THE ASCENT OF MAN

 JACOB BROWNOWSKI

MACDONALD FUTURA PUBLISHERS                        1973

PART VIII

 

Chapter 8: The Drive for Power

• Revolutions are not made by fate but by men. Sometimes they are solitary men of genius. But the great revolutions of the 18^th century were made by many lesser men banded together. What drove them was the conviction that everyman is master of his own salvation.
• The Industrial Revolution is a long trail of changes starting about 1760. It forms one of a triad of revolutions – the American Revolution that started in 1775, and the French Revolution that started in 1789. All three were social revolutions.
• Manufacture was cottage industry, and the Industrial Revolution begins in the villages. The men who make it are craftsmen: the millwright, the watchmaker, the canal builder, the blacksmith.
• Between 1760 and 1820 the customary way of running industry changed from taking work to villagers to bringing workers into a factory and have them overseen.
• James Brindley of Staffordshire started his self-made career in 1733 by working at mill wheels. His improvements were practical: to sharpen and step up the performance of the water wheel as a machine.
• James Brindley was also a pioneer in the art of building canals. The Duke of Bridgewater got him to build a canal to carry coal from the Duke’s pit at Worsley to the rising town of Manchester.
• Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterize all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use.
• Men like Franklin had a passion for rational knowledge. He proposed that lightning is electric, and in 1752 he proved it by hanging a key from a kite in a thunderstorm – an invention he turned into the lightning conductor.
• Meanwhile, cast iron was already being used in revolutionary ways by the ironmasters like John Wilkinson who built the first iron boat in 1787. The boat sailed under an iron bridge that he helped to build in 1779 at a nearby Shropshire town that is still called Ironbridge.
• The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong; many of them were inventors who came into business that way. A majority were members of the Church of England but belonged to a puritan tradition.
• John Wilkinson was much under the influence of his brother-in-law Joseph Priestly, late famous as a chemist, but who was a Unitarian minister and was probably the pioneer of the principle, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.
• Joseph Priestly, in turn, was scientific adviser to Josiah Wedgeood who made marvelous tableware for aristocracy and royalty. The creamware which made Wedgewood famous and prosperous was not porcelain, but a white earthenware pottery for common use that the man in the street could buy. In time that is what transformed the kitchens of the working class in the Industrial Revolution.
• But Wedgewood was not the most important industrialist in Birmingham: that was Matthew Boulton, who brought James Watt to Birmingham because they there they could build the steam engine.
• By our standards, the industrial towns were slums, but to the people who had come from a cottage, a house in a terrace was a liberation from hunger, dirt and disease; it offered a new wealth of choice. The iron bedstead saved more women from childbed fever than the doctor’s black bag, which was itself a medical invention.
• The factory system was ghastly; the school books were right about that. The factories simply carried on as village industry had always done, with a heartless contempt for those who worked in them.
• The new evil that made the factory ghastly was the domination of men by the pace of the machines. A new ethic was preached in which the cardinal sin was not cruelty or vice, but idleness.
• Power is a new preoccupation, in a sense a new idea, in science. The modern conception of transforming nature in order to obtain power from her, and of changing one form of power into another, had come to the leading edge of science.
• We are still in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; we had better be, for we have many things to put right in it. But it has made our world richer, smaller, and for the first time ours. And I mean that literally: our world, everybody’s world. 
• From its earliest beginnings, when it was still dependent on water power, the Industrial Revolution was terribly cruel to those whose lives and livelihood it overturned.
• The Renaissance established the dignity of man. The Industrial Revolution established the unity of nature.

 

Chapter 9: The Ladder of Creation