroads and steamships. But it did not enter consumers’ homes, and left much of the economy such as agriculture, construction, and most manufacturing untouched. Its impact, of course, grew over time. As late as 1770, the wasteful Newcomen machines were almost exclusively used for pumping water out of coal mines in places where coal was very cheap. The improvements introduced by Watt and others after 1769 turned it into a source of industrial power. Watt’s famous improvements—the separate condenser, double-acting, steam-jacketing, and the sun-and-planet gears—greatly increased the steam engine’s efficiency, versatility, and reliability, and made it easier to install, maintain, and repair. Eventually high pressure, compounding, and other improvements made steam a source of power in transport as well, but the first railroads date from 1830 and steam power on the oceans only became truly significant in the mid-1850s with the development of the screw propeller and the compound marine steam engine built by Glaswegian John Elder, in close cooperation with William Rankine.
Although its full economic effects were slow to be realized, steam power still became an inexorable force in determining the shape of modern society. Steam power could not have come into existence without the very rudimentary scientific discoveries that underlay it, many of them developed on the Continent (including the first model of a steam engine, built by Denis Papin). Its main achievement was to convert heat (thermal energy) into controllable work (kinetic energy), which is what any engine does. This idea is one of the most remarkable technological achievements humanity has ever made. It was bandied about in the last third of the seventeenth century, but not fully realized until the completion of Thomas Savery’s “Miner’s Friend” of 1705 (less of an engine than a steam-driven vacuum pump) and more importantly Thomas Newcomen’s famous Dudley Castle machine completed in 1712, a spectacular achievement, clumsy and inefficient as it may seem today. Our planet provides us with large amounts of energy, and harnessing it is in large part what production technology is all about. What steam power and its descendants, internal combustion, diesel engines, and the turbine, all did was to utilize stored-up energy in coal and oil, and turn it into work. Before, people had been able to harness heat (by burning) and work (by utilizing animals, water, and wind), but not convert one into the other. The idea was so radical that it took many years for physicists and engineers to fully realize the enormity of their achievement. Subsequent engineers such as Smeaton, Watt, Woolf, and Trevithick worked long and hard to make engines more efficient and more versatile and to convert the reciprocating motion of early engines into the rotary motion that industrial processes required. The full theoretical understanding of what an engine was, how steam power worked, and how one form of energy was transformed into another, however, did not become clear until the middle of the nineteenth century. As late as 1827 John Farey, the best contemporary expositor of the mechanical details of the steam engine, still regarded the steam engine as a vapor-pressure engine rather than a heat engine. Ten years later the French engineer François Marie Pambour wrote his Théorie de la machine à vapeur, which became the standard work and was translated into German and English under the same premise.
All this changed by the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1843 the Mancunian James Prescott Joule published a famous paper showing the equivalence of heat and work, and by the late 1840s the ideas of thermodynamics took shape and finally straightened out what the engine really did. The efficiency (or “duty,” measured as pounds of water raised one foot through the burning of one bushel of coal) of steam engines rose from 28 million lbs in 1820 to 80 million lbs in 1859 (Hills, 1989, p. 131), but the capital costs of steam power remained more or less constant in the 1830s and 1840s, and only in the second half of the nineteenth century did steam power have measurable effect on productivity in the British economy. Crafts (2004) estimates that the social savings due to steam engine improvements were still only 0.3 percent of GDP a year in the years 1830–50 and less before that, but jumped to 1.2 percent in the decades 1850–70. The effects of technological innovation, as Arthur Clarke once said, are overrated in the short run but underestimated in the long run.
Yet steam was only a part of the energy revolution. Perhaps one of the best clues to the nature of the Industrial Revolution is that the technology that most closely competed with steam, water power, also improved immensely during these years, and for much the same reasons: people with scientific interests, mathematical skills, and the ability to experiment, compute, and make inferences, became interested in understanding what water mills did and what determined their efficiency. Their findings were eventually translated into improved machinery. In Britain, the most important improvements in water power were due to two engineers, John Smeaton and John Rennie. They designed the so-called breast wheel that combined the advantages of the more efficient overshot waterwheels with the flexibility and adaptability of the undershot waterwheel. The increased use of iron parts and the correct setting of the angle of the blades also increased efficiency. The French engineer Poncelet designed the so-called Poncelet waterwheel using curved blades. Theoretical hydraulics gradually merged with the practical design of waterwheels. The desire for improvement through experimentation and careful analysis of data backed whenever possible by formal reasoning, the essence of the Enlightenment, was the driving force behind the improvement of all power technology. Water power was perhaps not a winner, and in the long run lost out to engines that burned fossil fuels, yet it could be and was improved in an age that improved whatever could be improved. Even wind power, despite its general unsuitability to industry, was experimented with. Smeaton built a wind-powered oil mill in Wakefield in 1755, and the British adopted a few wind-driven paper mills from the Netherlands, and a wind-powered spinning mill existed in Stockport in 1791. Wind power could not provide the constant speed required for textile mills and was eventually abandoned as a source of industrial power (Hills, 1994, pp. 177, 190, 210), but at the time it seemed worth investigating.
The other industry most widely associated with the Industrial Revolution was cotton. Unlike energy or chemicals, textile machinery involved little complex science requiring mathematical formulation, and the new technology required no principles that “would have puzzled Archimedes” as Donald Cardwell (1994, p. 186) once put it. But here, too, improvements involved a familiarity with techniques used in other activities, a reliance on experimentation, manual dexterity, and a belief that things could be made better and that personal advantages could be secured if an improvement turned out to be a success. Spinning was of course an ancient skill, but despite the introduction of spinning wheels and some other advances in the Middle Ages, it still was a manual activity, in which the human fingers were essential in imparting the “twist” that made the yarn. Three names will remain forever associated with the breakthrough that liberated spinning from its digital dependence. First, Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the so-called throstle, which used rollers to draft out the fibers, realizing (as Wyatt had not) that he needed two pairs of rollers spaced at a proper distance. The distance between the rollers had to be adjusted to the length (or “staple”) of the cotton. Arkwright also used lead weights on the rollers to prevent uneven drawing of the cotton. The strong yarns produced by these machines were suitable for the warp of the cotton fabric, a substantial improvement. The second was James Hargreaves, the inventor of the famous jenny that twisted the yarn by rotating spindles that pulled the rovings from their bobbins, with metal draw bars playing the role of human fingers guiding the spun yarn onto the spindles by means of a so-called faller wire. The jenny was a small and cheap machine that was used by small producers and the smaller models easily fitted in the cottages of domestic spinners: by 1811 over 150,000 of them were in use (Hills, 1970, pp. 58–59). Third, Samuel Crompton, who in 1779, after many years of hard work, combined the two in the aptly called mule which provided the optimal combination of the high-quality yarn made by the throstle and the speed of the jenny. The mule became one of the most famous inventions of all time and competed with steam power for the title of paradigmatic invention of the Industrial Revolution. It was at once a process innovation, that allowed the production of cotton yarn at far lower costs than before, and a product innovation in that the quality of the product (fine yarn) was such that Britain’s cotton industry could out-compete the very fine Indian yarns known as muslins. Between 1779 and 1850, scores of incremental improvements were introduced in the mule, and endless mechanical problems in its operation were resolved by ingenious mechanics and technicians, most of whom remain obscure.
Yet cotton-spinning, much like steam, was only the first among equals. Improvement was spread throughout the cotton industry—and in other textiles as well—and new machinery was introduced, some of it improving and rivaling the cotton-spinning machines, some of it complementing them and resolving technological bottlenecks in production. In the temporal order of preparing textiles, spinning comes after carding and before weaving. Carding is the process in which cotton is combed and wound on rovings on which the fibers are strung out parallel to one another. Six years after patenting his throstle, Arkwright patented a carding machine. Cotton also required weaving, bleaching, and printing, as well as the ginning of the raw material; in all of those processes, advances were made before the eighteenth century was out. Weaving turned out to be the most difficult to mechanize, and as spinning machines turned out ever larger supplies of yarn to be woven, handloom weavers for a few decades experienced a golden age of high demand for their services. Handlooms were improved, for instance, by the introduction of the dandy loom in 1802 invented by Thomas Johnson, a good example of the kind of highly competent and ingenious mechanics that gave Britain a comparative advantage in microinventions. Johnson, “an ingenious young man” who was known as “the conjuror” by his fellow mechanics, worked for William Radcliffe in Stockport, and another invention, the dressing machine allowed the warp to be dressed before it was put on the loom, increasing the productivity of a handloom weaver by as much as 50 percent (Day and McNeil, 1996, pp. 386, 583; Timmins, 1998, p. 130). Such inventions did not lead to large-scale steam-powered fully mechanized factories, but they demonstrate the ability of well-focused research efforts to solve recognized bottlenecks. When the technical problems involved in the power loom—first conceived by Edmund Cartwright in 1785—were gradually resolved after 1815, in large part due to the brilliant work of Richard Roberts, the mechanization of the cotton industry became inevitable. Cotton production grew at an astonishing rate, and it was transformed from an exotic but marginal fabric to the centerpiece of the British textile industry.
The precise causes of the spectacular success of the British cotton industry seem to be reasonably well understood. O’Brien, Griffiths, and Hunt (1991) have suggested that despite the Calico Act, the cotton industry in Lancashire and Derbyshire (supposedly producing only mixed fabrics such as fustians) was sufficiently large to make experimentation in cotton worthwhile. In the 1736 Manchester Act, Parliament explicitly watered down the Calico Act to allow the wearing of fustians and other printed mixed fabrics, thus creating enough of an opening for cotton yarn to make experimentation on mechanical cotton spinning worthwile (Ormrod, 2003, p. 172). However, it is hard to see how the passing of these laws rather than their weakening were instrumental in stimulating the mechanized cotton industry after 1760.
In any event, by the middle of the eighteenth century, cotton was still a marginal industry compared with wool. What accounted for its success was not so much the protection provided to local industry (which would have been more consistent with a huge expansion of the fustian industry, which the Calico Act was supposed to protect) as the special characteristics of cotton fibers that made its mechanical spinning an easier (though not easy) problem to solve than for linen or wool. Cotton had to be imported, but was elastically supplied from North America, the result of the large reserves of suitable land in the south of what was to become the United States, the cotton gin, and the presence of a large slave population in exactly those areas suitable for cotton cultivation. On the demand side, cotton could be dyed, printed, and laundered easily and was felt to be comfortable and fashionable. As we have seen, the ingenuity of skilled British engineers and craftsmen was a main reason why this industry took off in Britain before it did anywhere else. Its access to overseas raw materials was also a contributing factor. Yet we should not succumb to the “hindsight bias” that would lead us to believe that just because these problems were solved in Britain, they could not have been solved elsewhere; continental inventors, after all, made major contributions to textile technology in all other fabrics and there was little that Crompton or Cartwright did that was beyond the capability of the best continental mechanics.
Other textiles could not but be influenced by what happened in cotton, but because the physical properties of wool, linen, and silk differed from those of cotton, the rate at which technical bottlenecks were resolved differed from material to material and from process to process. Thus in the worsted (combed wool) industry the cotton-spinning machinery worked well, but the combing process itself turned out to be a difficult technology to mechanize. Mechanical weaving of woolen fibers was difficult and handloom weaving in wool survived longer than in cotton. The problem for woolen manufacturers was that due to the falling prices and improved quality of cotton goods, the other textiles were increasingly substituted by cotton cloth. By 1850, however, the spinning of wool and linen had to all intents and purposes been mechanized, and home production in textiles had retreated to a few niches. Many of the inventions came from abroad, such as the De Girard wet-spinning process of linen and the Heilmann wool-combing machines. The only area to resist the onslaught of technological change was apparel-making: tailors and seamstresses, working from homes and small workshops, continued to produce clothing made from factory-made fabrics.
One of the most original and interesting inventions of the Industrial Revolution was the Jacquard loom, perfected in France in 1804. Although it produced mostly for the upscale market of expensive silks and fine worsteds, it resembled steam power in that it used a revolutionary technological principle whose full potential was not realized until much later. Joseph-Marie Jacquard, building on earlier work by Jacques de Vaucanson and others, programmed looms to weave patterns into the cloth. The programs were written onto punch cards, and represent the first application of binary coding of information. The Jacquard loom was very different from the traditional drawloom, which had previously been used to weave patterns into cloth, not only because it eliminated the drawboy (a second worker assisting the weaver by selecting and pulling the warp threads through which a particular weft was going), but also because the pattern could be changed in a few minutes, and the Jacquard could produce figures, effects, and colors unattainable by drawlooms. British weavers adopted the Jacquard loom on a large scale in the 1820s and 1830s. Moreover, Charles Babbage was inspired by this technique to build his famous analytical machine, the first attempt to build a computer.
The third area of “great inventions” of the Industrial Revolution was iron. Iron could claim to be, if not a General Purpose Technology, at least a general purpose material: almost anything that needed to be harder and stronger than wood had to be made out of iron. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were no substitutes for iron in the majority of the many uses to which it was put. Before the Industrial Revolution, blast furnaces produced a substance known as pig iron which was high in carbon and thus hard, rigid, and fragile. Coke-smelting, which was introduced in the first decade of the eighteenth century but did not become widely used until the 1750s, reduced the cost of pig iron, and allowed the use of cast iron in many more applications. One of the lesser-known achievements of the age was the beginning of the use of cast iron as a construction material. The Shrewsbury engineer and architect Charles Woolley Bage (1751–1822) built Ditherington flax mill in 1796–97, the first major building ever to use a cast-iron frame. The construction with iron was prompted not so much by cost as by the increased fire hazards caused by increasing use of steam power in textile mills. The innovation was significant above all because it augured a method that would produce high-rise construction in the later nineteenth century.
The bottleneck in the iron industry was refining pig iron into the more malleable low-carbon wrought iron that was needed for many purposes. For centuries, this process, carried out by mostly small forges, had been costly and time-consuming. Henry Cort, in 1785, solved the problem by combining the reverberatory furnaces used in glass-making with grooved rollers that had been used for some purposes, and by employing coke (purified coal) as a fuel. It is not easy to think of Cort as an Enlightenment figure. Joseph Black wrote to his friend James Watt that Cort was “a plain Englishman, without Science” whose discovery was due to “a dint of natural ingenuity and a turn for experiment” (cited by Coleman and MacLeod, 1986, p. 603). Yet Cort took the trouble to consult him, recognizing that if Black might know things that were relevant, it made sense to ask him. More importantly, Cort must have had access to a wide array of industrial practices in his time, since he was able to recombine them into a technique that solved a well-known problem, while avoiding some pitfalls. After a few further improvements and tweakings, the Cort puddling and rolling technique took the British metallurgical world by storm. The supply of wrought iron changed dramatically, marked both by a decline in price and an improvement in quality. Advances continued in the nineteenth century. James Neilson’s “hot blast,” perfected in 1829, which reduced the fuel consumption of blast furnaces by two-thirds, turned west central Scotland into the most efficient pig-iron producer of Britain (Whatley, 1997, p. 33). The puddler Joseph Hall discovered (to his surprise) that by adding old iron or rust to the puddling process, he could get the metal to boil quite strongly, yielding a superior product. This “wet puddling,” adopted at his works in Tipton in the Black Country in the 1830s, constituted a significant improvement to the puddling and rolling process that was rapidly adopted throughout the industry. Hall arrived at this technique by trial and error, but by that time, increasingly, formal knowledge prepared the minds that Fortune favored (Gale, 1961–62, p. 5).
Much as the progressiveness of the textile industry was most remarkable in its leading branch, cotton, but eventually infected the other industries with its spirit of improvement, so the technologies of extracting, processing, and using non-ferrous metals advanced even if they are less well known than those of iron and steel. The copper industry was dominated by Thomas Williams (1737–1802), who became the richest man in Wales. While no inventor himself, he surrounded himself with the best minds he could find and he did take out a patent in 1778 for extracting arsenic from the ore with less trouble and expense than the common process. In the early 1780s his workers solved the problem of making hard cold-rolled copper bolts, and this invention helped solve the problem of corrosion through galvanic action between metals in copper-sheathed ships (J.R. Harris, 1966; 2004). The innovation turned out to be of major significance to shipping: the proportion of copper-sheathed merchant ships went from nothing in 1777 to 3.25 percent in 1786 and 18 percent in 1816 (Rees, 1971, p. 87). The Welsh method of copper refining adopted by him used reverberatory furnaces that smelted the ore in six stages using coke. The drive toward technical improvement even reached into the use of fairly rare metals. William Wollaston (1766–1828) attacked the rather formidable task of making platinum malleable and useful in a range of industries such as gunmaking and laboratory equipment. Unlike most accomplished scientists who applied their skills to industry, Wollaston kept his procedures a tight secret, yet seems to have benefited handsomely from his enterprise.
Not all such problems could be solved at the time: steel, a form of iron chemically intermediate between pig iron and wrought iron, could not be made cheaply enough throughout the period under discussion. Steel’s properties of hardness and elasticity made it essential for many products but the high price of the best quality had always been an obstacle. Benjamin Huntsman, a Sheffield clockmaker, perfected in 1740 the so-called crucible process, which made it possible to make high-quality steel in reasonable quantities. Huntsman used coke and reverberatory ovens to generate sufficiently high temperatures to enable him to heat blister steel (an uneven material obtained by heating bar iron with layers of charcoal for long periods) to its melting point. In this way he produced a crucible (or cast) steel that was soon in high demand. Huntsman’s process was superior in that it produced not only a more homogeneous product (important in a product such as steel, which consisted of about 2 percent carbon mixed in with the iron) but also removed impurities better because it created higher temperatures. Huntsman’s product remained too expensive for many industrial uses, and attempts to make steel not only good but also cheap had to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Huntsman’s process, one of the early pathbreaking inventions of the eighteenth century, is worth mentioning as an important advance. Steel was essential in the production of machine parts, cutting tools, instruments, springs, and anything else that needed a material that was resilient and durable. Crucible steel is one important technological catalyst that economic historians have tended to overlook. The quality of crucible steel was such that it was produced in considerable quantities in Sheffield long after the nineteenth-century methods of producing cheap bulk steel had been introduced. Huntsman worked in a world of tacit knowledge, with an instinctive feel for what worked based on experience and intuition, data-driven rather than based on a scientific analysis. The fuller understanding of what steel was and how best to make it was very much part of the Enlightenment project and particularly fascinated continental scientists. By the 1820s and 1830s, the chemical nature of steel as an alloy of pure iron and small quantities of carbon was becoming known, and it is hard to envisage the subsequent advances in steelmaking without it.
The same was true for much of what we would call today the chemical industry. Textiles had to be dyed, but the vegetable substances used to make these dyes such as indigo, woad, and madder were costly to grow and process. But devising man-made substances that would replace them turned out to be beyond the capabilities of the age. The one bottleneck that the chemistry of the age of Enlightenment succeeded in solving was bleaching. Bleaching had always been a tricky problem, because it required the interaction of sunshine with certain acids, in a process known as grassing—yet sunshine was one resource Britain could neither boast nor import. The process of chlorine bleaching was therefore the leading invention in the chemical finishing processes of textiles, and nicely illustrates the international nature of the Industrial Enlightenment as well as the features of British society that allowed it to be the first to exploit the invention. The invention itself was made on the Continent: chlorine was discovered by a Swedish chemist, Carl-Wilhelm Scheele, in 1774, and its bleaching properties were realized by Claude Berthollet, one of Lavoisier’s star students. When news of the invention reached Britain, its best engineer, James Watt, and its most successful entrepreneur, Watt’s partner Matthew Boulton, traveled to Paris in 1786 and had Berthollet demonstrate the technique. British industrialists (including Watt’s father-in-law, the bleacher James McGrigor) then set to the task of turning the invention into a viable industrial technique, a process that took a fair amount of “development” in our terms. In 1799 the Scottish bleacher Charles Tennant combined chlorine with slaked lime to produce bleaching powder and its success was phenomenal—grassing disappeared within a few years. “For the first time in History,” wrote Berthollet in 1790, “an experiment has succeeded in four years to produce great manufactures” (cited by Musson and Robinson, 1969, p. 337). It is not quite accurate, of course, that this invention was an example of “science in the service of technology.” Science and scientists helped, but chemical knowledge was highly imperfect and much of the actual implementation still depended on the trial-and-error evolutionary process of technological development in which inspiration and perspiration accounted for a lot more than scientific understanding.
The ceramic industry represents another successful breakthrough in the push for material progress. The precise chemical reactions that yielded porcelain (invented by the Chinese in the first millennium) were not well understood, so European advances came mostly through trial and error. Wedgwood’s celebrated invention of colored Jasper, termed the most significant innovation in ceramic history since the Chinese invention of porcelain (Reilly, 1992, p. 153), came after thousands of experiments. Yet progress in this area clearly was no longer confined to the random stumblings of inspired artisans. Wedgwood sought the advice of the best scientists of his time, and himself was the inventor of a pyrometer that earned him his election to the Royal Society in 1783. His arch-enemy, the Cornish apothecary William Cookworthy, was a polymath intellectual, friendly with both John Smeaton and Joseph Banks. Not all the science was quite effective in advancing the industry. Cookworthy’s belief in the ability of divining rods to locate deposits of metallic lodes serves as an example of the many pockets of superstition and ignorance that useful knowledge still needed to clear. There is little doubt that this industry in 1800 had progressed a great deal since Saxon porcelain-making techniques were first introduced into Britain in the 1740s. Advances in the use of materials other than iron were, however, widespread. Another example is the use of papier-mâché, patented by the Birmingham manufacturer Henry Clay in 1772. When subjected to a process of varnishing by a dark substance, known as “japanning,” it became substantial enough to become a versatile material used for furniture and houseware.
The British manufacturing sector thus experienced at many levels signs of the “age of progress” that signaled the capability of human ingenuity and knowledge to control nature and improve the material condition of humanity, just as Francis Bacon had believed. But innovations in manufacturing were far from all there was to innovation. Some of the more spectacular innovations of the period of the Industrial Revolution constituted radical new solutions to age-old problems outside the realm of industry that people had faced since days immemorial, and illustrate the determination of the Industrial Enlightenment to break through the constraints of nature by the application of useful knowledge. Consider the problem of human flight, a subject of human dreams since the days of Daedalus. In 1783, observation, ingenuity, and a rudimentary understanding of physics produced the first defeat of gravity when on November 21 two French daredevils, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, flew in a Montgolfier balloon. Ballooning did not attain economic significance until a century later, when it could be coupled with lightweight engines to produce airships. But its psychological effect should not be underestimated. Balloons were used to entertain at fairs and feasts, and new flight records made for good newspaper copy. Their capability of gathering huge crowds, amusing them, and filling them with a feeling of awe and wonderment at technology and its achievements helped persuade the public of the endless potential of the human mind to improve the human condition.
Another case in point was the solution to the longitude problem. Since the middle of the fifteenth century European ships had explored the world. One of the tools that allowed them to do this was a set of instruments that determined the latitude of the point of observation by measuring the angle of the sun or the stars. This technique provided one coordinate. The other, longitude, turned out to be far more difficult to establish in practice even if the theory behind measuring it was reasonably well understood by 1700. One technique was the construction of the Nautical Almanacs, detailed tables that allowed sailors to calculate their longitude from the position of certain stars, a method pioneered by the German astronomer Tobias Mayer in 1755. Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, designed tables put together by highly numerate “computers” that would allow seamen to compute with accuracy their location at sea in thirty minutes using this idea rather than the four hours required by Mayer’s original suggestions (Croarken, 2002). The other option was to have a clock on board that gave the precise time at a given fixed point. By comparing that time to the time at the location of the ship (determined by the height of the sun), the longitude could be calculated. The difficulty was to construct a clock of sufficient accuracy to operate on the unstable sailing ships of the time. The Board of Longitude, a special body set up to solve the problem in 1714, promised the huge sum of £20,000 to “such person as shall discern the longitude at sea.” After decades of experimentation, a clock accurate enough to solve the problem (known as H4) was completed by John Harrison in 1760, though it took another fifteen years and appeals to the King and Lord North for him to be paid the reward. Although a copy of H4 was actually used by Captain James Cook on his second and third voyages to the southern hemisphere, the early clocks were still expensive. When by the end of the century further improvements by British clockmakers reduced their price and they became more widely used, shipwrecks caused by mistaken location fell sharply. It was another triumph, not just of the ability of mechanical ingenuity and experimentation combined with just enough theoretical knowledge and mathematics to solve hard problems, but also of the promise that high degrees of technical precision and mathematics would be of great utility to society at large. Accuracy and reliability became the new catchwords. For clocks, pumps, scientific instruments, and chemical compounds, the old world of “more or less” would no longer do. That, too, was one of the principles of the Industrial Enlightenment (Heilbron, 1990).
A further example of useful knowledge being applied to solve a technological problem is found in the age-old issue of lighting. Modern observers might be astonished by how little progress there had been over the ages in lighting technology, given the universality of the problem of needing to see at night. If ever there was a counterexample to the misleading cliché that necessity is the mother of invention, this was it. The primitive oil lamps burned rapeseed oil and similar fuels, and provided a smoky and strongly colored flame. Tallow candles, widely used because of their low price, also provided fairly low-quality light. Wax candles were superior, but much more expensive. The true sea change came about two decades later. The notion that gas could be burned for useful purposes such as illumination and heating was an eighteenth-century insight. It became understood at around 1730 that coal could be broken up into components, one of which was a flammable gas. Most experiments with burning coal gas were, however, motivated by the need to get rid of the gas rather than produce it from coal and utilize the energy. Eventually it was realized that gas could be burned in a controllable fashion, giving a steady and clean flame, and turned to useful purposes. In about 1780, Archibald Cochrane, the Earl of Dundonald, lit the gases above his tar ovens mostly to amuse his friends. Yet much of the original insight into how to implement the insight in a practical way came again from the Continent, and a Frenchman named Philippe Lebon took out a patent in 1799 of a process in which he distilled gas from wood, cooled it, and proposed to burn the gas in a glass device known as a thermolamp in which gas and air were separately introduced, and the heavier by-products of the wood gas were collected in a special receptacle. In Britain, one of the leading entrepreneurs in the gas industry was a German, Friedrich Winser, and the first technical textbook on the industry was written by another, Friedrich Accum. Much as in the case of chlorine, however, it took British acumen and dexterity to take the idea to the finish line. William Murdoch, one of James Watt’s most able employees, improved the technology (in part by using coal gas, a by-product of coking, rather than wood derivatives), and gas lighting became a reality, first in factories and theaters, then in streets and homes. By the middle of the nineteenth century the great majority of towns with over 2,500 inhabitants, and not a few smaller ones, had gas lighting (Falkus, 1967, p. 500). It was a quiet and unsung revolution, the most literal way in which the Industrial Enlightenment movement dispelled darkness. In the spirit of the age, morality was seen as enforcing utility. The Times exclaimed that nothing so important had been invented in the British realm since navigation (cited by Falkus, 1982, p. 226). The economist will recognize an improvement in material conditions when he or she sees it regardless of whether it shows up in the formal estimates of GDP, since sharp quality improvements are often inadequately reflected in such data (Nordhaus, 1997). Gas light was cheaper than any previous technology, easier to use, the light steadier and brighter, the fire hazards much reduced, and its price kept falling, from about £3,000 per million lumens/hour in 1820 to £500 in 1850 (Fouquet and Pearson, 2006, p. 158). The advent of gas lighting was hastened by the availability of government surplus musket barrels after the Napoleonic Wars, which were used as service conduits for gas. By 1829, two hundred public gas companies, as well as private installations, were in existence, and the idea of gas cooking had emerged, although adoption was slow (Chaloner, 1963, pp. 128–29).
What is striking is that side by side with a radical new technology, the old one kept improving as well. In 1782, a Frenchman named Aimé Argand invented a vastly improved lamp, but one that still burned oil. It used a round wick with a hollow air supply and a chimney, so it had excellent oxygen supply and emitted little smoke. Argand’s invention involved ingenuity but little or no formal science, although he had studied with Lavoisier. This changed in the early nineteenth century. The French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul’s discoveries on the nature of fatty acids led to the emergence of a harder and purer fatty acid (stearine), the basis of candles, that burned longer and more brightly, with little smoke or smell. The real cost of candle light is estimated to have declined from £15,000 per million lumens-hour in 1760 to below £ 4,000 in constant prices in the 1820s (Fouquet and Pearson, 2006, p. 153).
In other industries, too, this was the age of progress. They were too many to sustain arguments that the Industrial Revolution was confined to so few industries that it was negligible, but too few to have major macroeconomic effects before 1830. In many activities promising advances were made in the technology, but actual implementation could take years and decades, until all the bugs had been removed and a cumulative set of improvements had made the new idea practicable. One industry which fits this pattern is that of food preservation. As in so many others, the original idea came from France: Nicolas Appert, attracted by a 12,000 franc reward promised by the Directoire in 1795, worked on the problem for a decade and received the prize in 1809. Although he never took out a patent, his British emulators did, and by 1813 a firm named Donkin, Hall, and Gamble was established that produced food in sheet-iron “cases” supplied to customers such as the Royal Navy and later Arctic explorers. For decades, the product remained too expensive and of too poor a quality to become mass-consumed, but as an illustration of the belief in making an improvement that would be both remunerative and socially beneficial, food-canning is paradigmatic of the age.
Or consider a very different product: cement. In 1756, John Smeaton began a series of experiments to see which forms of lime settle rapidly under water and discovered empirically that this was correlated with their content of clay. By adding small pebbles (known oddly as “aggregate”) and finely ground bricks, he created “hydraulic cement,” now known as concrete. In the 1820s a Leeds bricklayer, Joseph Aspdin, achieved the high strengths needed in high-quality construction by burning finely pulverized lime with clay at high temperatures. The new product became known as Portland cement (patented in 1824). A trained chemist, Isaac Charles Johnson, introduced some considerable improvements in the process in the 1840s, and while perhaps not lauded as one of the central advances of the Industrial Revolution, Portland cement quite literally became one of the building-blocks of the construction industry. In window (plate) glass, technological leadership was firmly in French hands before the Industrial Revolution. The St Gobain company had learned to cast plate glass when producing the windows for the Versailles palace in around 1688. The British started a similar process in 1776 in St Helens in Lancashire, but only after the firm was taken over by two brothers named Pilkington in 1826 did the firm become truly successful. Modern techniques were also used by their competitors, the Chance brothers in Smethwick (founded in 1824).
Substantial progress also took place during this period in paper-making. In the eighteenth century the only major innovation introduced into Britain’s paper industry was the “Hollander” invented in about 1680, in which the time needed in the preparation of rags was shortened due to a roller equipped with knives or teeth, widely adopted by the British after 1750. Paper output between 1738 and 1800 increased by a factor of four, and much of this higher output is ascribed to higher productivity (Coleman, 1958, p. 111). Steam power was introduced in paper-making as early as 1786, when a 10hp Boulton and Watt engine was installed at a mill near Hull, though water power remained a viable source of power. The mechanical breakthroughs came at the end of the eighteenth century, and again originated in France, where in 1799 Nicolas-Louis Robert received a patent for continuous paper-making, in which sheets of paper were cut from a long roll of paper made on an endless belt of woven wire. It elegantly mechanized tasks formerly carried out by hand. The machine was much improved by the endlessly ingenious engineer Bryan Donkin and became known as the Fourdrinier machine after a London publisher who originally funded it and subsequently went bankrupt in 1810. But mechanization marched on, and over the next two decades mechanized paper gradually came to dominate the industry and by 1850 handmade paper had been reduced to a niche, accounting for no more than 10 percent of all paper in Britain. The very top-quality paper was still made by hand, but paper for everyday uses such as printing, wrapping, and writing had not only fallen in price but also experienced a “marked improvement in finish, strength, and regularity” (Coleman, 1958, p. 205).
Mechanization was at the center of the Industrial Revolution, and as Rosenberg (1976, pp. 9–31) has observed in the American context, mechanization was made possible by better machine tools and the skills of those who made them. As in other industries, Britain was well served by the advanced skills and broad practical knowledge of its mechanical engineers, in an age in which dexterity and experience could still substitute for a formal training in mathematics and physics. It had outstanding tool makers, the best-known of which was the famed Peter Stubs of Warrington, the maker of superb metal files inscribed with his initials (and inevitably counterfeited). Mechanical engineering, as MacLeod and Nuvolari (2009) stress, was a core activity of the Industrial Revolution, generating a disproportional share of innovations. Rolt has emphasized that progress in engineering was constrained by the ability of machine shops to turn inventions into hardware and that accuracy and high-quality materials were essentially self-propagating (1970, p. 94). The operators of lathes and cutting machines learned to make power-driven machinery that could then be applied in other industries by workers with fewer skills than themselves. Many machine tools, however, did not replace the skills and steady hands of trained mechanics but complemented them by allowing them to do things that nature had decreed they could not do by themselves. Lancashire’s cotton industry generated a number of outstanding manufacturers of advanced textile machinery, prime examples of British competence in this area such as Henry Platt (1793-1842) whose specialty was carding machines, the partners Isaac Dobson and Peter Rothwell who manufactured mules in Bolton, and Samuel Lees, who produced rollers and spindles in Holt (Timmins, 1998, p. 104).
Much of this equipment was standardized. Standardization, of course, was an idea that came out of the Enlightenment movement’s interest in the rationalization and coordination of weights and measures. In production it was not easy to bring about, because it required high degrees of accuracy and exacting tolerance. The key to progress was special-purpose tools; much like the division of labor, mass production required a specialization in the design of machine tools. Presses, drills, pumps, cranes, and many other forms of mechanical equipment were produced in large series. Manchester, close to the best customers for these machines, became a center of this industry. Perhaps the paradigmatic examples of a British engineer in this tradition were Henry Maudslay and his apprentice Joseph Whitworth. While Maudslay was obsessive in his attempt to standardize bolt heads and screw threads within his own works, Whitworth helped modernize mechanical production by standardizing them nation-wide and thus laid the foundation of modern mass production through the modularity of parts. As Musson (1975) and others have argued, the widespread belief that Britain fell behind in this area of technology and eventually ceded mass production to the United States is simply inaccurate. By 1841, a parliamentary committee could proudly report that the implements after 1820 were “some of the finest inventions of the age” and that by their means “the machinery produced by these tools is better as well as cheaper … tools have introduced a revolution in machinery and tool-making” (Great Britain, 1841, p. vii). The influence of the machine-tool industry on the advance of manufactures, in the somewhat biased opinion of one of its leaders, had been comparable to that of the steam engine (Nasmyth, 1841, p. 397). By replacing the human hand in holding the tools of cutting metal by “mechanical contrivances,” they achieved an accuracy hitherto unimaginable, using far less skilled labor. Through the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, mechanical engineers worked primarily in small workshops, sometimes serving in a hub and spokes kind of outsourcing network with larger manufacturers (Cookson, 1997, p. 5).
Britain’s successful mechanical engineering sector is a useful example to illustrate the key to British technological leadership. It relied for its best practitioners on a system of highly informal training, some of it through apprenticeships or other affiliations with known centers of excellent such as Henry Maudslay’s workshop in London, and some of it on self-taught skills and a natural manual dexterity. George Stephenson, whose Rocket won the Rainhill Trials, was entirely self-trained in engineering skills, and had very little math and almost no writing skills. Many others in this industry, similarly, had informal training, and even Smeaton described himself, not entirely accurately, as “self-taught” and regretted his lack of formal training in practical “mechanical philosophy” (Skempton et al., 2002, p. 624). It was a sector that could still rely to a great extent on mechanical intuition and a high degree of competence. Its connections with formal science and mathematics, while not absent altogether, were still tenuous before the middle of the nineteenth century. Given that Britain’s system of informal education and cooperation at the artisanal level served it much better than its formal schools and universities, its successful mechanical engineering sector should surprise no one.
How much of the technological progress of the age of the Industrial Revolution depended on scientific knowledge? This question seems ill-posed, since there was no linear causality of any kind. Instead, what we call science and technology interacted and fertilized each other in many ways. Engineers and mechanics often learned from scientists, but the reverse was equally true. Moreover, the nature of the interaction differed from industry to industry and from product to product. The Industrial Enlightenment emphasized the generation and dissemination of useful knowledge, whether it was theoretical, experimental, or practical.
An illuminating example of how the Enlightenment affected the economy can be found in the rapid growth in geological research. Organizations intended to promote the diffusion of knowledge sprung up everywhere in the late eighteenth century, all the way from local societies in Newcastle and Cornwall to the more lofty Geological Society in London (Marsden and Smith, 2005, pp. 33–35). This society, explicitly committed to a Baconian program of cooperative fact-gathering, prepared an extensive geological database to be used in surveying and mapping (Laudan, 1990, p. 316). This effort was a classic example of the Enlightenment’s “three Cs,” as any clear-cut understanding of how geological strata were constructed was still in the future. The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society (founded in 1793), its name notwithstanding, spent much of its time on geological issues and it was there that George Stephenson first demonstrated his safety lamp in 1815. Its founder, the polymath Unitarian minister William Turner, is a good example of the impact that the English Enlightenment had on provincial culture. In addition to papers on coal mining, Turner gave lectures on metal, chemical, and glass manufactures (Musson and Robinson, 1969, pp. 161–62). The most important product of this movement was a set of “practical professionals,” coal viewers and civil engineers, who combined competence as it was defined here with a detailed knowledge of the best-practice geological science of the time. It was mostly a pragmatic and empirical endeavor, much of it based on accurate observation, mapping, and looking for exploitable regularities, but in close cooperation with mining interests that recognized the potential profits it could make if the epistemic base of mining could be expanded, so that the search for mineral resources and their subsequent exploitation would be made more systematic and depend less on trial and error and experimentation without science. The most famous product of the new geology were the geological maps produced by William Smith in 1815, and the competing map published in 1820 by the Geological Society of London. It is no exaggeration to say that a reciprocal relationship developed between the young science of geology and the mining and transportation sectors in Britain. Geologists and surveyors such as Smith and Thomas Sopwith (1803–1879) consulted to these industries, while practical professionals made contributions to the study of geology (Veneer, 2006, p. 80).
To say that continued technological progress after the first decades of sturm und drang of the Industrial Revolution was spurred and supported increasingly by the cumulation of useful knowledge is not the same as saying that it somehow depended on formal science. In the rather stringent definitions we employ for science, its impact remained fairly limited. But the growing application of useful knowledge of any kind to production in more and more industries kept productivity growing in many of them in the first half of the nineteenth century. One example is the famous mining safety lamp, invented by Davy in 1815, which allowed the opening of many deep coal seams that without the lamp “would never have seen the light of day,” as a prominent mine viewer, John Buddle, rather quaintly put it (cited by James, 2005, p. 212). It has been argued that Davy’s considerable knowledge of chemistry was of no direct help in developing the lamp (ibid., p. 201). Yet if we expand our definition of useful knowledge to include, in addition to formal science, the growing catalog of tricks, gimmicks, and rules of thumb that worked and the better understanding of heat, resistance, lubrication, plasticity, and mechanics that had accumulated, it is clear that growing useful knowledge was behind many of the nineteenth-century technological advances. By that time, for example, a body of knowledge about heat and the way certain materials behaved under heat had been the subject of scrutiny for many years, and it seems simply implausible that none of this epistemic base was of any use to Davy (Jacob, forthcoming). This hypothesis is supported by the fact that George Stephenson, an engineer with few scientific pretensions, came up with a very similar device at about the same time but apparently independently (unleashing an ugly argument between him and Davy about priority). Such coincidences are best explained by the cumulation of background knowledge that made the invention possible at that time. The same holds for the work in applied chemistry by Charles Macintosh (1766–1843), which led to the widespread application of rubber and rubber products. Macintosh was not the first to see the possibility of using rubber to waterproof textiles (for raincoats), but his knowledge of the underlying applied chemistry was just a tad better than that of his competitors (Clow and Clow, 1992, p. 253). Macintosh’s partner Thomas Hancock (1786–1865) discovered the vulcanization process of rubber in 1842 independently of the American Charles Goodyear.
The cumulation of useful knowledge also played a role in the development of the work of another Scot (and for some time Macintosh’s partner), James Neilson. Neilson, too, was no trained scientist but a practicing and experienced engineer, and his invention was the result of trial and error far more than of logical inference. Yet he was inspired and informed by the courses in chemistry he took in Glasgow, where he learned of the work of the French chemist Gay-Lussac on the expansion of gases (Clow and Clow, 1952, p. 354). In the cement industry, an article in Rees’ Encyclopedia in 1819 described in detail the chemical processes involved in the hardening of cement, a description deemed “remarkably acute” by a modern expert (Halstead, 1961–62, p. 43). To be sure, the full explanation of cement’s hydraulicity was not put forward until the1850s, but this was an area on which the new chemistry had a lot to say. In the 1830s, furthermore, the many decades of research in electricity started to see their first payoff: the research of scientists such as Hans-Christian Oersted and Joseph Henry led to the development of the electrical telegraph.
The payoff to better and wider propositional knowledge after 1815 can also be seen in the iron and steel industry. The famous paper by Berthollet, Monge, and Vandermonde, “Mémoire sur la fer consideré dans ses differens états métalliques” published in France in 1786, explaining the scientific nature of steel may have been above the heads of British steelmakers. The immediate impact of the paper was not large. It was “incomprehensible except to those who already knew how to make steel” (Harris, 1998, p. 220). But five years later the British chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes published a paper that relied on it and by 1820 it was well known enough to be made into an article in the Repertory of Arts, Manufactures and Agriculture (Boussingault, 1821, p. 369), which noted that idea had been adopted by all chemists who had turned their attention to the subject. Further work by scientists, such as Michael Faraday’s on the crystalline nature of wootz steel (high-quality steel made directly from ores), increased the understanding of the characteristics of ferrous materials. By the 1860s, two processes, Bessemer’s and Siemens-Martin, had been developed to produce cheap steel. As C.S. Smith (1964, p. 174) noted, “with carbon understood, Bessemer found control of his process easy, though its invention was not a deduction from theory, as the Martins' probably was.”
After 1800, then, the mutual reinforcement of technology and science came to dominate the process of innovation in the economy and eventually the entire economy (Mokyr, 2002). By 1848, John Stuart Mill thought that “the perpetual and unlimited growth of man’s power over nature” was the natural result of the fact that “increasing physical knowledge is now [1848] converted, by practical ingenuity into physical power” and that “the most marvelous of modern inventions … sprang into existence but a few years after the scientific theory which it realizes and exemplifies” ([1848], 1929, p. 696).
The historiography of the Industrial Revolution has tended to focus on “process innovation” in which costs fell due to growing efficiency. Yet it has been stressed by a number of economic historians, above all Maxine Berg (2005), that this is only part of the story. British manufacturers learned to make goods attuned to changing consumer preferences and yet were “branded” so that consumers knew what they were getting. An old chestnut in the literature has it that French manufacturers catered to “luxury tastes” whereas the British catered to price, producing large series of inexpensive cookie-cutter products without individuality, in order to take advantage of economies of scale in batch production. This is far too simplistic a picture. Technology included not only making things that worked well at a low price, but also designs that were aesthetically pleasing. In the eighteenth century there was a conscious and well-orchestrated attempt to wrestle away the traditional edge that French manufacturers were supposed to have in luxury goods. Product innovation in the form of decoration, ornamentation, coloring, catering to fashion in custom-made products (or mass-produced goods made to look custom-made) were very much part of the innovative effort. Besides the famous pottery produced by Wedgwood at his “modern” plant in Burslem, Britain witnessed a huge expansion in a wide array of “small products,” each of which perhaps counts for little in the national accounts, but which together defined an improving standard of living for a swelling middle class: buttons, buckles, gloves, door handles, chandeliers, wallpaper, toys, printed calicoes and cottons, fancy furniture, cutlery, and watch-chains (Berg, 2005). The improvement in quality of these goods consisted in part of standardization, in part of catering to new fashions. But having sufficient agility to adapt quickly to the changing whims and demands of a set of reasonably well-off consumers is itself a mark of technological capability, broadly defined.
The changing capabilities of producers to attract and satisfy consumers are one answer to the question of where the demand for the products that the Industrial Revolution produced in ever growing quantities came from. These capabilities resulted in goods that were not just cheaper but better in demonstrable dimensions. Technology and organization were joined in that effort. Samuel Oldknow, an entrepreneur specializing in high-quality muslins and calicoes, whose customers included “mostly people of fashion,” had each piece of cloth examined and maintained a sophisticated system of record-keeping so that each warp that suffered from bad workmanship could be traced back to those who had handled it. Quality control methods were also found in other industries, such as Wedgwood’s pottery plant, Boulton and Watt’s Soho plant (which ended outsourcing of engine components in 1795 because they could not guarantee their quality), and Archibald Kenrick’s hardware foundry in West Bromwich (founded in 1791), which specialized in high-quality hollowware such as kitchen utensils. More attractive and durable commodities at reasonable prices reflected the capabilities of manufacturers to give consumers what they wanted, whether they knew it or not.
The significance of demand is deeper than just the satisfaction of physical needs. Consumption played a social role of signaling one’s status and one’s aspirations, and nowhere was this more true than for the cotton industry. To be sure, the distribution of the demand for textiles reflected to a large extent the distribution of income and the social hierarchy. But at the invisible seams of this hierarchy were the hopes of social advance and mimicking those just above one’s status. By the mid-eighteenth century the importance of fashion was remarkable enough to be noticed by foreign visitors and to spawn a considerable fashion literature. The hierarchy of clothing was continuous, much like the distribution of income, and thus signaling progress in climbing the socio-economic ladder remained a desirable option. Signaling that one belonged to the gentleman class and “polite society” was of considerable value to the functioning of the commercial economy. Cotton was ideal because it was flexible. It could be colored and patterned in any shape that fashion dictated, and thus provided a vehicle for emulating those ahead of one in the hierarchy as well as for keeping a distance from those behind. Yet price was of supreme importance. The idea of ready-made mass-marketed clothing, sold off the rack, emerged in the eighteenth century. Gowns, hats, petticoats, and similar items were already sold in the early part of the century, and the growth of cotton clothes clearly spurred this trend on (Lemire, 1991, pp. 161–200). Stylish but affordable ready-made clothing seems to be one of the less widely trumpeted innovations of the age of Enlightenment, but no less than the mechanized spinning machines that provided the raw materials for them did they herald a manufacturing system that was totally different from the custom-made woolen clothes of an earlier age.
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Despite the protestations of some scholars who call it “a misnomer,” the idea of the Industrial Revolution will remain an essential concept in the economic history of Britain and the world. It was, in a narrow sense, neither exclusively industrial nor much of a revolution. But it remains in many ways the opening act of the still-developing drama of modern economic growth coupled to far-reaching changes in society. And while Britain’s role as a pioneer should not be mistaken for indispensability, it was in Britain that the important action took place between 1750 and 1850. By 1850, as we shall see in more detail below, it had become a very different economy. Yet the Industrial Revolution was not all there was to British industrial history (let alone economic history) in the period 1700–1850, and while in hindsight it seems like the towering event of the time, for contemporaries the importance of technological change was only becoming clear very slowly and it was by no means clear to all in 1850 that a new economic age had dawned.