The Most Powerful Idea in the World Part 7

And still he remained obsessed with screws and screw-making machinery.* Maudslay rightly realized that the match of screw lands to bolts or receivers was key to fastening metal pieces in large machines as well as small, and that the large machines represented a far more profitable market. He spent the decade after leaving Bramah building lathes that could produce screws of any desired pitch using the same leadscrew, and that were both large enough to make the linkage for a 48-inch cylinder steam engine and precise enough to make the quarter-inch valves that controlled their operation.

The key was the leadscrew, which reproduced its exact pitch on the material to be threaded-and introduced exactly the same inaccuracies. If the leadscrew was accurate to (for example) , then the screw, or screw fitting, it cut might make eight turns in anything from to 1; if it was accurate to 116, then its fittings would make the same eight turns somewhere between 3132 and 1132. Ten years of experimentation with different combinations of gears and cutting tools eventually resulted in a seven-foot-long bra.s.s leadscrew that was accurate to within less than 116.

By then, however, 116 might as well have been a foot; in another example of one problem's solution creating a new set of problems, the more accuracy Maudslay had, the more he needed. This was because, while he was iterating his way to his prize leadscrew, he had also built himself a tool that was to eighteenth-century metalworking what Galileo's telescope was to fifteenth-century astronomy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tool was used not to make things, but to measure them.

Micrometers, devices for measuring very small increments, were then only about thirty years old; James Watt himself had produced what was probably the world's first in 1776, a horizontal scale marked with fine gradations and topped with two jaws, one fixed and the other moved horizontally by turning a screw. With a pointer on the movable jaw, objects could be measured extremely accurately, up to 1100. But Maudslay's micrometer, which he nicknamed "the Lord Chancellor," was capable of measuring differences of less than 11000 (some say 110,000). When he measured the seven-foot-long bra.s.s screw, inch by inch, with the Lord Chancellor, he found that his "perfect" screw was actually inconsistent along its entire length: one inch might have fifty threads, another fifty-one, a third forty-nine, and the only reason it seemed accurate was that the irregularities had canceled one another out. This was clearly unsatisfactory to a perfectionist of Maudslay's degree, and the screw was recut, again and again, until even the Lord Chancellor could find no error.

There is a mythic quality to the Lord Chancellor-an Excalibur of measurement, slaying the dragon of imprecision-that explains its ubiquity in stories about Maudslay and his entire era. But that very quality tends to hide its real importance. The Industrial Revolution, however it is defined, depended on Maudslay's micrometer, and instruments like it, just as much as it did on laws protecting intellectual property or the birth of scientific experimentation. This is because sustained innovation is incremental innovation, and those increments are usually very small: a valve that weighs a fraction of an ounce less, a linkage that reduces coal consumption by a few pounds a day. Without instruments that could measure such small improvements in performance, invention was doomed to be rare and erratic; the mania for precision that was Maudslay's defining characteristic made it commonplace.

Maudslay's own inventions are impressive enough. In 1805, he patented a machine that could print designs on cotton; in 1806, he invented a new method for lifting weights with a differential motion; and in 1807, he devised a new and compact framework for supporting the cylinder of a steam engine, which permitted the use of so-called "table engines" in far smaller factory areas.

His influence is, however, larger than that, beginning with the astonishing number of other equally obsessive engineer-inventors to whom he was teacher and mentor. The best known may be the almost embarra.s.singly prolific Richard Roberts, who acquired patents the way Balzac wrote novels.* Another of Maudslay's a.s.sistants, Joseph Whitworth, developed a measuring system accurate to one-millionth of an inch. This is not a misprint; until the United Kingdom joined the metric system, the standard unit for screw threads was the BSW, which stands for British Standard Whitworth.

Whitworth worked for Maudslay at the same time as Joseph Clement, who would later build, on the instructions of Charles Babbage, the prototype for the original "difference engine"-the world's first mechanical computer. Maudslay's son, Joseph, later became a brilliant marine engineer, patenting the double-cylinder marine engine that was widely used during the nineteenth century. Yet another Maudslay graduate, James Nasmyth, the inventor of a steam hammer that made him the wealthiest of them all, wrote floridly of his mentor, "the indefatigable care which he took5 in inculcating and diffusing among his workmen, and mechanical men generally, sound ideas of practical knowledge, and refined views of construction, has rendered, and ever will continue to render, his name identified with all that is n.o.ble in the ambition of a lover of mechanical perfection." More prosaically, though probably just as accurately, one of Maudslay's workmen remembered that "it was a pleasure to see him handle a tool6 of any kind, but he was quite splendid with an 18 inch file."

However, even if Maudslay had never built an iron lathe to make Bramah his locks, never become the era's icon of precision, or never turned his Oxford Street workshop into the place where, as one modern historian put it, "a 'critical ma.s.s' of inventive activity"7 was achieved, he would still have earned a large place in industrial history. And he would have earned it by building blocks.

A PILGRIMAGE TO BRITAIN'S sacred sites of industrialism would certainly include Boulton & Watt's Soho Foundry and the Ironbridge Gorge Museums; probably the four-hundred-foot-deep mine at the National Coal Mining Museum in Yorkshire; and possibly the pumping station at Crofton. It would certainly be incomplete without a visit to the eastern sh.o.r.e of Portsmouth Harbor, where the Royal Navy's largest dockyard houses museums, historically important ships, and the Portsmouth Block Mills,* the place where Henry Maudslay's machines would make up the world's first true steam-powered factory.

The quadrupling of the Royal Navy during the eighteenth century, like the Apollo s.p.a.ce program of the 1960s, created a ma.s.sive customer for technological innovation. This was, after all, the Age of Sail, and while guns and ammunition might be metal, getting those guns to where they could be useful required the pressure of wind on canvas. Wind was a useful source of power for mills, but its directional variability made it a capricious sort of transportation "fuel," and a staggering amount of human ingenuity was required to make the wind blowing this way drive a three-thousand-ton ship that way. Each sail-a three-masted ship had at least nine-was raised, lowered, reefed, and turned by some portion of more than twenty miles of rope, every foot of which ran through up to a dozen different pulleys, contained within blocks of wood. The blocks consisted of sh.e.l.ls, usually of elm, cut with several oblong slots, or mortises, each containing a hardwood pulley fitted with metal bushings spinning around a pin, usually made of iron. A single ship of the line8 required as many as fifteen hundred such blocks, ranging in length from three inches to three feet, and with nearly a thousand ships at sea by the beginning of the nineteenth century, wearing out their blocks at a rapid rate, anyone who could produce them in quant.i.ty was going to make an indecent amount of money doing so; in 1800, the navy was paying more than 8 guineas-two months of a skilled laborer's salary-for a single 38-incher.

For centuries, blocks-sh.e.l.l, pulley, and pin-had been made by hand, with all the cost in time and error that implied. The first block makers to mechanize were the Walter Taylors (father and son) in 1754; eight years later, they patented their "Set of engines, tools, instruments,9 and other apparatus for the Making of Blocks, Sheavers, and Pins." In 1786 they received another, for lubricating the apparatus. More significant was Samuel Bentham,10 whose 1793 patent for woodworking machinery included a rotary planer; a circular saw; a primitive router for dovetail grooving; bevel saws, crown saws, and radial saws; radial and reciprocating mortise machines; guides, grinders, gauges, and tables; and his own version of the slide rest lathe. The Bentham application was so frighteningly comprehensive, covering all conceivable aspects of mechanized woodworking, that the Patent Office regarded it as "a perfect treatise on the subject."11 An innovative naval officer determined to reform his tradition-minded service, Bentham had become fascinated by the potential for machine production of naval components largely by accident. In 1786, while in Russia,12 where he had gone to take a job as a naval engineer, he was so short of skilled craftsmen that the only way to produce blocks, tackles, belaying pins, and all the other wooden impedimenta of the Age of Sail was to make the process simple enough that they could be manufactured by even illiterate and untrained serfs. Or, even better, by machines.

Bentham's older brother, the political philosopher Jeremy, had independently developed an interest in woodworking by unskilled laborers. While he is best remembered for his utilitarian philosophy-"the greatest good for the greatest number"-Jeremy Bentham probably spent as much time thinking about prison reform as anything else,* and his fascination with prisons extended to the idea that woodworking was the perfect way to occupy the idle but untrained hands of prisoners.

In 1795, the Bentham brothers put their ideas together and drafted a contract proposing that the Admiralty use prison labor to operate the woodworking machines used to produce naval stores. Jeremy, evidently ambitious to find an even larger market for Samuel's inventions, wrote a letter to his friend, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, a French n.o.bleman then in exile in North America, asking whether "a Propos of my brother's inventions,13 do you know of anybody where you are ... who would like to be taught how to stock all North America with all sorts of woodwork ... on the terms of allowing the inventor [i.e. Samuel] a share of the profits as they arise?" The Frenchman evidently had no immediate help on offer, but a few years later, the letter was apparently the chief subject of discussion at a dinner party in New York City, whose guests included the recently resigned secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and another French emigre, a former sailor and engineer named Marc Isambard Brunel.

BRUNEL HAD BY THEN crowded a fair bit into his first twenty-seven years. When he was eleven, he traveled from his birthplace at Haqueville in Normandy to attend the seminary of St. Nazaire in Rouen, where soon enough the priests realized that the boy's vocation was more mechanical than pastoral. They sent him to live with the American consul in Rouen, a retired sea captain, to be educated in hydrography and drafting as preparation for a naval career. He was commissioned into the French Navy in 1786 and served on a dozen voyages, but when he returned from the West Indies in 1792, France's three-year-old revolution was taking a violent turn. In the fall, Parisians had imprisoned the king and queen, and the era of ma.s.s executions known as the Reign of Terror was looming. Brunel decided to emigrate. His education seems to have nurtured interests in navigation and the United States of America equally; a year later, in September 1793, he landed in New York.

The royalist-leaning Frenchman was enthusiastically welcomed by the new republic. On the recommendation of two of his fellow pa.s.sengers, he almost immediately won a job to survey a land grant near Lake Ontario and drew up plans for a ca.n.a.l between Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. Once he took on U.S. citizenship, he was named chief engineer for the City of New York, building foundries, laying out roads, and planning for the defense of the city's harbor, which was the job he held when the subject of block making was broached at the dinner with Hamilton.

In Brunel's later recollection, the flash of insight that followed struck him as he was "roaming on the esplanade of Fort Montgomery."14 Just as with James Watt's stroll on Glasgow Green, a machine had appeared to him, more or less fully formed, in which the mortises in the blocks could be cut by chisels moving up and down in series "two or three at a time"15 as the blocks were conveyed along a moving line.

On January 20, 1799, Brunel sailed for Britain armed with a letter of introduction from Hamilton to the First Lord of the Admiralty* and a patent specification for his machine. The First Lord arranged an immediate introduction to Samuel Bentham, by now Inspector General for Naval Works, but it took two years before he finally received a patent for his "New and Useful Machine for Cutting One or More Mortices Forming the Sides of and Cutting the Pin-Hole of the Sh.e.l.ls of Blocks, and for Turning and Boring the Shivers."

Brunel had broken block making into a series of steps that synchronized a dozen different woodworking processes. During one of those steps, machine-driven chisels-between one and four-cut out slots in a rectangular block of wood, while their reciprocating motion drove a gear that moved the block laterally the length of the needed mortise. In another, sheaves-the pulleys intended to fit inside the mortises-were made by a rounding saw that made a circular disc while simultaneously cutting a groove in the middle. Bentham's own designs were ingenious enough, but the machines specified in his 1793 patent operated independently; each one could typically complete only a single step. Brunel's plan, in essence, took the motion imparted by one machine and used it to drive another. By requiring that each step in any procedure be driven by the preceding one, he effectively automated the entire block-making system.

In the same year that the patent was awarded, Brunel persuaded Samuel Bentham to put his ideas to work at the navy's largest dockyard, in Portsmouth. For that, he needed a toolmaker. Someone like, for example, Henry Maudslay, whom Bentham hired in 1802 to turn Brunel's drawings into machines.

Or, more accurately, to revise them. The brilliance of Brunel's patented idea was the manner in which it coordinated the different cutting and drilling movements, but their very coordination demanded precision that could be measured in thousands of an inch. The design, however, specified16 the use of wood for dozens of components, and vibration alone introduced errors larger than that. Maudslay, who by then knew more than anyone else living about eliminating vibration, did so by translating Brunel's designs into cold iron. His machines-he ended up building forty-five or so-included power saws17 for roughing out pieces of elm into useful sizes; drills, mortising chisels, and scorers; rotary saws for the sheaves; and even forging machines to make the iron pins and bushings. And they were all, in the end, made of the same cast iron that had become so reliably available.

Maudslay's fee for constructing the machines18 came to the very handsome sum of 12,000-considerably more than $1 million in current dollars-which made sense only given the contract that Brunel had executed with Bentham and the Admiralty. That agreement guaranteed19 that the machinery would allow six men to do the work of sixty, with annual cost savings in the neighborhood of 24,000, which would be used to calculate his own payment. The final accounting is almost incomprehensible-in 1808, the Mills produced 130,000 blocks at a nominal price of 54,000, but the figures that were used to calculate the annual "royalties" payable to Brunel came out anywhere between 6,691 and 26,000-and, perhaps predictably, Brunel had to chase down the money he was owed. He didn't come close to recouping20 his own investment until 1810, when the Admiralty settled on a single payment of a bit more than 17,000.

By then, the Portsmouth Block Mills had become Britain's most advanced industrial factory and among its most important defense plants. On the day in 1805 that Horatio Nelson left Portsmouth in search of the French fleet he would eventually find at Trafalgar, his last stop was the Mills. Three years after Nelson's death, the Portsmouth Block Mills was producing "an output greater21 than that previously supplied by the six largest dockyards." Just as important, it had become Britain's best advertis.e.m.e.nt for the virtues of industrialization. The Portsmouth Block Mills was extraordinarily public, and deliberately so. Bentham had hoped to publicize the machine age by making the mills open to the public (a cause for much complaint by the engineers), and he encouraged articles about it in numerous journals and encyclopedias, including six consecutive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. To the degree that the machines of the Industrial Revolution depended upon awareness of, and inspiration from, other machines, Henry Maudslay's saws, drills, and chisels earned Portsmouth Block Mills its place on the pilgrimage route.

So did the engines that drove them.

Even before Bentham had put Brunel's ideas and Maudslay's hands to work, he had shown a powerful affection for novelty in both naval tactics-he is justly famous as an early advocate for replacing solid shot with explosive sh.e.l.ls in naval combat-and engineering. In 1798, he introduced at Portsmouth the Royal Navy's first stationary steam engine, a relatively small "table engine" built and installed by James Sadler, a member of Bentham's staff, to drive one of the early rotary saws. That one was supplemented in 1800 by a Boulton & Watt beam engine housed in a separate building, despite the Navy Board's nervous belief that these newfangled machines would "set fire to the dockyards22 [and] would occasion risings of artificers, and so forth."

Though the first engine to drive Maudslay's saws and chisels came from the Soho Foundry, it wasn't to be the last. The year it was installed, 1800, was also the year that the patent for the separate condenser finally expired, thus in theory opening the marketplace to compet.i.tion; and indeed, in 1807, the Royal Navy replaced its Boulton & Watt machine with a more powerful subst.i.tute from the company's most serious challenger, Matthew Murray.

MURRAY WAS THEN ABOUT forty years old, like so many others a product of the apprentice system-in his case, to a "whitesmith" or tinker in his home of Newcastle-on-Tyne-who become a journeyman mechanic and inventor, first in the employ of a linen manufacturer named John Marshall, then in partnership with two friends named James Fenton and David Wood. In 1797, the new company, Fenton, Murray, and Wood, patented a brilliant new steam engine design, one that used a horizontal cylinder and incorporated a new valve, designed by Murray, that dramatically improved engine efficiency.

By this time, an awful lot of the big stuff in steam engine design-the separate condenser, the double-acting engine-had already been introduced, patented, and seen those patents expire. Each time this happened, the innovation in question lost its compet.i.tive advantages, with the result that the search for smaller and smaller improvements was well under way. Even so, some small improvements resulted in large profits, and one was certainly Murray's D-valve (so called for its shape), which controlled the flow of steam. Earlier self-acting valves had been relatively heavy and required a not inconsiderable amount of the engine's own steam power to lift-and every bit of energy that went into lifting a valve was not available for any other work. The lighter the valve, the more efficient the engine, and the D-valve weighed less than half as much as its predecessor. The valve's shape was likewise a cost saver: it absorbed less heat than its predecessor, thus increasing engine efficiency, since every bit of heat used to heat the engine parts was no longer available to make steam.

There was no doubt of the originality of the D-valve, but in 1802, Murray patented "new combined steam engines23 for producing a circular power ... for spinning cotton, flax, tow and wool, or for any purpose requiring circular power," and this one was challenged in court by Boulton & Watt. Their victory (on a technicality: Murray had included dozens of improvements in the same patent application, and the law provided that if any one of them was not completely original, it invalidated the entire application) did not endear them to Murray. After his loss, he spent large sums advertising his originality, attempting to persuade Britons that his ideas weren't stolen from Watt. The experience enriched the newspapers but soured him on the patent system, which he rarely used again. Even so, the conflict continued; he and his partners planned to expand their factory in Leeds, only to find out that Murray's conflict with his Birmingham compet.i.tors did not improve with time; the planned expansion24 of Fenton, Murray, and Wood's four-story-high circular factory-the famous "Round Foundry" in Leeds-was thwarted when Boulton & Watt bought up every surrounding acre. It soon became clear that the cultural and legal revolution that had transformed ideas into an entirely new sort of valuable commodity had created a new sort of conflict as well. The availability of patent protection was, predictably, motivating inventors to make more inventions; it was also motivating them to frustrate competing inventions from anyone else.

The argument between those who believe legal protection for inventions promotes innovation or r.e.t.a.r.ds it continues to this day. For both sides of the debate, Exhibit A is often the litigation between James Watt and Jonathan Hornblower.

HORNBLOWER, THE SON OF a onetime steam engine mechanic (the steam engines in question were reputedly Newcomen's) and nephew of another,* followed them into the family business when he hired on with Boulton & Watt to install engines in Cornwall in the late 1770s. By 1781, either by native ingenuity or careful observation, he was able to draft a patent for a revolutionary new kind of steam engine that coordinated two separate cylinders, one at higher pressure than the other, and used the pressure exhausted from one cylinder to drive the other. This both increased the machine's output by as much as a third, and, by running each cylinder in a sort of syncopated rhythm, reduced the "dead spots" where the piston reversed direction (this is known as "smoothing out the power curve"). In addition, Hornblower's "compound engine" also incorporated a couple of less revolutionary items: a separate condenser and air pump, both of which were still protected by Watt's original patent, to say nothing of the 1775 extension.

The new design did not catch on immediately. The patent itself was vague enough that most of what was known about the Hornblower engine was little more than speculation. It wasn't until 178825 that Watt caught wind of a speech given by Hornblower to a group of Cornish miners, in which his onetime employee reputedly said that Watt had not even invented the separate condenser, and that they were in consequence paying Boulton & Watt an unnecessary royalty. The speech offended Watt, but it did not, by itself, threaten the dominant position of his engine design. Three years later, however, Boulton & Watt were growing concerned about both potential compet.i.tion and actual infringement. In November of 1791 Watt wrote to Boulton that "the ungrateful, idle, insolent Hornblowers26 [there were three Hornblower brothers, none of whom had particularly endeared himself to Watt] have laboured to evade our Act, and for that purpose have long been possessed of a copy of our specification." In 1796, they sued Hornblower and his partner, David Maberley, a.s.serting infringement on the separate condenser patents.

The most illuminating aspect of the entire affair was the difference in the way that Watt and Boulton viewed it. For Watt, the theft (as he saw it) of his work was a deeply personal violation. In 1790, just before realizing the extent of what he perceived as Hornblower's theft of his own work, he wrote, if patentees are to be regarded27 by the public, as ... monopolists, and their patents considered as nuisances & encroachments on the natural liberties of his Majesty's other subjects, wou'd it not be just to make a law at once, taking away the power of granting patents for new inventions & by cutting off the hopes of ingenious men oblige them either to go on in the way of their fathers & not spend their time which would be devoted to the encrease [sic] of their own fortunes in making improvements for an ungrateful public, or else to emigrate to some other Country that will afford to their inventions the protections they may merit?

Despite his own confidence, he was aware of the complicated public relations aspect of his situation: "Our cause is good,"28 he wrote, "and yet it has a bad aspect. We are called monopolists, and exactors of money from the people for nothing. Would to G.o.d the money and price of the time the engine has cost us were in our pockets again, and the devil might then have the draining of their mines in place of me.... The law must decide whether we have property in this affair or not" (emphasis added).

In the event, the law did decide against Hornblower, and in favor of Boulton & Watt (though not until January 1799, only a year before the expiration of Watt's patent) notwithstanding the testimony of none other than Joseph Bramah, the lockmaker, who stated under oath that Watt's separate condenser offered no improvement on Newcomen's engine, referring to the 1769 innovation as "monstrous stupidity,"29 which rubbed Watt very raw indeed. Boulton, who had only money at risk rather than pride, recommended keeping an even keel: "I think we should confine our contentions30 to the recovery of our debts, and in that be just, moderate and honourable, for sweet is the bread of contentment."

The lessons to be derived from the Hornblower litigation are probably fewer than generally thought. The lawsuit has been used to underline the many contemporaneous perspectives on intellectual property; the abusive character of patent law; and even the geopolitics of eighteenth-century Cornwall. It certainly is not an object lesson in the wages of patent theft; despite numerous citations that find him ruined and even jailed for his troubles, Jonathan Hornblower actually ended up quite wealthy, and continued to pursue patents for steam engine improvements on his own for years.

If the case informs anything, it is actually the great virtue of an environment that recognized the value of intellectual property. Whatever the failures of any specific judicial remedies, a society that wants good ideas to triumph over bad-for superior technology to replace inferior-must promote the creation of as many ideas as possible. In the end, the compound engine was fairly rapidly "rediscovered" by a onetime carpenter named Arthur Woolf, who patented, in 1804, a new method of using steam in an expansive engine, this time by raising the temperature of the steam within the cylinder instead of the boiler, thus creating "a sufficient action against the piston31 of a steam engine to cause the same to rise in the old [Newcomen] engine ... or to be carried into the vacuous parts of the cylinder in [Watt's] improved engines." That is, it discharged steam directly from a higher-pressure cylinder into a lower-pressure one, thereby compounding the power stroke. With the separate condenser now in the public domain, he was free of the risk of litigation.

By 1808, a compound engine had made its way to the Portsmouth Block Mills, though both Brunel and Maudslay had moved on to other ventures. The former ultimately went bankrupt, despite being paid more than 17,000 by the Navy, and in 1821 was incarcerated as a debtor. He had once again gone to the patent well, in August 1810, with a machine for ma.s.s-producing shoes and boots for the army, and when peace came after Waterloo in 1815, he was left with truckloads of unsold footwear, a reminder of the fickle nature of a fortune built on government contracts. His most ambitious endeavor, a tunnel under the Thames, would ultimately be completed by his even more famous son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.* Maudslay, on the other hand,32 would eventually build engines for forty-five naval ships, including HMS Lightning, the Royal Navy's first steamship, and HMS Enterprise, the first to steam to India.

Maudslay's lasting fame, however, came from his work on his beloved lathes, where he applied the precision of one-at-a-time scientific instrument making to engineering for ma.s.s production-or what pa.s.sed for ma.s.s production in the eighteenth century. While the world of British invention was forming up on the pro- versus anti-Watt debate, Maudslay stayed above it, respected, even beloved, by everyone. His 1831 epitaph read, "A zealous promoter of the arts and sciences,33 eminently distinguished, as an engineer for mathematical accuracy and beauty of construction, as a man for industry and perseverance, and as a friend for a kind and benevolent heart."

By then, the biggest transformation of all was well under way in Britain's steam-driven economy: In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the factories that Boulton had promised to power with Watt's engines were manufacturing not iron, or wood, but cloth.

* Estimating the present-day value of the amount in question-of any monetary amount from the period-is problematic. The historical purchasing power of the pound sterling can be calculated either by compounding the changes in the retail price index or as a fraction of average earnings in Britain. Using the first method, the prize was worth a little less than 12,000 in 2009 currency; the second, more than 160,000. Put another way, the cost of a loaf of bread has increased by about sixty times; but the hour that a laborer had to work to earn the money to buy that loaf is now only five minutes. The huge discrepancy between the two calculations is in itself a powerful reminder of the transformative power of industrialization.

* In Yorkshire, extraordinarily precise lathe work was being performed by the scientific instrument maker Jesse Ramsden, who was able to cut a screw with an awe-inspiring 125 turns per inch-that is, a Ramsden screw rotated 125 times before it traveled a single inch, which allowed for very fine adjustments-but his achievements in telescopes and quadrants, like those of clockmakers, though known to Maudslay, were peripheral to industrialization.

* Compulsively, and often brilliantly. A single one of Roberts's cotton spinning machines warranted no fewer than eighteen separate patents. His plate punching machine, operated by the same Jacquard system originally used for weaving, was the first digitally operated machine tool.

* Or it would be if the Mills wasn't actually still part of the naval base itself and consequently off-limits to most visitors.

* Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon," a multilevel prison with a central core from which guards could watch every move each prisoner made, and which has become a metaphor for the modern surveillance state, is one of his best-remembered, if creepiest, ideas. Less well known is that the original Panopticon was designed by Samuel Bentham, for use in supervising laborers at Krichev, the estate of Prince Vasiliy Potemkin.

* Earl Spencer of Althorp, a direct ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales.

* Uncle Josiah emigrated to America in 1753, where he became a judge and speaker of the House of a.s.sembly in New Jersey before dying in Belleville, New Jersey, in 1809.

* Isambard Kingdom Brunel is so famous, in fact, that a 2002 BBC poll to select the one hundred greatest Britons placed him second, behind Winston Churchill, but ahead of Shakespeare, Darwin, and Newton (to be fair, so was Princess Diana; Watt came in eighty-fourth, behind such immortals as Michael Crawford, David Beckham, and Boy George). One result is that his father, who preferred being called Isambard during his own lifetime, is now known as Marc.

CHAPTER TEN.

TO GIVE ENGLAND THE POWER OF COTTON.

concerning the secret of silk spinning; two men named Kay; a child called Jenny; the breaking of frames; the great Cotton War between Calcutta and Lancashire; and the violent resentments of stocking knitters THE CITY OF LIVORNO sits at the northern end of Italy's resort-spotted Etruscan coast, overlooking the Ligurian Sea. At its center is the original town: a walled compound, made up of two separate forts that in the year 1715 were enough for Livorno to serve as one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean. Livorno's walls, its fortifications, even its streets and ca.n.a.ls, were a sixteenth-century bequest from the city's Florentine rulers, the Medici family, who had also bequeathed to the city its cosmopolitan air and legendary hospitality to foreigners. The city's const.i.tution of 1606 granted privileges and immunities to immigrants, including Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Dutch, and Muslims; it even attracted a large number of traders and artisans from England, who, in the distinctive manner of English away from home, renamed it Leghorn.*

The name stuck, in Anglophone countries, for centuries-a style of hat and breed of chicken still carry the name-because of Livorno's large and well-known expatriate community. The profile of that community was probably never higher than in 1822, when both Byron and Sh.e.l.ley were residents, but a hundred years before, another Briton had made himself at home in the city, with less publicity, but more significance. John Lombe was his name; and what brought him to Livorno was silk.

LOMBE WAS THE SON of a woolen weaver1 from Norwich, and a onetime apprentice to another weaver in Derbyshire, where in 1702 he took employment as a mechanic for a small silk mill owned by a lawyer named Thomas Cotchett. England by then had tried and failed half a dozen times to start up its own silk industry, less from any deficiency in raw materials than from lack of the technology required to make its production economical. But neither Cotchett nor Lombe was prepared to give up on the profits to be made from selling silk cloth and garments-profits far greater than for any other fabric.

By the eighteenth century, silk had been commanding high prices for millennia; during the eighth century BCE, silk was one of the Zhou Dynasty's most widely cultivated "crops," with tens of thousands of farmers feeding white mulberry leaves to domesticated silkworms with the Linnaean moniker Bombyx mori before the chrysalis stage, then steaming or boiling the coc.o.o.ns and pulling, or "reeling," the filaments that emerged into strands of silk. Those strands were not only very long but triangular in cross-section, which gave silk thread its distinctive reflective quality; the combination of length and l.u.s.trousness made the stuff easy to weave, and even easier to sell.

The reason this is a matter of note in the history of industrialization, however, has less to do with the beauty of the fiber-a fiber is, technically, anything with a length at least one hundred times its diameter-than with its structure. Virtually all textiles, from linen to rayon, are made using the same step-by-step process. First, foreign materials, if any, must be removed, or carded, from the raw fiber; then individual strands must be separated, with those of uniform length combed, or aligned in parallel. The carded and combed fiber is then twisted into yarn, or spun, and ultimately woven by interlacing yarns at right angles.

Or so the sequence goes with staples, such as wool, linen, or cotton, which must be drawn at an angle so that the relatively short fiber twists into a longer and stronger yarn. But reeled silk is a filament: a very long filament. A single coc.o.o.n of B. mori2 holds only a few grams of silk's two const.i.tuent proteins, fibroin and sericin, but they form threads, one-twentieth the diameter of a human hair, that can reach the length of ten football fields. The result is that silk produces yarn without either combing, or carding, or drawing; all it needs to be is tightly twisted and it's ready to serve as the warp on a silk loom.

Silk from Chinese looms3 started appearing in Egypt as early as 1000 BCE, but it didn't really take off as an article of trade until 50 CE, when the Han emperor made a "gift" of ten thousand rolls of the stuff to pacify the western nomads known as the Xiongnu-silk that would eventually be shipped westward across the Central Asian desert along the not yet named Silk Road to Persia and the Mediterranean empire of Rome.

China remained a major supplier of silk to Europe for centuries, but with the breakup of the Mongol empire in the fourteenth century and the rise of the Ottomans, silk production shifted west. The Turkish city of Bursa4 was shipping more than 100 metric tons annually by the beginning of the sixteenth century, most of it carried by Armenian merchants to either Italy or southern France. When the cities of Toulon and Ma.r.s.eille imposed a series of confiscatory tolls on west Asian silk in the 1650s, the free port of Livorno was happy to step into the breach and almost immediately became the entrepot of choice for silk. In 1665, five Dutch ships5 left the Turkish port of Smyrna (now Izmir) for Livorno carrying five hundred bales of silk; in 1668, they carried twenty-five hundred.

The dramatic increase was driven by technology. The unique characteristics of silk fibers made them uniquely easy to weave by machine, and the demand for such machines was greatest in the triangle formed by the "silk cities" of Pisa, Lucca, and Livorno. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century, an engineer from Padua named Vittorio Zonca had designed the first machine to turn silk fiber into silk cloth. It was Zonca's machine,6 which consisted of two frames, one inside the other, with the outer one holding spindles and reels and the inner one rotating around a central vertical post that held the silk by friction-a machine that had been kept a secret in the Piedmont district for more than a century-that drew John Lombe to Livorno. Or, more exactly, the plans for the machine, which he had traveled from Derbyshire to acquire.

It's not known how he got them; bribery is a good guess. But when Lombe left Livorno in 1716, he had a set of plans for Zonca's mill,* and two years later, something even better. In 1718, having figuratively filed the serial numbers off his smuggled plans, he received patent number 422 for his invention of "three sorts of engines never before made7 or used in Great Britaine [sic], one to winde the finest raw silk, another to spin, and the other to twist the finest Italian raw silk into organzine in great perfection, which was never before done in this country." That's about as specific as the application got, and it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the vagueness was deliberate, along with the decision to include a lot of Italian, apparently so that the process would remain exclusively Lombe's even after the patent expired.

In 1719, John Lombe joined with his brother, Thomas, a mercer (that is, a dealer in fine, usually imported cloth) and a member of the London guild known as the Mercer's Company,* to build their own mill. The site they chose was in Derbyshire, on the same island in the River Derwent used by Cotchett, and for the same reason: the water flowing past could easily be used to power their new silk mill. The "Italian Works," as the Lombe mill was locally known, was a five-story structure, 100 feet long by 37 feet wide, set on pillars over an undershot waterwheel that drove a single vertical shaft operating machines on each of the five floors. The mill, which employed more than two hundred men,8 was able to produce so much silk that Thomas Lombe's investment, reported at 30,000, had increased by 1732 to more than 80,000.

Lombe neglected to point out this seemingly pertinent fact when he pet.i.tioned Parliament for an extension of his 1718 patent, arguing that "he has not hitherto received the intended benefit9 of the aforesaid patent, and in consideration of the extraordinary nature of [the] undertaking." Moreover, he was then locked in litigation with a group of potential compet.i.tors eager to get into the silk business, who introduced a suit, The case of the manufacturers of woolen,10 linnen, mohair, and cotton yarn ... with respect to a bill for preserving and encouraging a new invention in England by Sir Thomas Lombe. He must have been a persuasive advocate on his own behalf, because even though the Crown declined to reward him with a patent extension, it did dismiss the suit, and paid him 14,000 in the bargain. Lombe would go on to become an alderman and a sheriff of a ward of the City of London; in 1739 he died, leaving an estate of 120,000, a poor moral lesson about the hazards of theft.

Lombe's career is even more telling, a reminder that mechanization was a necessary but not sufficient component of national industrialization. No matter how efficient the Zonca/Lombe machine, it was still spinning yarn for a fabric whose appeal was restricted to the elite of English society. This simple fact placed the same ceiling on expansion that had limited the potential of every other innovation since Heron started making toys for Alexandria's n.o.bles. Only one silk spinning factory11-the Lombe mill at Derby-was established in England before 1750, and obviously waterpower was sufficient for all its needs. The true industrialization of Britain, and subsequently, the world, depended on a commodity that could attract consumers not by the thousands but by the millions. Something that could be produced in such quant.i.ty that hundreds of factories would need steam power not only to manufacture but (remember Rocket) to transport it.

Something like, for example, cotton.

TODAY, THE SEED FIBER of plants belonging to the genus Gossypium is the world's most important nonfood agricultural product, with something in the neighborhood of 115 million bales, or twenty-eight million tons, produced annually. All of that production comes from the plant's boll, or seed pod, which appears after the plant blossoms and, as it matures, grows "hair" in the form of fibers from two to three inches in length. Since not all bolls mature at the same time, for most of the crop's history, handpicking has proved to deliver the highest yields; this has resulted in a number of well-known consequences, including the durability of the inst.i.tution of slavery, from Egypt in 3000 BCE to the American South until 1865 or so. Abusive labor practices and cotton appear together pretty much everywhere, in fact, that the climate is temperate, with a lot of moisture during the growing season and a hot and dry harvesting season. Which describes the banks of not only the Nile and the Mississippi, but the Hooghly: the river that runs past Calcutta, home to the world's first great multinational corporation.

The international venture that would ultimately be known as the Honourable East India Company was created by a royal charter-a letter patent-issued by Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600, providing a fifteen-year monopoly on trade with the so-called Spice Islands. Soon enough, the charter, and the ambitions of the Company, were to embrace south Asia and the Indian subcontinent; its scale was enough to make twenty-first-century multinationals hide their heads in shame. From about 1608 until 1757, the Company merely dominated India's economy; from 1757 until 1858, it ruled nearly half the subcontinent as sovereign, with its own tax collectors, police force, and army.

India had many attractions for the Company, but by far the largest was that India could produce more cotton more cheaply than anywhere else on the planet. Even before the Company chose the village of Calcutta12 on India's east coast as its trading post in 1690, they were in the cotton business; shipments of Indian "calico"-named not for Calcutta, but for the Malabar Coast entrepot known as Calicut-rose twentyfold between 1620 and 1625 and another fivefold between 1625 and 1690.

Production increased to meet demand, and demand for Indian cotton rose because it was not only cheaper than cotton from elsewhere, but better-the result not of superior technology but of a gigantic labor pool with centuries of expertise. English cotton thread was not only pricier than Indian, but too weak to be used on its own; because weaving used the vertical threads of the warp to hold the lateral threads of the weft in a lattice, the warp fibers needed to be both longer and stronger. This obliged English weavers to use local cotton only in combination with much stronger linen, to make the cloth known as fustian. Even then, it made for a very rough weave13 indeed, not nearly smooth enough to accept the printed designs demanded by Britain's aristocrats, or the increasingly prosperous British middle cla.s.s.

As Indian cotton began to crowd out not only domestic cotton but all domestic cloth, British textile manufacturers predictably sought protection from imports. They did not count any large number of cotton weavers, given the small part that the fiber was then playing in the English economy; but they did include politically powerful weavers of wool, and especially of silk. In particular, the hand silk weavers of Spitalfields, a hamlet in the East End of London, pressured Parliament to pa.s.s the first of what would be known as the Calico Acts.

The Calico Acts (the first was pa.s.sed in 1700, the second, more restrictive one twenty years later) prohibited both the import and ownership of Indian printed cottons. It was a decisive victory for the large but dispersed English textile industry against the single largest joint stock corporation in the kingdom. But if the Acts were originally drafted to favor manufacturing at the expense of trade, they failed miserably. In one of history's most significant validations of the law of unintended consequences, the Acts, which originated as protection for Britain's woolen, silk, and linen manufacturers, sheltered the nascent cotton industry even better. The results were, to understate the case, startling, beginning with the creation of the most valuable export industry in human history. Between 1700 and 1750,14 British export trade in textiles doubled; by 1800 it had trebled, and, with two-thirds of the total generated by cotton goods, British manufactured exports amounted to 40 percent of national income-the largest percentage ever enjoyed by any nation before or since.

The explosive growth in the output of Britain's textile manufacturers was fueled by the equally explosive growth in the number of potential consumers for their products. The market for cotton,15 in fact, was so avid that only extraordinary increases in productivity could satisfy it. Since the domestic market could expand only as fast as the population itself, really fast growth needed to harness colonial policy to the export-friendly protectionist philosophy that would come to be called mercantilism. Thus the policy of conquering large territories was justified not because of a colony's mineral wealth, but because of its consumers.

Those overseas consumers were needed16 badly, because while the domestic market was growing (the British economy trebled in the century following the pa.s.sage of the first Calico Act, mostly because of population growth, but partly because per capita GDP grew by a third, twice as fast as anywhere else in Europe), it wasn't growing nearly fast enough.

Not all of the increase was even measurable. Hundreds of studies of probate show dramatic increases in the inventories of furniture, clothing, household tools, and so on that Britons were bequeathing to their heirs, which strongly suggests that the stock of material goods was exploding. Even those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British households that were seeing no increase in their cash income were nonetheless able to reallocate that income to purchase more market-supplied goods in preference to homemade. They were the ones who were able to attract the attention17 of a generation of inventors eager to replace their homespun with something better, or at least prettier.

And they didn't just subst.i.tute market-bought commodities for homemade; they also replaced them with products never before imagined. Throughout Britain, members of the middle and even working cla.s.ses even looked different, once they were widely able to replace dyed wool with cotton prints.

In order to make cotton fabric from domestic yarn smooth enough to accept prints, however, Britain's textile manufacturers needed to master the other half of the clothmaking equation. The industry's next world-changing invention was intended not to spin fiber into yarn, but weave yarn into cloth.

With the exception of flaking stone into useful shapes (a skill that seems unlikely to return to the vocational curriculum), weaving is humanity's oldest craft. People in Mesopotamia and Turkey wove both baskets and cloth around 8000 BCE, and the first technique, simple over-and-under latticework, remained pretty much the only technique for at least four millennia. By 2000 BCE,18 however, far more complex weaving was being practiced, as is evidenced by models of looms found in Egyptian tombs. These frame looms had replaced the temporary "looms" made by either hanging fibers from tree branches or stretching them across a hole in the ground, making it possible to use heddles (the cables or wires used to separate the threads that form the warp of a piece of woven cloth) and permitting a shuttle to carry the weft laterally. A fabric's texture and design are created by simultaneously lifting the heddles to create a s.p.a.ce, or shed, and interlacing the warp with different weights and colors of weft. The more heddles in a loom, the more combinations possible.

For millennia, the hands controlling those heddles and shuttles were overwhelmingly female, as, indeed, were the artisans spinning the weaver's yarn. When the fourth-century church father Saint Jerome recommended the craft for his female parishioners as an inoculation against the idleness sure to lead Eve's daughters into temptation, he was giving a Christian spin to the same occupation that Penelope used to keep her suitors at bay a thousand years before. By the sixteenth century, however, weaving had become the prototypical cottage industry: diffuse, traditional, and decidedly low-tech. It would remain so for two centuries. As with metalworking, toolmaking, and a dozen other crafts that had experienced a thousand years' worth of occasional innovation, the textile industry was able to enter into a cycle of sustainable invention only in the early eighteenth century.

THE CYCLE BEGAN WHEN John Kay, the fourteen-year-old son of a Lancashire farmer, was apprenticed to a maker of reeds (the devices used to separate the threads of a warp, usually made of cane, or reed). In legend at least, Kay left after a single month, convinced he had learned everything he would ever need to know. It seems likely that he didn't know everything, since it was eight years later, in 1726, that his first invention appeared, an improved reed that used wire instead of cane. He never patented19 what soon became known as "Kay's Reeds," but it was certainly not out of any antagonism to the principle of patenting. In 1730, he acquired a patent for a method of preparing the twine used for looms, and three years after that, one for a machine for dressing wool. More significantly, in the same year, Kay patented a new shuttle that was initially known as a wheel shuttle, then a spring shuttle; no one called it a flying shuttle until 1780.

Before Kay's invention, looms had been operated by weavers pa.s.sing the shuttle, which carried the weft, through the warp threads by hand. As a result, any loomed cloth was going to be about the width of a human wingspan. By putting the shuttle on wheels and attaching cords to either end, Kay's invention permitted it to "fly" by pulling the cord in either direction. It would take another fifty years for its use to become widespread, but despite its relatively leisurely adoption, the flying shuttle made Kay, if not wealthy, then at least prosperous; in 1738, he described his profession as that of "inventor," but by 1745, had promoted himself to the status of "gentleman." In 1747, he moved to France, where policies toward invention and inventing were as capricious as they had been in England under the Tudors: Inventors in good odor at the Bourbon court20 could be rewarded with pensions, loans, production subsidies, exclusive franchises, and even t.i.tles. Kay was able to receive a French "patent" on his shuttle just as his English patent was expiring, and in 1749 a pension.

Kay may have seen himself as a gentleman, but he never stopped inventing. In 1738, he patented a windmill that successfully competed with Newcomen's atmospheric engine in raising water from mines; in 1745, a loom whose spindles were coordinated by treadles, thus permitting the weaver to keep hands free; and in 1754, a new machine for making the cards used to store weaving designs. He spent so much time, in fact, traveling from France to Britain and back again in order to defend his patents that the French government revoked his pension in 1760 (though they restored it in 1770).

Without minimizing the importance of his inventions, Kay's posthumous reputation, as changeable as a couturier's hemlines, may have even more to say about the special character of the Industrial Revolution in England. Though his death in France occurred in such vague circ.u.mstances that even the year cannot be established precisely, a hundred years later, by the 1880s, the critical importance of textile mechanization in the making of what was newly called the Industrial Revolution was so obvious that he, and other clothmaking pioneers, were being lionized in both English and French biographies. When the times, and the culture, demanded a hero, Kay, a Central Casting dream for the part of the brilliant inventor denied credit, was made to fit the bill, and his reputation has risen and fallen regularly ever since.

That is not, however, the case with the flying shuttle itself, which indisputably revolutionized the craft of weaving. It didn't do so by making the skills of the artisan redundant. Quite the opposite, in fact. Kay's flying shuttle made it possible for weavers to produce a wider product, which they called "broadloom," but doing so was demanding. Weaving requires that the weft threads be under constant tension in order to make certain that each one is precisely the same length as its predecessor; slack is the enemy of a properly woven cloth. Using a flying shuttle to carry weft threads through the warp made it possible to weave a far wider bolt of cloth, but the required momentum introduced the possibility of a rebound, and thereby a slack thread. Kay's invention still needed a skilled artisan to catch the shuttle and so avoid even the slightest bit of bounce when it was thrown across the loom.

The significance of this fact for industrialization21 was twofold, and instructive. The initial impact of Kay's invention was an increase in the productivity of Britain's weavers-enough of an increase that they were able to weave all the yarn that they could get in less time than ever before. And they could do it by hand. Though power looms had existed, at least in concept, for centuries (under his sketch for one, Leonardo himself wrote, "This is second only to the printing press22 in importance; no less useful in its practical application; a lucrative, beautiful, and subtle invention"), there was little interest in them so long as virtually all the available yarn could be turned into cloth in cottages. This fact reinforced the weaver's independence; but it also encouraged another group of innovative types who were getting ready to put spinning itself on an industrial footing.

The first tools for spinning are not quite as old as the first looms. For millennia, the device used to make yarn consisted essentially of two simple sticks; one, the distaff, held the unspun fiber, while the other, the spindle, imparted twist as a pitchfork-shaped flyer wound the fiber around its "tines" and into yarn, with all the twisting and rotating done at different, though proportionally related speeds. The first wheels used to mechanize23 the process by turning the spindle at a consistent rate were probably invented in India during the fifth or sixth century CE, and made their way to Europe around the end of the first millennium, though the earliest doc.u.mented European spinning wheel can be dated only to 1298.

The significance of the spinning wheel is as large in the history of mechanical invention as it is in the history of textiles; it was not merely the first machine to transmit power via a belt, but after 1524, when Leonardo (surprise!) put wheel, crank, connecting rod, and treadle together, it was the first to do so with various parts of the machine revolving at different speeds. The bigger the wheel, the larger the demand for power; the wheels of the fourteenth century were spun by hand, by the sixteenth, by a foot treadle. Inevitably, more demand for yarn meant more demand for power, either animal, wind, water, or, eventually, steam.

The first step in that direction was taken in 1738 by Lewis Paul, a onetime carpenter who patented a machine that cleaned and carded fiber and "put [it] between a pair of rollers,24 cylinders, or cones, or some such movements, which being twined around by their motion, draws in the new ma.s.s of wool or cotton to be spun, in proportion to the velocity given to such rollers, cylinders, or cones; as the prepared ma.s.s presses regularly through or betwixt these rollers, cylinders, or cones, others, moving proportionally faster than the first, draw the rope, thread, or sliver to any degree of fineness"-a design that he improved with a new patent in 1758.

The following decade, an even larger step was taken. At almost exactly the same time that Matthew Boulton was creating the Soho Manufactory, Henry Cort was building his puddling furnace, Joseph Black was investigating the properties of latent heat, and James Watt was repairing Glasgow University's broken model of a Newcomen engine, a Lancashire weaver had his own Gestalt moment.*

The year of James Hargreaves's inspiration is a little vague-his daughter dated it to 1766-but not its character. While visiting a friend, Hargreaves observed a spinning wheel that had been knocked down; with the wheel and spindle in a vertical position, rather than their then-traditional horizontal one, they continued to revolve. In a flash, Hargreaves imagined25 a line of spindles, upright and side by side, spinning multiple threads simultaneously.

Nearly fifty years later, the first description of the spinning jenny ("jenny" is a dialect term for "engine" in Lancashire) appeared in the September 1807 issue of The Athenaeum, in which readers learned that the first one was made "almost wholly with a pocket knife.26 It contained eight spindles, and the clasp by which the thread was drawn out was the stalk of a briar split in two." The result is not just a romantic tale; the jenny immediately delivered an eightfold increase of the amount of yarn that a single spinner could produce. Just as immediately, the machine had customers-and enemies. Hargreaves's daughter recalled that fearful hand spinners "came to our house and burnt27 the frame work of twenty new machines."

In June 1770, Hargreaves drafted an application for a patent (number 962) which read, "much application and many trials28 [produced] a method of making a wheel or engine of an entire new construction that will spin, draw, and twist sixteen or more threads at one time by a turn or motion of the hand and the draw of the other." Those "many trials," and, more significantly, the delay between the first (and very public) sales of the jenny and receipt of legal protection for its design, made for some serious problems. Lancashire's cotton manufacturers* had been using the jenny for at least two years before Hargreaves got around to patenting it, and, under threat of losing their new best friend, they offered Hargreaves 3,000 for a license, which he evidently refused, seriously overplaying his hand. The fact that he had sold the jenny before patenting it severely limited his patent rights, and he died eight years later, comfortable, but not rich.

Hargreaves's experience was telling. Both ends of the clothmaking process-spinning and weaving-were dominated by artisans who defined their own interests in terms rather more complicated than a simple desire for wealth. Prior to the introduction of the jenny, Britain's spinning was performed largely by what we would call independent contractors: the original cottage industrialists, taking raw materials from manufacturers who "put out" for contract the production of finished fabric.

This was efficient-no huge capital expenses for the manufacturer, for example-but it contained within its organization what one might call a moral hazard. Since independent spinners worked for more than one manufacturer, they frequently juggled their contracts, delaying manufacturer number one in order to meet an order for number two. At its worst, this meant taking one manufacturer's raw material and using it to produce goods for another, hiding the choice by making a flimsier yarn for both.

The other half of the textile "industry" was no different. Like the lilies of the field, Britain's weavers did not spin, nor did they toil, at least not more than necessary. They were proud artisans who not only wanted to control their work, but also were famously unwilling to work too hard at it. In the words of historian David Landes, "Weavers typically rested and played long,29 well into the week, then worked hard toward the end in order to make delivery and collect pay on Sat.u.r.day.... Sat.u.r.day night was for drinking, Sunday brought more beer and ale." And it didn't end there; one of their more rambunctious traditions was the custom known as "Saint" Monday, an ode to which appeared sometime in the 1780s: When in due course, SAINT MONDAY30 wakes the day,

Off to a Purl-house straight they haste away;