I’ve written several hundred non-fiction book reviews here on Amazon over the years and this is the first one that comes with a spoiler alert. William Rosen has written a fabulously thorough and consistently entertaining history of the steam engine in “The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention” (2012). But it has a surprising twist ending. On literally the last page of the book Rosen reveals that the steam engine isn’t the most powerful idea in the world, it’s the patent system that protected and rewarded the eighteenth and nineteenth century inventors that built it.
Some have argued that the Industrial Revolution was all about cotton. Rosen argues that it was steam power that made the phenomenal growth of the British cotton textile industry possible. “Cotton traveled to the British Isles on steamships,” he writes, “was spun into cloth by steam-powered mills, and was brought to market by steam locomotives.” But Rosen doesn’t stop there. If cotton made the Industrial Revolution possible, and steam made the cotton textile industry possible, what made steam power possible? According to the author, the answer is the patent system.
The Republic Venice instituted a patent system as early as 1474. However, according to the author, it was the British who developed intellectual property rights into their modern form. The foundation of British patent law – “the lawsuit that marks the ideological transformation that would [eventually] create the Industrial Revolution,” Rosen says – is the Case of Monopolies (officially Darcy vs Allein). Argued by the celebrated lawyer Sir Edward Coke in 1602, this landmark case established that the grant of exclusive rights to produce a certain product was improper and therefore illegal. The case arose out of Darcy’s monopoly over the import and trade of playing cards granted to him by Queen Elizabeth. The judgment found that state-established monopolies are inherently harmful and therefore contrary to law. This decision was followed two decades later by the Statute of Monopolies (1624), which determined that patents (i.e. time restricted, state-established monopolies) could only be awarded to “the first and true inventor” of a technology or process. The patent had to be both novel and useful, not related to the improvement of an existing technology or manufacturing process, and unlikely to be “mischievous to the state” (i.e. raise commodity prices or hurt trade). Those that met all of these criteria would be granted a patent for the term of fourteen years, which amounted to two standard seven-year artisan apprenticeship cycles. (Later, in 1700, the British would pass the Calico Acts, which prohibited the import and ownership of Indian printed cottons, a key part of London’s industrial policy that led to the Industrial Revolution.)
For most of the seventeenth century, less than ten patents were issued a year. But something else important was happening in Great Britain at this time, Rosen says, echoing the argument made famous by Northwestern University economic history professor Joel Mokyr: “a culture of observation, experimentation, and innovation was being cultivated in England at exactly the same moment that Coke was advocating for her artisans.” The final piece of the puzzle, according to Rosen, was the articulation of intellectual property rights by John Locke. “The recognition of a property right in ideas,” he writes, “was the critical ingredient in democratizing the act of invention.” The allocation of patents grew slowly in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, from just five a year from 1700 to 1740, to almost twenty a year from 1740 to 1780, before exploding to over fifty a year from 1780 to 1800. By comparison, between the years 1793 to 1800 Britain granted 533 patents to Revolutionary France’s 65.
If intellectual property rights and the patent system are “the most powerful idea in the world,” how did those ideas translate into the steam power-driven Industrial Revolution? Rosen says it was a relatively slow and often anonymous process. He claims that the Industrial Revolution was not a function of impersonal forces, but neither was it “the work of a dozen brilliant geniuses.” It was not driven by strikingly original creations (i.e. invention) but rather by an innumerable string of small improvements made over decades by anonymous tinkerers (i.e. innovation). “Sustained innovation is incremental innovation,” he writes, “and those increments are usually very small,” such as Henry Maudlslay’s leadscrew, Matthew Murray’s D-valve, Richard Trevithick’s fusible plug, and thousands of other now forgotten micro-improvements that collectively added up to significant change.
Rosen writes that there are general phases of steam power. The first phase used condensed steam to convert atmospheric pressure into reciprocating motion. The basic mechanics of a steam engine are simple: turning water into steam creates pressure (because water in its vapor form takes up 1,800 times more space than it does as a liquid), converting it back into a liquid creates a powerful vacuum. This simple equation, known since antiquity, held the secret of almost unimaginable power. The foundational principles at play were the vacuum and adiabatic pressure (the phenomenon that causes a gas to cool when it expands and heat when it is compressed). In 1698, Thomas Savery (1650-1715) patented a steam-powered water pump, the first commercially available steam-powered device. A decade later, in 1712, Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729) introduced a piston to Savery’s basic design, which greatly increased its efficiency and versatility. Rosen equates the Newcomen steam engine to the AK-47 for its legendary simplicity and ruggedness. Because of Savery’s patent, however, Newcomen could only take, after much negotiation, one-quarter of the sales from his revolutionary device. Within three years of developing his prototype, Newcomen had over one hundred of his steam engines pumping water out of mines all over Great Britain. However, because of its fuel inefficiency, that’s all the Newcomen steam engine could do. It was so big and so fuel inefficient that it was only cost effective if it could operate at the literal source of its fuel.
The second phase of steam power came in the late eighteenth century by converting the expansive power of steam into rotary motion able to drive dozens, and then hundreds, of spinning and weaving machines. The transition to this phase was driven by James Watt (1736-1819), a man who, according to the author, combined “the hands of a master craftsman and a brain schooled in mathematical reasoning.” He recognized early on that fuel efficiency was the Newcomen engine’s achilles heel. He began to meticulously test the performance of a variety of changes as to how the steam was converted to power. By 1765 he had developed the separate condenser, a relatively modest innovation that would essentially change the world. With one chamber that stayed hot and another that stayed cool, Watt introduced a dramatic improvement in fuel efficiency. In January 1769, Watt was issued patent number 913 for “a method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines.” Watt’s separate condenser alone increased the fuel efficiency of a Newcomen steam engine by one hundred percent while also increasing the power of the engine. In the process, Watt introduced a new unit of measurement to compare his steam engine with a separate condenser against the traditional Newcomen model: horsepower. The Newcomen engine averaged at most ten horsepower; the Watt engine upwards of fifty. Because of Watt’s innovations the steam engine was both more capable of power generation and fuel efficient enough to liberate it from the close tether of direct access to coal mine fuel supplies. Suddenly steam engines could go into factories.
“The Fire-Engines Act of 1775” was, according to at least one historian, “the most important single event in the Industrial Revolution.” It extended Watt’s 1769 patent on his steam engine with a separate condenser for twenty-five additional years. In 1774, John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson received patent number 1063 for his high precision boring system that enabled the manufacture of large, airtight cylinders capable of generating powerful and efficient engines. “If the most important invention of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself,” Rosen writes, “then automation of precision has to be one of the top three,” with Wilkinson’s boring device being perhaps the most important example. In 1786, Albion Mills, the largest and most efficient flour mill in the world, opened in London. It featured three large (34 inch cylinder) steam engines and thirty grinding wheels (the previous largest flour mill in London had four) and produced six thousand bushels of flour every week. “Behind the Albion Mills engine were hundreds of large and small innovations that had solved a dozen ancient problems in physics, metallurgy, and kinetics,” Rosen writes. It was in operation for just four years before burning down under mysterious circumstances.
Steam engines were big business, but textiles would prove to be “the most valuable export industry in human history,” according to Rosen. The Industrial Revolution overturned “five centuries of traditional expertise controlled by militant and well-organized artisans.” Like steam engines, textile manufacturing developed over the course of the eighteenth century mainly because of patents. The leading inventors included John Lombe (silk throwing machine in 1718), John Kay (flying shuttle in 1733), James Hargreaves (spinning jenny in 1770), and Richard Arkwright (water frame in 1774). All of these inventions ultimately became public property, attracting competing and superior inventions. (Perhaps the most important innovation of all, Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule in 1779, which combined the work of Hargreaves and Arkwright, was never patented). In 1813, there were 2,400 steam driven power looms in England. Twenty years later there were 85,000. A century and a half after the Calico Acts, the productivity of the British cotton industry had grown by a factor of fourteen. “A great artisan can make a family prosperous,” Rosen writes, “a great inventor can enrich an entire nation.”
The final stage was converting steam power into motion. It is best exemplified by the Rocket, the world’s first locomotive, introduced in 1829. In order for a steam engine to produce enough power to move itself, along with weighty cargo and passengers, it needed to be both powerful and lightweight. The only way to achieve that was to dramatically increase the pressure in the cylinder. American inventor Oliver Evans (1755-1819), who Rosen calls “a visionary and a pioneer,” made a significant contribution to the steam revolution in 1804 by placing his furnace inside a water-filled chamber, which significantly increased the heat transfer to the water. Doubling the heat of the water increases the potential power by one hundred times. Next, Richard Trevithick (1771-1833), the one man (along with Robert Stephenson) with a credible claim to the title of “father of railways,” developed a high pressure steam engine known as a “Cornish engine.” The thermal efficiency of the Cornish engine was astounding for its time, converting thirty percent of heat energy into work (steam turbines would eventually convert up to eighty percent). Using the standard benchmark of “duty” (the pounds of water raised one foot by a bushel of coal), Trevithick’s high pressure Cornish engine dominated the competition. A Newcomen-style engine possessed a duty of 5,000 pounds. A separate condenser Watt engine boasted a duty of almost 19,000 pounds. Trevithick’s engine could achieve 30,000 pounds by 1814 and 100,000 pounds by 1835. In 1829, the Manchester & Liverpool Railway offered a 500 pound prize for a locomotive that met several demanding requirements: the locomotive had to weigh less than six tons (including water), it had to operate at 45 to 60 psi, had to consume its own smoke, and pull a gross load of twenty tons at ten miles per hour for sixty miles. Only three applicants were serious contenders. The Rocket won in convincing fashion.
Rosen notes that all of this was possible not only because the British patent system incentivized and protected would-be inventors, but also because the British slowly learned over time how to invent. No man was more important in teaching British artisans how to experiment productively and innovate successfully than John Smeaton (1724-1792), who was “by consensus the most brilliant engineer of his era – a bit like being the most talented painter in sixteenth century Florence.” Smeaton emphasized the importance of precise measurements and detailed records in experimentation. His work significantly advanced various fields, especially civil engineering and scientific methodology. “He bequeathed to his nation a process by which inventions could be experimentally tested,” Rosen says.
In addition to improvements in the process of invention, Britain also took the relatively unusual and highly important step of lionizing her native inventive geniuses, men like Watt, Arkwright, and Trevithick, one time artisans who made fortunes by acquiring useful knowledge. Rosen contrasts this attitude with that of the French, who abolished the Academy of Sciences during the early years of the French Revolution, claiming, “The Republic does not need savants!”
In closing, “There is no doubt that the thermodynamic gradient between liquid water and steam changed the world,” Rosen concludes, “and that its discovery marks one of the most important turning points in history.” Those are some pretty strong words, but I think Rosen successfully argued his case. From 1700 to 2000, the global population grew by a factor of twelve, but the production of goods and services expanded by one hundredfold. The patent-protected creative developments of the Industrial Revolution did much to spur and sustain this growth. No one benefited more than the Anglosphere (i.e. Great Britain and its majority caucasian former colonies). The Anglosphere created the Industrial Revolution and the Anglosphere profited most from it. The Anglosphere’s share of global GDP grew from perhaps three percent in 1700 to 28 percent in 2000 (down from an all-time high of 37 percent after World War II). At the foundation of this incredible success, according to the author, is the patent system and the notion of intellectual property rights. In the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln, the only US president to hold a patent, the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."
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TeamManley
Watt did not invent the steam engine, Stephenson the Railway engine..and so much more.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2015