The Most Powerful Idea in the World Part 11

For the last three centuries, the process has been feeding very well throughout the world. But the best feeding has been in places with a distinct judicial, political, and even linguistic history: what Winston Churchill called the English-speaking peoples, what jurists call the common law world, and what a number of modern scholars have termed the Anglosphere-Great Britain and its former colonies, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (though not colonies with more robust indigenous cultures, such as India, Hong Kong, South Africa, and so on).*

The last three centuries of the Anglosphere, whatever its current liabilities in a contemporary, multicultural world, are a reproach to the rather vaguely worded "Cardwell's Law," the creation of the economic historian D.S.L. Cardwell, who propounded it in 1972. Cardwell's Law contends that no nation maintains technological superiority for more than two or three generations, or, in Professor Cardwell's own words, "no nation has been very creative6 for more than an historically short period." The economic statistics tell a different story.

In 1700, when Great Britain's per capita7 gross domestic product was roughly equal to that of Italy, the aggregate world GDP was $371.3 billion in constant 1990 dollars. The Anglosphere's share, virtually all of it Britain, was a little more than 3 percent. By 1820, the conventional endpoint of the Industrial Revolution, the world's GDP had nearly doubled, to $694.5 billion, but the Anglosphere's share had grown even faster: to nearly $50 billion, or more than 7 percent.

At that moment, virtually all of the core inventions of industrialization had, in the economist Alfred Marshall's phrase, spilled over to the rest of Europe and much of the rest of the world. Moreover, by 1850, the Anglosphere's "secret"-an absolute and relative advantage in the tinkerers who specialized in the micro-inventions essential to constant improvement of complex machinery-had lost much of its value. The age of scientific invention8 was overtaking the age of intuitive invention, and France and Germany had started to benefit from it.* In 1850, France alone issued9 2,272 patents, more than Britain and the U.S. combined.

However, fifty years later, in 1870, while the world economy had doubled again, to $1.11 trillion, the share of the Anglosphere was more than 19 percent. In 1900, by this time largely owing to the dramatic growth of the United States, just under 27 percent of the world economy was Anglophonic. In 1940, it was more than 30 percent, and in 1950-after the huge damage of the Second World War-it hit its all-time high of 37 percent; but even in 2000, it had "fallen" only to 28 percent of what was then a $36.7 trillion world economy.

Part of this was population growth. In 1700, the Anglosphere represented less than 2 percent of the world's population; by 1870, it was more than 6 percent, largely because of the decreased infant mortality and extended life spans directly traceable to increasing income. Since 1870, however, the share of world population has generally been between 6 and 8 percent-and its share of world income has been at least four times greater. The lead has been remarkably durable, even as compared to nations close to the Anglosphere in technical sophistication. Even as late as 2000, the Anglosphere's per capita GDP was still 36 percent greater than the Western European average-$26,238 vs. $19,264 (and 25 percent more than j.a.pan's $21,051). Path dependence goes far to explain the durability of the Anglosphere's dominance of the world's economy for at least a century and a half after the spread of industrialization; in Paul Krugman's words, the phenomenon was feeding on itself. Economic prosperity resulted in more economic prosperity.

Which explains why the economic advantage persists, not how it began. It is impossible to look at the last three hundred years without wondering at the persistent advantage accrued during the first decades of the Industrial Revolution, and wondering at its cause.

Or, more to the point, wondering who caused it. In 1963, the historian of science Derek de Solla Price (who was, as it happens, the first to study the Antikythera mechanism in detail) wrote a book ent.i.tled Little Science, Big Science, in which he formulated the Price Law (building on the work of others, most especially the early twentieth-century economist Wilfredo Pareto). The Price Law states that the number of individuals responsible for half of all innovations is roughly equal to the square root of the number of total contributors.

Let's do the math. If the transformation of the world into an industrial economy depended on thirty thousand or so innovations, large and small (this is a generous number; by 1820, the United Kingdom and United States together had issued fewer than ten thousand patents), and the typical inventor was responsible for three of them-which probably understates the case, given the number generated by men like Watt, Roberts, Bramah, and Evans-then the total number of innovators is around ten thousand. By Price's Law, therefore, half of the Industrial Revolution is the work of about one hundred people. Which is a convenient number: one can far more easily visualize a pantheon of heroes with a hundred members than one with three thousand.

The figure of the "heroic" engineer has been sitting on a carnival dunking stool for more than a century, and one historian after another has taken a turn at knocking him into the water. Part of this is the natural tendency of scholars toward revisionism; if one generation of historians built G.o.dlike statues of Watt and Arkwright, then their successors were certain to find feet made of, if not clay, then at least base metal.

But there is more to the antiheroic school of industrial history than simply the Academy's demands for original scholarship. The unique characteristic of the Industrial Revolution-its sustainability-depended less on "macro-inventions" such as Watt's separate condenser than on the hundreds of micro-inventions that surrounded it: Henry Maudslay's leadscrew, Matthew Murray's D-valve, Richard Trevithick's fusible plug, and a thousand other improvements owed to a thousand other inventors. Their relative anonymity is an unavoidable consequence of the relative elevation of the Watts and the Arkwrights.

This is why Samuel Smiles, the great hagiographer of British inventions, was in some ways as important as his subjects. It was Smiles, with his biographies of Boulton, Watt, Stephenson, and others, who made a secular religion out of human striving: "It is not the man of the greatest natural vigour11 and capacity who achieves the highest results, but he who employs his powers with the greatest industry and the most carefully disciplined skill...."

It matters less that Smiles was right than that he was believed. It was belief in the chance to become a national hero that, despite equal distribution of talent, and even of expertise, at least throughout Europe, made innovation such a local phenomenon. It is suggestive that Anders Ericsson's "expert performance" calculations reinforce this: A typical apprenticeship, running as it did for seven years, or fifteen to twenty thousand hours, buys an expert weaver, goldsmith, or millwright; that's what the apprenticeship system was supposed to do. But the commitment to spend a similar amount learning to be an expert inventor is a lousy economic decision for almost everyone who makes it. Not only does it mean years of working without income-forgoing the income that could have been generated by working at the skill acquired while an apprentice-but it offers no guarantee that the investment will be recouped. While one should be cautious about applying current data to earlier historical eras, it's worth recalling that twentieth-century inventors, on average, sacrificed nearly one-third of their potential lifetime income.

Thus, despite the fact that those hours, ten thousand at a time, were being invested in skills acquisition all over Europe, the only place where really large numbers of skilled craftsmen decided to become inventors was in the Anglosphere. And it wasn't that they made enough money to make it a smart decision, so much as the fact that they thought they could.

Nowhere did that thought take root more firmly than in the part of the Anglosphere known as the United States of America.

ON THE THIRD FLOOR of the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution in Washington, D.C., is a scale model, constructed of varnished wood, that looks a little like an outrigger canoe with sixteen vertical tubes inserted fore and aft. On May 22, 1849, the device, "a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steam boat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pa.s.s over bars, or through shallow water," received U.S. patent number 6469. Its inventor was "Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, in the County of Sangamon, in the State of Illinois."

Lincoln, the only American president ever awarded a patent, had a long and pa.s.sionate love for things mechanical. He made his living for many years as a railroad lawyer and appears to have absorbed something of the fascination with machines, and with steam, of the engineers with whom he worked. In his first public speech, in 1832, he spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the need for navigable rivers and ca.n.a.ls to accommodate steamboats. In the middle of the Civil War, he signed, on July 1, 1862, the Pacific Railway Act, the authorizing legislation for what would become America's transcontinental railroad. Even more revealing, in 1859, after his loss in the Illinois senatorial race against Stephen Douglas, he was much in demand for a speech ent.i.tled "Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements" that he gave at agricultural fairs, schools, and self-improvement societies.

The speech-decidedly not one of Lincoln's best-nonetheless revealed an enthusiasm for mechanical innovation that resonates powerfully even today. "Man," Lincoln said, "is not the only animal who labors,12 but he is the only one who improves his workmanship ... by Discoveries and Inventions."

The speech goes on to offer a brief history of civilization as seen through the lens of one invention after another: We can scarcely conceive the possibility of making much of anything else, without the use of iron tools.... the boat is indispensable to navigation [though] it is not probable that the philosophical principle upon which the use of the boat primarily depends-to-wit, the principle that anything will float, which cannot sink without displacing more than its own weight of water-was known ... the plow, of very early origin; and reaping and threshing machines, of modern invention, are, at this day, the princ.i.p.al improvements in agriculture.... Take any given s.p.a.ce of the earth's surface-for instance, Illinois; and all the power exerted by all the men, and beasts, and running water, and steam, over and upon it, shall not equal the one hundredth part of what is exerted by the blowing of the wind over and upon the same s.p.a.ce. And yet no very successful mode of controlling, and directing the wind, has been discovered....

Lincoln concluded: The advantageous use of Steam-power is, unquestionably, a modern discovery. And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt. What appears strange is that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as a toy.... in the days before Edward c.o.ke's original Statute on Monopolies, any man could instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention.... The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery of new and useful things.

There's something appealing about starting a book in a museum in London and ending it in one in Washington. However, the real ending takes place just to the north of the National Museum of American History, at another Washington landmark: the United States Department of Commerce, a huge pile of limestone known since 1983 as the Herbert C. Hoover Building. Since 1995, it has housed the White House Visitor Center on its street level, in the same s.p.a.ce that was once home to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Incised in the stone over the Herbert C. Hoover Building's north entrance is the legend that, with Lincoln's characteristic brevity, sums up the single most powerful idea in the world: THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED.

THE FUEL OF INTEREST.

TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS.

* In 1861, Ericsson, who had emigrated to the United States in 1839, designed and built the revolutionary ironclad steamship the Monitor.

* Reams of Ph.D. theses have explored why industrialization was greeted with such a different att.i.tude on the other side of the Atlantic, where Emerson, Whitman, and Hart Crane could all celebrate the new nation's bridges and railroads. It's not unrelated to America's early displacement of Britain as the world's premier economic power.

* This is an argument starter,5 but not a particularly original one. Andrew Roberts argues in his controversial History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900 that the distinction between the period of British ascendancy and of American is roughly the same as that between imperial Rome and its republican ancestor, i.e. not much of a difference at all. The Indian economic historian Deepak Lal believes the rise to predominance of the English-speaking world is the most important event of the last thousand years.

* Not without some envy; Goethe wrote that Germans "regard discovery and invention10 as a splendid personally gained possession, but the clever Englishman transforms it, by a patent, into a real possession.... One may well ask why are they in every respect in advance of us?"

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Writing may be a lonely business, but it is not a solitary one. Like the steam engine itself, creating The Most Powerful Idea in the World depended on the work of hundreds if not thousands of people, but-as with the steam engine-only a few can be adequately recognized. Life isn't fair.

We are not yet at the moment in history where research can be performed entirely via Internet access, and I am small-l luddite enough to be grateful for the need to spend time in libraries, large and small. As always, the guidance of Elizabeth Bennett at Princeton University's Firestone Library has been indispensable; so indeed has the Princeton Public Library, and I am delighted to recognize the help of Leslie Burger and her staff. I am also profoundly in debt to the Birmingham Central Library, which has maintained-and microfilmed-the Boulton and Watt Archive, and the Matthew Boulton Papers. A special debt of grat.i.tude is similarly owed to Tom Vine, at London's Science and Society Picture Library.

I am likewise happy to recognize the enormous help of two people who signed on to help me to enforce quality-control standards on specific chapters of the ma.n.u.script for The Most Powerful Idea: Dan Swain and Paul Anderson. Each is responsible for saving me from hundreds of embarra.s.sing errors, and neither can be blamed for any that crept in after their work was done. As both were found through the good offices of Princeton University, my advice to all authors remains: Live in a college town.

The subt.i.tle to this book reads "A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention," and the use of the indefinite article is no accident. The story of humanity's climb out of its Malthusian trap has been told from a hundred different perspectives, and all of them have something useful to say. The scholars, living and dead, who have traveled this road before me are recognized in the endnotes that follow these Acknowledgments, but the work of nine didn't supply merely historical examples but inspiration: Joel Mokyr, David Landes, Gregory Clark, Eugene Ferguson, John Lienhard, Lynn White, Samuel Florman, David Warsh, and-most of all-Abbott Payson Usher. Friends and colleagues who read this book in various draft forms have given service above and beyond the call of duty: John Rosen, Michel Debiche, Frank Ryle, Joyce Howe, Holly Goldberg Sloan, Gary Rosen, and David Jacobus. While I was writing this book, Lewis Lapham and Adam Garfinkle were both kind enough to offer me the chance to write for their respective publications, for which I am happy to publicly thank them.

Thanks are due also to this book's editors. At Jonathan Cape, Ellah Allfrey was this book's first champion, and her editing added immeasurably to it before she pa.s.sed the baton to Alex Bowler, who has gracefully seen it through to publication. Tim Bartlett at Random House immersed himself in the ma.n.u.script of The Most Powerful Idea with a level of detail and care that I have never seen surpa.s.sed-and as a onetime editor myself, this is no small feat. There are literally thousands of places in this text that have his imprint. I promised Tim that I would immunize him from any criticisms of this book's editing, and do so cheerfully: Its many remaining infelicities appear, without fail, in areas where I disagreed with Tim's extraordinarily perceptive edits. Thanks are also due to Tim's unfailingly helpful a.s.sistant, Jessie Waters. The book's production editor, Janet Wygal, and its copy editor, Emily DeHuff, delivered work at the very highest level of professionalism, and The Most Powerful Idea is better for their labors. A special thank-you is owed to Jennifer Hershey, who has consistently shown her support for this project.

My agents, Eric Simonoff of William Morris Endeavor, and Anne Sibbald at Janklow & Nesbit, have never done anything but surpa.s.s the highest expectations of what a literary agent can be: immediate response to questions, intelligent evaluations of work, determined promotions of the interests of author and book. It is one of the joys of my life to count them as friends and advocates.

Most important, I am grateful to my wife, Jeanine, and to my children: Quillan (one of the book's very first readers), Emma, and Alex. I am no treat to live with, even when I am not writing a book, and their love and support is the only thing that makes the life of a writer even possible.

NOTES.

PROLOGUE: ROCKET.

1 "the rapid development in industry" George N. Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution (Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Company, 1953).

2 Carolingian merchants spoke different languages This has been conclusively demonstrated by dozens of studies, of which the most recent is Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

3 The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE Michael Kremer, "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990," Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3, Fall 1993. The figures in question are J. Bradford deLong's slightly different estimates.

4 The nineteenth-century French infant Numbers from UN and CIA Factbook.

5 A skilled fourth-century weaver Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution-Lessons for the Computer Age (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

6 But by 1900 In 1900, the average U.S. hourly wage was $0.22, and a loaf of bread cost about a nickel; in 2000, the average wage was $18.65, and a loaf of bread cost less than $1.79.

7 "[a]bout 1760, a wave of gadgets swept over England" T. S. Ashton, Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

8 "fizzled out" Joel Mokyr, "The Great Synergy: The European Enlightenment as a Factor in Modern Economic Growth," April 2005, online article at http://faculty.weas.northwestern.edu/jmokyr/Dolfsma.pdf.

CHAPTER ONE: CHANGES IN THE ATMOSPHERE.

1 No other steam engines were inspired by it T. P. Ta.s.sios, "Why the First Industrial Revolution Did Not Take Place in Alexandria," in 10th International Symposium on Electrets, 1999, IEEE, eds. (Athens: IEEE, 2002).

2 "if a light vessel with a narrow mouth" Hero of Alexandria, Joseph George Greenwood, and Bennett Woodcroft, The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria (London and New York: Macdonald and American Elsevier, 1971).

3 "very satisfactory theory" Marie Boas, "Hero's Pneumatica: A Study of Its Transmission and Influence," in Otto Mayr, ed., Philosophers and Machines (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976).

4 Aleotti's work, and subsequent translations Ibid.

5 It is testimony to the weight of formal logic Graham Hollister-Short, "The Formation of Knowledge Concerning Atmospheric Pressure and Steam Power in Europe from Aleotti (1589) to Papin (1690)," History of Technology 25, 2004.

6 "What is so intricate" Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, cited in Boas, "Hero's Pneumatica."

7 Torricelli had not only invented W. E. Knowles Middleton, "The Place of Torricelli in the History of the Barometer," Isis: Journal of the History of Science in Society 54, no. 1, March 1963.

8 "technical wonders of its time" Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

9 As the air was pumped out of the chamber Arnold Pacey, The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology (London: Lane, 1974).

10 A dispute between King and Parliament H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In a.s.sociation with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

11 "the leading pumping engineer in England" Allan Chapman, "England's Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the Art of Experiment in Restoration England," Proceedings of the Royal Inst.i.tution of Great Britain 67, 1996.

12 to anything, in short Ibid.

13 "those two grand and most catholic principles, matter and motion" "Robert Boyle" in Noretta Koertge, ed., New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Detroit: Scribner's, 2008).

14 halfway to atheism "Robert Boyle" in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

15 "engine philosophy" Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Including a Translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus physicus de natura aeris by Simon Schaffer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

16 England's most gifted mathematician Chapman, "England's Leonardo."

17 "the best Mechanick this day in the world" Ibid.

18 "Gentleman, free, and unconfin'd" Ibid.

19 made him the first scientist in British history Ibid.

20 It took until 1665 "Robert Hooke" in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

21 "mere Empiricks" Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

CHAPTER TWO: A GREAT COMPANY OF MEN.

1 In 1671, he got the chance Cornelis D. Andriesse, Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

2 In the 1686 issue of Philosophical Transactions White, Medieval Technology and Social Change.

3 "Since it is a property of water" Milton Kerker, "Science and the Steam Engine," Technology and Culture 2, no. 4, Autumn 1961.

4 By the time he built a demonstration submarine Richard S. Westfall, The Galileo Project (Rice University), at http://galileo.rice.edu/.

5 "to Raise Water from Lowe Pitts by Fire" Pacey, Maze of Ingenuity.

6 "was responsible for the design and fabrication" Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation: Bureaucrats, Families, and Heroes in the Early Industrial Revolution, As Foreseen in Bacon's New Atlantis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).

7 "a place of resort for artists, mechanics" A 1640 letter to Robert Boyle, cited in ibid.