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A Brief History of Engineering (Part 2)

The invention of the steam engine was one of the key steps in the Industrial Revolution. A number of technologies cross-fertilised each other: the engines pumped dry the mines; the mined coal fuelled the engines and the blast furnaces; the blast furnaces produced steel enough to build the railways; steel-clad ships and troops armed with the Maxim gun spread the rule of the industrialised countries around the world.

Some human activities are cumulative: one achievement prepares the way for another. Many people consider science is cumulative in this way. Newton, for example, disclaimed credit for his laws of motion, saying, ``If I have seen further than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.'' Other activities -- painting, for example -- do not seem to be cumulative; it's not clear that the paintings of Picasso are superior to those of Raphael, nor is it clear that Raphael's work helped Picasso in his.

So, is engineering cumulative in this way? The examples we've just considered suggest that it is. In fact, the cumulative power of engineering is greater than that of science: the scientific advances of Newton's predecessors could only help him if he understood them, but an engineer can incorporate another engineer's device in a product while knowing nothing of its principles of operation. Moreover, the cumulation of engineeering is distinct from the cumulation of science; of the great steps in scientific understanding this century, relativity, has contributed nothing to engineering; quantum physics has contributed a little, recently.

As well as introducing new technologies, the steam engine altered old ones. Prior to the introduction of the engine, clothing had mostly been made on hand looms, in individual cottages. Now there was the possibility of steam-powered looms. Lathes, for manufacturing wood and metal products, could also be steam-powered. But one of the laws of engineering we will encounter later in the course is that big machines are more efficient than small machines. The Industrial revolution could not deliver an efficient cottage-scale engine. It could deliver an engine that would power a hundred looms. Now, a cottager who used to be self-supporting can't buy a machine that will power a hundred looms, and it won't fit into the cottage. On the other hand, the cottager can't produce as cheaply as the steam-powered looms. So the cottager has to go to work in a mill: an immense, noisy factory whose scale is dictated by the laws of engineering. The engine has to be big, and the mill is built around it, pulleys and belts driving each of the individual looms.

From the point of view of the factory owner, there is a different problem: how to find workers for the hundred looms. There are unemployed cottagers, but they may choose to eke out a living farming and grazing their animals on the common land, since the mills are unpleasant places to work. The solution to this, in England, were the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which took the common land away from the people, thus creating a reserve of unemployed who would be glad to work in the mills rather than starve. Actually they weren't all that glad; there was widespread dissatisfaction with the new society, and brutal laws were enacted to keep the people in check; hundreds of crimes were made capital offences.

This is a good place to re-examine the idea of progress which we discussed in the last lecture. The replacement of hand-operated looms by water power and steam power surely counts as technological progress. What did this progress mean for the ordinary citizen? Well, at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England, you could expect to begin work when you were 14, and to work a twelve-hour day, with breaks for meals and rest. It was a six-day week, with frequent traditional holidays. By the early 19th century, you could expect to go to work when you were seven or eight years old, work a fourteen-hour day in a dangerous, noisy mill, and the traditional holidays had all but disappeared. Your take-home wage would be less than it had been a century before.

In France, too, the Industrial revolution brought misery to the majority of the population. Women and children worked a 15-hour day in the textile mills. Epidemics were frequent, particularly among children, because of poor hygienic conditions at home and in the factories. One response to this might be, we have to accept growing pains as we adjust to the new technology; but in the long run, everyone (except perhaps the incorrigibly lazy) will be better off. But this is not terribly convincing. In the first place, the long run in this case was very long -- more than a century. Secondly, we need to look at what the changes were that started the improvement in the conditions of the mass of the population. These were not changes in technology, but political changes -- the broadening of the vote and the Factory Acts.

So it was perhaps not surprising that there were constant revolts against the machinery. Many dissatisfied weavers smashed the new looms. One in particular, Ned Ludd, gave his name to all subsequent struggles against oppressive techology. In 1811 in Lancaster 13 Luddites were publically hanged. 17 more were hanged in York the following year. Despite this opposition, the new order established itself, leading to the miserable conditions for the urban worker described by Dickens.

Let me give you the question the Luddites faced: the new mills have destroyed your previous occupation, and the only new occupation available is brutally hard. What can you do?

But it was now possible to produce far more woven cloth than before. More, in fact, than the English workers could afford to buy. Hence the need to find new markets overseas. Between 1750 and 1770 the export of cotton goods increased tenfold. This export of cheap English cloth to India, crushing Indian local production, was one of the things Gandhi fought against in his struggle for independence; this is why the flag of India has a spinning wheel on it.

The steam engine could power the looms; but to produce complex designs on the woven cloth, such as this, something more was required. The looms required not merely energy, but information, the detailed information that specified the pattern to be woven in. Here is a device first developed in 1725, by the Frenchman Basil Bouchon, to record and apply that information. The same device was developed and improved upon by another Frenchman, Jacques de Vaucanson, and brought into widespread use in 1800 by Joseph Marie Jacquard.

This idea -- punched paper or card to store information in machine-readable form -- was used to control rivetting machines in England in 1847. An American engineer called Herman Hollerith used similar cards to record and process data from the 1890 census. When I first programmed a computer, twenty-five years ago, I wrote my program on a key punch, cutting small rectangular holes in `Hollerith cards'.

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