Third in a #ReadWithMe series.*
“For all of human history until the 1820s, nobody went faster than the speed of a galloping horse”. I cannot think of another consideration equally telling, of the tremendous progress we made in a rather short time. The main engine, pardon the pun, of such progress was the locomotive. “The man who did most to make the breakthrough in speed” as a craftsman of humble origin, George Stephenson:
Using a steam engine to pull wagons was not a new idea, but it was made more interesting by the war, as “the Napoleonic conflict created an insatiable demand for horses and for hay to feed them, driving up the price of both”.
In 1814, Stephenson “built a two-cylinder locomotion at Killingworth” which “proved capable of hauling fourteen wagons carrying 2 tons of coal each at 3 miles an hour [this is _not_ a typo], doing the work of fifteen horses”.
In a few years, in 1822, Stephenson will be busy in the building of the Stockton to Darlington railway. Fast forward to 1832, he will be inaugurating the Liverpool-Manchester one.
In his book, How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley makes a splendid use of these stories, which may remind us of the work of Samuel Smiles. In describing Stephenson’s “moving up” from workman to “engineer” (“he was no less a worker, but only in a different way”), Smiles noted that he had “now many more opportunities for improving himself in mechanics than he had hitherto possessed. His familiar acquaintance with the steam-engine proved of great value to him. The practical study which he had given to it when a workman, and the patient manner in which he had groped his way through all the details of the machine, gave him the power of a master in dealing with it as applied to colliery purposes”.
The 19th century was the era of the inventor, geniuses of unlikely backgrounds who through tinkering accomplished magnificent innovations. In a sense, the steam train is the quintessential example of “ideas having sex”, to use a favorite catchphrase of Ridley’s. The steam engine mated with wagons and rail tracks. This happened not because of grand designs, but of very practical needs: how to save on horses. It happened not because of grandiose theorists, but of very practical men, such as Stephenson.
Here’s a point many tend not to get about innovation: needs are a big part of it. It is not necessarily about grandiose research programs pursued for the sake of mere knowledge (though pursuing knowledge qua knowledge is a great source of meaning and happiness to scholars who write on this subject). More often than not, it comes out of very precise, “local”, needs. Adam Smith observed long ago that “a great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the inventions of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it”. That is not necessarily true today, but when it comes to the beginning of the industrial age, I think Ridley would agree with Smith that common workmen played a central role.
*Read Part 1 here.
*Read Part 2 here.
READER COMMENTS
JK Brown
Aug 12 2020 at 4:35pm
The men who transformed humanity with the industrial revolution were workmen, craftsmen, for the most part. Newcomen, Watt, Micheal Faraday, Thomas Davenport (first useful US DC motor), Henry Bessemer. Even John C. Lincoln, inventor of the first arc welder, though university trained electrical engineer invented as a course of his commercial work.
–p29, Rosen, Willam, ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World’
Michael Pettengill
Aug 13 2020 at 10:25am
A 60 year train fan, I think the adaptation of the electric motor to trains a century later is more important to advancing rail locomotion.
But the real question is why steam power on rail from England and electric power in the US, both of which are freely available globally, have not resulted in rail transport globally to drive economic development in every nation?
The US Constitution includes a provision to promote IP theft from England, and elsewhere, to overcome the British lock on industrial production, guarded as a national treasure by its charter laws: patents for a limited term. Thus, the US quickly developed it’s own steam power rail industry. But it was government policy that produced the hundred thousand miles of rail that connected rural production to the world: free land for rail, cash and in kind incentives to build rail, and cheap government debt to pay workers to build the rail lines in less than a century.
No nation has benefited from all the train related innovations without strong government policy to build a rail network for the public good. A rail line in Africa built by a mining company generally harms economic growth in contrast to an equivalent public transportation rail line, the former sucking resources away from workers, the latter connecting workers to resources.
Patents were good for US train users, as was the ICC, as both provided consumers with market choice for what government policy built, and the US was the global leader in train innovation, until public policy disfavored rail and favored trucks and buses. Note, the ICC created to give users free access to train services also controlled trucking and busing with the same “iron hand”. The difference was government providing the land and funding to pay workers building a better road system while requiring railroads to buy land and fund it, and pay taxes on the property roads didn’t pay. Ditto air transport.
Public policy in Asia has driven train innovation there, as well as in Europe, so leadership in train innovation has been taken from the US. Today, the US which led in electric train drive must now rely on either Asian or European innovators for train service in the US. Government dictates require the hardware be built by US workers, but the rewards of innovation flow out of the US. For an innovation, electric drive, that originated in the US, helping make GE and Westinghouse “great”.
Getting rid of the ICC has not eliminated the outsized influence of government in picking transportation winners and losers, and hasn’t done much to spur private innovation.
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