The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [90]
Coalbrookdale in mid-century. Plumes of smoke rise from the coking work at the edge of the Furnace Pool, right. In the foreground, a team of horses pulls a steam engine cylinder away down the Wellington Road. The furnace chimneys can be seen left of centre.
Then, in 1769, a wig-maker called Richard Arkwright obtained financial backing from a friend, a liquor merchant, to produce his water-frame. The machine was the first to bring all textile workers together under one factory roof. In 1771 Arkwright employed 300 men; by 1781 his workforce numbered 900. In spite of this, the new factories were still, in the main, small and old-fashioned. When Matthew Boulton, another Dissenter, opened his metal works in Soho, Birmingham, it was just a cluster of little buildings echoing the cottage industry system of earlier years.
The only remaining problem was that of power. However ingenious the uses to which water power was put, it was neither efficient enough nor plentiful and cheap enough to satisfy the tremendous potential for development which the country had, by now, built up. Domestic demand was reckoned to be between ten and twenty times what the foreign markets were worth.
Money was waiting to be utilised. Tobacco money had founded the Clyde Valley industries. Tea money had started South Wales iron. The cotton industry had unlimited potential if only production could be expanded. The population was rising at just the right speed, fast enough to keep down labour costs and increase demand for goods, yet not so fast that real wages could not be maintained and improved and labour-saving innovation encouraged.
Mass-production was beginning. Boulton studied classic designs, picked one, and put it on all the buttons he made. Josiah Wedgwood put a standard, immensely successful ‘Etruscan’ design on his pottery. Chippendale and Sheraton produced design books for others to copy. In 1760 the Carron works, in Glasgow, started making cast-iron cog-wheels for mills.
Darby’s reverberatory furnace, originally designed for glass-making, was now producing iron all over the country. The iron was melted without coming into contact with the fuel, in furnaces lined with bricks which reflected and intensified the heat. In 1760 there had been seventeen coke furnaces in Britain. By 1790 there would be eighty-one. In 1776 the first cast-iron bridge was built at Coalbrookdale, over the river Severn. The great ironmaster James Wilkinson, who was also a Dissenter, proposed iron houses, built iron pipes and vats for breweries, invented a new way to bore cannon muzzles with great accuracy, and finally had himself buried in an iron coffin.
Wilkinson’s work was helped by the demand caused by war against France, and by the invention of crucible steel. In the 1750s Benjamin Huntsman, a clock-maker from Doncaster, had produced high-grade steel using the same reverberatory furnace technique. By 1775, using a cutting head made from Huntsman’s steel, Wilkinson was able to cut iron accurately to within a few millimetres. This accuracy was to prove perhaps the most important factor in releasing British industry from its power-starved state when a new source of energy was found - thanks to difficulties experienced by whisky distillers.
In the previous century Newton had placed the study of matter on a firm foundation by showing that masses are equal if they suffer equal changes in momentum by the act of equal forces on them. Constancy of weight, therefore, became the baseline for all eighteenth-century investigation into the behaviour of matter.
Josiah Wedgwood’s London showrooms, where the newly affluent middle class vied to buy his chinaware. Wedgwood was the first to use snob appeal to sell the product. His greatest success came with a design called ’ Queensware’.
One of Priestley’s experiments, investigating the carbonation of liquids. Priestley