Between about 1760 and 1900 the world rebuilt itself around coal, iron and the clock. These stories follow the machines and the people who ran them: a clergyman who designed a loom without ever having woven, a mill town founded on alpaca wool, a murderer caught by a telegraph that had no letter Q, and the first railway journey, which started as a bet.
Every tile in a Industrial Revolution game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Inventors
nine stories
1The ironmonger who put steam to work
On the tile: Newcomen1712
Thomas Newcomen sold iron goods for a living and preached as a Baptist layman, an odd resume for the man whose engine opened the age of steam. His first known engine went up near Dudley Castle in 1712, thumping away to pump water out of a coal mine. He never held the key patent for it; he worked under one granted to Thomas Savery. By the time he died in 1729, more than a hundred of his engines were at work.
The Newcomen engine wasted most of its heat warming the cylinder back up after every stroke; Watt reckoned about four-fifths of the steam's heat went that way. His answer, reached in 1765, was to condense the steam in a separate chamber kept permanently cool, so the working cylinder never had to cool down at all. The patent followed on January 5, 1769. Engines built his way burned two-thirds less coal, which took steam out of the mines and into the mills.
3The barber who became one of England's richest men
On the tile: Arkwright1771
Richard Arkwright trained as a barber and then set up in Bolton as a wigmaker. He patented a spinning frame in 1769, and in 1771 he built a mill at Cromford in Derbyshire driven by water rather than muscle, the first water-powered cotton spinning mill to succeed. He was knighted in 1786. When he died in 1792 his fortune was put at more than five hundred thousand pounds, which made the former wigmaker one of the richest men in England.
4He invented the mule and sold it for almost nothing
On the tile: Crompton1779
Samuel Crompton finished his spinning machine about 1779, when he was twenty-six. It borrowed from Hargreaves's jenny and Arkwright's frame, and because it was a cross between the two it got called the mule. Crompton never patented it. He made the design public instead, on promises of payment from manufacturers, and received around sixty pounds. Mule spindles went on to number in the millions. Parliament allowed him five thousand pounds in 1812, and he died at Bolton in 1827.
Edmund Cartwright was a Church of England clergyman who had never even watched a hand loom at work. He designed a loom driven by power in 1784, patented it in 1785, and went on patenting improvements until 1792. Setting up as a manufacturer at Doncaster taught him how many things were wrong with his machine, and he gave up the works in 1793 after heavy losses. By 1809 the power loom was earning money for Lancashire manufacturers, about fifty of whom had petitioned on his behalf, and Parliament voted him ten thousand pounds.
6He carried a cotton mill across the ocean in his head
On the tile: Samuel Slater1789
Britain guarded its spinning machinery the way a country guards a weapon: the designs could not be exported and skilled workers were not supposed to emigrate. Samuel Slater, apprenticed in Jedediah Strutt's mill, left anyway in 1789, aged twenty-one and dressed as a farmer, carrying nothing on paper. Working with Moses Brown in Rhode Island, he rebuilt Arkwright-style machinery from memory. In Belper, where families depended on Strutt's mills, they called him Slater the Traitor.
7The outsider who made steel cheap in half an hour
On the tile: Bessemer1856
Henry Bessemer was a type-founder's son and a prolific inventor, not a trained metallurgist, which may be why he tried blowing cold air straight through molten iron, a blast that ought to have chilled it. Instead it raised the iron's temperature, with no fuel needed. In August 1856 he described the process to the British Association at Cheltenham, and The Times printed his paper in full on August 14. He claimed three to five tons of crude iron could be converted in about half an hour. Then came the phosphorus problem, and years of disbelief.
8The cannon borer who made Watt's engines possible
On the tile: Wilkinson1774
John Wilkinson's boring machine was meant for cannon. Instead of casting a barrel hollow, he cast it solid and cut the hole out, turning the gun against a fixed tool, and he patented the idea in 1774. Boring of the same accuracy gave James Watt engine cylinders true enough to work, and Wilkinson became the main supplier of cylinders to Boulton and Watt. His enthusiasm for the metal did not stop there. In 1787 an iron boat of his, seventy feet long, came up the canal to Birmingham, and he had coffins made of iron as well.
A sailing warship ran on rope, and rope ran through wooden pulley blocks, about a thousand of them in a ship of the line. Marc Brunel designed machines to make those blocks at Portsmouth, and Henry Maudslay built them, more than forty in all. By 1808 the mills were turning out 130,000 blocks a year. Maudslay's real subject was precision. In 1805 he built a bench micrometer that could measure to a ten-thousandth of an inch, and called it the Lord Chancellor, because it settled any question about accuracy.
1The loom that read its pattern from holes in card
On the tile: Punched cards1804
Weaving a figured silk pattern used to mean lifting exactly the right warp threads by hand, row after row. Joseph Marie Jacquard's mechanism, patented in 1804, read each row from a stiff card punched with holes, the cards laced into a chain. Holes in cards were not his idea; presenting them to the reader automatically was. A woven silk portrait of Jacquard took about twenty-four thousand cards. Charles Babbage owned a copy of that portrait, and the punched card went on into computing.
On February 21, 1804, at the Penydarren ironworks in south Wales, Richard Trevithick's engine hauled ten tons of iron in five wagons, with seventy men riding along, nine miles down the tramway. The run had been set up as a wager of five hundred guineas that the thing could not be done. The engine managed nearly five miles an hour on two hundredweight of coal. Then a bolt sheared on the way back, and the rails, laid for horses, kept breaking under the weight.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway wanted the best locomotive it could find, so in October 1829 it held a public competition at Rainhill with five hundred pounds for the winner. Rocket, designed by the twenty-five-year-old Robert Stephenson and built at his firm's works in Newcastle, was the only engine to complete the trials. It averaged twelve miles an hour and touched thirty on a run without a load. The Stephensons won the contract to build the railway's locomotives.
In 1839 the engineer Francis Humphrys wrote to James Nasmyth that no forge hammer in England or Scotland was powerful enough for the paddle shaft planned for the steamship Great Britain. Nasmyth sketched a hammer lifted by steam and dropped on the work, and dated the page November 24, 1839. The ship was finished with a screw propeller instead and never needed the shaft. The first steam hammer actually built was at the Schneider works at Le Creusot in France, and Nasmyth patented his own in June 1842.
A naked flame in a coal mine could touch off the gas the miners called firedamp. In 1815 Humphry Davy enclosed the flame in a chimney of fine wire gauze, which absorbs enough heat that the flame cannot ignite the gas outside. George Stephenson, enginewright at Killingworth Colliery, had been working on the same problem and tested a lamp of his own in the pit that autumn. The quarrel over who came first ran for years, and a Newcastle committee backed Stephenson's claim.
6Spelled without a Q, because the telegraph had none
On the tile: The Kwaker1845
On New Year's Day 1845 a man suspected of a killing at Salt Hill boarded a London train at Slough, and the station telegraphed his description ahead. The two-needle instrument had no letter Q, so the clerk spelled what he could: the suspect was in the garb of a kwaker. Paddington needed the word repeated several times before it made sense. It is thought to be the first time the telegraph was used to catch a murderer, and the instrument survives at the Science Museum in London.
7Before 1841 every workshop cut its own screw threads
On the tile: Screw threads1841
A screw made in one town would not fit a nut made in the next, because every workshop cut its threads to its own habits. Joseph Whitworth collected screw bolts from the major workshops of England, worked out the average of what he found, and in 1841 proposed a single uniform system of threads. The railways took it up, and then everyone else. Whitworth also built a measuring machine he reckoned could read to a millionth of an inch, and showed it in 1851.
8A bricklayer named his cement after a prestigious stone
On the tile: Cement1824
Joseph Aspdin followed his father into bricklaying in Leeds, and in October 1824 he patented what he called an improvement in the mode of producing an artificial stone. The name he gave the product was shrewd marketing: Portland cement, because mortar made with it looked like Portland stone, the most prestigious building stone in England, quarried on the Isle of Portland. The cement the world actually uses owes more to his son William, who changed the recipe in the 1840s and made it far stronger.
9The can arrived long before anyone made a can opener
On the tile: The tin can1810
Food sealed in tin-lined iron cans was patented in England in 1810, and the early cans were so heavy that the printed instructions said to cut round the top with a chisel and hammer. Soldiers used their bayonets. Not until January 5, 1858 did Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut patent an American can opener: a pointed blade with a guard to stop it plunging into the food, and a curved cutter that sawed around the rim. The Union army took it up. Thinner cans were what made such a tool practical.
Arkwright's water-powered cotton mill at Cromford opened in 1771, and from 1772 it ran day and night. The work was divided into two twelve-hour shifts, the smaller night shift doing spinning only, so the machines kept turning while the people took turns. Children worked there, the youngest only seven at first; the minimum age was later raised to ten, with six hours of lessons a week. The village could not supply enough hands, so Arkwright built houses for the workers, and a community grew up around a timetable.
New Lanark was built beside the falls of the Clyde by David Dale in a brief partnership with Richard Arkwright, and on the first day of 1800 Dale's son-in-law, Robert Owen, moved in as mill manager. Owen cut the working day to about ten and a half hours, ran a school that banned beating, and called New Lanark the most important experiment for the happiness of the human race yet begun anywhere in the world. On New Year's Day 1816 he opened his Institute for the Formation of Character. Some 2,500 people lived there in his time.
3A mill owner built a town and named it for himself
On the tile: Saltaire1850s
Titus Salt made his fortune out of alpaca. In 1836 he bought hair from Liverpool brokers whose warehouses held three hundred bales that nobody could sell, the stuff being so hard to work. Unwilling to add to crowded Bradford, he later moved his mills to a site by the river and the canal and built a village for them, its name made from his own and the river Aire. By 1871 it held 755 houses and 45 almshouses with 4,389 people, plus wash-houses, baths, a hospital and an institute with a library and a gymnasium.
4A farm village made into a city for spinning cotton
On the tile: Lowell1821
Lowell, Massachusetts was not a town that happened to get a mill; it was mills that were given a town, laid out on the Merrimack from 1821. The workforce was young women from New England farms, housed in company boardinghouses with a ten o'clock curfew and required church attendance. By 1840 the Lowell mills had recruited more than eight thousand workers, nearly three-quarters of them women, on weeks averaging seventy-three hours. Later in the century the work passed to immigrants from Ireland and French Canada.
Nobody had built a large bridge out of cast iron before, so the men at Coalbrookdale used the joints they already trusted. The ribs are held with dovetails and shouldered joints, the joinery of wood, scaled up into 378 tons of iron costing around six thousand pounds. Most of the large castings were made individually to fit their own place. Work began in 1777, and the bridge over the Severn opened on New Year's Day 1781. It is still there.
6A greenhouse gardener designed it in about ten days
On the tile: Crystal Palace1851
Joseph Paxton built glasshouses for a duke, which is why he thought of the Great Exhibition building as an enormous greenhouse. He designed it in about ten days, in standard parts of iron and glass made off site and assembled in Hyde Park: 900,000 square feet of glass, some 4,000 tons of iron and 30 miles of his own guttering. Six million visits were counted before it closed in October 1851, and the profit paid for museums in South Kensington.
London emptied its sewage into the Thames and drew its drinking water from the same river. In the hot summer of 1858 the smell reached the windows of Parliament, and money was found at last. Joseph Bazalgette built 83 miles of large intercepting sewers and about 1,100 miles of street sewers beneath the city. Asked how wide to make the pipes, he calculated what London needed and then doubled the diameter, and that extra room is why the system lasted.
8Thirty-eight thousand people rode it on the first day
On the tile: Underground1863
The world's first underground passenger railway opened in London on January 10, 1863, running three and three-quarter miles from Paddington to Farringdon Street. Most of it was made by digging a trench along the road and roofing it over. Thirty-eight thousand passengers rode on the opening day and nine and a half million in the first year. The trains were hauled by steam locomotives, in tunnels, which was as unpleasant as it sounds until electrification arrived in 1905.
9Birmingham's showpiece factory, two miles out of town
On the tile: Soho works1761
Matthew Boulton leased thirteen acres at Soho, two miles north of Birmingham, in 1761, and with his partner John Fothergill built a manufactory that was up by 1765. It turned out buttons, buckles and ornamental metalwork, and ran public tours that Boulton took pride in. One visitor was James Boswell, who wrote down what Boulton told him in March 1776: "I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have, - POWER." He had entered into partnership with James Watt the year before, to make Watt's improved steam engine pay.
Earlier factory acts set limits on paper. The 1819 act left enforcement to local magistrates, who could not inspect a mill unless two witnesses swore it was breaking the law. The 1833 act meant business: no child under nine in a textile mill apart from silk, nine hours a day for those aged nine to thirteen, no night work for anyone under eighteen, and a schoolmaster's certificate to show a child had two hours of lessons a day. The new thing was an inspectorate answering to the Home Office, with the right to demand entry. There were four inspectors, for some four thousand factories.
The Luddites were not enemies of machinery in general. They were skilled textile workers whose trade was being undercut, and in the Midlands they broke the wide frames turning out cheap goods. Parliament answered in 1812 by making frame breaking a hanging offense. Lord Byron rose in the House of Lords on February 27 to argue against the bill, saying of the men thrown out of work that they "were willing to dig, but the spade was in other hands." The bill passed anyway.
Sir John Lubbock was a banker and a member of Parliament. On February 21, 1871 he brought in a bill to make provision for bank holidays, and respecting bills of exchange and promissory notes payable on bank holidays, which is a very dry title for a day at the seaside. In England and Wales it named Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day. People took to calling them St Lubbock's Days.
4A shilling for the train, and an industry followed
On the tile: Thomas Cook1841
On July 5, 1841, Thomas Cook put 485 people on a train from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance meeting and charged a shilling a head. Among the passengers was his own seven-year-old son. Cook, who had signed the abstinence pledge five years earlier, had been struck by the thought that the new powers of railways and locomotion could be made "subservient to the promotion of temperance." Out of that outing grew an excursion business, and then a trade in arranged travel that the rest of the century took up with enthusiasm.
The women and girls who made matches at Bryant and May in east London were fined for talking, for dropping matches, for being late. In June 1888 Annie Besant published an account of the conditions in The Link, the paper she edited. The firm demanded that its workers sign a statement calling the account untrue, and when a sacking followed in early July the factory emptied: about fourteen hundred were out. They won an end to the fines, and formed a union of their own that summer.
On April 28, 1869, a Central Pacific crew laid ten miles and fifty-six feet of railroad track in a single day. Eight Irish rail handlers set the rails down, and no fewer than four hundred Chinese laborers worked behind them: 25,800 ties and 55,000 spikes went down before the crews stopped at seven in the evening. About ten thousand Chinese laborers built that line, boring tunnels through Sierra granite. More than a thousand of them are estimated to have died in the work.
7The factory workers who published their own magazine
On the tile: Mill girls1840
From 1840 to 1845 the women working the Lowell mills wrote and edited a monthly magazine of their own, the Lowell Offering, full of essays, stories and poetry by people who had spent the day tending machines. Harriet Farley, who had come to Lowell in 1837 to work in the mills, became its editor in 1842. It drew subscribers across New England and among foreign visitors, and critics who thought it too easy on mill life: Sarah Bagley, once a contributor herself, called it a mouthpiece of the corporations.
Birkenhead opened a park on April 5, 1847, designed by Joseph Paxton on 226 acres bought with public money under a local act of Parliament. Spending public funds on grounds open to everybody was still an unusual notion. A young American named Frederick Law Olmsted came to see it, and the visit is said to have shaped his design for Central Park in New York. Paxton went on to design the Crystal Palace.
9Pall Mall by gaslight, and the mills got there first
On the tile: Gas lamps1807
On January 28, 1807, Pall Mall in London became the first public street lit by gas, and in 1812 Parliament chartered the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company, the first gas company in the world. The mills had gotten there first: William Murdoch lit the Salford cotton mill of Philips and Lee in 1805, the first industrial mill to be illuminated by gas, fifty lamps at the start and 904 before long.