The invention of the steam engine is often considered as the turning point that triggered the industrial revolution. It enabled massive productivity gains as well as the ability to scale industry from small workshops to large enterprises producing consumer goods at scale. Other key technologies make up the industrial landscape today, such as electricity, transport, etc, but the steam engine was the first key technology that determined a particular path for the development of the industrial society.
England in the 1700s
What was special about England in the 1700s – a cold, damp island with nothing very remarkable apart from a maritime empire that it was about to lose?
What were steam engines?
The first steam-driven mechanical devices widely used were Newcomen Atmospheric Engines, or Fire Engines invented in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen. They were widely deployed but not very efficient. The improvement patented by James Watt is generally considered the first general purpose steam engine, and the trigger of the industrial revolution. The Watt engine was more efficient (double the work per energy input) but also more general-purpose as it rotated a shaft rather than driving a pump.
The technology and the innovative process are interesting, but the question we are asking here is – what was the problem that Newcomen and Watt were trying to solve?
The Newcomen engine was designed specifically to pump water from coal mines. England was, as we have noted, a cold and damp place. England needed coal but the coal mines would flood easily and pumping water from the mines would mean that you could dig deeper and get more coal.
In other words, the engine was not designed as a general purpose power source for the coming industrial revolution. It was a technical solution to an immediate problem of digging up coal.
In fact, Watt’s use of the patent system significantly slowed down the improvements to the steam engine that would enable its use in other applications, such as transport (steam trains and ships). Widespread use of steam engines did not really take off until the 1800s, after Watt’s patent expired.
Why did England need so much coal?
To get back to what concerns us here, why was the steam engine needed in the 1700s in England and not in some other place or some other time?
In the 1700s, there were no steam engines except those used for pumping water from coal mines. So what was all the coal for?
England needed coal principally for two things: heating and iron. Iron smelting, in particular, uses large quantities of heat to reduce ore to metal. And iron was in demand for many uses, including military uses.
But…humans had been burning stuff for heat for a long time and smelting iron for at least 3000 years. The primary fuel sources for these activities were wood and charcoal (produced from wood). Coal is relatively difficult to acquire since one needs to dig it up, a time-consuming and labour-intensive process compared to gathering wood.
The problem was that in the 1700s, England had a shortage of wood for use as an energy source.
Deforestation in England
In pre-historic times, England was probably covered with thick forests. However, by the 18th century, the forest cover had been reduced to around 20%, so there was very little surplus.
With the expansion of sea trade and naval power that England undertook from the 17th to 18th centuries, a lot of ships needed to be built. The English Navy alone needed around 300 ships, and the life of each ship was not usually more than 15-20 years because of shipwrecks, wear and simple rot.
To build a sailing ship required between 2000 and 6000 trees, mostly mature oaks and other trees. This therefore represented a demand of at least 40,000 trees per year, on top of the demand for trees for fuel and for the metal industry. During the 18th century, forest coverage in England declined from 20% to around 10% and England actively imported wood from other countries.
The result was that prices for fuel wood rose, the government imposed restrictions on its use, and simple economic forces drove people to look for alternatives. Although coal is difficult and dangerous to mine, it was abundant in England and much more energy-dense than wood or charcoal. And so this new fuel resource was exploited.
Why did sea trade become so important?
The motivations for European sea trade are well-documented. Christopher Columbus is the best known example, but even earlier in the 15th century, Portuguese and Dutch sailors were building ships to sail around the Cape to trade (or raid) in India and Asia.
For centuries during the middle ages, goods had been traded east and west across the Eurasian continent over the “silk roads”. Venice and other cities in Europe grew rich from this trade, but the system was disrupted in the 15th century with the decline and fall of the final bastion of the Roman empire – Constantinople in 1453.
As the trade routes were blocked, Europeans sought to find new trade routes across the sea.
Cause and Effect
Tracing back the key events leading to the industrial revolution, we see that the fall of Constantinople disrupted trade, pushing Europeans to find new trading routes, for which they needed hundreds of wooden ships, which put pressure on wood supplies leading to substitution by coal, which was difficult to mine in England because of flooding in coal mines, for which some inventors created steam-driven pumps which were then modified to become general-purpose engines which revolutionised transport, industry, etc.
But is history and technology really so deterministic and so contingent? Yes and no.
We can imagine that, if England had found significant oil reserves, the industrial revolution may have skipped the use of coal altogether. If China had established long-distance trade routes and associated colonies and outposts, the development of technologies could have been completely different. So the trajectory of history and technology is highly contingent on the conditions at each step.
Similarly, the steam engine didn’t necessarily need the motivation of pumping water. Demands for energy to drive industry were strong enough that many other paths could have been taken to develop the technology. In fact, there were many inventors working on steam power in the late 18th century and some historical analyses suggest that they were hampered, not helped, by James Watt and his patents.
We place too much emphasis on specific events and people and give them too much individual credit for the path of history and the development of technology. Reality is much more complex than that. We have taken one particular path that is marked with memorable events and people, but that path was highly dependent on specific circumstances and we could quite easily have taken another path.
What is more interesting to contemplate, is what kind of circumstances lead to accelerated innovation or to blocked innovation.