The Ascent of Man (26 page)

You have begun to burn our towns. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations.

The red glow has become the picture of the new age in England – in the sermons of John Wesley, and in the furnace sky of the Industrial Revolution, such as the fiery landscape of Abbeydale in Yorkshire, an early centre for new processes in making iron and steel. The masters
of industry were the ironmasters: powerful, more than life-size, demonic figures, whom governments suspected, rightly, of really believing that all men are created equal. The working men in the north and the west were no longer farm labourers, they were now an industrial community. They had to be paid in coin, not in kind. Governments in London were remote from all this. They refused to mint enough
small change, so ironmasters like John Wilkinson minted their own wage tokens, with their own unroyal faces on them. Alarm in London: was this a Republican plot? No, it was not a plot. But it is true that radical inventions came out of radical brains. The first model of an iron bridge to be exhibited in London was proposed by Tom Paine, a firebrand in America and in England, protagonist of
The
Rights of Man
.

Meanwhile, cast iron was already being used in revolutionary ways by the ironmasters like John Wilkinson. He built the first iron boat in 1787, and boasted that it would carry his coffin when he died. And he was buried in an iron coffin in 1808. Of course, the boat sailed under an iron bridge; Wilkinson had helped to build that in 1779 at a nearby Shropshire town that is still
called Ironbridge.

Did the architecture of iron really rival the architecture of the cathedrals? It did. This was a heroic age. Thomas Telford felt that, spanning the landscape with iron. He was born a poor shepherd, then worked as a journeyman mason, and on his own initiative became an engineer of roads and canals, and a friend of poets. His great aqueduct that carries the Llangollen canal over
the river Dee shows him to have been a master of cast iron on the grand scale. The monuments of the Industrial Revolution have a Roman grandeur, the grandeur of Republican men.

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business
that way. And for another, a majority of them were not members of the Church of England but belonged to a puritan tradition in the Unitarian and similar movements. John Wilkinson was much under the influence of his brother-in-law Joseph Priestley, later famous as a chemist, but who was a Unitarian minister and was probably the pioneer of the principle, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest
number’.

Joseph Priestley, in turn, was scientific adviser to Josiah Wedgwood. Now Wedgwood we usually think of as a man who made marvellous tableware for aristocracy and royalty: and so he did, on rare occasions, when he got the commission. For example, in 1774 he made a service of nearly a thousand highly decorated pieces for Catherine the Great of Russia, which cost over £2000 – a great deal
of money in the coin of that day. But the base of that tableware was his own pottery, creamware; and in fact all the thousand pieces, undecorated, cost less than £50, yet looked and handled like Catherine the
Great’s in every way except for the hand-painted idylls. The creamware which made Wedgwood famous and prosperous was not porcelain, but a white earthenware pottery for common use. That is
what the man in the street could buy, at about a shilling a piece. And in time that is what transformed the kitchens of the working class in the Industrial Revolution.

Wedgwood was an extraordinary man: inventive, of course, in his own trade, and also in the scientific techniques that might make his trade more exact. He invented a way of measuring the high temperatures in the kiln by means of
a sort of sliding scale of expansion in which a clay test-piece moved. Measuring high temperatures is an ancient and difficult problem in the manufacture of ceramics and metals, and it is fitting (as things went then) that Wedgwood was elected to the Royal Society.

Josiah Wedgwood was no exception; there were dozens of men like him. Indeed, he belonged to a group of about a dozen men, the Lunar
Society of Birmingham (Birmingham was then still a scattered group of industrial villages), who gave themselves the name because they met near the full moon. This was so that people like Wedgwood, who came from a distance to Birmingham, should be able to travel safely over wretched roads that were dangerous on dark nights.

But Wedgwood was not the most important industrialist there: that was
Matthew Boulton, who brought James Watt to Birmingham because there they could build the steam engine. Boulton was fond of talking about measurement; he said that nature had destined him to be an engineer by having him born in the year 1728, because that is the number of cubic inches in a cubic foot. Medicine was important in that group also, for there were new and important advances being made. Dr
William Withering discovered the use of digitalis in Birmingham. One of the doctors who has remained famous, who belonged to the Lunar Society, was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. The other grandfather? Josiah Wedgwood.

Societies like the Lunar Society represent the sense of the makers of the Industrial Revolution (that very English sense) that they had a social responsibility.
I call it an English sense, though in fact that is not quite fair; the Lunar Society was much influenced by Benjamin Franklin and by other Americans associated with it. What ran through it was a simple faith: the good life is
more
than material decency, but the good life must be
based
on material decency.

It took a hundred years before the ideals of the Lunar Society became reality in Victorian
England. When it did come, the reality seemed commonplace, even comic, like a Victorian picture postcard. It is comic to think that cotton underwear and soap could work a transformation in the lives of the poor. Yet these simple things – coal in an iron range, glass in the windows, a choice of food – were a wonderful rise in the standard of life and health. By our standards, the industrial towns
were slums, but to the people who had come from a cottage, a house in a terrace was a liberation from hunger, from dirt, and from disease; it offered a new wealth of choice. The bedroom with the text on the wall seems funny and pathetic to us, but for the working class wife it was the first experience of private decency. Probably the iron bedstead saved more women from childbed fever than the doctor’s
black bag, which was itself a medical innovation.

These benefits came from mass production in factories. And the factory system was ghastly; the schoolbooks are right about that. But it was ghastly in the old traditional way. Mines and workshops had been dank, crowded and tyrannical long before the Industrial Revolution.
The factories simply carried on as village industry had always done, with
a heartless contempt for those who worked in them.

Pollution from the factories was not new either. Again, it was the tradition of the mine and the workshop, which had always fouled their environment. We think of pollution as a modern blight, but it is not. It is another expression of the squalid indifference to health and decency that in past centuries had made the Plague a yearly visitation.

The new evil that made the factory ghastly was different: it was the domination of men by the pace of the machines. The workers for the first time were driven by an inhuman clockwork: the power first of water and then of steam. It seems insane to us (it was insane) that manufacturers should be intoxicated by the gush of power that spurted from the factory boiler without a stop. A new ethic was
preached in which the cardinal sin was not cruelty or vice, but idleness. Even the Sunday schools warned children that

Satan
finds some Mischief still

For idle Hands to do.

The change in the scale of time in the factories was ghastly and destructive. But the change in the scale of power opened the future. Matthew Boulton of the Lunar Society, for example, built a factory which was a showplace,
because Boulton’s kind of metalwork depended on the skill of craftsmen. Here James Watt came to build the sun-god of all power, the steam engine, because only here was he able to find the standards of accuracy needed to make the engine steam-tight.

In 1776 Matthew Boulton was very excited about his new partnership with James Watt to build the steam engine. When James Boswell, the biographer,
came to see Boulton that year, he said to him grandly, ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – power’. It is a lovely phrase. But it is also true.

Power is a new preoccupation, in a sense a new idea, in science. The Industrial Revolution, the English revolution, turned out to be the great discoverer of power. Sources of energy were sought in nature: wind, sun, water, steam, coal.
And a question suddenly became concrete: Why are they all one? What relation exists between them? That had never been asked before. Until then science had been entirely concerned with exploring nature as she is. But now the modern conception of transforming nature in order to obtain power from her, and of changing one form of power into another, had come up to the leading edge of science. In particular,
it grew clear that heat is a form of energy, and is converted into other forms at a fixed rate of exchange. In 1824 Sadi Carnot, a French engineer, looking at steam engines, wrote a treatise on what he called ‘la puissance motrice du feu’, in which he founded, in essence, the science of thermodynamics – the dynamics of heat. Energy had become a central concept in science; and the main concern
in science now was the unity of nature, of which energy is the core.

And it was a main concern not only in science. You see it equally in the arts, and the surprise is there. While this is going on, what is going on in literature? The uprush of romantic poetry round about the year 18oo. How could the romantic poets be interested in industry? Very simply: the new concept of nature as the carrier
of energy took them by storm. They loved the word ‘storm’ as a synonym for energy, in phrases like
Sturm und Drang
, ‘storm and thrust’. The climax of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
is introduced
by a storm that breaks the deadly calm and releases life again.

The upper air burst into life!

And a hundred fire-flags sheen,

To and fro they were hurried about!

And to and
fro, and in and out,

The wan stars danced between.

The loud wind never reached the ship,

Yet now the ship moved on!

Beneath the lightning and the Moon

The dead men gave a groan.

A young German philosopher, Friedrich von Schelling, just at this time in 1799, started a new form of philosophy which has remained powerful in Germany,
Naturphilosophie
– philosophy of nature. From him Coleridge
brought it to England. The Lake Poets had it from Coleridge, and the Wedgwoods, who were friends of Coleridge’s and indeed supported him with an annuity. Poets and painters were suddenly captured by the idea that nature is the fountain of power, whose different forms are all expressions of the same central force, namely energy.

And not only nature. Romantic poetry says in the plainest way that
man himself is the carrier of a divine, at least a natural, energy. The Industrial Revolution created freedom (in practice) for men who wanted to fulfil what they had in them – a concept inconceivable a hundred years earlier. But hand in hand, romantic thought inspired those men to make of their freedom a new sense of personality in nature. It was said best of all by the greatest of the romantic
poets, William Blake, very simply: ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’.

The key word is ‘delight’, the key concept is ‘liberation’ – a sense of fun as a human right. Naturally, the marching men of the age expressed the impulse in invention. So they produced a bottomless horn of plenty of eccentric ideas to delight the Saturday evenings of the working family. (To this day, most of the applications that
lumber the patent offices are slightly mad, like the inventors themselves.) We could build an avenue from here to the moon lined with these
lunacies, and it would be just about as pointless and yet as high-spirited as getting to the moon. Consider, for example, the idea of the zoetrope, a circular machine for animating a Victorian comic strip by flashing the pictures past the eye one after another.
It is quite as exciting as an evening at the cinema, and comes to the point rather quicker. Or the automatic orchestra, which has the advantage of a very small repertoire. All of it is packed with homespun vigour which has not heard of good taste, and is absolutely self-made. Every pointless invention for the household, like the mechanical vegetable chopper, is matched by another superb one,
like the telephone. And finally, at the end of the avenue of pleasure, we should certainly put the machine that is the essence of machineness: it does nothing at all!