How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (55 page)

Steam

The single individual who contributed most to the Industrial Revolution was James Watt (1736–1819).
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Watt was born in Scotland of bourgeois parents. He became an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow. There he became interested in Thomas Newcomen’s primitive and inefficient steam engine, which was being used to pump the water from mines. Newcomen’s engine was large and not very powerful, was hard to maintain, and wasted more than 80 percent of its steam. Using quite different principles, Watt designed a far superior engine in 1765.

Watt’s engine and all its successors work this way. Water is heated by a wood, coal, or oil fire in a boiler—an enclosed vessel. When the water reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius), it begins to turn into steam, thereby greatly increasing in volume and putting pressure on the boiler. Were the boiler to remain shut up, eventually the pressure of the steam would burst it open—that is the basic power source involved in the steam engine. But instead of allowing the boiler to explode, the engine harnesses the power of the expanding steam by means of a valve
that opens to allow steam to escape from the boiler into a cylinder. The cylinder contains a piston, and the entering steam forces the piston to the end of the cylinder, at which point the steam is allowed to escape. When the spent steam is released, the piston returns to the other end of the cylinder, whereupon a new blast of steam is admitted to the cylinder and the power cycle is repeated. The piston is connected to a cam shaft that turns whatever the engine is being used to power—the wheels of a locomotive or an industrial machine such as a power loom. Thus, the movement of the piston up and down in the cylinder provides the power.

Watt tried to market his invention but lacked the necessary finances. So in 1775 he entered into a partnership with the wealthy Matthew Boulton, and the next year they introduced the revolutionary Boulton and Watt engine. Watt continued to make significant improvements to the engine, which soon spread far and wide with many applications.

The steam engine changed everything. First of all, there soon were engines far more powerful than any waterwheel (to assess power, Watt invented the horsepower metric: 1 hp equals the pulling power of one horse). Second, mills no longer needed to be located on rivers and streams; powered by steam, they could be placed anywhere convenient. Moreover, there was no limit to the number of steam engines that could be built and utilized. With virtually unlimited power now readily available, even cumbersome manufacturing machinery became practical. Perhaps the most important and immediate effect was to create a new era in the smelting of iron.

The New Iron Age

As noted in chapter 9, the blast furnace was one of the great medieval inventions. What the blast furnace did was to smelt iron ore at a far higher temperature than had been possible previously, allowing better iron to be produced less expensively and in larger quantities. It was named after the reason for its superiority: blasts of air were introduced into the firebox, thereby increasing the intensity of the blaze. For small blast furnaces this was accomplished by use of a hand-operated bellows. For larger furnaces, the bellows was operated by a waterwheel. But there turned out to be a severe limit on the size of the bellows that a waterwheel could power. Watt’s steam engine overcame this limit in 1776.

That alone was not enough to usher in the new iron age, however. Most of the iron produced was cast iron, which is brittle and lacks tensile strength, meaning it cannot bend and is easily broken. Wrought iron (or bar iron) overcomes this shortcoming (as does steel), but it was very difficult to produce in this era. The only known method required repeated heating with charcoal. Transforming iron into steel posed still another problem: even when waterwheel-powered hammers were used, the process of pounding on and repeatedly heating a piece of iron was slow and only moderately effective. Both of these problems were solved by a remarkable Englishman, whose wife inherited a small ironworks.

Henry Cort (1740–1800) invented the
puddling
technique for producing wrought iron and the
rolling mill
to replace hammering to produce steel. Puddling involved stirring molten iron with rods that were consumed during the process. This reduced the carbon in the iron and increased its tensile strength. To turn that wrought iron into steel, which has even more tensile strength, Cort hit upon the technique of passing iron bars through a series of grooved rollers that pressed the metal into steel. His first rolling mill produced fifteen times as much steel per day as could have been produced with hammers.
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These immense gains in metallurgy prompted many other improvements, including the coking of coal to make it burn hotter and to use less fuel.

Consequently, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, better, stronger iron and steel were readily available in Britain, which made it possible to build more powerful but smaller and lighter steam engines. This had the truly revolutionary effect of providing
portable
power: steam engines became powerful and small enough to move themselves as well as things to which they were attached—such as railroads and steamboats.

Railroads

As noted in chapter 9, rail transportation long preceded the steam engine. Because rails so greatly reduce friction, horses could pull much greater loads more rapidly when hooked to carts that ran on rails. This proved especially vital for moving heavy materials such as coal and iron ore. Consequently, many miles of rail were laid down during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. By the time the steam engine was invented, a number of significant rail lines already existed. Because it was unnecessary to lay track
to demonstrate the utility of railroads, there was considerable competition among inventors to produce a successful railroad using the steam engine.

The earliest attempt was made by Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) in 1804. His steam-powered locomotive used an existing track in Wales and pulled five cars holding seventy passengers and ten tons of iron ingots nine miles. But Trevithick’s train proved too heavy for the existing cast-iron rails and was abandoned after three trips.
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The first successful railroad venture was by Matthew Murray (1765–1826) in 1812, whose locomotive, the
Salamanca
, was much lighter and did not damage the rails. Even so, railroading did not take off until 1825, when a truly self-made young man perfected both rails and engines.

George Stephenson (1781–1848) was born in poverty and grew up without any education. At seventeen he began to attend night school, where he learned to read and write. Initially he was employed to help operate the pumping engine at a coal mine, and he taught himself to fix clocks to earn money on the side.
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In 1814 Stephenson built a locomotive he named the
Blücher
after the famous Prussian general, and it was the first to have sufficient traction between the wheels and the rails to allow it to pull loads uphill. But rails were still a problem, being too brittle and apt to break under the weight of a train. Stephenson improved the design of rails and constructed them from the newly available supply of wrought iron, eventually using them to construct the Stockton and Darlington Railway. This consisted of twenty-five miles of track that connected various coal mines to the River Tees, where the coal was loaded on barges. Using Stephenson’s newly designed
Locomotion
, this became the first public steam-driven railroad. But Stephenson’s ultimate success, the one that earned him the title “Father of Railways,” came with his construction of the
Rocket
.

The
Rocket
was built to win a competition held by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1829 (Stephenson had played the major role in designing its route and roadbed). The rules of the contest were quite strict. To compete, a locomotive could weigh no more than six tons (including water) if on six wheels and four and a half tons if on four wheels. It must be able to pull a load of twenty tons, at no less than ten miles an hour, forty times over a mile-and-a-half course.
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Stephenson’s
Rocket
easily won the competition and made him a major figure in this, the first intercity passenger railroad, which covered a distance of thirty-five miles.

The
Rocket
had a tall smokestack at the front, which prevented the
smoke from the coal fire from engulfing the passenger cars; a round boiler section; and the firebox in the rear so that it could be constantly fueled with coal carried in a car directly behind the engine cabin. This became the standard design of steam locomotives, still unchanged when they were replaced by diesel units in the 1950s. The successful operation of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway prompted an outburst of railroad construction. By 1830 there were 98 miles of railroad in Britain. By 1840 this had grown to 1,498 miles. This doubled by 1845 and doubled again by 1850. In 1860 Britain had 10,433 miles of railroads.
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A similar pattern occurred in the United States. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began in 1830; initially it was only 40 miles long. The first locomotives were imported from Britain, but American-built engines soon took over—the first being the
DeWitt Clinton
, perfected in the early 1830s. By 1840 Americans had laid more railroad track (2,755 miles) than had the British—not surprising since distances were far longer in America. By 1860 American railroads rolled over nearly 30,000 miles of track. And the lonesome whistle of trains passing through became a staple of life as well as poetry.

Although getting a later start than Britain or the United States, Europe soon joined the rush for rails. But with some typically European flaws, especially in France. The French railroad system radiated from Paris. Built by six private companies, nonetheless it was tightly controlled by the government, with each company having a government monopoly on a particular area. Rather than develop any domestic technology, the French government directed that all the locomotives and cars be purchased from Britain. From the start the government set fares, freight charges, and schedules. Inefficiency was the inevitable result, since routes and schedules often were determined by political rather than economic factors.
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The French also designed their rail system at least partly to serve military objectives, such as troop movements to the frontier with Germany.

The Germans quickly noted the developments in Britain, and several private companies built lines, using locomotives Stephenson built in Britain. The first to operate was the Bavarian Ludwig Railway, which began running trains in December 1835. It was only four miles long. Then, in 1839, came the Leipzig-Dresden railway, which was seventy-five miles long and passed through the world’s first railroad tunnel. But the Germans were not content to keep relying on the British for locomotives and
cars. They began to design their own and by 1850 were entirely independent of British imports. After this flying start, the various governments involved (Germany was not united until 1871) took over. Unlike the French, however, these governments recognized the economic importance of railroads and focused construction efforts on linking industrializing cities and the major seaports. The Germans soon pulled far ahead of France in terms of both miles of track and number of trains. Only somewhat later did the Germans expand their rail system to support troop movements and to deliver military supplies to both the western front (facing France) and the eastern front (facing Russia).

A major consequence of railroads was to create national, and in Europe, international economies. Before railroads it was too costly and slow to transport anything but light goods such as luxuries or textiles very far by horse-drawn wagons; shipments of grain, for example, were feasible only by water. Therefore, only seaports or places on navigable rivers could obtain bulky goods from afar. For the most part this meant that economies were local and thereby limited in available goods and commodities. For example, before railroads it would have been pointless to establish large cattle ranches in the American West, because there was no way to send cattle or meat to customers in the East. Railroads overcame these limits. Long trainloads of western cattle could now reach the eastern markets in several days. Steel made in Pittsburgh could be shipped to Atlanta at an acceptable cost. In Europe, Danish farm products could be eaten in Berlin. And, of course, trains were also people movers: the age of travel began.

Steamboats

To use Watt’s steam engine to power a boat was an obvious application, since no rails were required and there was no need for the engine to be light. Consequently, efforts to build a steamboat began nearly at once (these followed a number of not very satisfactory attempts to use the inefficient Newcomen engine to power a boat). A number of the early boats—in France, Italy, Scotland, and the United States—seem to have performed adequately but were not pursued.Then came Robert Fulton (1765–1815).

Fulton was an American, but he began his illustrious career in France, where he built the first successful submarine, the
Nautilus
, under a commission from Napoleon Bonaparte. He then built a large steamboat,
sixty-six feet long, and tested it on the River Seine in 1803. It performed well and even achieved a speed of three to four miles an hour against the current. During a subsequent test, however, it sank. At that point Fulton broke off with Napoleon and moved to London, where he helped the British prepare to resist a threatened invasion by the French. To this end, he designed and successfully tested the first naval torpedoes. But after the British fleet destroyed the French fleet in 1806 at the Battle of Trafalgar (without using torpedoes), the British lost interest in the new weapons. So Fulton decided to go home.