The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [94]
The greatest effect of steam, however, was that it enabled manufacturers to move their factories nearer to the coalfields and the textile industry to be closer to its markets. Water power was no longer vital, so industries moved away from the hills and the streams and down to the plains where transportation of goods and raw materials was easier.
The overall change is perhaps best shown by the change in factory activity. Some years after the beginning of the nineteenth century it was noted that a factory using one 100 hp steam engine did the work equal to 880 men. It ran 50,000 spindles, employed 750 workers and produced 226 times more than it had done before the introduction of steam. The increase was also in part due to the introduction, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, of the new French Argand lamp, which was capable of generating ten times more light from the same wick. This made shift work possible. Round the clock production began.
As people flooded into the new towns they came to a way of life very different from that of the village they had left behind. The towns themselves were not much better serviced than the villages. There were no cesspools and sewage disposal was very primitive. People threw garbage into the streets as they had always done. The major problem, however, was the inability to cope with the accelerating increase in urban population.
An early photograph of workers at the model industrial village of New Lanark, near Glasgow. From 1800, the mills here were run on proto-socialist principles by their manager, Robert Owen, whose aim was to set up workers’ co-operatives as a viable alternative to capitalism.
To the newcomer the cities were strange, lonely places. The workers began to band together in clubs and friendly societies and eventually in unions, both for comfort and protection. Life in the factory was not much different from the way it had been in the day of the cottage industries. Then, too, people had worked long hours in terrible conditions. But in the factory the regimentation enforced by the machine system changed people’s attitude to work. Now there was no longer personal freedom to work or stop as you chose. The new discipline aroused animosity and a sense of servitude.
Nevertheless, the new urban workers were better off than they had been in the country. Even in times of depression they did not return to their villages. Wages were paid more punctually than in the country, although the money as often as not went to company shops charging exorbitant prices. The new worker could no longer go out to the fields and find what he needed to heat and dress and feed himself with. He had become a consumer, cut off from the source of production and dependent on cash for the first time. Money now defined working relationships.
Together with the Industrial Revolution came the modern expectation of progress and a better standard of living made possible by men’s skills and the machines they invented. So too came the basic skills which the modern businessman uses to find market opportunities, increase sales through the use of advertising and the sales force, make enough goods to meet demand, solve the technical problems of production, maintain standards of quality, ensure adequate supplies of raw materials, organise the administration, teach the workforce how to handle the technology and, above all, make enough profit to plough back into the system to make it even more productive.
The Industrial Revolution also gave birth to socialism, and the social separation of society through the division of labour. It brought science and industry together in a new and dynamic relationship. It radically altered the shape of the country and the behaviour of its citizens. And it made modern urban society dependent on mass-production techniques without which we cannot now survive.
A good bedside manner was essential for the doctor of the eighteenth century. Prior to the advent of scientific medicine, it was likely to be his most successful therapeutic tool.
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