CHAP. I. Steam. trade. Prohibitory duties were replaced with actual prohibition, and elaborate attempts were made to regulate the wages of the Spitalfields weavers. The natural consequences ensued. Smuggling, which had been created by prohibitive duties, flourished with fresh vitality under the influence of actual prohibition. The capitalists transferred their mills from Spitalfields, where the labours of their workmen were fixed by law, to Macclesfield and other places, where master and workman were free to make their own terms. The silk trade was hardly being developed with the same rapidity as the three other textile industries. But silk, like wool, cotton, and linen, was affording a considerable amount of employment to a constantly growing population. The textile industries of this country could not indeed have acquired the importance, which they have since obtained, if the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright had not been supplemented by the labours of explorers in another field. Machinery makes possible what man by manual labour alone would find it impossible to perform. But machinery would be an useless incumbrance were it not for the presence of some motive power. From the earliest ages men have endeavoured to supplement the brute force of animals with the more powerful forces which nature has placed at their disposal. The ox was not to be perpetually used to tread out the corn; women were not always to pass their days laboriously grinding at a mill. The movement of the atmosphere, the flow of running water, were to be taken into alliance with man; and the invention of windmills and water-mills was to mark an advance in the onward march of civilisation. But air and water, mighty forces as they are, proved but fickle and uncertain auxiliaries. When the wind was too low its strength was insufficient to turn the cumbrous sails of the mill; when it was too high it deranged the complicated machinery of the miller. The miller who trusted to water was hardly more fortunate than the man who relied upon air. A summer drought reduced the power of his wheel at the very time when long days and fine weather made him anxious to accomplish the utmost possible amount of work. A flood swept away the dam on which his mill depended for its supply of water. An admirable auxiliary during certain portions of each year, water was occasionally too strong, occasionally too weak, for the purposes of the miller. The manufacturing industry of the country stood, therefore, in need of a new motive power; and invention, which is supposed by some thinkers to depend like other commodities on the laws of demand and supply, was busily elaborating a new problem-the use of a novel power, which was to revolutionise the world. The elasticity of hot water had long been noticed, and, for a century and a half before the period of this history, a few advanced thinkers had been speculating on the possibility of utilising the expansive powers of steam. The Marquis of Worcester had described, in his 'Century of Inventions,' 'an admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by means of fire.' Steam was actually used early in the eighteenth century as a motive power for pumping water from mines; and Newcomen, a blacksmith in Dartmouth, invented a tolerably efficient steam engine. It was not, however, till 1769 that James Watt, a native of Greenock, and a mathematical instrument maker in Glasgow, obtained his first patent for 'methods of lessening the consumption of steam, and consequently of fuel, in fireengines.' James Watt was born in 1736. His father was a magistrate, and had the good sense to encourage the turn for mechanics which his son displayed at a very early age. At the age of nineteen Watt was placed with a mathematical instrument maker in London. But a feeble health, which had interfered with his studies as a boy, prevented him from pursuing his avocations in England. CHAP. I. CHAP. I. Watt returned to his native country. The Glasgow body of Arts and Trades, however, refused to allow him to exercise his calling within the limits of their jurisdiction; and had it not been for the University of Glasgow, which befriended him in his difficulty, and appointed him their mathematical instrument maker, the career of one of the greatest geniuses, whom Great Britain has produced, would have been stinted at its outset. There happened to be in the University a model of Newcomen's engine. It happened, too, that the model was defectively constructed. Watt, in the ordinary course of his business, was asked to remedy its defects, and he soon succeeded in doing so. But his examination of the model convinced him of serious faults in the original. Newcomen had injected cold water into the cylinder in order to condense the steam and thus obtain a necessary vacuum for the piston to work in. Watt discovered that three fourths of the fuel which the engine consumed were required to reheat the cylinder. It occurred to him that, if the condensation could be performed in a separate vessel, communicating with the cylinder, the latter could be kept hot while the former was cooled, and the vapour arising from the injected water could also be prevented from impairing the vacuum. The communication could easily be effected by a tube, and the water could be pumped out. This is the first and the grand invention by which he at once saved three fourths of the fuel, and increased the power one fourth, thus making every pound of coal produce five times the force formerly obtained from it.' But Watt was not satisfied with this single improvement. He introduced steam above as well as below the piston, and thus again increased the power of the machine. He discovered the principle of parallel motion, and thus made the piston move in a true straight line. He regulated the supply of water to the boiler bug Lord Brougham's Men of Letters and Science, p. 367. I. by the means of 'floats,' the supply of steam to the cylin- CHAP. der by the application of the governor,' and, by the addition of all these discoveries, 'satisfied himself that he had almost created a new engine, of incalculable power, universal application, and inestimable value.' It is unnecessary to relate in these pages the gradual introduction of the new machine to the manufacturing public. Watt was first connected with Dr. Roebuck, an ironmaster of Glasgow. But his name is permanently associated with that of Mr. Boulton, the proprietor of the Soho Works near Birmingham, whose partner he became in 1774. Watt and Boulton rapidly supplemented the original invention with further improvements. Other inventors succeeded in the same field, and, by the beginning of the present century, steam was established as a new force; advanced thinkers were considering the possibility of applying it to purposes of locomotion. The steam engine indeed would not have been invented Iron. in the eighteenth century, or would not at any rate have been discovered in this country, if it had not been for the vast mineral wealth with which Great Britain has fortunately been provided. Iron, the most useful of all metals, presents greater difficulties than any other of them to the manufacturer, and iron was probably one of the very last minerals which was applied to the service of man. Centuries elapsed before the rich mines of our own country were even slightly worked. The Romans indeed established iron works in Gloucestershire, just as they obtained tin from Cornwall or lead from Wales. But the British did not imitate the example of their earliest conquerors, and the little iron which was used in this country was imported from abroad. Some progress was, no doubt, made in the southern counties; the smelters naturally seeking their ores in those places where wood, then the only available fuel, was to be found in abundance. The railings, which 1 Lord Brougham's Men of Letters and Science, p. 371. СНАР. I. but lately encircled our metropolitan cathedral, were cast in Sussex. But the prosperity of the trade involved its own ruin. Iron could not be made without large quantities of fuel. The wood gradually disappeared before the operations of the smelter, and the country gentlemen hesitated to sell their trees for fuel when the increase of shipping was creating a growing demand for timber. Nor were the country gentlemen animated in this respect by purely selfish motives. Parliament itself shared their apprehensions and endorsed their views. It regarded the constant destruction of timber with such disfavour that it seriously contemplated the suppression of the iron trade as the only practicable remedy. Many think,' said a contemporary writer, that there should be no works anywhere, they so devour the woods.'1 Fortunately, so crucial a remedy was not necessary. At the commencement of the seventeenth century, Dud Dudley, a natural son of Lord Dudley, had proved the feasibility of smelting iron with coal, but the prejudice and ignorance of the workpeople had prevented the adoption of his invention. In the middle of the eighteenth century attention was again drawn to his process, and the possibility of substituting coal for wood was conclusively established at the Darby's works in Coalbrook Dale. The impetus which was thus given to the iron trade was extraordinary. The total produce of the country amounted at the time to only 18,000 tons of iron a year, four fifths of the iron used being imported from Sweden. In 1802 Great Britain possessed 168 blast furnaces, and produced 170,000 tons of iron annually. In 1806 the produce had risen to 250,000 tons; it had increased in 1820 to 400,000 tons. Fifty years afterwards, or in 1870, 6,000,000 tons of iron were produced from British ores.2 1 Smiles' Industrial Biography, p. 43. 2 Pict. Hist., vol. iv. p. 689; McCulloch, Dict. of Commerce, ad verb. Iron; Porter's Progress of the Nation, p. 250; statistical abstract of the United Kingdom. |