Machines and Manufacturing

The tremendous growth in European industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the result of a number of changes, technology foremost among them. The accumulation and diffusion of technical knowledge necessary for manufacturing began in the countryside, where handicraft operations were gradually enlarged and mechanized. Often it was small-and medium-sized producers, and the occasional amateur experimenter in a barn, who were the inventors and innovators. Numerous small inventions, applied and diffused on both sides of the Atlantic gradually built up a stock of technical knowledge and practice that was widely available.

Most famous of these inventors was James Watt (1739-1819) of Scotland who succeeded in making steam engines more efficient Steam engines burned coal to boil water, which condensed into steam that was used to drive mechanized devices. Watt devised a way to separate steam condensers from piston cylinders so that pistons could be kept hot. and therefore running constantly. This set the stage for a fuel-efficient engine. Early prototypes of Watt’s engine were used to pump water out of mines. After moving to Birmingham in 1774. Watt joined forces with the industrialist Matthew Boulton(1728-1809). who marketed the steam engine won an extension of the patent for another twenty-five years, and set up a special laboratory for Watt so that he could refine his device. Thus, technical exploration joined forces with the interests of business: collaboration between inventors and entrepreneurs was a sign of the times. Moreover. perhaps the most important aspect of Watt’s engineering feat was that it was subject to a stream of improvement and adaptation. not just from Boulton and company, but from its competitors as well.

The steam engine, driven by burning coal, provided vastly increased, power and sparked a revolution in transportation. Steam-powered ships and railroads, built once inventors were able to construct lighter engines that required less coal to run. slashed the time and cost of long-distance travel. Steam power’s diffusion accelerated when iron-making improved, allowing for the production of railroad track and cables used to hang suspension bridges. The first public rail line opened in 1830 in England between Manchester and Liverpool. During the next twenty years, railway mileage increased from less than 100 to almost 25,000 in England, France Russia. and the German-speaking countries. Steamships appeared in the 1780s in France. Britain, and the United States. and in 1807 Robert Fulton inaugurated the first commercially successful route between New York City and Albany on the Hudson River. A century of toying with boilers and pistons culminated in the radical reduction of distances. Moreover steam-powered engines also improved sugar refining, pottery making, and many other industrial processes.Mechanizing processes that would have taken much longer and been subject to human error if done by hand enabled manufacturers to make more products at cheaper cost.

Textile production was one of the areas that benefited from both technical changes and the consolidation of different stages of the work in a factory With new machinery, a single textile operator could handle many looms and spindles at once, and could produce bolts of cloth with stunning efficiency. Gone were the hand tools. the family traditions, and the loosely organized and dispersed systems of households producing cloth in their homes for local merchants to carry to markets. The material was also stronger, finer, and more uniform. Thanks to such innovations. British cotton output increased tenfold between 1770 and 1790. leading to a 90 percent decline in the price of cloth between 1782 and 1812.

Most raw cotton for the British cloth industry had come from colonial India until 1793, when the American inventor Eli Whitney (1765-1825) patented a device called a “cotton gin”that separated cottonseeds from fiber. Cotton farming quickly spread through the southern states-from South Carolina into Georgia. Alabama Mississippi, and Louisiana-as the United States came to produce more than 80 percent of the world cotton supply by the 1850s Thus, the American south became a supplier of raw cotton to Britain.?