to secure laws which would curb the railroads: next they tried conclusions with the elevator companies and the speculators in the wheat pit. They usually lost, but out of many disappointments, followed in one state-North Dakota-by an orgy of agrarian socialism after the late war, a co-operative movement has arisen which points with pride and hope to the achievements of the Canadian wheat pools and the Californian fruit growers. In Great Britain, as in old Ontario, co-operative marketing has met with greater obstacles. British agriculture on its marketing side is suburban.

CHAPTER XIII

STEAM POWER AND THE ENGINEERS

Section 1. Boulton and Watt. Section 2. Rise of the Machine Tool Industry. Section 3. Coal and Coal Mining.

Section I. Boulton and Watt

JAMES WATT (1736-1819) patented his steam engine in 1769, and the other landmarks in the forty-five years of his working life (1755-1800) can be conveniently remembered by the fives.

1755. In this year Watt went from Glasgow to London to learn his trade of mathematical instrument making, and there abode one year. Having no legal status (for he was a foreigner and too old and did not mean to stay seven years), he was lucky to escape impressment for the Seven Years War. Adam Smith had gone up to Oxford fifteen years earlier and, staying longer in England, was taught less. The two were together in Glasgow from 1756 to 1763, Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy, and Watt in a workshop adjoining the Department of Natural Philosophy. In 1763 Adam Smith started on the Grand Tour and Watt took a home in the town.

1765. In this year, which was also about the time that Adam Smith began to work on his book, Watt invented the steam engine. They had given him the model of a Newcomen engine to put in working order. On a certain Sunday early in 1765 the crucial idea of a separate condenser flashed upon him. By this he saved heat, and went on to save more by closing the cylinder at the top (so that steam worked on either side of the piston instead of the air above and steam only below) and by enclosing the cylinder itself in a casing packed with steam. Thus all Watt's improvements were economical of heat. Economy in

heat meant economy in steam, and economy in steam meant economy in working costs, and, above all, in coal.'

1775. In this year he entered into partnership with Matthew Boulton (1728-1809), a hardware manufacturer of Birmingham. He had kept himself going during 1770 and 1771 by following in the footsteps of Brindley, engineering the Monkland Canal which connected Glasgow with the collieries there. He had formed a partnership in 1769 with Dr. Roebuck of Carron, but in 1773 the doctor failed. Boulton, a creditor of the two, then proposed to Watt to take over the patent in satisfaction of his claims and to form the partnership of Boulton and Watt for working it. Accordingly in 1774 Watt came to Soho with his engine Beelzebub, and before the end of 1775 two engines had been delivered from Soho, one to Bloomfield colliery near Birmingham, and one to John Wilkinson at Broseley. The trouble in Scotland was the lack of trained mechanics at that time. For when Watt left the model for the real, he left the clockmaker for the local blacksmith. Soho met the need, building on its hardware past. 'We are systematising the business of engine making,' wrote Boulton to Smeaton in 1778, as we have done before in the button manufactory; we are training up workmen and making tools and machines to form the different parts of Mr. Watt's engines with more accuracy, and at a cheaper rate than can possibly be done by the ordinary methods of working.' 2 The installation of the engine was the final labour difficulty. Millwrights were clumsy and they drank. But in 1777 Providence sent to Soho William Murdoch, a big brawny Scot, as loyal as a dog, the genius of fitting tingling at his finger tips, good natured too with the men, and therefore an ideal foreman. It was he who later invented gas lighting, which he installed in Soho in 1803.

1785. In this year the steam engine was first used to drive a cotton mill. It was the unsought crown of five years' effort. First in 1781 came the rotative motion, which Watt patented in the form of a Sun and Planet motion, of his foreman Murdoch's contrivance. Watt substituted this for the simpler crank motion because a rival had stolen the latter from him. Next came the double-acting engine,' with a drive to the piston both upwards and downwards. Watt saw his way to this almost from the first, and its presence is assumed in the description under the year 1765; but as he knew that such a machine was beyond the intelligence of the average engineer, he did not employ it in the first engines supplied from Soho and he only introduced it in his patented designs in 1782. It was especially suited to rotative

engines, since its double stroke upwards and downwards solved the problem of continuous motion. Finally, in 1784 he patented the parallel motion. The double-acting engine had to push as well as pull, but the piston-rod moved vertically and the beam attached to it in a curve. How was he to get a rigid communication which would not pull the piston out of the straight? He solved this by a parallelogram of jointed rods connecting the under side of the beam with the piston rod-hence the name, parallel motion.

The progress of the steam engine was accompanied by progress no less important in the iron industry which supplied the parts. The cylinder was not true as long as it was bored by hand, therefore either it leaked or the piston jammed. John Wilkinson invented a way of boring cylinders which remedied this defect and thereby made the steam engine a commercial possibility. In the first two engines made, one of them for Wilkinson himself, the small parts were made at Soho, the large by Wilkinson; and Watt superintended the erection of the engine. This was the arrangement followed later in engines supplied from Soho to third parties. Boulton and Watt had a contract with Wilkinson for the work. Furthermore, just at this time, 1780-85, the finishing of iron was revolutionised by Cort and others. Thus was ushered in what may be termed the second stage of the industrial revolution. Isolated progress in the textile, pottery and iron and steel trades now converged on Soho and made Boulton the leader of the new industrialists.

In 1755 Watt went to London to learn instrument making. Three trades supplied the personnel of the new engineering business clockmakers, with whom instrument makers were associated; the millwrights, who installed and repaired machinery, working generally with wood as their material and water as their power; and the military engineers now broadening into builders of drainage works and canals. Brindley, the father of canal building, was a millwright, Arkwright was helped in his spinning inventions by a clockmaker of Warrington. From the clockmakers were bred the machine tool makers to the millwrights succeeded the engine minders and engineering mechanics: from the military engineers of the Continent were descended the civil engineers of England. Among mathematical instruments the most important economically were naval instruments; for this was the great half-century of British expansion overseas. Her sailors were everywhere, and one of them, Captain Cook, was on the point of discovering a new Continent. Therefore in Glasgow, with its growing trade and shipbuilding industry, such instru

ments were in brisk demand, and in this vital environment Watt spent his early life. The need of capital took him inland to Birmingham, and technical difficulties denied the high seas to the steam engine until the 30's of the 19th century, but the baby was nursed by Symington in Glasgow a few years before Watt died.

In 1765 Watt invented the steam engine. An invention may be measured either by the gap which it creates between itself and the anticipations of it or by the difference which it makes to economic society; by either criterion the steam engine is the greatest mechanical invention in human history. Nevertheless, the steam engine too illustrates the law that invention in the last analysis is a social product. There were reasons why it came in the 1760's from the brain of a Scotsman for the service of mines. Science was in the air and had been from the time the Royal Society was founded in 1662. Before 1700 Isaac Newton had elucidated the laws of gravitation and light and Richard Boyle had demonstrated the relation between the pressure of a gas and its volume. Watt was a scientific discoverer as well as a mechanical genius; and his intellectual stature was equal to that of his colleagues in the Royal Society, to which he was elected in 1785. He associated on level terms with Priestley and Cavendish, who were revolutionising chemistry, and with his Glasgow friend and adviser Professor John Black, the discoverer of the phenomenon of latent heat, which amounts to this. When water is boiling, however much you go on heating it, it will get no hotter the steam receives the heat and holds it in store. This discovery was central to a powerful steam engine; and being a master of theory as well as of technique, Watt saw the possibilities of high-pressure steam, although recognising that it was as yet not feasible for technical and economical reasons. Symington and Stephenson by contrast were practical inventors. They adapted to a new use the body of new knowledge crystallised by Watt.

Fire engines had been in action for more than half a century. Thomas Savery, a clockmaker and military engineer of Devonshire, patented an engine in 1698. Thomas Newcomen, a Dartmouth blacksmith, made a successful model engine in 1705 and installed his first working one in Wolverhampton in 1712. Both these inventions utilised the new knowledge relating to the barometer and atmospheric pressure which had reached England from Europe at the end of the 17th century. But neither invented a genuine steam engine. Savery depended solely on air pressure for his lift, which was 34 feet as a theoretical maximum and actually only 15. To pump out a mine by means of such an

engine would have necessitated installing them at different levels and pumping the water from level to level. It was thus hardly more than a garden toy. The true line of advance was taken by Newcomen, who in effect mechanised the action of a man working the handle of a pump. The piston which moves up and down in the cylinder was connected by a beam (the pump handle of nature) to work a pump rod. Steam forced the piston up and air pressure forced it down. This allowed of a surface engine and thus of a lift far more than 34 feet, because the area of the steam cylinder could be made much larger than that of the cylinder containing the pumprod. In Newcomen's, as in Savery's, engine steam was used to produce the upward stroke of the piston only. The air when the steam was reduced by condensation into water drove the piston down into the vacuum thus created. Now Watt saw that a cylinder must lose so much heat if a jet of cold water was squirted into it, that some of the next lot of steam would be condensed also. Therefore he added a separate condenser (the revelation of his Sunday walk past the golf house), closed the top of the cylinder and admitted steam alternately above and below the piston. This made the engine a real steam engine. The work,' of course, came from the burning of the coal, as in Newcomen's engine, but now the engine did twice as much work in the same time, since two lots of steam instead of one, one below and one above, were used in each stroke of the engine.

In 1775 Boulton and Watt began to manufacture. Boulton brought to his partner Watt not only a skilled labour force, but capital and administrative talent of the highest order. The two seemed made for one another. Three episodes in the partnership will serve in illustration :

1. Before they began Boulton saw that the first thing was to be sure of the patent, which in 1775 was six years old. For Boulton's age was one which resented patents of monopoly. He therefore went to Parliament, and after a fight secured an Act declaring that the sole privilege of making and selling steam engines in Great Britain and her Colonies should be vested in James Watt and his executors for a term of 25 years. This was an improvement on the normal 14 years from the date of patenting.

2. From 1775 to 1785 the biggest customers of Soho were the Cornish tin mines. But their urgency-deep mines suffering from flood-was also their weakness. For they could not pay cash; and besides there was no precedent for pricing power, the commodity which Boulton had for sale. Boulton therefore devised an experimental system, which in its final form was as follows. The engines were built and erected at the expense of the purchasers, who further undertook to pay annually a sum