In 1786, George III knighted an irascible, grouchy Lancashire entrepreneur who had started as a barber inventing waterproof periwigs: Sir Richard Arkwright, now fifty-four. Fifteen years earlier, Arkwright, a sturdy tailor’s son, had created a small factory using the new technology of a spinning frame to spin cotton, then set up a water-powered mill at Cromford that was so successful that he founded a new type of workplace, the factory, bringing in more workers, among them children as young as seven, whom he organized in thirteen-hour shifts, policed by ringing bells that enforced strict timekeeping: latecomers were not paid.
The ‘bag-cheeked, pot-bellied’ Arkwright amassed a fortune of £500,000, enabling him to buy a country castle, as he aggressively opened more factories that revolutionized the British textile industry. For a long time, the factories were small cottage industries where women could work while still caring for the growing numbers of children who also joined the workforce. Woolmaking – in England, Flanders, Florence – had helped create the European mercantile class, but Indian textiles still dominated. For millennia, the essentials of life had not changed greatly; for centuries, work had remained essentially the same. But super-shifts require a dynamic nexus of coalescing forces: revolutions and wars combined with new technologies and ideologies. Arkwright’s use of technology was as radical as his creation of the factory system that changed the way people worked. Now everything would change – and fast.
Steam-driven engines were first used to drain coal mines; now deployed in cotton mills, they increased productivity by two hundredfold. Like computers in the 1990s, they powered changes in the very mindset of a generation. Steam power, like the textiles it produced, became a core technology so universal that it attained invisible ubiquity. Such technologies, writes Mark Weiser, ‘weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’. But the inventions would not have worked without the proximity of fossil fuel – Britain’s plentiful coal was essential. Now the coal had to be transported to the factories.
The entrepreneur who created the means of transporting the coal was as far from being a harsh former wig-maker as you could get: Francis Egerton, duke of Bridgewater, was one of those lucky landowners who discovered coal on his estates. But he had to get the coal to the factories. In 1776, aged forty, he completed his first canal, started in 1771, linking Worsley to Manchester, while he built another between Liverpool and Manchester. He was a serious and unhappy, rather plump boy who had inherited his titles at twelve. He became engaged to a society star, Elizabeth, duchess of Hamilton, one of the Irish Gunning sisters,* It-girls of the time, famous for their amateur acting. Yet the engagement was cancelled, she married another magnate and Bridgewater closed down his London mansion, never married and retired to collect art and design the canals that made him £2 million – the richest British nobleman.
In 1781, this coal power was harnessed by a maniacal ironmaster, John Wilkinson, a potfounder’s son nicknamed the Iron-Mad Titan, using steam engines to fire up blast furnaces for casting iron to make artillery and sponsoring the Coalbrookdale iron bridge – the world’s first – cast by Abraham Darby III, scion of another iron-mastering family. By now Wilkinson was making an eighth of all British iron, his ‘iron madness’ culminating in his casting of his iron coffin and the iron obelisk over his grave.
The principles of the new technologies had been known for centuries. Steam technology was not itself new; Arkwright’s spinning machine was just an improvement on the work of a long line of inventors, from James Watt and Matthew Boulton back to Thomas Newcomen in 1712, who was inspired by a Frenchman, Denis Papin, who had published his ideas in 1687. The Greeks had had a steam pump in the first century; the Han Chinese had puddled iron. Their development owed less to ‘genius’ inventors than to centuries of accumulated knowledge, small modifications, accidental revelations and now a quickening exchange that allowed educated minds and interconnected networks to experiment, innovate and apply the technologies – and then compete with one another. Many of these British inventors were members of the Lunar Society, which met in provincial Birmingham to debate ‘the first hints of discoveries, the current observations, and the mutual collision of ideas’. It was that ‘collision of ideas’ – they corresponded with Ben Franklin in America and the
