The Most Powerful Idea in the World Part 8

Or, at a Gin-shop, ruin's beaten road,

Offer libations to a tippling G.o.d....

The att.i.tude of the day suited spinners and weavers a lot better than it did the manufacturers who employed them. The obvious solution to their problems was to observe the artisans as they worked, which meant getting them out of their cottages and into factories. One of the more obdurate rules of economics, however, is that, given their capital demands, factories are preferable to more flexibly "outsourced" labor only if they are more productive.

The place where they became so was the same one where the Lombes built England's first textile factory: on the banks of the River Derwent.

A TOUR GROUP DECIDING to engage a boat for a day trip along the Derwent might be forgiven for thinking that they had seen England change from a feudal to an industrial economy between morning and evening. Chatsworth Park, on the banks of the Derwent in Derbyshire's Peak District, is one of the greatest estates in Britain; from the sixteenth century on, Chatsworth House was only one of the many homes of the Dukes of Devonshire, built at the center of the sine qua non of medieval wealth: thousands of acres of productive agricultural land cultivated by tenant farmers. Downstream from Chatsworth Park's legendary gardens, the Derwent flows under a bridge even older than the dukedom, past the village of Darley Dale whose place in history marks another sort of wealth: Darley Dale was the home of Henry Maudslay's a.s.sistant, Joseph Whitworth, who established the standard for English screw threads. From there, the river takes a series of U-shaped oxbow turns through a deep set of limestone cliffs and picks up some tributary streams, emerging into a valley with heavy vegetation on both banks, broken, about five miles south of Darley Dale, by a onetime factory now housing a museum and a shopping mall, a sprawling red brick behemoth known as Ma.s.son Mills.

Ma.s.son Mills, and the Derwent Valley in which it was built, are, like the Iron Gorge foundries, recognized by the United Nations as an official World Heritage site. The reasons given by UNESCO read as follows: "The Derwent Valley saw the birth of the factory system, when new types of building were erected to house the new technology for spinning cotton.... In the Derwent Valley for the first time there was large-scale industrial production in a hitherto rural landscape. The need to provide housing and other facilities for workers and managers resulted in the creation of the first modern industrial towns." The system, the buildings, the transformation of the landscape, and even the towns arose on the banks of the Derwent almost entirely because of the efforts of one man: the brilliant, and exceedingly controversial, Richard Arkwright.

ARKWRIGHT WAS BORN IN Lancashire in 1732, to a family at the less prosperous end of the artisan scale-saddlers, tailors, shoemakers, and the like-who apprenticed him at age twelve to a slightly atypical trade. For six years, Arkwright studied the craft of barbering, though it didn't take him long to realize that he could make considerably more money making hair than removing it. For nearly fifteen years, he was a maker of wigs, recalling, "I was a barber,31 but I have left it off, and I and another are going up and down the country buying hair and can make more of it."

No doubt he found the trade in hair pleasant enough, at least until 1767, when he met, in a pub, an itinerant clockmaker with the confusing (to historians, anyway) name of John Kay. This John Kay had nothing to do with flying shuttles, but he did have an interest in the other side of clothmaking, and he boasted to his new drinking companion, just as he collapsed over his last drink, that he could build a machine that would spin cotton on rollers. As both men later recalled,32 Kay woke up to find the onetime wig maker looming over him demanding a small model as proof of the clockmaker's boasts.

As would be subsequently revealed, Kay had invented the new spinning machine in much the same way that John Lombe had invented the silk mill. Given the rather fluid att.i.tudes of the day concerning intellectual property, it's probably too much to say that he stole the design, but he certainly borrowed it, from a Lancashire reed maker and weaver named Thomas Highs, who may even have a claim on the invention of the spinning jenny (Highs's daughter, Jane,33 always maintained that it was named for her). Whatever his contribution to the jenny, he was clearly responsible for the design of the machine that Kay reproduced-from memory-for Arkwright, since two years before, Highs had hired the clockmaker to turn his wooden model into a working machine made of iron.

Fig. 6: This is the diagram that accompanied Arkwright's patent application, which became the 931st patent awarded by Britain, in July 1769. The rollers, on the right, teased out the fibers at different speeds, and were then given a helical twist by the wheel, on the left. The original power source was a horse mill driving a vertical shaft attached to a pulley; a belt, in turn, transferred the motion from the pulley to the spindles. Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library The Highs design did have one unique and important feature. While Paul's spinning machine had only one set of rollers, Highs's had two, with the second rotating five times as fast as the first. The second rollers therefore stretched the original thread fivefold before the jennylike bobbin-and-flyer gave it the needed twist, producing thread that was both longer and stronger than could be produced by either hand or jenny.

This was huge. English cotton was finally strong enough and long enough to be used not merely for weft but as warp thread, replacing both the more expensive linen and the Indian cotton that had been banned by the Calico Acts. Highs had invented the machine that would, more than any other, create Britain's cotton industry.

He did not, however, patent his creation, perhaps because he did not yet see the profit to be made from it. Richard Arkwright, however, did. In 1768, after keeping Kay sequestered in Nottingham for a full year, he applied for a patent, which was awarded in 1769, the same year that James Watt patented his separate condenser. Two years later, Arkwright and his two partners, Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, started building, at Cromford in the Derwent Valley, the first factory to use the new spinning machine, which he named the water frame-"water" because Arkwright's cotton was to be spun by harnessing the current of the River Derwent.

It is scarcely surprising that Arkwright's cotton mill was dependent on waterpower. Though Newcomen engines were by then familiar sights at mine shafts all over England, Britain's waterwheels produced at least ten times as much power as steam did, and the source of rotary motion for the rollers in Arkwright's water frames was a wheel set below a millrace off the Derwent River, harnessing not only water flow but gravity to deliver a nominal ten horsepower. It opened in 1771 and a year later was already a huge success, based on the enormous labor savings of the mill (as Arkwright himself wrote, "wee [sic] shall not want34 of the Hands I First Expect.d"); the high quality of the cotton, which approached silk in its smoothness; and, as was predictably the case, Jedediah Strutt's successful lobbying of Parliament to reduce the taxes on British-made cotton.

Success can cement the relations between partners; such was the story of Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It can also corrode them. In 1775, the partnership of Arkwright, Strutt, and Need was showing some signs of rot. That was the year that Arkwright applied for, and received, an entirely new series of patents for machines that could, sequentially, card and comb raw cotton, draw it into thread, and twist it into yarn, intended to centralize every aspect of the manufacturing process. Significantly, the 1775 patents were in Arkwright's name only, unlike the original 1769 water frame patent, which included the two partners (though not Kay, who had been formally apprenticed to Arkwright and subsequently left after much conflict with his master). The partnership did not survive, though both Strutt and Need were well compensated for their few years' investment when Arkwright bought out their shares in the Cromford mill.

In 1774, another Lancashire inventor, Samuel Crompton, had produced the first machine to integrate a spindle carriage with a weaving frame, and could thus take raw material in one end and produce cloth at the other. But Crompton, either out of perversity or lack of ambition, never patented his invention, apparently being more interested in the writings of the Swedish scientist, inventor, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. As a result, though Richard Arkwright paid a small fee to see the machine demonstrated in 1780, he had no obligation to pay subsequent royalties to its inventor, and almost immediately he incorporated Crompton's invention-the first "mule," so called because of its mixed parentage-into his factories, of which the most spectacular was Ma.s.son Mills.

If the Derwent River mills weren't already, Crompton's mule made them the most productive, if not the most enlightened, in the world, running two twelve-hour shifts daily. The machines still required adult strength and skill to operate, but numerous tasks, including gleaning the unused cotton, gave employment (if that is the right word) to hundreds of children as young as six. When the brilliant engineer and indefatigable improver John Smeaton demonstrated that b.r.e.a.s.t.shot waterwheels, which caught the flow of water as it fell from a millrace, were more efficient than the undershot wheels that were turned only by a river's current, Arkwright changed his power source within months.

He was, partly because of his success with waterpower,35 suspicious of steam, about which he displayed an atypical indecisiveness, inquiring about a Boulton & Watt engine as early as 1777 but waiting until 1790 to order one. While he preferred waterpower, he was scarcely dogmatic about it; his Nottingham factory continued to use horse-powered wheels long after he shifted to water, partly as an experiment in calculating his power needs; he could scarcely add to or subtract36 from a river's flow in the same way that he could add or subtract horses on their wheel. Horse power, in addition (and again unlike waterpower), was scalable: As a factory grew, it was easier to augment horse power than waterpower.

By the 1780s, however, Arkwright finally caught an enthusiasm for returning engines, the kind that use steam pumps to transport water to a higher elevation, which allowed gravity flow to operate a waterwheel. In 1781, Smeaton evaluated the potential of mills worked by steam directly versus those mediated by water and wrote that "no motion can ever act perfectly steady37 and equal in producing a circular motion, like the regular efflux of water turning in a waterwheel." Arkwright took him at his word. He built the Shudehill mill, in Manchester, which used two Newcomen-type steam engines, consuming five tons of coal daily, to pump water to a reservoir from which it could drive a waterwheel thirty feet in diameter and eight feet wide, recycling the water all day long; the "earliest steam-powered cotton spinning mill38 was driven by the earliest successful type of steam engine."

By the time he built Shudehill, Richard Arkwright employed at least five thousand people and his estimated net worth was somewhere north of 200,000.39 That was also the year in which he decided to take his winning streak to court, filing suit to protect his rights in the underlying 1769 patent, which was due to expire in 1783, along with his royalties on the fundamental machine used in cotton spinning. Arkwright had consistently set those royalties very high, partly to protect his own manufacturing businesses, and as a result had no shortage of infringers; in 1781, Arkwright sued nine of them, and the court found for him eight times. Unsatisfied, he kept up the pressure for another four years, even after the expiration of his first and most important patent.

In February 1785, Arkwright filed suit against his Derbyshire neighbor "Mad Peter" Nightingale* to finally recover the carding portion of his 1775 patent, and although he secured a finding of infringement, Arkwright had finally overreached. In May 1785, the Crown, under pressure from Arkwright's compet.i.tors, filed a writ of scire facias, using an archaic legal doctrine that required a sheriff to notify a party that his right was questioned and had to be defended. By placing the burden of proof on Arkwright rather than his accusers, his compet.i.tors in the cotton industry, who had invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in machinery that they understandably wanted to be able to use without permission from Arkwright, had stumbled on a powerful weapon.

The trial of Rex v. Arkwright, which was heard at Westminster Hall in June 1785, was the result. The original dubiousness of Arkwright's "invention" now came back to haunt him, as Highs and Kay, and even James Hargreaves's widow, all appeared as witnesses against him, with Kay going on record as saying "he never would have had the rollers but through me." Arkwright, during his own testimony, said, "if any man has found out a thing,40 and begun a thing, and does not go forwards ... another man has the right to take it up, and get a patent for it."

The final ruling, by Chief Justice Buller, found against Arkwright on three separate grounds: that the 1775 patent was not novel (that it essentially restated the 1769 patent, in an attempt to extend it); that it included elements not invented by Arkwright; and that it was insufficiently specific. On November 14, 1785, the Court of King's Bench vacated four of Arkwright's patents.

He was enraged, but hardly impoverished, by the ruling. The real impact, however, was the unique public forum it offered Britain on the subject of patent, invention, and the new world that they had created. Though the public attacks on Arkwright's behavior were vicious (as were the courtroom tactics: King's Counsel Edward Bearcroft pointed to Arkwright and declared, "There sits the thief!"41), the actual decision against him was based on the technical grounds that his original specification was too vague. Though the last piece of the decision was the least newsworthy-the broadsheet distributed immediately after the trial, which crowed that "the old Fox is at last caught42 by his own beard in his own trap," made no mention of it-it was by far the most significant.

By failing to describe the invention adequately, Arkwright's patent application had, in essence, broken the bargain that granted patents to inventors in return for their making public the useful knowledge inherent in them. This part of the ruling would draw the attention of a number of other inventors, including James Watt.

Watt had been drawn into the Arkwright litigation in January 1785, at the behest of Boulton, who received a letter from Erasmus Darwin that said in part, "If yourself or Mr. Watt think as I do43 on this affair, & that your own interest, pray give me a line that I may advise Mr. Arkwright to apply to you." Watt replied, "Though I do not love Arkwright,44 I don't like the precedent of setting aside patents through default of specification. I fear for our own. The specification is not perfect according to the rules lately laid down by the judges. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that we [Boulton & Watt] have hid our candle under a bushel. We have taught all men to erect our engines, and are likely to suffer for our pains.... I begin to have little faith in patents; for according to the enterprising genius of the present age, no man can have a profitable patent but it will be pecked at...."

Watt did more than simply offer testimony in the Nightingale trial. After the final decision in November 1785, Josiah Wedgwood, like Watt and Boulton a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and himself a successful industrialist, wrote to Watt, "I have visited Mr. Arkwright45 several times and find him much more conversible than I expected.... I told him you were considering the subject of patents, and you two geniuses may probably strike out some new lights together which neither of you might think of separately." Wedgwood proved prescient; together, Watt and Arkwright wrote a ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled "Heads of a Bill to explain and amend the laws relative to Letters Patent and grants of privileges for new Inventions," essentially a reworking of c.o.ke's Statute of 1623 that had created England's first patent law. In addition to its policy prescriptions, which were largely an unsuccessful argument against the requirement that patent applications be as specific as possible, the ma.n.u.script offered a remarkable insight into Watt's perspective on the life of the inventor, who should, in Watt's own (perhaps inadvertently revealing) words, "be considered an Infant, who cannot guard his own Rights": An engineer's life without patent46 is not worthwhile ... few men of ingenuity make fortunes ... without suffering to think seriously whether the article he manufactures might, or might not, be Improved. The man of ingenuity in order to succeed ... must seclude himself from Society, he must devote the whole powers of his mind to that one object, he must persevere in spite of the many fruitless experiments he makes, and he must apply money to the expenses of these experiments, which strict Prudence would dedicate to other purposes. By seclusion from the world he becomes ignorant of its manners, and unable to grapple with the more artful tradesman, who has applied the powers of his mind, not to the improvement of the commodity he deals in, but to the means of buying cheap and selling dear, or to the still less laudable purpose of oppressing such ingenious workmen as their ill fate may have thrown into his power.

At no earlier time or other place in human history could Watt's argument-"patents create a great and profitable trade ... to the immense emolument of the state," which should therefore grant patents "not as the price of a secret,47 but as rewards to men of merit for their ingenuity"-have even been comprehensible.* Combining Locke's seventeenth-century doctrine of natural rights in one's intellectual labor with eighteenth-century utilitarianism, it was, literally, revolutionary.

Arkwright died a wealthy man in 1792; within a few decades, biographers would describe him as a fraud who had, in one biographer's words, "possessed unwearied zeal49 and patience in obtaining the discoveries of others." A few years later, others would defend him; one described him as "a man of Napoleonic nerve and ambition." By the 1840s, the retrospectively apparent fact that Arkwright, and men like him, had made Britain a world-straddling power pretty much guaranteed a measure of florid, if backhanded, hero worship. The greatest hero-worshipper of them all, Thomas Carlyle, described Arkwright as A plain, almost gross,50 bag-cheeked, potbellied, much enduring, much inventing man and barber.... French Revolutions were a-brewing: to resist the same in any measure, imperial Kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth of England, and it was this man that had to give England the power of cotton.... It is said ideas produce revolutions, and truly they do; not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical. In this clanging clashing universal Sword-dance which the European world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one choragus [leader of a movement, from the old Greek word for the sponsor of a chorus] where Richard Arkwright is another.

This touches on, but misses, the importance of the part played by Arkwright in the birth of self-sustaining industrialization. Sooner or later, the cycle of innovation needed to provide goods not merely for Britain's manufacturers and traders-what a modern a.n.a.lysis would call business-to-business commerce-but the nation's consumers. The typical eighteenth-century British household could scarcely buy cannon, or wooden pulley blocks for sailing ships, or-except for home heating-even much coal. But they could, and did, buy clothes. Arkwright was not a great inventor, but he was a visionary, who saw, better than any man alive, how to convert useful knowledge into cotton apparel and ultimately into wealth: for himself, and for Britain.

IN ADDITION TO MAKING cloth and inspiring innovation, textile manufacturing produced conflict. More than the mining of coal, or the making of iron, or even the grinding of grain, it exposed the great social clash of the day: on the one hand, the power of sustained innovation, fueled by ever-increasing wealth; on the other, five centuries of traditional expertise controlled by militant and well-organized artisans. None of them were more militant, or better organized, than Britain's spinners and weavers.

Spinning first. The art of spinning is largely a matter of coordinating several processes simultaneously so that the fiber is under constant tension. Since it is elastic, the amount of tension applied to it while it is wound can result in yarn that is inconsistent in quality from one end to the other. In the first spinning machines, the operator had to simultaneously shape the winding and turn the spindles at precisely the same rate, so as to wind up the yarn-the term of art is "winding the cop"-without either stretching the yarn or allowing it to go slack. The craft was difficult enough that spinners became not only indispensable to the process, but highly protective of their place in it, exhibiting all the rent-seeking mania of a medieval guild. Along the way they transformed themselves from independent contractors into the nation's most powerful and highly organized craft union. At one union meeting, a spinner argued violently against allowing "piecers" (the subordinates on the spinning line, who tie together threads when they break) to actually put up a cop of cotton yarn unless he was "a son, brother, or orphan nephew."51 In the industry's Lancashire heartland,52 mule spinners developed work rules in 1780 that remained in force until the 1960s, and partly in consequence, the new and improved ring-spinning machines, invented by the American John Thorp in 1828, which operated continuously and twisted fibers into yarn by attaching them to a rotating ring, didn't catch on in Britain53 until the end of the nineteenth century.

As with spinning, so with weaving. Edmund Cartwright, a onetime Church of England minister and "the last of the great inventors54 who belong to the craft period," built the first power loom in 1785, inspired by the need to keep up with the great surpluses of yarn being produced by Arkwright's factories.* As Cartwright later recalled, as soon as Arkwright's patent expired,55 so many mills would be erected and so much cotton spun that hands would never be found to weave it.... It struck me that as plain weaving can only be three movements which were to follow each other in succession, there would be little difficulty in producing them and repeating them. Full of these ideas I immediately employed a carpenter and smith to carry them into effect. As soon as the machine was finished, I got a weaver to put in a warp which was of such material as sail cloths are usually made of. To my great delight, a piece of cloth, such as it was, was the product.

Cartwright's initial design, for which he received a patent in 1785, was ingenious, but not yet practical, because it failed to solve the feedback problem inherent in the nature of mechanizing the shuttle, which was, in the language of engineering, "negatively driven." That is, it was driven first one way, then the other, which meant that it could not be allowed to rebound and so slacken the weave. The task of maintaining the constant tension needed to keep each thread of the warp the same length was hugely difficult to mechanize, which was why weaving remained a handcraft longer than any other step in textile manufacturing. Among other things, Cartwright needed some way to control variations in speed, since a too-slow shuttle wouldn't travel the entire width of the loom, and a too-fast one would bounce back, with disastrous results.

It took two years, and three more patents, before the Reverend Cartwright's loom was ready for commercial application, but in April 1787, the new and improved version, with its frame now horizontal rather than vertical, and with each warp thread attached to a separate bobbin, was complete.

Cartwright constructed twenty looms using his design and put them to work in a weaving "shed" in Doncaster. He further agreed to license the design to a cotton manufacturer named Robert Grimshaw, who started building five hundred Cartwright looms at a new mill in Manchester in the spring of 1792. By summertime, only a few dozen had been built and installed, but that was enough to provoke Manchester's weavers, who accurately saw the threat they represented. Whether their anger flamed hot enough to burn down Grimshaw's mill remains unknown, but something certainly did: In March 1792, after a series of anonymous threats, the mill was destroyed.

Cartwright's power looms were not the first textile machines to be attacked, and they would not be the last.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S THIRD law of motion states that every action is paired with an equal and opposite reaction. The "equal and opposite" reaction to the industrialization of the textile industry-and, by extension, all industrialization-is widely, though vaguely, known as Luddism.

Resistance to the mechanization of the traditional crafts of spinning and weaving had been around for two centuries before anyone heard of Luddism, or Luddites. In 1551 Parliament pa.s.sed legislation56 prohibiting mechanical gig mills, used to raise the nap on wool, and William Lee, inventor of an early knitting frame, was forced by the hosier's guild to leave England in 1589. More often, hostility to machinery made itself known not in the form of writs and laws but crowbars and clubs. In 1675, weavers in Spitalfields attacked engines (not, of course, steam-powered) able to multiply the efforts of a single worker. Not only was Richard Hargreaves's original spinning jenny destroyed57 in 1767, but so also was his new and improved version in 1769.

Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. Machine breaking in France was at least as frequent, and probably even more consequential, though it can be hard to tease out whether the phenomenon contributed to, or was a symptom of, some of the uglier aspects of the French Revolution. Normandy in particular,58 which was not only close to England but the most "English" region of France, was the site of dozens of incidents in 1789 alone. In July, hundreds of spinning jennys were destroyed, along with a French version of Arkwright's water frame. In October, an attorney in Rouen applauded the destruction of "the machines used in cotton-spinning59 that have deprived many workers of their jobs." In Troyes, spinners rioted, killing the mayor and mutilating his body because "he had favored machines."60 The carders of Lille destroyed machines in 1790; in 1791, the spinning jennies of Roanne were hacked up and burned. By 1796, administrators in the Department of the Somme were complaining, it turns out presciently, that the "prejudice against machinery61 has led the commercial cla.s.ses ... to abandon their interest in the cotton industry."

The Luddite version of machine breaking-what the historian E. J. Hobsbawm called "collective bargaining by riot"62-was the product of half a dozen different but related historical threads. One was surely the Napoleonic Wars, which had been under way more or less continuously for more than fifteen years by the time of the first Luddite activity. The war economy had affected the textile industry of the Midlands no less than the shipbuilders of Portsmouth, first with dramatic increases in demand for sailcloth and uniforms, and then-as Napoleon's so-called "Continental System" restricted British trade with the Americas and Europe-with equally dramatic decreases in exports, which fell by nearly a third from 1810 to 1811.

Bad enough to be a manufacturer in such times; far worse to be a laborer. Handloom weavers had been earning63 nearly twenty shillings a week in the 1790s; twenty years later, mostly because of the large number of new entrants to the industry, they were now earning less than ten. Factory workers were paid better, but the conditions in which they worked could be much worse: lung-destroying cotton dust everywhere, and noise so loud that workers were obliged to invent a method of lip-reading (known in Lancashire as "mee-mawing"64).

Many were nonetheless driven to factory work by the dramatic increase in the amount of rural land removed from the commons-the so-called "enclosure" movement by which more than six million acres of fields, meadows, and forests representing more than half of all the land then in cultivation in England65 were hedged, fenced, and turned into private property between 1770 and 1830. Enclosure was bad enough; in combination with war-fueled inflation, it doubled the price of food: a loaf of bread that had cost ninepence in 1800, by 1810 carried a price of a shilling and fivepence. The effective increase, to a handloom weaver who had seen his income halved in the same decade, was even more onerous, from 4 percent of his weekly wage to more than 14 percent.

Resentment and hunger among Britain's weavers made for an explosive mixture. The first shots of the "rebellion," however, were fired, not by weavers of broadloom but by an even more militant subset of textile artisans: Nottingham's stocking knitters.

The technique of knotting and looping a single length of yarn into a continuous fabric is a fairly new technique, at least as compared to weaving, but versions still date back several thousand years. Evidence of the earliest, the single-needle craft known retrospectively by the Norse term nalbinding, has been found in the third-century CE Syrian city of Dura-Europos, but the use of double needles to pull one knot through another didn't replace the far more difficult technique until the early Middle Ages. Double-needle knitting is not only faster, but it can, by selective choice of dropped st.i.tches, curve in three dimensions, and it is therefore a highly attractive method for producing garments that need to be form-fitting. For most of human history, this meant extremities: gloves for hands, and (especially) stockings for feet. The skill required to produce a knitted sock by hand was great enough, and the investment in training so expensive, that stockingers were even more opposed to mechanization than either spinners or weavers.

This did not, of course, eliminate the urge to invent. The stocking frame, the world's first knitting machine, was designed and built in 1589 by William Lee of Nottingham, a onetime curate who twice attempted to secure patent protection, failing both times. The lack of a patent66 took royalties out of Lee's pocket but did nothing to stall the widespread adoption of the machine, which increased speed from a hundred st.i.tches per minute to a thousand. This demanded a response from the stocking makers; in 1657, during the Protectorate, the London Company of Framework Knitters persuaded Oliver Cromwell to grant them a charter, and thus effective control over the production of knitted fabric throughout England. Sixty years later, disputes between the guilds of London and Nottingham ended with the latter independent of its parent guild and home to lots of new stockingers.* In the late 1770s, they pet.i.tioned Parliament67 to formalize their exclusive ownership of their craft with a law ent.i.tled "the Art and Mystery of Framework Knitting," and when it failed to pa.s.s, they rioted in Nottingham.

The stockingers' fierce defense of their prerogatives thus had a long list of precedents on March 11, 1811, when the first shots of the Luddite "rebellion" were fired. By then, Nottingham alone probably had nine thousand stocking frames, Leicestershire and Derbyshire another eleven thousand-and fewer than half were in use. Their owner-operators had become victims of both compet.i.tion from factory "cut-ups" (stockings sewn together from two or more knit pieces, which had the benefit of being easier and cheaper to make, though far less st.u.r.dy) and the vagaries of Regency fashion; the legendary dandy Beau Brummel, who famously claimed that a frugal man could, with discipline, dress himself for no more than 1,000 a year, preferred trousers to knee socks.

The stockingers began in the town of Arnold,68 where weaving frames were being used to make cut-ups and, even worse, were being operated by weavers who had not yet completed the seven-year apprenticeship that the law required. They moved next to Nottingham and the weaver-heavy villages surrounding it, attacking virtually every night for weeks, a few dozen men carrying torches and using prybars and hammers to turn wooden frames-and any doors, walls, or windows that surrounded them-into kindling. None of the perpetrators were arrested, much less convicted and punished.

The attacks continued throughout the spring69 of 1811, and after a brief summertime lull started up again in the fall, by which time nearly one thousand weaving frames had been destroyed (out of the 25,000 to 29,000 then in Nottingham, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire), resulting in damages of between 6,000 and 10,000. That November, a commander70 using the nom de sabotage of Ned Ludd (sometimes Lud)-the name was supposedly derived from an apprentice to a Leicester stockinger named Ned Ludham whose reaction to a reprimand was to hammer the nearest stocking frame to splinters-led a series of increasingly daring attacks throughout the Midlands. On November 13, a letter to the Home Office demanded action against the "2000 men, many of them armed,71 [who] were riotously traversing the County of Nottingham."

By December 1811, rioters appeared in the cotton manufacturing capital of Manchester, where Luddites smashed both weaving and spinning machinery. Because Manchester was further down the path72 to industrialization, and therefore housed such machines in large factories as opposed to small shops, the destruction demanded larger, and better organized, mobs. Because the communities they targeted were likewise better protected-Manchester alone had more than three thousand men73 serving as constables or members of the city's night watch-it also put more of them at risk of capture, and by 1812, dozens of Luddites were on trial. Most were acquitted, but all were required to take loyalty oaths, and those at risk of punishment were granted royal pardons, though only under condition that they renounce Luddism and reaffirm their loyalty to the Crown on pain of death.

By 1812, however, the riots had started to inspire other disaffected laborers. In January, the West Riding of Yorkshire74 was subject to regular attacks by groups of "croppers" (men who used fifty-pound hand shears to cut the nap from woolen cloth, thus making it smooth) in fear for their jobs by the introduction of yet other new inventions: the once-banned gig mill, which raised the nap of the wool so that it could be sheared; and the complete shearing frame, which made a slightly inferior article, but could be operated by relatively unskilled workers.

On January 1, the Framework Knitters issued a doc.u.ment that declared, among other things, Whereas by the charter75 granted by our late sovereign Lord Charles II by the Grace of G.o.d King of Great Britain France and Ireland, the framework knitters are empowered to break and destroy all frames and engines that fabricate articles in a fraudulent and deceitful manner and to destroy all framework knitters' goods whatsoever that are so made and whereas a number of deceitful unprincipled and intriguing persons did attain an Act to be pa.s.sed in the 28th year of our present sovereign Lord George III whereby it was enacted that persons entering by force into any house shop or place to break or destroy frames should be adjudged guilty of felony and as we are fully convinced that such Act was obtained in the most fraudulent interested and electioneering manner and that the honourable the Parliament of Great Britain was deceived as to the motives and intentions of the persons who obtained such Act we therefore the framework knitters do hereby declare the aforesaid Act to be null and void....

Given under my hand this first day of January 1812. G.o.d protect the Trade. Ned Lud's Office-Sherwood Forest The choice of words is revealing. The knitters believed themselves to be not merely injured economically, but victims of fraud and deceit. This made them not only self-interested76 but self-righteous, and through the spring of 1812, attacks grew more and more violent, with total damage estimated at 100,000 and at least a dozen deaths, almost all of them Luddites shot by hors.e.m.e.n from the Scots Greys, an army troop quartered nearby. In self-defense, the Luddites began targeting armories in order to equip themselves with firearms and ammunition; more alarming to the national government, the mobs had adopted Jacobin vernacular and costume, including the red flag, the drapeau rouge, of the Revolution. The national government was ready to react, or, more precisely, overreact. In February 1812, frame breaking was made a capital offense, and twelve thousand soldiers-roughly the number of British troops the future Duke of Wellington had led into battle against the French in Portugal four years earlier-deployed to enforce it. During a single Luddite attack on a Lancashire steam loom on April 18, five were killed and eighteen wounded. Hundreds were transported to Australia, and even more imprisoned. On April 28, a group of Luddites led by the onetime cropper George Mellor attacked the Rawfolds Mill and killed William Horsfall, its owner. Newspapers were reporting not just a local insurrection but a national rebellion.

Much of it was exaggeration. In July 1812, another letter to the Home Office, this from Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding, described a somewhat less frantic scene: I do not mean to say, that parties of Luddites77 have not been met travelling from place to place, and perhaps marshalled in some degree of order, but that there is no evidence whatever, that any one person has yet established the fact of their having been a.s.sembled and drilling in a military way-as far as negative evidence can go, I think, the contrary seems established.

The Luddite legend has survived for centuries in part because of the appeal of a romantic brotherhood, a secret society complete with blood oaths: "I,______, of my own free will and accord do hereby promise, and swear that I will never reveal any of the names of any one of this secret committee, under the penalty of being sent out of this world by the first brother that may meet me, I furthermore do swear, that I will pursue with unceasing vengeance any traitor or traitors ..." and even secret signals and pa.s.swords: You must raise your right hand78 over your right eye if there be another Luddite in company he will raise his left hand over his left eye-then you must raise the forefinger of your right hand to the right side of your mouth-the other will raise the little finger of his left hand to the left side of his mouth and will say What are you? The answer, Determined-he will say, What for? Your answer, Free Liberty-then he will converse with you and tell you anything he knows....

Though they would not have used the terms, the Luddites were on one side of a newly violent debate about the relationship between labor and property. Opposing them was the newfangled notion that ideas were property; the Luddites argued (with crowbars and torches) that their skills were property. The right of men to enjoy the fruits of their labor gave them license to defend the free exercise of those skills in exactly the same way that they might defend their houses.

The Luddite rebellion failed for the most obvious reason: an enormous disparity in military power, power that the national government was, eventually, willing to bring to bear. The Luddite idea lost the historical battle-"Luddite" is not, in most of the contemporary world, used as anything but an insult-because its thesis, which might be abbreviated as "property equals labor plus skill," was less attractive than the idea that property equals labor plus ideas. The victory of the latter was decided not by argument, but economics: it produced more wealth, not just for individuals, but for an entire nation. Over time, the patents of Lombe, Kay, Hargreaves, and Arkwright not only became public property but attracted competing and superior inventions. In 1813, there were 2,400 power looms79 in England; in 1820 there were 12,150, and by 1833 more than 85,000. With the introduction of the iron power loom by Henry Maudslay's onetime a.s.sistant Richard Roberts in 1822, a weaver could produce seven pieces of cotton shirting in a week, each twenty-four yards long, while a hand weaver could make only two. Three years later, the same weaver would average twelve weekly, and six years after that, "a steam-loom weaver,80 from 15 to 20 years of age, a.s.sisted by a girl about 12 years of age, attending to four looms, [could] weave eighteen similar pieces in a week; some can weave twenty." During the century and a half81 that followed the Calico Acts, the productivity of the cotton industry increased fourteenfold.

We feel real poignancy when we recall the bucolic life (even if we do so through the soft focus of nostalgia) of a country weaver happy in his work skills and content with his life. But those skills, like those of a medieval goldsmith or an ancient carpenter, could not, by their very nature, reproduce themselves outside the closed community of the initiates. One lesson of the Luddite rebellion specifically, and the Industrial Revolution generally, is that maintaining the prosperity of those closed communities-their pride in workmanship as well as their economic well-being-can only be paid for by those outside the communities: by society at large. A great artisan can make a family prosperous; a great inventor can enrich an entire nation.

* The name, which appears in even some modern maps, is not such a leap as it seems. The city was also known, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Legorno, harking back to a pre-Roman people known as the Ligurians, either directly or because of proximity to the Ligurian Sea. The two names, despite the number of shared letters, have no etymological connection.

* In one sense, the plans were unnecessary, since the mill was described in Zonca's posthumously published 1607 book Novo teatro di machine, a copy of which was owned by the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Unfortunately, while there is no reason to think that Lombe, or for that matter anyone else, was aware of it, the existence of the book makes at least some of the more romantic stories about the theft slightly less persuasive. As a case in point, Lombe's first biographer, William Hutton, wrote that the Piedmontese silk weavers were so angry at the theft of their secrets that they sent a femme fatale ("an artful woman," in Hutton's words) to England to seduce and poison John Lombe.

* The Mercer's Company, which dates back to at least 1348 and which was chosen by the Lord Mayor of London as the first guild in the city's hierarchy in 1515, still exists, along with one hundred other so-called "livery" companies including traditional ones like goldsmiths and weavers and rather more modern ones like information technologists.

* Or possibly not. See Thomas Highs's version, below.

* One of them was the future prime minister Robert Peel, whose father had been a partner of Hargreaves.

* This nickname for Nightingale, great-uncle of Florence, was apparently earned by his daredevil horseback riding.

* It's not fully comprehensible even today, since it depends on a principle that remains problematic: the belief that a direct line can be drawn from a single invention to a single inventor. In the 1920s, the historians William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas first doc.u.mented the notion of "multiples"-simultaneous discovery by different people, which occurred with the telephone (Bell and Elisha Gray), thermometer (six different inventors), steamboat (Fulton, Jouffroy, Stevens, etc.), and calculus (Newton and Leibniz). Robert K. Merton wrote an essay on scientific discovery in the 1960s suggesting that the more gifted the scientist, the more likely that his discoveries will be multiply discovered, thus inspiring the statistician Stephen Stigler to formulate Stigler's Law: No scientific discovery is ever named48 after its original discoverer.

* He was also, apparently, convinced of the practicality of such a machine by the success of the "Mechanical Turk," a supposed chess-playing robot that had mystified all of Europe and which had not yet been revealed as one of the era's great hoaxes: a hollow figurine concealing a human operator. Inventors are sometimes beneficiaries of their own ignorance.

* And lots of new stockings. Knitting anything but wool or silk was a pretty daunting task until 1758, when Jedediah Strutt-Richard Arkwright's partner-patented the Derby Rib, which alternated two st.i.tches, one the reverse of the other, and so made the production of ribbed cotton stockings as practical as that of silk.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

WEALTH OF NATIONS.

concerning Malthusian traps and escapes; spillovers and residuals; the uneasy relationship between population growth and innovation; and the limitations of Chinese emperors, Dutch bankers, and French revolutionaries IT TOOK ABOUT SIX hundred years for the publishing industry to get from Johann Gutenberg to the book you are now reading.* The most remarkable eight-week stretch in all of those six centuries fell between January and March 1776-a year overloaded with significant dates. On January 10, Thomas Paine published the pamphlet Common Sense ("Society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness"). February 17 saw the first volume of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire roll off the presses ("In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth ..."). And on March 9, a former University of Glasgow colleague of Joseph Black published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Standing in London's Science Museum, in front of Rocket and surrounded by models of Thomas Newcomen's beam engine, Joseph Bramah's challenge lock, and James Watt's separate condenser, it takes very little imagination to see connections with iron foundries, coal mines, and even cotton fields. The road back to Adam Smith requires more thought, but is just as important, and as enlightening.

Smith's book, like Darwin's Origin of Species, was revolutionary in its impact, immediately and permanently, though both are far more frequently cited than read. In particular, Wealth of Nations demonstrates that Britain's eighteenth-century transformation-the schoolboy's "wave of gadgets"-was a revolution not merely in technology but in commerce. The founding text of economic science is staggering in its range, with disquisitions on the origin of money, the nature of commodities, interest rates, profitability, the mechanics of trade, bank interest, taxation, public debt, agriculture, and manufacturing. It devotes thousands of words to histories of Europe's towns from the end of the Roman Empire to the present, and of colonial policy from the time of ancient Greece. It is telling, therefore, that Smith decided to open his magnum opus with a section entirely devoted to the "causes of improvement in the productive powers of labour [and] in the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which labour is applied in any nation." This was a remarkable bit of insight, the application of Locke's labor theory of value to national policy.

Smith argued that two conditions were necessary for labor to produce the maximum amount of wealth: perfect compet.i.tion among sellers-everyone pursuing his or her selfish interest, the famous "invisible hand"-and the complete freedom of buyers to subst.i.tute one commodity for another. Under such ideal circ.u.mstances (Smith was not the first economist, but he was probably the first to "a.s.sume a can opener," i.e. perfect conditions, in a model), specialization, or division of labor, was inevitable. Ten men could each bake their own bread, weave their own cloth, and build their own houses, but if one became a baker, another a weaver, and a third a builder, the result would be more food, clothing, bricks ... and trade.

Smith's theorems did a spectacular job of explaining the self-regulating character of a free market, in which prices and profits are forced by compet.i.tion to the lowest possible level.* They inspired David Ricardo's exposition, in 1817, of the principle of diminishing returns: his argument that the growth of the first decades of industrialization was certain to level off, as each successive improvement produced smaller results. Helped along by the inflation in food prices caused by the Napoleonic Wars, they even set the stage for Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, with its famous argument that population always grows geometrically, food production arithmetically.

What they didn't do was explain how wealth, profit, and compet.i.tion can all grow over time. In short, it didn't explain the two centuries of growth that were beginning just as Wealth of Nations was being published. It is in no way a criticism of the book to state that it covered everything except the reason the author's own nation was about to get wealthier than any other nation in the history of mankind. The failure is pretty much explained by what is not in the book. Despite living in the middle of the biggest explosion of inventive activity ever recorded, and even though his ill.u.s.tration of the advantages of specialization was a factory for making pins, Smith's book hardly mentions the role of the new machines then transforming his world. Next to nothing about waterpower, to say nothing of steam; nothing about the forging of iron,1 and his few paragraphs about the textile revolution are mostly an argument for restricting the export of spinning machines. His pin factory, it turns out, was only a metaphor; he never set foot inside one.

Nor did he show any understanding of Darby's furnace, or Arkwright's water frame, or Watt's double-acting engine-none of the escape hatches out of humanity's millennium-long Malthusian trap. The efficiencies of specialization are real, and the self-regulating "invisible hand" powerful, but it was the machines, and nothing else, that allowed Britain, and then the world, to finally produce food (or the wealth with which to buy food) faster than it produced mouths to consume it.

A lot more is known about how population increases than how wealth grows. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was decades old before anyone realized that wealth was growing at all. The first edition of Malthus's Essay on Population was published in 1798 and convinced nearly everyone that the hoofbeats of the hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse could already be heard throughout England. In 1817, the English economist David Ricardo predicted2 that land rents would increase while wages would approach subsistence level, at precisely the moment when British farmland rents per acre started to plummet and the wages of laborers to explode. Partly this was evidence of the limits of accounting with very little data; Britain's first census, inspired by Malthus, wasn't conducted until 1800. But even more it was the lack of a model that carved up overall growth into its const.i.tuent parts.

In 1890, another economist, the mathematically trained Cambridge scholar Alfred Marshall, suggested that the century of growth in both income and wealth that began just as Ricardo predicted its opposite was largely due to ideas whose benefits spilled over into the economy soon after they had enriched their creator. An idea-a separate condenser, for example, or a spinning jenny-might be costly for one inventor to develop, but it wasn't long (not even the fourteen years of a patent) before it became de facto public property, and inspired others to improve upon it.

Marshall's "spillovers" were intriguing but remained anecdotal until the 1950s, when the n.o.bel Prizewinning economist Robert Solow incorporated something very like it into an equation known as the fundamental equation of growth. Working from a contemporary economic model that had shown that capital, labor, and land could be subst.i.tuted for one another-as one component grew more expensive, producers could subst.i.tute one for the other-Solow was able to calculate the rate at which average workers increase their output. He found three components of output increase, each one reflecting the key inputs to the national wealth calculus. The first two, land per worker and capital per worker, are, if not easy, at least possible to measure. Except during times of dramatic depopulation, such as the Black Death of the fourteenth century, or extremely large additions to the stock of arable land, as with Europe's discovery of the New World, growth in land per worker has been negligible for centuries, so small that its effect on growth can be eliminated in the simplest calculations. The second component, growth in capital3 per worker-that is, all the buildings, machinery, tools, and so on-explains only about 24 percent of total growth. However, since the growth in the amount of land and capital per worker together doesn't equal the overall growth rate, a fudge factor must be used, called the residual: what's left over.

This also means that the residual, despite the a.s.s-backward way it is calculated, amounts to at least three-quarters of the total increase in economic growth since 1800. That's a big chunk of activity defined by subtracting everything else, a little like a ten-drawer file cabinet with seven drawers marked "Miscellaneous." Solow first a.s.sumed4 that the residual represented increasing efficiency over time, and he incorporated an arbitrary constant to represent the rate of the growth in useful knowledge.

Useful knowledge, in this formulation, is not all knowledge. The growth in capital includes not just cash, buildings, and machines, but also patents-for the duration of the grant. That's how a corporation reports it on a balance sheet, and that's therefore how it is accounted for in estimating national growth as well.

But all the patented knowledge that was originally counted as growth in capital becomes part of the residual once the patent expires, and what it loses in the value it had to its original inventor is gained by the inventor's nation. Just as public domain books, such as the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, are both more numerous and more valuable than the universe of copyrighted ones, the universe of useful knowledge is a lot bigger than the universe of patented ideas.

How much bigger? Solow attempted to put a number on the rate of growth in formerly (and also never) patented knowledge-which included everything from calculus to the laws of motion-and a.s.sumed, for the sake of simplification, that the rate of increase was not only regular, but independent of changes in custom, law, or historical contingency; that is, knowledge, like Topsy, just "grow'd." Such simplifications are essential for theory building, but this particular one just pushed the big question back another step: Since knowledge, whether patented or not, is rarely lost, and the sum available has been increasing at least since the invention of written language more than five thousand years ago, what caused it, for the first time in history, to increase faster than the rate of population growth?

Population and prosperity are correlated, albeit imperfectly. Adam Smith was the first to recognize the hugely important but completely obvious correlation (this is a pretty good definition of genius) when he pointed out that the value of specialization utterly depends on the size of the community in which one lives. A family living alone grows its own wheat and bakes its own bread; it takes a village to support a baker, and a town to support a flour mill. Some critical ma.s.s of people was needed to provide enough customers to make it worthwhile to invest in ovens, or looms, or forges, and until population levels reached that critical level, overall growth was severely limited.

That level, however, was reached long before it had any impact on per capita growth in productivity. From 1700 to 1820, China grew in population from 138 million to 328 million, which increased its production of goods and services from $83 billion to $229 billion-but both population and production increased at almost exactly the same rate, about 0.75 percent annually. Population growth alone is clearly not sufficient to explain, for example, how the population of Britain, during the same period, could increase at the same rate as China's, but its gross domestic product nearly one-third faster. Something more than specialization through population growth was at work.

This was the conclusion of E. J. Hobsbawm, who argued that the fuel for the Industrial Revolution was not coal but demography: population-or, more precisely, the growing size of markets both domestic and foreign. While recognizing, generally, the importance of a cadre of mechanics to build and repair steam engines, forges, lathes, and spinning machines, he minimized the importance of the inventions on which they practiced their trade. The presence of a thousand brilliant inventors was far less important, in Hobsbawm's words, than "the ma.s.s of persons with intermediate skills,5 technical and administrative competence ... without which any modern economy risks grinding into inefficiency."

Another currently fashionable explanation for the Industrial Revolution is also a demographic one, though subtle: not the nation's overall birth rate, but the birth rate in a particular subset. This is essentially the theory proposed in Gregory Clark's examination of the relationship between differential reproduction in different cla.s.ses.

Clark's discovery, arrived at by combing through centuries' worth of parish records, was that the wealthiest families in England were far likelier to have more sons than similarly wealthy families in China, and therefore had less real property to pa.s.s along to the average member of the next generation. Throughout the period 15401640, preindustrial Britain exhibited a fair bit6 of both upward and downward mobility, largely due to primogeniture, which obliged a prosperous landowner to leave his land to only one of his sons-and the typical landowner had up to eight. Since all but one of those sons would have to find his own niche in the economy, "craftsman's sons became laborers,7 merchant's sons petty laborers, large landowner's sons smallholders" carrying with them the habits of hard work, deferred gratification, literacy, and a disposition to settle disputes peacefully, all of which showed a decided increase during the eighteenth century. As upper-cla.s.s habits trickled throughout society, so did economic growth.

This theory explains fairly well why the son of a country squire might find himself learning the craft of a carpenter, and it may explain some critical aspects of historical growth in national wealth, particularly in Britain. A literate population bound by the rule of law and exhibiting middle-cla.s.s behaviors such as deferral of gratification and low levels of corruption is as valuable to a nation as it is to a business firm. A recent World Bank a.n.a.lysis8 found that a significant amount of wealth worldwide is derived from such behaviors, and that human capital and the rule of law might account for up to 30 percent of the residual.

But the middle-cla.s.s work habits that proved so vital for a new generation of factory laborers were valuable only because there were factories for them to work in. And Boulton and Arkwright weren't motivated to build the factories because good workers suddenly became available, but because they had machines that needed housing. Similarly, whatever percentage of Solow's residual is attributed to a reliable labor force operating in a relatively uncorrupt economy ruled by law, something still needs to explain why growth in prosperity, three-quarters of it derived from the creation of useful knowledge, stagnated for five millennia and then exploded in Britain in the eighteenth century.

This is where Solow's simplifying a.s.sumption-the idea that the growth in useful knowledge occurs at a constant rate, directly proportional to population-however a.n.a.lytically valuable, runs out of gas. It can't explain the steam engines and reciprocating chisels of the Portsmouth Block Mills, or the boring machines of Bersham Furnace, or the water frames in the Derwent Valley, because it implies that the decisions made to investigate the properties of steam, or iron, or silk were just as probable in eighteenth-century India as in eighteenth-century Europe; more likely, really, since India was home, in 1700,9 to more than thirty million more potential inventors than all of Europe, including Russia. The only thing that can be said in favor of making the growth of knowledge what economists call an exogenous variable (i.e. one without deliberate purpose, a kind of magical growth in knowledge from which everyone could benefit) was that its constant rate of increase made the equations simpler. By the 1980s, however, a number of economists examining the eighteenth century's wealth explosion thought that Solow's equations might be too simple.