Inventing a New World

Wall Street Journal ^ | April 11, 2009 | John Steele Gordon

[reaganaut1]

As Gavin Weightman's "The Industrial Revolutionaries" reminds us, inventions on the level of the stirrup's importance seemed to come every other month during the late 18th and 19th centuries -- what Mr. Weightman calls "the most remarkable period of practical inventiveness in world history."

...

The steam engine, first made practical by Thomas Newcomen and then made vastly more fuel efficient by James Watt, made work-doing energy cheap for the first time in human history. With the steam engine, factories could be located where labor was most available, and Britain's urban industrial cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, quickly expanded.

Soon after the turn of the 19th century a new type of steam engine, using high pressure, proved far more powerful per unit of weight than Watt's engine. "In one of the most remarkable coincidences in the history of invention," Mr. Weightman writes, two versions of the high-pressure steam engine were developed "almost at the same time," in Britain by Richard Trevithick -- "a giant of a man with immense energy" -- and in America by Oliver Evans.

...

[T]he new agricultural machinery that was built in factories -- such as the reaper developed by the American Cyrus McCormick -- freed countless agricultural laborers for factory work. The collapse in the price of steel -- thanks to Henry Bessemer, the Englishman whose process allowed steel to be produced by the ton -- greatly increased the demand for iron ore and coking coal.

...

Thus, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, economies began to grow far more rapidly than before, generating far more wealth. Pre-industrial economies grew at a rate that averaged 1% per year, thus taking 72 years to double in size. Industrial economies grew at a rate that averaged 4% per year, doubling in just 18 years.

[reaganaut1]

I wonder if schools would even include a book like this -- celebrating the achievements of dead Englishmen -- in the library. Under the Obama-Waxman regime, we'll get a "De-Industrial" revolution, where the technologies developed by our ancestors are replaced by wind.

[SonOfDarkSkies]

bflr

[SunkenCiv]

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The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created by William Bernstein

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