Borrowing Brilliance: Technology Transfer Across Sectors in the Early Industrial Revolution

Abstract

An exploration of the way in which ideas and practices were transferred across sectors by human agencies between 1750 and 1829; set within the framework of a model of innovation in which early adopters are included in the category of ‘innovators’ on the grounds that they faced similar problems to those faced by the originators of technologies. Following a discussion of the increase in patents from the mid-eighteenth century, the paper considers applications of the science of measurement, and applications of generic technologies in coal fuel, furnaces, rollers, stamping and pressing and image transfer technologies. It concludes by seeking to address the questions why? And why then?

Keywords:

• invention
• innovation
• patents
• patentees
• measurement
• generic technologies

The period 1750 to 1820 — the early Industrial Revolution — was characterized by a flurry of invention and innovation. These were exciting times. There is a great deal of difference between invention and innovation. Invention is an outcome and a process a new device or product a new material technology, chemical or process, devised and developed with inspiration, study and experiment. Innovation is also an outcome and a process and is the implementation of new machines, processes new systems and products, for financial gain or other benefits. It, too, is achieved with inspiration, study and experiment — and not a little perspiration. By no means all inventions become innovations.

Some researchers regard innovation as something intrinsically new, the innovator being the first mover.¹ Others, recognizing that early adopters of innovations freq­uently face problems similar to those faced by the originator, include early adopters in their definition of innovators.² The potential benefits of early adoption are similar for both the originating innovator and early adopter and, while the desired outcomes are positive, not all the side effects or unintended outcomes are necessarily negative. The problems faced by early adopters are similar to those of the originators of an innovation and may be caused by replication, each application, even within the same industry, possessing different contextual variables — perhaps in the composition of raw materials, availability of power or knowledge. Alternatively, the problems faced by early adoption may be caused by the adoption of a machine or a process in a different industrial sector; or an issue of scaling-up (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1. Borrowing Brilliance for Innovation.

In any age there are a few major, strategic, inventions and innovations. In the early Industrial Revolution Watt’s engine was one; the Jacquard loom another; large-scale sulphuric acid manufacture, chlorine bleaching, powered spinning, gas lighting and ballooning are others. To these mechanical innovations should be added the process innovations of flow production systems and the scaling-up to factory product­ion. In addition there was the multitude of micro inventions and innovations, without which most of the major inventions would not have been adopted.³ Most major inventions required a number of modifications, improvements and adaptations in order to be effective. Some of these were made by the originators but many were made by their employees (e.g. Southern and the Creighton brothers for Boulton & Watt) and/or subsequent adopters (not necessarily acknowledged). A successful innovation was greatly enhanced by subsequent improvements which could considerably extend its useful life. Major technological inventions and innovations were more likely where they were not specific to a location — the steam engine, for example. But, even in this case, adoption became far wider than that envisaged by the invent­ors, the reciprocating engine being modified to generate rotative power. Would James Watt ever have got around to developing an operational rotative engine without Matthew Boulton’s sense of urgency?

This paper is set within the second, more all-embracing definition of innovation, on the basis that early adoption, even nowadays, can prove hugely problematic. It was much more so in the early Industrial Revolution. If the problems encountered by early adopters of machines and processes are charted, they quite uncannily appear to replicate the problems addressed by the originator, the inventor. (This is, of course, to beg the question as to who the originator was.) Some major innovators in the Industrial Revolution were both producers of something that was intrinsically new, as well as being creative early adopters (and often improvers) of the inventions of others, sometimes adapting these inventions to different products and processes. These were the Borrowers of Brilliance. Innovation was heady stuff and prolific innovators often developed crossover innovations within their own businesses, namel­y innovations developed/adopted in one area of their business which were transferred to another.⁴

Innovation in one manufacturing process in the early Industrial Revolution almost inevitably created a bottleneck in another, particularly in upstream processes. Part of Arkwright’s genius was the recognition that mechanized spinning created a bottleneck in the carding process — and he duly patented a carding machine. Downstream pressure, on the other hand, was exerted by the adoption of coke smelting which put pressure on refining. Cort’s puddling process eased this problem but a new tension was created by the introduction of new and larger furnaces. (This imbalance was not eased until the introduction of the Bessemer converter.)⁵

Patents/patentees

The random survival of manuscript sources or published accounts of industrial processes in the early Industrial Revolution, notwithstanding excellent local studies of particular entrepreneurs, organizations and industrial sites, almost inevitably points to patents as a starting point.

Around sixty patents per decade were taken out in the seventeenth century, but by the 1760s the total was over 200 per decade and almost 500 by the 1780s;⁶ they continued to double every two decades in the mid-nineteenth century. It is tempting to use patent statistics as an indicator of invention, yet there are many pitfalls in doing this. As Christine MacLeod has demonstrated, we do not know how many patented inventions never went into production, or were never adopted or, if they were adopted, did not work.⁷ And some significant inventions were never patented, for example, Huntsman’s crucible steel and Newcomen’s engine. It is not always clear where one invention ends and another begins, particularly along technological traject­ories (families of innovations and improvements) — for example, developments of the low pressure steam engine, some of which were patented and others were not.⁸ Technological change depends, in some measure, on its past as learning by using draws on techniques already in use.

Some manufacturers, such as James Watt, were positive about patenting and keen to pursue infringers.⁹ Josiah Wedgwood, on the other hand, took out a single patent for encaustic vases and reached a compromise with an infringer on the grounds that both men wished to avoid the expense of litigation. Wedgwood did not resort to patenting thereafter, but was a prolific innovator.¹⁰ There is a thin line between being able to defend a patented invention, particularly one regarded as materially significant by potential users, and deciding whether (or not) to turn a blind eye to the minutiae of some infringement. Matthew Boulton suggested in 1781 that if Richard Arkwright had kept quiet he might have been able to continue to hold onto his patents.¹¹ Instead Arkwright charged a high price for licences, only allowing them to be granted in multiples of 1000 spindles. This was believed to have intimidated cotton carders and spinners to the point where they felt it worthwhile to challenge the legality of his patents.¹²

MacLeod identifies three categories of patentees in the eighteenth century.¹³ First there were the amateur inventors who were a feature, particularly, of the early eighteenth century. They were outsiders; invention was a hobby — this is not to suggest that their inventions were necessarily crackpot or frivolous. The second category was the professional inventor who was also an outsider. For the professional inventor, inventing was a livelihood and their number increased markedly from the early nineteenth century. Typically, the professional inventor took out patents across a wide range of industries with the objective of selling his inventions to manufacturers. The third category was the businessman/manufacturer/artisan who dominated patenting from the 1760s until the end of the eighteenth century.¹⁴

Patents taken out in the second half of the eighteenth century were largely for production machinery and equipment, particularly engines and textile machinery. They were usually for a specific, clearly describable, operation such as spinning, or for brewing and distilling, rather than chemical processes.¹⁵ And patentees often applied their inventions in one industry, while covering a wider range of applications in their patents. Richard Arkwright, for example, developed his carding and spinning machinery for the cotton industry.¹⁶ This technology was only later transferred to worsted and, while the carding engine was adapted to the woollen industry, Arkwright’s spinning machine — the water frame — was not. (It worked well with longer fibres as in cotton and worsted but not for shorter staple woollen fibres.)¹⁷ James Watt’s first working engine was utilized for pumping — although as early as 1766 he had conceived of a steam wheel and continued to experiment with this into the 1770s. But it did not work. It was Boulton who urged that the reciprocating engine be adapted to generate rotative motion: ‘The people in London, Manchester and Birmingham are steam mill mad. I don’t mean to hurry you but […] the most likely line of consumption of our engines is the application of them to mills which is certainly an extensive field’.¹⁸ John Smeaton, a gifted civil engineer, millwright and improver of the atmospheric steam engine, with a wide-ranging practice, did not believe that steam power could be effectively used for corn milling, on the supposition that the engine could not generate sufficiently smooth motion.¹⁹ John Rennie, not an improver of steam engines but a very able engineer and millwright, demonstrated at Albion Mill that it could.²⁰ Borrowers of brilliance could be — and often were — relative outsiders.

Curiously, very few civil engineers took out patents for engineering and machine tool making.²¹ They devised machines to solve their own particular working problems and chose not to patent in their core activities. Instead, professional engineers seem to have patented their sideline inventions. George Sorocold, the well-known engineer of London Bridge Waterworks, patented a whip twisting machine and a mechanical saw, whereas he took out no patents in his core areas of expertise. Machine tool making was little patented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There were many inventions and improvements in mechanical tools but the pioneers chose to patent inventions in other fields. Henry Maudslay, for example, took out six patents between 1805 and 1824, not one of which was for the machine tools that established his reputation.²²

There were new incentives from 1776, when patents could be held for additions and improvements. Lists of patents were published in specialist journals such as the Repertory of Arts and Manufactures, launched in 1794, which from 1797 provided complete lists of patents, as did the Annual Register, while the Philosophical Magazine, launched in 1798, provided short critiques of recently patented inventions.²³ Inventors’ attitudes varied greatly. On the one hand, James Watt sought to patent as soon as possible, complaining to his partner, Matthew Boulton that ‘one’s thoughts seemed to be stolen before one speaks’.²⁴ Others, such as Josiah Wedgwood and James Keir were more reluctant, although both were highly inventive and innovative.

We have no consistent means of knowing which patents were implemented, which remained on the drawing board; which ones worked and which did not; and how many inventions were never patented. Nevertheless, problematic though patent data are, they provide a starting point for tracking the transfer of innovations across sectors so long as sight is not lost of the inventions and innovations which, for a variety of reasons, were not patented. Borrowing brilliance could be facilitated by an absence of patent protection.

Innovative applications of measurement

The late eighteenth century saw a surge of interest in measurement. This attracted the attention of scientists, engineers, clock-makers, and amateur enthusiasts of all sorts. The flourishing provincial philosophical societies — of which there were some thirty — the Lunar Society of Birmingham being a prime example — frequently discussed measurement, for example barometers, thermometers, hydrometers, weights and linear measurement; Lunar Society members enjoying Matthew Boulton’s con­genial hospitality at Soho House, Birmingham.²⁵ The focus on practical applications of science moved from the Royal Society, which had taken the lead in the seventeenth century, to the provincial societies in the eighteenth century. There was an upsurge of interest in mathematics, evidenced by the large number of textbooks available in eighteenth-century England. Thermometers and hydrometers became routine instruments in brewing and distilling, as in chemical manufacture. Watch- and clock-making, instrument-making, optical equipment, the design of gear wheels and other millwrighting; the measuring of engine efficiency and machine: power ratios all required a facility with mathematics.²⁶

Boulton & Watt charged for their reciprocating engine by a calculation of fuel saving of their engine compared with a common one of comparable size and this required application of the science of measurement. Based on empirical evidence, Watt calculated the equivalence between his engine and the common engine it replaced at a specific Cornish mine. On this basis he produced a table of comparative sizes (in terms of power exerted) of his engine and common engines. It was then necessary to measure the quantity of water raised. On the assumption that all strokes were of equal length (a matter subject to some dispute) a calculation of the number of strokes in a given time would provide a figure for the total amount of water raised. To count the number of strokes Watt designed a mechanical counter, the pendulum, employing another dimension of clockwork, the mechanism being fixed to the engine beam.²⁷ He did not invent the engine counter; it was a piece of brilliance borrowed from a Liverpool firm of pedometer manufacturers and it was Boulton who made the mental connection. Watt suggested improvements and, thereafter, they purchased Wyke & Green’s modified pedometers.²⁸

With the development of rotative power Watt required another means of measuring engine capacity. It is significant that he adopted the term horsepower, for the horse wheel was the most visible prime mover and its effective power output could be observed by the addition or subtraction of animals.²⁹ In c. 1790 Watt devised the engine ‘indicator’ — a form of pressure gauge. This was modified a few years later by the addition of a pointer which passed over a scale. In 1796 the pointer was replaced by a pencil which traced a graph on a sheet of paper from which a comput­ation of the work done could be made, a modification attributed to John Southern, one of Boulton & Watt’s loyal and knowledgeable engineers.³⁰ Richard Arkwright, the pioneer of power spinning in the cotton industry, operated the machinery in his first factory with nine horses around a large wheel. This provided him with a visible indicator of power to machine ratios. Arkwright then moved with more confidence to water power and, later, to steam.³¹ The power-to-spindle ratio adopted by Boulton & Watt in providing rotative engines for cotton spinning was 1 hp per 100 spindles, on the basis that Arkwright worked his nine horses hard.³²

In the ten years or so from the commencement of Boulton & Watt’s rotative engine business in 1775, the partners were keen to collect prototype steam power application data. To this end they sought to identify key innovating entrepreneurs in major industries who would be prepared to share data on steam power implementation, providing the essential testing ground for calculating power to machine ratios.³³ Samuel Whitbread was identified in brewing — indeed he was so excited by his engine that, to John Rennie’s annoyance, he would not allow it to be started except in his presence.³⁴ Benjamin Gott, woollen manufacturer of Leeds, John Marshall, the Leeds flax spinner, G. A. Lee, the Manchester cotton spinner, and Boulton & Watt’s ‘own’ industrial interest, Albion Flour Mill in London, all became showcases (Lee’s factory was a showcase for gas lighting, steam heating, and fireproofing as well). These were not necessarily the first manufacturers to adopt the Boulton & Watt engine in their respective sectors but were recognized leaders and experimenters.³⁵ As Mathias says ‘magic was being driven out of technology’.³⁶

The science of measurement was significant in the brewing industry toward the end of the eighteenth century. By 1762 Michael Combrune introduced the thermometer into his brewery and this was widely used in the industry by 1780. In 1784 John Richardson published a contract describing his saccarometer, an instrument providing exact knowledge of the specific gravity of the wort and, through that, the amount of fermentable matter contained in a unit weight of malt or barley. This enabled the brewer to manipulate the product for profit. (Beers were subject to excise and by manipulating the strength of the ale the brewer was able to compute the profitability of a particular batch.)³⁷

Josiah Wedgwood sought to apply the science of measurement to firing pottery. Temperature control presented a high risk area of the business. His first idea was to measure the expansion of metal rods, but attempting to measure the length of a red-hot rod proved impractical. Another idea was to monitor how clay wares changed in colour under extreme heat. He then decided on firing specially made discs of clay, covered with iron oxide. When fired, they darkened from light brown through chocolate brown to black, depending upon the temperature reached. Unlike a metal rod, clay contracted on heating, so Wedgwood made cylinders of the purest Cornish clay and used a brass gauge, against the scale of which a fired disc could be measured to quantify the precise degree of contraction. He devised his own temperature scale — degrees Wedgwood — and his paper on the subject was read to the Royal Society in 1782. This system was simple but, in the longer term, proved to be unreliable.³⁸ Nonetheless, a stream of beautiful high quality and perfect jasper ware and Queens ware was produced at his Etruria factory.

The science of measurement was involved where the significant scaling-up of a process took place. From the middle of the eighteenth century sulphuric acid replaced buttermilk in calico bleaching thereby reducing a process which had previously taken days to a matter of hours. Sulphuric acid was made in glass vessels by a process invented in France in 1666 and industrialized in about 1740 by an English pharmacist, Joshua Ward, who undertook the manufacture in large glass vessels. The price of sulphuric acid dropped dramatically but the glass vessels were liable to breakage. In 1746 John Roebuck developed the lead-chamber process, in which the acid was made in large lead-lined oak tanks. Prosser queried whether Roebuck knew that Glauber had used lead vessels for condensing acid fumes in the seventeenth century. His work had been published in England in 1689. It seems, however, that while he has been described as the first chemical engineer, his work was on a laboratory scale.³⁹ Sulphuric acid was a key ingredient in the manufacture of hydrochloric acid, based on the discovery of chlorine by Berthollet. A number of British industrialists, including James Watt, were interested in the possibilities of chlorine bleaching, perceiving a significant market for bleaching woven cotton goods, besides coloured rags prior to mashing them for paper-making. One of the problems encountered was dealing with chlorine fumes.⁴⁰ The successful development of a chlorine bleaching process was achieved by Charles Tennant who, in 1798, patented bleaching powder, a mixture of chlorine and lime, in a method which proved to be both inexpensive and not harmful to health. His St Rollox Works produced 52 tons in the first year and over 9200 tons in the fifth year of production.⁴¹

The large-scale manufacture of alkali was commenced by James Keir at Tipton chemical works. Rather than employing a large quantity of salt, which was subject to duty, he used cheaper waste products from the manufacture of nitric acid and sulphuric acid. He was supplying alkali to Boulton as early as 1781 and by 1801 his works had grown to an immense size. He had intended supplying local soap manufacturers with alkali but, in the event, he also became a soap-maker. He also supplied white lead to the Staffordshire potters and red lead to local glass-makers.⁴² Tar and pitch were by-products of the manufacture of coke for smelting. Archibald Cochrane, ninth Earl of Dundonald, a prolific inventor, undertook a reverse innovation by taking out a patent in 1781 for the extraction of tar, pitch and other products from coal, establishing purpose-built tar kilns first at Culross and later at Madeley Wood in Shropshire, with the encouragement of William Reynolds, selling the by-product coke to local ironworks.⁴³

Experimenting with gases, or ‘airs’ as they were called towards the end of the eighteenth century, was an international interest.⁴⁴ James Watt became interested in the potential medicinal uses of gases following the death of his daughter Jessy from tuberculosis in 1794 and his friendship with Dr Thomas Beddoes who was developing the practice of pneumatic medicine, made more poignant by the illness and death in 1804 of his son Gregory, also from tuberculosis. Watt designed and built a pneumatic apparatus (the purpose being to produce and deliver gas to patients) complete with a gasholder or gasometer for storing gas, for Beddoes. He had been introduced to the idea of the gasometer following his reading of a paper by Lavoisier and Beddoes had sent him a sketch of one in 1791. Boulton & Watt began to make pneumatic apparatus for sale from 1794. Pneumatic medicine was a failure but William Murdock, then in Cornwall as Boulton & Watt’s agent, became interested in distillation and began experimenting with coal gas. At first there was little interest at Soho but experiments began from 1798 when Murdock moved back to Soho and the Foundry was gas-lit. Watt jun. (his father having retired from the firm) was, at first, discouraging. However, the firm began serious work in 1801 and, between then and c. 1810, a number of large mills and factories were gas lit, complete with gasometers. This was both a case of borrowing brilliance as well as scaling-up.⁴⁵ A more playful outcome of experiments in gases was a huge scaling-up from the domestic or labor­atory context to ballooning. The Mongolfiers sent up their first hot air balloons in 1783, later explicitly acknowledging the work of Black, Cavendish and Priestley. These were followed by hydrogen balloons which could achieve greater height, Erasmus Darwin being the first Englishman to fly a large one from Derby. The Mongolfier brothers were paper manufacturers and used this material to line their balloons — a technology transfer from business to pleasure; Matthew Boulton made a large paper balloon filled with hydrogen gas with his children in Cornwall ‘to the great delight of all concerned’. Balloon mania caught the imagination of young and old and provided opportunities for learning about the nature of gases, the resistance of materials and the strength of winds.⁴⁶

Innovation in generic technologies

Generic technologies such as power systems, rollers, presses, lighting, heating, the tappit wheel and punched cards were adopted across industrial sectors, although each transfer posed specific problems in adaptation, a process which could take a number of years. Brilliance was borrowed across sectors through a perception of the possibility of spin-offs. Boulton & Watt branched into factory central heating, another generic technology, when it was perceived that a larger boiler than was required solely for power generation could be installed at relatively little extra cost, and this could provide steam for heating pipes. If an engine customer’s factory was fireproof and supported by circular cast-iron columns, these could become conduits for steam heating.⁴⁷ Boulton & Watt also supplied a few heating devices for dyeing vats, the innovating entrepreneur being the leading Leeds woollen manufacturer, Benjamin Gott. When smaller woollen manufacturers adopted the process, it was found not to pay unless the factory owner already had, or intended to buy, a steam engine.⁴⁸ There were further spin-offs from the introduction of steam power to major breweries: casks were cleansed by steam and a host of tasks for which steam power had not been intended, such as hoisting and mashing, proved to be as important as steam’s super­iority in the functions for which it had been adopted. Steam’s ‘creative effects […] proved as valuable as its substitution effects’.⁴⁹ And brilliance could be borrowed in the reverse direction, by generic technologies borrowing a specific mechanism. The windmill governor (employed to control the speed of and distance between corn milling stones) was transferred to the Watt steam engine on the advice of either John Rennie or John Southern and with the enthusiastic support of Boulton.⁵⁰

Innovations: crossing sectors

Innovations which crossed sectors can be categorized in six ways. First, there were technologies designed and/or patented with a specific industrial sector or sectors in mind such as tappit wheels, steam power, rolls, presses and punched cards, which were subsequently adopted in other sectors. Second, there were process innovations such as flow production and scaling-up as in Maudslay’s block-making system, or the manufacture of sulphuric acid, which greatly increased output. Third, there was materials substitution such as coal for wood and charcoal in a wide range of fuel burning industries. Fourth, there were specific spin-offs either from a generic or an industry-specific technology to applications not originally envisaged by the inventor, such as heating liquids from steam engine boilers. Fifth, there was the use of waste products such as those from sulphuric acid manufacture; and finally, crossover innovations between businesses owned by an individual or a partnership, such as the different applications and modifications of the stamp and press in Matthew Boulton’s businesses, or the Mongolfier brothers’ use of paper in their first air balloons.

Reference has been made, above, to the delight in scientific enquiry in the late eighteenth century, as indicated by the provincial philosophical societies. This was both at the abstract level of puzzle solving, besides the immensely practical. Millwrights in the water power era were used to calculating power-to-machine ratios in corn milling, fulling cloth and the operation of forge hammers, for example. Millwork involved the transmission of power from a prime mover, be it water, wind, animal or steam power, to perform a function as economically as possible. This is a prime example of scaling up — from the intricacies of watch and clockwork to millwork consisting of cog wheels, gears, levers and shafts. Indeed, some eighteenth-century millwork was referred to as clockwork.⁵¹

A rather more way-out sector-crossing was the first industrial application of a semi-automated machine — the introduction of the punched card to industry — a system of programming which anticipated twentieth-century computing. In 1725 Basile Boucheron, a Lyon silk weaver, invented a way to control a loom with perfor­ated paper tape. He was the son of an organ-maker and knew that the information content for the cylinders of musical automata was first laid out on paper before the design was transferred to the expensive cylinders. The practice was to punch holes in the paper designs wrapped around the cylinders indicating where holes were drilled for pegs. The paper layout with punched holes already held the information which was to be transferred, so he applied a similar coding to the weaving of patterns in silk, thus partly automating the tedious process of setting up the draw loom. In 1728, one of Boucheron’s assistants, Jean-Baptiste Falcon, improved the machine, replacing the paper roll with a series of punched cards joined together in an endless loop. This was moderately successful. An attempt at full automation was made in 1745 by Jacques Vaucanson but it was not until 1805 that the hugely successful Jacquard loom was produced and this transformed the silk and ribbon industries.⁵²

Coal fuel technology

The use of coal and coke, as industrial fuel, was a major generic technology. It has been suggested that this was one of the most significant distinguishing features of the transformation of British industry in the early Industrial Revolution;⁵³ and in which England differed from the industrializing Continental European countries. By the early eighteenth century the primary side of the ferrous and non-ferrous metal industries — smelting — was considerably larger than the final-product metal industries. Lead, tin and copper were already smelted in reverberatory furnaces using mineral fuel on a large scale and works were located on or near coalfields. As the scale of enterprises grew yet larger some relocated; for example, copper moving from Bristol to South Wales where fuel was cheaper. Copper smelting was also relocated from Cornwall to South Wales in the 1720s.⁵⁴

The iron industry was located with reference to fuel and power needs and these changed in the course of the eighteenth century from charcoal to coke, although relatively slowly at first. Abraham Darby first smelted iron with coke in 1709 but the process was only slowly adopted by other ironmasters after the 1760s. The main reasons were twofold: charcoal for smelting was still readily available in some locations and there were only limited uses for the cast iron product of coke smelting until later in the century.⁵⁵ However, from the 1770s, as industrialization developed apace, the demand for cast iron increased for millwork, machinery, steam engine parts, canal metalwork; cast iron for structural purposes (fireproof factories), props and bridges, besides many smaller items. Henry Cort’s puddling innovation released the refining of cast iron from dependency on charcoal since the reverberatory furnace was part of the process. From then on the location of the iron industry was determined by the availability of coal and ore.⁵⁶

The Newcomen and, later, Watt engines released heavy power-using industry from a dependence on water power but these engines required supplies of coal — it was, after all, the high price of coal, shipped to Cornwall from South Wales, which led Boulton & Watt to focus, initially, on the Cornish copper mines as a significant first market for their engines.⁵⁷

Furnaces, iron, glass

Another generic technology was the reverberatory furnace used for smelting copper and lead, refining iron, and producing glass. Each of these industries had grown over the centuries using various smelting and refining techniques. In the coal-fired reverberatory furnace (Figure 2) the fire was kept separate from the metal or glass, thereb­y preventing contamination. The first recorded application of the technology was in glass-making. By the seventeenth century British glass-makers had invented the glass cone to optimize the draught for a circle of ‘pots’ around, but not in contact with, the fire pit. Glass cones became a significant feature of the landscape in Bristol, St Helens, Stourbridge, South Yorkshire and Tyneside.⁵⁸

FIGURE 2. A coal-fired reverberatory furnace.

Early in the sixteenth century reverberatory furnaces were employed in Germany for melting bronze for guns. They were first used in England for smelting metals in the late seventeenth century; first for lead and copper, later for tin and, in the 1690s, for melting pig iron for foundry work, the process becoming obsolete with the introduction of the foundry cupola in the late eighteenth century.⁵⁹ Cort’s puddling furnace of the 1780s combined the reverberatory furnace with the rolling of heated iron using grooved rollers. This was, in some respects, the culmination of a process that had taken over 200 years of searching for a solution to a complex mineralogical and technical problem, resulting in an integrated solution. Little wonder that Cort, too, did not retain his patent protection for many years. He, like Arkwright, was challenged by industrialists who claimed that the invention was not new.⁶⁰ It was more difficult to claim that the integration of a series of operations was original.

Technologies and products of forging, devised for manufacture or use in one industry, were transferred to others in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cent­uries. Two examples will suffice — both from weapons manufacture. John Wilkinso­n, as is well known, devised a boring machine for cannon manufacture which was adapted to the boring of Boulton & Watt’s engine cylinders. He cornered the market since others could not match his precision.⁶¹ And, in the early days of the adoption of gas lighting before c. 1810, gun barrels were found to be of the right cross-section for conveying gas.⁶² Josiah Wedgwood saw a lathe at Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory in the early 1760s and informed his partner Thomas Bentley that he intended asking Boulton if he would be prepared to part with it. Boulton evidently did for Wedgwood noted ‘Engine lathe turning introduced into pottery by Mr Wedgwood in 1763’.⁶³

The roller

The roller was a generic technology with a wide range of potential applications. It thinned, flattened and lengthened materials and could be employed to generate an almost continuous band of material. The rolling and slitting mill produced metal cut into strips or narrow sheets for a vast number of different trades and promoted the widespread use of the stamp and press. At first used for iron — in the early 1500s in Germany and Belgium — the first known slitting mill in England was in 1588. By the early 1600s a number of slitting mills had been built in the Stour Valley in Worcestershire, as well as in the Weald (Figure 3).⁶⁴ Spin-off from iron slitting was the wire mill — the first recorded one being from the 1560s at Tintern, the need being in part created by the growing demand for wool cards.⁶⁵ Rolling and slitting had diffused to the copper industry by the 1560s and to lead by the early eighteenth century if not before.⁶⁶

FIGURE 3. A slitting mill.

The transfer of the concept of the roller to textile spinning occurred in the early eighteenth century — it supplanted human fingers which had, for centuries, manually drawn out and twisted woollen, linen and, later, cotton threads for weaving. The first roller spinning machinery, patented in 1738, was invented by Lewis Paul. The invention involved stretching slivers of cotton between two sets of rollers placed a few inches apart, an invention described by Prosser as ‘exquisite in its simplicity’.⁶⁷ The key to the process was the speed of the second pair of rollers which turned faster, thereby extending the material. This was followed by a patent for mechanical carding ten years later. Paul, with his business partner John Wyatt, set up a spinning concern in a Birmingham warehouse in 1741 operated by a donkey wheel and, by 1742, in a water-powered mill in Northampton which was reported on in detail by the engineer Thomas Yeoman.⁶⁸ The mills were both technical and commercial failures — contributory factors may have been the fact that Paul had not initially developed a mechanized carding process and there may have been difficulties in ascertaining the speeds and distance between the spinning rollers. However the principle had been explored and the knowledge entered the public domain.

It was Richard Arkwright who, in 1769, patented the roller spinning machine for weft yarn which transformed the cotton industry, patenting a carding machine in 1775. His first mill, in Nottingham, was powered by nine horses. By 1771 he had moved to a water-powered factory at Cromford and extended his business to nearby Wirksworth, Bakewell and Masson mills, besides Shudehill in Manchester and New Lanark in Scotland.⁶⁹ In 1781, Arkwright’s patents were annulled following sustained opposition from cotton spinners who argued that his machinery was not new. He may, indeed, have seen horses turning carding frames on Paul’s or Bourn’s principles in Lancashire in the 1760s. Arkwright’s key innovation, however, was not so much a set of unique machines — although he did make them work effectively in his factor­ies; Arkwright’s key innovation was the effective introduction of an integrated flow production system. Moreover, by insisting on selling licences for multiples of 1000 spindles during the period his patent was in force, he pioneered the introduction of the factory system in the cotton industry.⁷⁰

Stamping/pressing

The rolling mill, stamp and press — and, later, the drawbench — transformed the metal trades. The hand-operated screw press had been in use in London and, probably the Midlands, towards the end of the seventeenth century.⁷¹ As a technique, the press remained relatively unchanged, except in size for at least 200 years (Figure 4). Button-making was just one of the many eighteenth-century Birmingham ‘toy’ trades which depended on screw presses and stamping equipment.

FIGURE 4. A hand-operated screw press.

The screw press had been employed by Italian medallists at the turn of the sixteenth century and was first used to strike coins in Germany in the late 1540s, diffusing to other parts of mainland Europe, including the Paris mint, which was equipped with them in 1553. The technology travelled to Britain via a Huguenot refugee, Eloi Mestrell and, in 1561, his machinery was installed in the Tower Mint. However, ten years later, the Royal Mint, not for the last time resistant to technological change, argued that the machinery was not cost effective. Mestrell’s operation was closed and, understandably frustrated, he turned to counterfeiting — and was caught in 1578. There was also resistance to the screw press in Paris and that Mint reverted to hammering. Some thirty years later an engraver at the Paris Mint sought to revive mechanized coining. Meeting with concerted opposition he, too, came to Britain. In 1632 he was made Engraver General and transferred to the Royal Mint, where he was tolerated rather than welcomed. Opposition to the screw press in minting in Paris and London was ultimately defeated in 1645 and 1661 respectively.⁷²

Matthew Boulton’s first Soho Mint, built in 1788 in anticipation of a Government contract for coin, contained six hand-operated screw presses, similar to those used in Soho Manufactory for his ‘toy’ business, a crossover innovation. Whilst he was employing current best-practice technology in the mint, he did this ‘with greater accuracy and with numerous improvements in details’.⁷³ One innovation was the organization of the manufacturing process. Each machine was placed in a logical flow production system, material handling being reduced by being fed to the appropriate machines in boxes through shoots. And in 1790 he took out a patent (no. 1757) for steam-driven presses, and an air pump to facilitate the operation of the fly presses.⁷⁴ The hoped-for Government contract did not materialize and the Mint was employed in contracts for tokens and overseas coin. The second Soho Mint, containing steam-driven presses, was begun in 1798. The eight presses were arranged around a large horizontal wheel, each press could be adjusted to coin from 50 to 120 pieces per minute. The coins were struck in a collar, to keep the diameter exact and enable the border to be raised to resist wear and tear. The feeding in of the blanks and the removal of coins when struck was automatic. In 1798, John Southern, head of the engine works drawing office, suggested a radical new arrangement for ‘working of Coining presses by means of a partial vacuum’.⁷⁵ Soho Mint no. 2 became the prototype for the new Royal Mint, the engineering design being supplied by Boulton (as well as for overseas mints later supplied by his son). Boulton, bedridden for much of the time from 1804, was busily engaged in Royal Mint design work. As he made clear to the resident engineer, John Rennie, while acknowledging the status of a national mint, he was clear where responsibilities lay:

The buildings should in general be plain simple and strong and all the operative buildings need not be more than two storeys high, many of them one at most, except the front which may be simply elegant in the Wyattistic style […] Mr Wyatt may design the ornamental but I must sketch the useful [Figure 5].⁷⁶

FIGURE 5. The Royal Mint.

After Boulton’s death William Murdoch attributed to Boulton ‘the perfection to which the art of coining has ultimately obtained’.⁷⁷

A sector transfer of the pressing process was James Watt’s invention of the letter (and drawing) copying press, patented in 1780, occasioned by his own business need to replace the laborious hand-copying of letters and engineering drawings. His first press was a roller press but the screw press was the preferred model, both being described in the patent. And from the 1780s all business letters and working drawings were copied by this process. With his usual thoroughness Watt experimented with different kinds of ink and paper as these were crucial to the success of the technique.⁷⁸

Image transfer

The technology of image transfer was transferred across a number of sectors, each of which presented a series of unique problems. The transfer of images to enamels had been resolved at the London Battersea enamel works in the early eighteenth century.⁷⁹ When these works closed in 1756 Robert Hancock, a skilled copper engraver, took his skills to Worcester Pottery. At this time porcelain wares were laboriously hand-painted and the pottery owner, Dr John Wall, agreed to some experiments. A year later, in 1757, the first copper plate transfer print was produced.⁸⁰ The process was also developed, at around the same time, by John Sadler of Sadler & Green’s pottery in Liverpool.⁸¹ The process demanded skill not only in the transfer application but at the firing stage too, a diary entry from Worcester in 1789 recording a level of frustration: ‘Have had a good deal of trouble the last week about blue printing, the colours peel off in the burning-in and spoils the vast deal of ware’.⁸¹ The process was taken up by Josiah Spode who developed the well-known blue transfer classical landscape print. By 1800 underglaze transfer printing had reached a high level of perfection. Factory Commissioner J. G. May visited Wedgwood’s Etruria in 1814 and noted that ‘two copper engraving presses are used for this purpose and they are working all the time’.⁸³

Calico (cotton) textile printing was initially undertaken using hand blocks — a process known in Continental Europe by the twelfth century and, by the 1660s, in England. The application of transfers printed from metal plates, mirroring the process of printing pottery and porcelain, was introduced In 1770 by Thomas Bell who, in 1783, patented a roller machine to print with one or more colours at a time and, in the following year, a machine to print five (or more or less) colours at once.⁸⁴ It proved difficult to keep the rollers in perfect register with each other, a problem resolved by Adam Parkinson of Manchester in 1785. And in that year Livesey Hargreaves & Co. of Bamber Bridge, near Preston, adopted the process. The Calico printing industry was transformed.⁸⁵

Letterpress printing continued to use the flat-bed press through the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. The press did, indeed, get larger but the innovation of rotary paper printing was delayed by the fact that paper was made in sheets, rather than in rolls. Paper-making had remained virtually unchanged since medieval times when, following the mechanization of the fulling process in woollen manufacture in the eleventh century, similar hammers raised by tappit wheel were adopted for pulverizing rags, the raw material for paper. Mills for this process were built in Spain, Italy and Germany between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.⁸⁶ While there were some older prototypes, it was the Fourdrinier machine which transformed paper-making. A patent was granted in 1799 to Nicholas Louis Robert of Essonnes, France, who was at the time working for Leger Didot. They quarrelled over ownership of the invention and Didot sent his brother-in-law John Gamble to London to meet two London stationers, Sealy and Henry Fourdrinier, who undertook to finance the project. Gamble was granted a British patent in 1801.⁸⁷ What became known as the Fourdrinier machine was improved by the engineer Bryan Donkin who, by 1804, had produced a working machine. By 1810 eighteen had been erected in various mills.⁸⁸ This breakthrough enabled roller printing to be adopted for newsprint.

A form of image transfer⁸⁹ which mystified historians for many years has recently been unravelled by Barbara Fogarty. This is Boulton’s so-called mechanical painting, the means by which repeatable reproductions of oil paintings were made. The process was invented by Francis Eginton (who was working for Boulton by 1764, having been taken into partnership by Boulton & Fothergill from c. 1776 to manage the silver, plated and ormolu business). Mechanical paintings were developed commercially by Boulton in a new partnership with Eginton between c. 1777 and 1781. Eginton is known to have engaged in early experiments to imitate the French aquatint process which had been developed in the late 1760s — one of the French innovators, Peter Perez Burdett, who fled to England in 1774 to escape his creditors, certainly knew Eginton. But printing onto canvas, in imitation of an oil painting, required a different — or at least an intermediary — technique (due to the amount of pressure required to transfer the print which would have cracked the canvas). This is where knowledge of the process of making images on enamel bodies via transfers came in. What Eginton did was to combine and adapt the processes of transferring from paper to hard bodies, with the process of aquatint to produce mechanical paintings. Copper plates were etched and for larger pictures more than one was required. After the image was etched, it was printed onto paper and then transferred to canvas forming a ‘tonal impression’ which was then over-painted in oils by boys in the factory and finally hand-finished by artists. The terms ‘plate’ and ‘impression’ occur a number of times in the correspondence showing that there was no attempt to mislead potential buyers into believing that they were acquiring a unique painting.⁹⁰ The equipment, including copper plates and a rolling press for printing the paper transfers, was transferred from other Soho enterprises, another Boulton crossover innovation. It was a short-lived enterprise for Boulton who ended it for financial reasons in 1781 although, subcontracted to Eginton and others, it continued for around a decade afterwards.

Conclusion

The survival of records of past industrial activity is in great measure due to chance (unless the industry in question was regulated). We are often able to demonstrate that a particular activity took place somewhere. We may be able to learn how it was undertaken. But we are much less likely to be able to state, with any degree of certainty, why? And why then? Here we are into the realms of hypothesis.

Time lags between the first ideas, or even applications and their further development could be spectacular — for example the large number of inventions in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. Thomas Lombe’s silk throwing machine, first used in England in 1709, had been in use in Italy since 1620; the reverberatory furnace was in use in Germany in the early sixteenth century, only being adopted in England late in the century; the screw press was known in Italy in the early sixteenth century, in Germany and France by mid-century and in England in the 1560s; the calico block press known in Continental Europe in the twelfth century, was adopted in England in the 1660s.

The scientific know-how for major technological innovation existed in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy in the eighteenth century. Much of the theor­etical work on structures, stresses and the mechanics of design in civil engineering was French, besides knowledge of chemistry, glass, and bleaching technology, and in the early nineteenth century German university scientists criticized British science for its vulgar concerns with practicality.⁹¹ Formal knowledge is transferable but, as was demonstrated when attempts at industrial espionage were made, a blueprint could be accurate but learning by doing and learning by using were essential for innovation. There was an established aristocracy in pre-Revolutionary France, whose interests were sustained by the stabilizing forces protecting the status quo, for which luxury goods and playthings found a market. French mechanical skills were diverted to devising ever more elaborate musical boxes and intricately patterned woven silks, rather than practical millwork. British inventors and innovators enjoyed mechanical diversions too, but their playfulness was more likely to lead to practical outcomes. The English were known as improvers of others’ inventions: ‘they cannot boast of many inventions but only of having perfected the inventions of others’, a Swiss calico printer rather ungenerously wrote in 1776, adding ‘whence comes the proverb that for a thing to be perfect, it must be invented in France and worked out in England’.

Technological change occurs through the emergence of new ideas which may occur randomly or systematically. Technological innovations address particular problems and are more likely to be sustained through subsequent improvement if they occur in a society which either positively encourages or, at the very least, does not impede change. Innovating entrepreneurs flourish best where there is diversity and tolerance, where they sense they have relative autonomy, where playfulness can be explored. And Britain provided just such an environment from the late seventeenth century onwards. (This is not to suggest that a different combination of factors elsewhere might not have achieved a similar result). Some innovative French mechanics and engineers emigrated to England in the early to mid-seventeenth century, while the persecution of Huguenots in the 1690s and the mass emigration of these protestants to England (whose number included skilled artisans) was a drawback to innovation in France. Scientific networks knew no national boundaries and, in the late eighteenth century, British engineers were in contact with French scientists: Berthollet readily shared his knowledge of chlorine, while French inventions in glass- and paper-making were brought to England — technology, literally ‘on the hoof’. Moreover the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars widely disrupted industrial development on the Continent.

England’s endowment of natural resource was not unique; its uniqueness lay in a combination of factors. Most inventions required adaptation and improvement; that myriad of small changes which a) made it work in the first place and b) extended its lifetime, establishing a technological trajectory. These were more readily fostered in an open society in which people were prepared to take risks — where observation, testing, experimenting, adopting and modifying could be engaged in — for innovation is full of uncertainty. What can be pointed to with some degree of certainty is that, between 1750 and 1830, a clustering of macro inventions and innovations: coal-fuel technology, steam power, gaslight, chlorine bleaching, flow production systems, machine tools and, indeed the transfer from proto-factory to factory system, besides a myriad of micro innovations, occurred in Britain rather than in other European nations or America. While, in 1769, Watt suggested that ‘of all things in life nothing is more foolish as inventing’,⁹² invention and innovation were compulsive activities. The cross-fertilization of technologies and techniques through borrowing brilliance significantly contributed to Britain’s lead in the early Industrial Revolution.

Notes on contributor

Jennifer Tann is Professor Emerita of Innovation at the University of Birmingham, being at first Dean of Education, latterly being Director of Research in the Business School; previous academic positions being held at the Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Aston; she has been a visiting professor at the University of Queensland, Australia and at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and has travelled widely to universities in Australia, the USA and Canada giving seminars and public lectures. She has published widely on the diffusion of the steam engine, besides The Development of the Factory (based on drawings of customers’ factories in the Boulton & Watt papers). Her Boulton & Watt research led to invitations to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Power House Museum in Sydney. She has consulted widely to the manufacturing, public and not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1 E.g. economists, engineers. See Christopher Freeman and Luc Soete, The Economics of Industrial Innovation (Routledge, 2012); Christopher Freeman, Systems of Innovation: Selected Essays in Evolutionary Economics (Edward Elgar, 2008);Joe Tidd, John Bessant, and Keith Pavitt, Managing Innovation (Wiley, 2005) and other work from SPRU, University of Sussex, and Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester; Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovators Solutions (Harvard B.S. Press, 2003); James M. Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation (Harvard B.S. Press, 1996); Michael Tushman and William L Moore, Readings in the Management of Innovation (New York, Harper Row: Ballinger, 1988).

2 Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1962 and subsequent editions to 2003); Jennifer Tann and M. J. Breckin, ‘The International Diffusion of the Watt Engine, 1775–1825’, Economic History Review, xxxi (1978).

3 The same often pertains in contemporary innovation.

4 See below.

5 Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 295.

6 Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 5.

7 Ibid.

8 Mokyr, pp. 161–62.

9 Jennifer Tann, ‘Mr Hornblower and his Crew’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 51 (1979–80), 95–109.

10 Patent 939, 3 July 1769; MacLeod, p. 108.

11 M. Boulton to J. Watt, 7 August 1781, quoted in R. S. Fitton, The Arkwrights, Spinners of Fortune (Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 96–98.

12 Patents 931/1769 for spinning; 1111/1775 for carding. Arkwight lost his carding patent in a trial of 1781, sought to regain it and in 1785 both patents were annulled, Fitton, pp. 117–45.

13 MacLeod, p. 79.

14 Ibid., p. 84.

15 Ibid., p. 114.

16 R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights (Manchester University Press, 1958), pp. 81–107.

17 D. D. Chapman, The Early Factory Masters (1967), pp. 101–02.

18 Ben Marsden, Watt’s Perfect Engine (2002), pp. 109–110; M. B. to J. W., 21 June 1781, quoted in H. W. Dickinson, James Watt Craftsman and Engineer (Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 124; Jennifer Tann, ed., The Selected Papers of Boulton & Watt, 1 (Diploma Press, 1981), 58–60.

19 Smeaton was responsible for the Navy Board countermanding an order for a Wasborough Pickard engine in 1781: ‘no motion communicated from the reciprocating beam of a fire engine can ever act perfectly steady and equal in producing a circular motion’. J. Smeaton, Reports, 11 (1797), 378–79.

20 This was demonstrated both in the experimental corn mill set up at Soho and at Albion Mill. Boulton & Watt were partners in Albion Mill (which burned down) but it demonstrated that corn could be effectively milled by steam power and the partners supplied rotative engines to corn mills both in Britain and overseas, Jennifer Tann, The Development of the Factory (Cornmarket Press, 1970), p. 79.

21 MacLeod, p. 104.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., p. 62.

24 Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham (Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 23, 27–29; Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men, The Friends who made the Future (Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 265; Sheena Mason, ‘A New Species of Gentleman’, in Matthew Boulton A Revolutionary Playe, ed. by Malcolm Dick (Brewin Books, 2009), pp. 30–44; Jennifer Tann and Anthony Burton, Matthew Boulton, Industry’s Great Innovator (The History Press, 2013), p. 51.

25 Schofield; Uglow; Mason; Tann and Burton, pp. 51–65.

26 E.g. Lunar Society member John Whitehurst was a clock-maker, James Watt had been a mathematical-instrument-maker and a surveyor and his interests in latent heat and the expansion of steam were significant to the development of his steam engine; Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley were both interested in increasing the efficiency of telescopes. Jennifer Tann, ‘A Little Light on the Powers of Darkness: The Lunar Society of Birmingham’, Biology History (1995/96), pp. 33–54.

27 H. W. Dickinson and R. Jenkins, James Watt and the Steam Engine (1927, repr. 1981), p. 226.

28 Ibid., pp. 227–28.

29 Ibid., pp. 353–56.

30 Ibid., pp. 228–29.

31 Jennifer Tann, ‘Richard Arkwright and Technology’, History, 58 (1973), 29–44.

32 Jennifer Tann, ‘Horse Power’, in Horses in European Economic History, A Preliminary Canter, ed. by F. M. L. Thompson (The British Agricultural History Society, 1983); Jennifer Tann, The Development of the Factory (Cornmarket Press, 1970), pp. 77–87.

33 Tann, Factory, pp. 77–87.

34 Ibid., p. 77; J. Rennie to M. Boulton, 5 September 1785.

35 Tann, Factory, pp. 77–87.

36 Peter Mathias, ‘Science and Technology during the Industrial Revolution’, in The Transformation of England, ed. by Peter Mathias (Methuen, 1979), p. 86.

37 Peter Mathias, ‘An Industrial Revolution in Brewing’, and Mathias, ‘The Entrepreneurs in Brewing’, in Transformation, p. 237.

38 Andrea Sella, ‘Wedgwood’s Pyrometer’, Chemistry World, 19 December 2012.

39 ‘It is no exaggeration to say, we may judge with great accuracy of the commercial prosperity of the country from the amount of sulphuric acid it consumes’. Liebig, letters of chemistry cited in R. B. Prosser, Birmingham Inventors and Inventions (repr. SR, 1970), p. 16; W. H. B. Court, The Rise of the Midland Industries, 1600–1838 (Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 231; Lance Day, ‘The Chemical and Allied Industries’, in An Encyclopaedia of the History of Technology, ed. by Ian McNeil (Routledge 1990), p. 221.

40 A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester University Press, 1969), pp. 260–300.

41 Ibid., pp. 322–26.

42 Ibid., pp. 357–69; Uglow. pp. 159–61; Schofield, pp. 156–58.

43 Paul Luter, ‘Archibald Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald, Father of the British Tar Industry’, Paper presented as the 1979 John Wilkinson Lecture to the Broseley Local History Society, http://www.oldcopper.org/Broseley/Pages/lord%20dundonald.htm [accessed 12 June 2014].

44 Uglow, pp. 229–42.

45 Leslie Tomory, Progressive Enlightenment, The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, 1780–1820 (MIT Press, 2012), pp. 71–79; Tann, Factory, pp. 123–34.

46 Uglow, pp. 371–74.

47 Tann, Factory, pp. 109–20.

48 Jennifer Tann, ‘Fuel Saving in the Process Industries during the Industrial Revolution: A Study inTechnological Diffusion’, Business History,15(1973), pp. 151–59.

49 Mathias, ‘Entrepreneurs’, in Transformation, p. 237.

50 Dickinson and Jenkins, pp. 221–23; Richard L. Hills, James Watt, Volume 3: Triumph through Adversity, 1785–1819 (Landmark Publishing, 2006), p. 79.

51 Jennifer Tann, ‘The Textile Millwright in the Industrial Revolution’, Textile History (1979); Jennifer Tann, ‘The Employment of Power in the West-of-England Wool Textile Industry, 1790–1840’, in Textile History and Economic History, Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann, ed. by N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 202–05.

52 Mokyr, pp. 101–02; see also James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford University Press, 2004).

53 Transformation, p. 16; J. R. Harris, ‘Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and France’, Inaugural Lecture, Birmingham University, 1971.

54 Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation (Methuen, 1969), pp. 122–23.

55 Charles K. Hyde, Technological Change and the British Iron Industry 1700–1870 (Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 23–41.

56 Ibid., pp. 88–91.

57 Jennifer Tann, ‘Riches from Copper, The Adoption of the Boulton & Watt Engine by Cornish Mine Adventurers’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 67 (1995–96), 27–51.

58 http://www.igg.org.uk/gansg/12-linid/glass.htm, pp. 12–13 [accessed 10 April 2014].

59 Rhys Jenkins, ‘The Reverbatory Furnace with Coal Fuel 1612–1712’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 14 (1933), 67–81; Lynn Willies, ‘Derbyshire Lead Smelting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Bull.Peak District Mines Historical Society, 11.1 (1990), 3.

60 T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester University Press, 1963), pp. 93–94.

61 Douglas Braid, ‘The Transfer of John Wilkinson’s Technology’, Wilkinson Studies, 1 (1991), 33–41.

62 Prosser, p. 96.

63 Schofield, p. 83.

64 Rolling and slitting mills.

65 Bodmer visited England in 1816–17, his diary recording industrial developments: he commented on a Midlands wire factory powered by steam and containing more than sixty machines for polishing, boring and turning. W. O. Henderson, Industrial Britain under the Regency (Cass, 1968), p. 84.

66 Copper and lead rolling/slitting.

67 Prosser, p. 8.

68 Musson and Robinson, p. 375.

69 Fitton,pp. 50–90.

70 A contemporary painting of Cromford Mill is reproduced in Jennifer Tann, Factory, p. 158 and a cross-section of Bedworth Worsted Mill, constructed and equipped on Arkwright’s principles in ibid., p. 38. It is also reproduced in Mike Williams, Textile Mills of South West England (English Heritage, 2013), p. 106; Jennifer Tann, ‘Richard Arkwright and Technology’, History, 58 (1973), 29–44.

71 Prosser, pp. 135–36; Court, pp. 242–243.

72 George Selgin, Good Money (California: The Independent Institute, 2008), pp. 190–91.

73 H. W. Dickinson, Matthew Boulton (1936), p. 138.

74 Patent 1757, 8 July 1790; Richard Doty, The Soho Mint & the Industrialization of Money (Smithsonian Institution, 1998), pp. 23–54.

75 Ibid., pp. 54–63.

76 In the event the front elevation was designed by Johnson and Smirke. Jennifer Tann, ‘Matthew Boulton — Innovator’, in Matthew Boulton Enterprising Industrialist, ed. by Kenneth Quickenden, Sally Baggott, and Malcolm Dick (Ashgate, 2013), p. 49, quoting M. B. to J. Rennie, 15 November 1804.

77 Quoted in Dickinson, Boulton, pp. 147–48.

78 Dickinson, Watt, pp. 115–18; J. A. Andrew, ‘The Copying of Engineering Drawings and Documents’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 53 (1981–82), 1–16.

79 http://ruby-lane.hubpages.com/hub/ Invention-of-18th-Century-Ceramic-Transfer-Print [accessed 23 April 2014].

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 John Flight’s diary, quoted in G. Godden, Chamberlain Worcester Porcelain, 1788–1852 (Barrie & Jenkins, 1982), p. 24. I am indebted to Dr Malcolm Nixon for this reference.

83 Report on the journey to England by Factory Commissioner J. G. May in 1814, Henderso­n, p.5.

84 Archibald Clow and Nan L. Clow, The Chemical Revolution (Batchworth Press, 1952), pp. 226–27.

85 There was much objection to this innovation by the calico printers who were unionized and Livesey Hargreaves went spectacularly bankrupt, Tina Bruland, ‘Industrial Conflict as a Source of Technical Innovation: Three Cases’, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ -drbr/b_ruland2.html [accessed 2 May 2014].

86 A powerful steam engine was required before pulp could be made from wood.

87 http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/History_of_paper [accessed 5 May 2014].

88 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Donkin [accessed 5 May 2014].

89 ‘what the process was, research has quite failed to reveal’, Dickinson, Boulton, p. 104.

90 Barbara Fogarty, ‘The Mechanical Paintings of Matthew Boulton and Francis Eginton’, in Quickenden, pp. 111–26.

91 Mathias, p. 77.

92 Dickinson, Watt, p. 57.