Page 74 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

Heaven & Earth / Industrial revolution

he prime minister, Lord mand high wages, belong to a trade union,
Liverpool, told parliament maintain a family and aspire to education
in 1820 that “England was and the vote. They believed it was their skills
indebted for its present that were making Britain great and they
greatness” to men such as admired the inventors who had set it on this
James Watt, Matthew industrial path to wealth and power,
TBoulton and Richard especially the pioneers of steam.
Arkwright. It was an astonishing statement Watt was their first hero. An instrument
from a prime minister whose cabinet maker by trade, he posthumously breached
included the hero of Waterloo and nation’s the national pantheon where military figures
darling Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of jostled a few cultural lions – Shakespeare,
Wellington. No less astounding, he made it Milton, Bacon and Newton. The second was
to a body still largely composed of landown- George Stephenson, another working man,
ers, which in 1815 enacted the Corn Law to whose engineering feats had transfixed
protect Britain’s agriculture at the probable public attention ever since the first train ran
expense of her industry. Yet, this was not the on the Liverpool to Manchester railway in
A statue of James Watt in
first time that Liverpool had identified “the Glasgow. By 1834, Glasgow 1830. During the 1840s and 50s, his son
machinery and mechanical inventions of boasted three statues of Watt Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom
this country” as the upcoming source of Brunel and Joseph Locke (‘the railway
national wealth and power, and in 1824 he industrialisation that still dominates school triumvirate’) held centre stage, but in the
would chair a meeting to launch a subscrip- textbooks and popular histories, despite wake of their coincidental deaths in 1859–60,
tion for a monument in Westminster Abbey simultaneously evincing pride in its loyalty to the older generation was reasserted.
to James Watt, who had died in 1819. technical achievements. By then, Watt and George Stephenson were
Others’ rhetoric on that occasion hugely Familiarity with the poetry of celebrated nationally, locally, and by the
exaggerated the significance of the steam Wordsworth, the fiction of Dickens and the engineering trades and professions
engine and hymned Watt, its ‘inventor’, as illustrations of Gustave Doré deepens this (Stephenson was elected first president of the
the true victor of the Napoleonic wars. If sense of gloom and regret. Postwar economic Institution of Mechanical Engineers,
their analysis of steam power’s importance historians’ more positive assessments of 1847–48). Their biographies provoked
for British industry was premature, like industrialisation, with their emphasis on emulation and their achievements were
Liverpool’s it demonstrated their awareness long-term economic growth, higher entered into the history books, as monarchi-
of the tectonic change occurring in Britain’s standards of living and extended life cal politics began ceding several pages to ‘the
economy and its role in funding Wellington’s expectancy, have done little to disturb our rise of manufactures’.
victory. Their erection of a ‘colossal’ statue of ingrained belief that the industrial revolution
Watt among the abbey’s aristocratic tombs was almost universally deplored by those What’s Watt?
symbolised this change at the same time as who lived through it. In 1824, when liberal Tory members of
the Reform Act of 1832 recognised the Undoubtedly, many workers deskilled by Liverpool’s cabinet joined with moderate
challenge it presented to the aristocracy’s new technologies lost their livelihoods, many whigs, leading fellows of the Royal Society
hold on power. It also inaugurated a tradition were made homeless by railway construction, and well-heeled manufacturers to commem-
of commemorating inventors and engineers, and many lives were shortened by scandalous orate Watt, the radicals realised they had
such as the recent tercentenary of the death working conditions and jerry-built, unsani- missed a trick. William Cobbett, one of
of Abraham Darby, inventor of the coke- tary housing. Yet, numerous others benefit- 19th-century England’s leading champions
smelting process for iron making at ed; they saw in the smoke from factory of political reform, bellowed: “WHAT’S
Coalbrookdale or the bicentenary of the chimneys not air pollution but evidence of WATT? I, of late, hear a great deal about IT;
death of Matthew Boulton in Birmingham, prosperity. Industrialisation demanded new but, for the life of me, I cannot make out
where he and Watt established their steam- skills, especially in the engineering and what this Watt IS’ (Cobbett’s Political
engine business. metal-working trades: to build and maintain Register, 24 August 1824). Cobbett’s feigned
From William Blake’s powerful image of machinery, operate boilers, drive locomo- ignorance belied his anxiety that Watt’s
‘dark satanic mills’ to Arnold Toynbee’s tives, mine coal and tend spinning-mules reputation was being hijacked by the ‘cotton
coining of ‘the Industrial Revolution’ only to and power-looms. Such men could com- lords’ to the detriment of the slaves of both
condemn it, the loud cries of industrialisa- plantation and factory. He proposed a
tion’s critics and victims have suppressed the cast-iron statue of ‘the great mechanic’ with
acclamations with which many 19th-century The cries of panels on its plinth illustrating their distress,
Britons greeted it. The first generation of the “effects of the system which Mr Watt’s
professional economic historians, aghast at industrialisation’s inventions have established among us”.
the persistence of poverty in the midst of critics have By contrast, a subscription of £6,000
Victorian prosperity, took their cue from bought a huge block of marble and the talents
investigators of social deprivation such as suppressed the of sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey: Watt’s
Henry Mayhew and Friedrich Engels. seated figure in Westminster Abbey wore
Thus Toynbee’s Lectures on the Industrial acclamations academic robes, a ‘philosopher’ rather than
Revolution in England (1884) together with an engineer. Lord Liverpool made subscrib-
the publications of JL and Barbara with which Britons ing fashionable when he persuaded George
Hammond and Sidney and Beatrice Webb IV to give £500. The Boulton family donated BRIDGEMAN
established a catastrophist history of once greeted it £500 and other close friends £50 to £100

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