The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [109]
Industrialisation became contagious: the increased productivity of cotton mills encouraged demand from the chemical industry, which invented chlorine for bleaching, and from the printing industry, which turned to drum printing to print coloured cloth. By cutting the price of cotton, it also released consumer expenditure for other goods, which stimulated other manufacturing inventions. And of course to make the new machines, it demanded high-quality iron, which was made possible by cheap coal.
The crucial thing about coal was that, unlike forests and streams, it did not experience diminishing returns and rising prices. The price of coal may not have fallen much in the 1800s, but nor did it rise despite an enormous increase in the volume of consumption. In 1800 Britain was consuming over twelve million tonnes of coal a year, three times what it had used in 1750. The coal was still being used for two purposes only: domestic heating and general manufacturing, which at that date meant mostly bricks, glass, salt and metals. By 1830, consumption of coal had doubled, with iron manufacture taking 16 per cent and collieries themselves 5 per cent. By 1860, the country had consumed a billion tonnes and was now using it to drive the wheels of locomotives and the paddle wheels of ships. By 1930 Britain was using sixty-eight times as much coal as it had in 1750 and was now making electricity and gas with it as well. Today most coal is used for generating electricity.
Dynamo
Electricity’s contribution to human welfare can hardly be exaggerated. To my generation it is a dull utility, as inevitable, ubiquitous and mundane as water or air. Its pylons and wires are ugly, its plugs tiresome, its failures infuriating, its fire risks frightening, its bills annoying and its power stations monstrous symbols of man-made climate change (complete with Al Gore hurricanes coming from their stacks). But try to see its magic. Try to see it through the eyes of somebody who has never known power that was invisible and weightless, that could be transmitted miles through a slender wire, that can do almost anything, from lighting to toasting, from propulsion to music playing. Two billion people alive today have never turned on a light switch.
Imagine yourself at the Vienna exhibition of 1873. There is a stand exhibiting the work of the splendidly named semi-literate Belgian inventor Zénobe Théophile Gramme, and it is manned by his business partner, the equally euphonious French engineer Hippolyte Fontaine. They are showing off the Gramme dynamo, the first electricity generator that can produce a smooth current, and a steady light, when set spinning by hand or by a steam engine. Over the next five years, their dynamos will power hundreds of new industrial lighting installations all over Paris. In the Vienna exhibition, one of the workmen makes a careless mistake. He connects the wires from the spinning dynamo accidentally to the spare dynamo that is there to provide a backup in case the first one fails. The reserve dynamo immediately begins to spin all by itself, in effect it becomes a motor. Fontaine’s mind starts spinning too. He calls for the longest wire that can be found and connects the two dynamos by a wire that is 250 metres long. The reserve dynamo springs to life as soon as it is connected. Suddenly it became clear that electricity can transmit power over a distance far greater than belts, chains or cogs could.
By 1878, Gramme dynamos, turned by water in the river Marne, were transmitting power to two other Gramme dynamos working as motors three miles away, which in turn were pulling ploughs by cable through a field at the Menier