Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

In 1603, the aristocratic poet and naturalist Sir Hugh Platt proposed mixing coal dust and loam ‘according to the manner and making of snowballs’. In the fireplace, these balls looked ‘attractive’ and produced less ‘smoot’. Decades later, breweries in Derbyshire started using coke, which they produced by setting fire to heaps of coal mixed with clay; the new fuel was instrumental in the invention of pale ale and then cast iron. In 1709, Abraham Darby, a Quaker, first used coke for this purpose.

While blast furnaces were built taller and taller, coal mines were dug deeper and deeper. Groundwater had to be pumped out of them. From 1705 onwards, Thomas Newcomen, a Baptist preacher, found a way of pumping water up by burning coal under water-filled boilers. Steam rose, creating a vacuum in the boiler and drawing up the water from the mine. These ‘atmospheric engines’ used a lot of coal, but there was more than enough of that in the mines. In 1763 James Watt, the son of a Scottish shipwright, invented a more efficient engine. Watt created a laboratory at Edinburgh University and Adam Smith helped him in his negotiations with the administration. But there was no funding to develop the prototype. The project was finally realised when the silver manufacturer Matthew Boulton went into a business partnership with Watt. Their engines were very large; each one required a separate building with solid foundations several metres deep because any shift could put the engine out of action. In addition, all these steam pumps depended on a flow of river water to supply the boilers. According to the patent, Watt and his investor would receive a third of the coal which each machine saved. One of the explanations for the success of the Industrial Revolution is that England had established a patent law that enabled inventors to be generously rewarded. Unfortunately, Watt’s life leaves no room for illusions. He died a wealthy man, but, without Boulton and his mint, Watt would not have been able to register his patent. The creator of the first locomotive, George Stephenson, was the son of a fireman who had worked on a steam pump in one of the Northumbrian coal mines. His father was blinded in a mining accident, and probably this experience prompted George to come up with his first invention – a miner’s lamp which could burn without causing an explosion. In 1814 Stephenson mounted on wheels an improved version of the steam pump his father had looked after. All his technical experience was connected with coal mines, and the locomotive’s inaugural task was to transport coal from the mine to the river.

Water power

For heating, coal was irreplaceable; but steam engines powered by coal were in competition with an older source of energy – the waterwheel. Invented in Asia, the waterwheel was used there to raise water and irrigate the fields. The use of water energy in the processing of matter was the greatest difference between the European economy and its oriental rivals – China, India and the Islamic Levant. Joined by a shaft to a waterwheel, wooden mechanisms raised water, milled grain, sawed timber, cut and polished stone. Waterwheels raised ore from the mines, crushed it, powered bellows for smelting furnaces, and hammered metal. Complex machines powered by waterwheels spun and wove fibre. As early as 1086, the Domesday Book, a survey of all the landed property in England, recorded 6,000 waterwheels. These watermills were very expensive structures. The wheel was not particularly complicated – it was the hydraulic technology needed for directing water onto the wheel that was tricky. A weir raised the level of the water and flooded the land upstream. Circumventing the dam, a narrow wooden trough, a ‘mill race’, channelled water onto the wheel. Cogwheels converted the movement of the wheel into the back and forth movements of bellows, saws or hammers. The huge construction creaked, shook and swayed. But the wooden wheels could function for as much as twenty years and were more reliable than the first steam-powered machines. Their disadvantage was their dependence on the water level in the river and therefore on climate, season and the lie of the land.

Many of these mills have survived – they were built to last. Situated on river banks and ponds in the centres of our busy – formerly industrial – towns, most of them have been converted into much loved residences. But, in fact, the majority of watermills were floating. One or two wheels were installed on a barge which was moored by rapids, and a mill of this type could grind wheat or saw planks for a decade. Cheaper than fixed mills, they didn’t need dams and didn’t depend on the water level.

Even a simple mill for grinding grain released fifty to sixty people, principally women, from exhausting manual labour. Transforming the economy, mills, with their dams, ponds, locks and aqueducts, also changed the ecology. One piece of land was flooded, a second drained, a third turned into swamp. New towns sprang up on fields and forests around the factories. Producing dry, tradable commodities with a minimal investment of labour, such mills were centres for the concentration of capital. Prepared to invest large sums and wait for long-term returns, powerful landowners, for example monasteries, turned their lands and rivers into sources of capital. From Strasbourg to Bologna and from Tampere to Luhansk, many inland European towns owed their rapid growth to water-powered factories.