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We talk about the singularity as if it were a future event. But arguably, we crossed into a ‘singularity’ at the dawn of the industrial revolution. For most of human history, our lives were largely the same as any other animal. We spent the vast majority of waking hours hunting and gathering food, grinding out a meager existence. While the agricultural revolution spared some of us from this drudgery, the Industrial Revolution altered our lives beyond recognition. The Industrial Revolution was the singularity, and we are still living in it.
Before The Industrial Revolution
Before the Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the 18th Century, progress was slow, uneven, and often reversed itself. According to a paper authored by Robert J. Gordon and published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, British real GDP per capita grew by a mere 0.2 percent per year in the four centuries leading to 1700. At that rate, it took about five centuries to double the standard of living. But with the Industrial Revolution in full swing by 1800, growth dramatically accelerated. It took a century for living standards to double again in 1900, and just 30 years to double again, and then again.
Why the sudden dramatic change? If we understand technology to be novel ways of rearranging atoms to expand human capability, we must acknowledge that this requires energy. The invention of agriculture made more energy (food) available to humans and animals such that some of us could join cities and specialize in activities other than basic survival. The key breakthrough that kicked off the Industrial Revolution, however, was the ability to utilize heat energy to do work. Namely, to effectively harness fossil fuels, the stored chemical energy of long-deceased life. Here, the steam engine was crucial to augmenting our physical capabilities, which until then, were limited to human, animal, or in some cases, wind and waterpower.
To get a sense of how dramatic a change this was, author Robert Bryce examined the history of power in his book Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper. He writes that the average human can produce 60-120 watts of power. Cattle could produce between 300-400 watts of power, enabling them to plow fields about three times faster than humans. But like us, these animals require food: a lot of food. As a consequence, much of the food surplus we could grow was eaten by the very animals required to grow it. Water wheels and windmills could achieve 10,000 watts of power but were limited by geography as one cannot place them just anywhere, and they certainly couldn’t plow fields.
Steam engines, on the other hand, relied on fossil fuels, an energy source that did not compete with humans and animals. The first commercially successful steam engine, the Newcomen engine, could produce about 18,000 watts of power. As we will soon see, our heat engines became increasingly power-dense and thermally efficient. Engine technology, combined with the exploitation of fossil fuels, enabled humans to escape the “Malthusian trap” that imprisoned many of us in agrarian societies for millennia. The steam engine pumped water from mines, allowing us to mine more minerals. They powered steamships that transported guano fertilizer needed to grow crops. They generated electricity that powered the lightbulbs that lit the darkness and the motors of machine tools in factories.
The First Industrial Revolution
With coal, we could do more with less. Coal formed one of the three “spokes” of the Industrial Revolution, the others being cotton and steel. Cotton was needed to clothe a steadily growing population, but until the Industrial Revolution, the production of clothing was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. For this reason, textile production was among the first to enjoy the benefits of mechanization. There were a great number of machines invented that increased the productivity of the textile sector, chief among them were the “Spinning Jenny,” the “Power Loom,” and the “Cotton Gin.”
James Hargreaves invented the “Spinning Jenny” in 1764, a machine that could spin up to eight cotton spools at a time, dramatically accelerating the production of yarn. Subsequent versions of the machine could spin as many as 120 spools simultaneously. By 1788, Britain had over 20,000 of the machines operating. Concurrently with new, more efficient spinning machines, came the “Power Loom,” a weaving machine that was invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1785. The power loom doubled the speed of cloth production and, importantly, eliminated the need for skilled handweavers. By 1835, there were some 50,000 power looms in factories across the whole of Britain.
The machines’ insatiable appetite for cotton forced the invention of the “Cotton Gin” by Eli Whitney in 1794. The “gin” mechanized the laborious process of separating the seeds from the cotton balls by pulling them through rotating metal teeth with hooks. Later in 1844, in the United States, Elias Howe invented a sewing machine. His machine was the first to use a “lockstitch,” where two threads were put into the cloth, from below and above. The machine could execute 640 stitches a minute compared to about 23 by hand. As a result, a dress that used to take 6.5 hours to sew by hand could be completed in just one hour by machine.
Together, these innovations saw an explosion in textile output and dramatically reduced the cost of clothing. British factories could produce textiles of higher quality, in higher quantities, and at lower prices than anywhere else in the world. In fact, Britain could now compete with India, where the cost of labor was far lower, signaling the arrival of the industrial era and the triumph of innovation and machine power over armies of human labor.
The third “spoke” of the Industrial Revolution, the arrival of high-quality steel, marked a key threshold in the 1850s, leading into the “Second” Industrial Revolution. Iron, being harder and stronger, had displaced Bronze for weapons and tools centuries earlier. However, the quality of iron was dependent on the quality of the local ore. At high temperatures, iron absorbs carbon, resulting in cast iron, which is typically 2.5% to 4.5% carbon. While strong, cast iron is relatively brittle due to its relatively high percentage of carbon. By the late 1700s, metallurgists knew they needed to reduce the iron’s carbon content but had no cheap and effective means of doing so.
That was until 1856 when Henry Bessemer devised a means of introducing oxygen into molten iron to reduce and curate the carbon content. The Bessemer Process, as it became known, is perhaps the single greatest innovation in the history of steelmaking. In that process, iron was heated while oxygen was blown through the molten metal. As oxygen passes through the metal, it reacts with the carbon, releasing carbon dioxide, and producing a purer iron. With this process, alongside additional improvements, iron ore deposits could be transformed into affordable steel with consistent quality. As a consequence, the price of steel rail fell some 80% from 1867 to 1884.
Soot and Slaves
To be sure, the Industrial Revolution had a dark side. Early factories belched toxic soot into the air, worker protections were non-existent, and in some sense, exploitative. The cotton that fed the looms of Britain was picked by armies of slave labor in America. Working hours, bizarrely, appear to have increased as workers were squeezed ever harder to increase profits. In the 1750s, the average British working year was 2,760 hours. That rose to about 3,366 by 1830.
This fact presents something of a conundrum. The huge leaps in productivity and output should have seen an immediate improvement in worker wages and likely not have led to more working hours. On the contrary, some argue that British real wages did not begin rising until after 1850 as the First Industrial Revolution drew to a close. Why was this? Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson argue in their book, Power and Progress, that technological improvement doesn’t necessarily or automatically improve the human lot as many assume. In a cautionary tale for today, the “productivity bandwagon” is not automatically shared absent proper institutional design.
This may explain why the First Industrial Revolution brought relatively few gains for the common person compared to the Second. The First Industrial Revolution arose in the context of what was essentially still an agrarian society. Agrarian societies, as we know, were deeply hierarchical and extractive. It took decades of political realignment in Britain, including the expansion of voting rights, the arrival of trade unions, and other “countervailing forces” to fundamentally alter the deeply entrenched extractive agrarian socio-economic system and reshape it into an inclusive industrial one. This happened by the time of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution after ~1870, which made the first look meager in comparison.
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The increase in working hours doesn't necessarily mean a lower standard of living. It might mean that people were becoming more specialised. Instead of producing a bunch of stuff in your household, you're doing wage labour so that you can afford to hire someone outside your family do a thing for you.
A modern example would be women getting full time jobs while hiring maids, nannies and tutors to handle increasing share of childrearing activities.