Revolution that changed the world for good

Sep 11 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

The question of how we got from one era to another and arrived at the technological age is answered in a fine new book. Peter Elson reports

CAN we really imagine what it was like to be in a world where the fastest means of travel was on horseback?

A world where international communications were dependent on the whims of wind and weather?

Where handmade goods meant ones which were expensive, rare and denied to ordinary people? Or where foodstuffs were limited and seasonal?

Then it all changed. How did it happen? In what way did ideas thought by men isolated in one place combine with others elsewhere to create machines that suddenly had a mass impact on life?

It’s all to do with technology transference. Hardly a subject to get the heart racing, but in the hands of writer historian Gavin Weightman the subject bursts into life.

Gavin discusses the revolution that transformed the West in just around 100 years from a society dictated to by water and wind-power to the modern age’s astonishing benefits (and some tyrannies) of the machine world.

He illustrates this staggering transformation through the inventors and engineers and free-spirits who made it happen.

The colourful characters who gallivant across his rich canvas included those such as Marc Brunel, father of the more famous Isambard, who dug the first Thames tunnel.

Nearer to home, Robert Whitehead, a Lancastrian and patriotic Englishman, who ended up inventing the torpedo for the Austrians (and, in a curious twist of fate, was grandfather of the Von Trapp family, of Sound of Music fame).

Not to forget George Stephenson, engineer of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. His son, Robert, built their steam locomotive Rocket which won the Rainhill Trials, held to decide on the line’s motive power.

Along with the likes of Richard Trevithick and James Watt, these men were big personalities with verve and drive coupled to an idealism that seems to make those who have driven the high- technology electronic age pale into nothing.

Although the Industrial Revolution started here in Britain, Gavin’s picture embraces the globe, showing how our ideas rapidly sparked off the modern age in places thousands of miles away.

There were the “Choshu Five”, who could have been threatened with execution after leaving the closed society of Japan to learn the secrets of technology.

These young Samurai men in 1863 aimed to drag their homeland from its 16th-century, medieval-style isolation. Their dangerous gamble paid off and the ruling Shogunate were eventually swept away.

They are but one example of how a mere handful of people can change the world – look at the domination of modern Japan’s industry and economy. Yet its railways and industry were set up by the British.

So what was the means by which the technological skills evolved in Britain during that crucial “lift-off” period of 1775 to 1825 were disseminated to the rest of the industrialising world?

Was it achieved by some kind of spy network? Did French, Germans and Americans infest Lancashire, secrete themselves into mills and engineering companies before hot-footing home with stolen ideas that would topple Britain’s dominance?

Gavin paints a more intricate and complicated picture in The Industrial Revolutionaries.

Of course, the big-name inventors and engineers were crucial, but the movement of ideas also came from workers.

These were men trying to better themselves using their new skills and the pathways along which the information travelled across the globe.

Having guillotined some of their best brains in the Revolution (and others such as Marc Brunel had a narrow escape from the Terror), the French offered good money to British mill workers to lure them over the channel to boost their own cloth-making industry.

There others, like Henry Bessemer, the man who invented the means of producing steel, born in Britain of a Huguenot family which also fled France.

“I was always interested in social and economic history rather than kings and queens,” says Gavin.

“It would even come into pieces I wrote for New Society magazine in the 1970s. Did industrialisation spontaneously crop up in other places, or did it come from Britain by diffusion?

“I realised there was not much on the subject, but in the London Library I found a little book called The Transference of Early Technologies to America, by Darwin H Stapleton.

“He gave me a huge reading list and much of it is based on textiles, relevant to the Liverpool and Manchester side of things.

“Exclusively British textile machinery inventions started turning up in Europe. How did they get there? It was industrial espionage.”

Also, Gavin says, there was the “baton-passing” of newly- acquired information. This was not always regarded as a good thing, especially by those company owners whose livelihood depended on containing such information. This was also be regarded as being of national concern.

There was anxiety about “toolbag travellers”, those skilled men whose desire for a better life overseas meant a gradual spread of all that home-grown expertise.

Industrial knowledge is like a genie being let out of the bottle. You could not “unmake” or forever keep secret these early ideas any more than you can “forget” or hide nuclear fission or the modern computer. It demonstrates why the notion of ownership, like life itself, was such a transient business.

“John Holker was a Roman Catholic who joined the 1745 Jacobite uprising and was imprisoned,” says Gavin.

“He escaped to Rouen where he became feted by the French government for his textile expertise and they used him to entice numerous other British workers over.”

Gavin believes that it is probably the case that those world-famous inventors of textile machinery, James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright, were really themselves men who refined other workers’ discoveries.

Again and again, there were situations where an invention created somewhere in Continental Europe would be adopted and improved to become commercially viable in Britain and further.

“The US had to industrialise, although it was not sitting on coal like Britain, so it bought machinery from us, including the first steam loco.

“If you didn’t industrialise, you didn’t have the military might to fend for yourself, and were left behind other nations.”

Politics also intervened, such as with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 which changed US and British history in an entirely unexpected way. “Napoleon wanted to raise money for his French war machine and to fight Wellington, so he sold Louisiana to the US,” says Gavin.

“While the Northern US states industrialised, the South States suddenly found they had a huge sub-tropical area ideal for growing upland cotton, which Lancashire and other British mills found ideal for making thread.

“Slavery, which was about to be abandoned, was continued as slaves became highly valuable for working the vast plantations. “From 1830, vast amounts of raw cotton from the Southern States were shipped into Liverpool. This was 90% of the UK’s total cotton import creating the great northern cotton industry and Liverpool’s place as the crop’s world exchange.

“It’s a vivid example of how nobody can predict technological change. Most predictions are confounded by sudden technological change and the strange way they develop.

“Who’d have thought that transfer of knowledge today would mean we’d all be sitting at screens tapping away to connect us around the world?”

THE Industrial Revolutionaries: The Creation of the Modern World 1776-1914, by Gavin Weightman, Atlantic Books, £20.00.

One of the greatest English engineers

ONE of the greatest English engineers during the Industrial Revolution was Thomas Brassey, of Birkenhead, right, who also helped to create the French railways.

The Industrial Revolution was a masculine enterprise, with wives shadowy figures who provided broods of children and occasionally finance through dowries.

But, says Gavin Weightman: “Brassey attributed a great deal of his success to Miss Maria Harrison.

“This was the young woman he met and married when he became established at Birkenhead.

“Her father, Joseph Harrison, was a well-to-do shipping agent and one of the far-sighted enthusiasts of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, who travelled to speak for the project in Parliament.”

Thomas and Maria married a year after the line opened, in 1831, and she urged him to go on looking for railway contracting work. His chance came in 1835 when he bid to build the Penkridge viaduct on the Stafford to Wolverhampton line. “Brassey moved from Birkenhead, the beginning of a nomadic lifestyle, to which his ambitious wife agreed.

“Brassey attracted a following of loyal labourers, who knew they would be paid on time and in full and that, if injured, he would get them medical help.”

When Brassey and fellow engineer Joseph Locke were contracted to build the Paris – Rouen – Le Havre mainline, no local labour was suitable so they brought over 5,000 British navvies.

Each navvy could shift 20 tons of earth a day – exciting many admiring comments from the French, who dubbed them the “rosbifs”.

Mule rustling

AS BRITAIN’S greatest seaport, Liverpool was at the heart of these great movements of population caused by industrialisation. Before the American War of Independence, a fifth of all the emigrants leaving Britain for America settled in Philadelphia.

There they created a textile industry along the lines of that back in their Lancashire and Yorkshire hometowns. This was irritating to the British industry, but not illegal since America was still a colony and therefore not in competition with Britain.

The situation hotted up after 1776, when the two nations officially became industrial rivals. Any entrepreneurial Brit who wanted a new start in the new world in his old textile job had to box clever.

One such was Benjamin Phillips, who tried to smuggle a version of Crompton’s spinning mule from Liverpool to Philadelphia, pretending it was a crate of pottery.

The spinning machine arrived safely, but sadly Phillips did not. His son, already in the US, had to discover how the machine worked. Baffled by its intricacies, Phillips Jnr’s partners repacked the offending mule for shipment back to Liverpool.

In true comic form, Philadelphia’s big-wigs then loudly complained that US pioneering machinery was being shamelessly given away to the old country.