Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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A person whisked out of the year 1500 and dropped into 1800 would find the worldchanged but recognizable. Ships would be more advanced but were still powered by sail.Farming was still done by animal-pulled plow. Weapons were still muskets and cannons. Theone really different feature would be the steam engine, but by 1800 the steam engine hadnot completely changed the world. In contrast, a person whisked out of 1800 into todaywould find a very unfamiliar world. Would such a person be able to comprehend creditcards, video games, airplanes, microwave ovens, automobiles, or television?
The root changes that made the modern world what it is can be described as the nearelimination of constraints of space and time. These two changes are deeply intertwined. Weshall also see repeatedly that the real lifestyle-changing technology was often fairlyprimitive, and that modern high technology is often just an improvement on a revolutionthat was already won using much more primitive methods.
One very useful source of information on the transition to the modern world is BillBryson's Made in America. Although it's a history of English in America, the lasthalf of the book is a remarkably useful summary of the development and impact of moderntechnology. The fact that a language book is such a useful source on technologyis interesting. Bryson has a lot to say about colonial English but it doesn't tell us muchabout 18th century technology. But after about 1850, the picture changes radically.America becomes such a technological society that technology dominates our language. Newterms flood the language, technology becomes a source of imagery, and technology becomes afocus of our speech because it becomes a focus of our lives.
Technologies for communicating instantly across wide areas have always been around.Signal fires and smoke signals have been used in many times and places. In the RomanEmpire, chains of signal towers could be used to send messages the breadth of the Empirewithin hours, limited only by the time it took each tower to read and relay the signals.In the 19th century, chains of signal towers employing semaphore signals - systems ofcolored arms that could be set in different positions - were erected in a number ofEuropean nations. The inventors of these early systems solved many problems in informationtechnology, such as ways of compressing signals and techniques for detecting andcorrecting errors in transmission. These systems were actually called telegraphs.The heliograph made use of sunlight reflected off mirrors to send messages. It hadthe obvious drawbacks of being usable only in daylight and clear weather, but the greatadvantage of portability, and saw some use by the U.S. Army in the Southwest, whereconditions for its use were excellent. All of these technologies were special-purposesystems, limited only to extremely important and official messages, and they had littleimpact on the everyday lives of most people.
All that changed in 1844, when Samuel Morse sent the first electrical telegraph messagefrom Washington to Baltimore. The word telegraph had been around for decades, as we haveseen, and the device itself was actually invented in 1831 by Joseph Henry of Princeton(the same Henry famous in chemistry and physics). Morse perfected its practical andcommercial application. At about the same time, he was doing the same thing withphotography in America. By 1850, America had thousands of miles of telegraph lines. News,not just national but local, and personal messages could be sent instantly andcomparatively cheaply. The effect was, pardon the pun, electrifying. When Thoreau lamentedthat modern man would get up from a nap and ask if there was any news, he was referring tothe impact that instantaneous communication had on society.
The telephone, radio, television, and the Internet are all fascinating technologies,but the telegraph is really what changed the world. The telegraph marked the transitionfrom a world without telecommunications to a world with it.
To connect the East with the newly-won territories on the Pacific, a group ofentrepreneurs reverted to an idea millennia old - fast riders. The Pony Express wasinaugurated in April, 1860. It made it possible to get information from coast to coast inabout a week, at the then-staggering cost of $5 an ounce for letters, but even as theriders traveled, they were being paralleled by telegraph line. The Pony Express went outof business after 19 months and never turned a profit, surely the most colorful andromantic business failure in history. The telegraph line to California was completed justbefore the outbreak of the Civil War and was instrumental in keeping the far West in theUnion. We tend to forget that America had frontiers in other directions as well;Californians knew of Lincoln's assassination within hours, but the news took two weeks toreach northern Maine.
America and Europe might be tied internally by telegraph lines, but news between thetwo still took at least a week by fast steamship. Transoceanic telegraph cables wereproposed in the 1850's. The technology is daunting. The cable has to be insulated wellenough to survive immersion in thousands of feet of ocean water, and means have to bedeveloped to retrieve the cable and fix it if it breaks. Cable-laying ships were devisedand means of insulating the cable as it was laid perfected, and the first transatlantictelegraph cables were in service by 1868. By 1900 the world's oceans were laced by cables.
Two vignettes from the dawn of trans-oceanic telegraphy are revealing:
In 1876 the steamer Jeanette left San Francisco for the Bering Strait, in anattempt to reach the North Pole from the Pacific side of the Arctic. The attempt was afailure; the ship never got beyond 76 degrees north, was frozen in the ice, and eventuallycrushed. The crew dragged longboats over the pack ice and rowed to the Arctic coast ofSiberia. One boat capsized in a storm and the other two separated. Both boats landed withthe occupants horribly frostbitten and near starvation. The crew of one managed to reach avillage, and two of the healthiest survivors sledged over a thousand miles south toIrkutsk where there was - a telegraph. They were able to get word to America of the fateof the expedition. Rescue expeditions had been searching the Arctic for two years lookingfor them. Tragically, the crew of the other boat was located in the spring, all dead ofstarvation and cold. But by 1876, survivors of an Arctic expedition were able tocommunicate with the rest of the world from the middle of Siberia.
After a failed revolt in Ireland, ten Irish rebels were exiled for life to the penalcolony of Australia. After ten years, sympathizers devised a plan to free them. They hiredan American whaling vessel to travel to Australia to carry the escapees. Meanwhile,advance men traveled across America and then across the Pacific by ship. Two groups ofconspirators traveled in opposite directions to rendezvous on the opposite side of theplanet. The prisoners escaped and were spirited out to the American ship, whileBritish authorities commandeered the only other ship around, a coastal steamer. After atense confrontation in which the whaler nearly rammed the steamer, the convict ship madeit safely into international waters. Now to get to America. Had this happened a decadelater, the British Navy would certainly have intercepted them, but since there was notyet a telegraph line to Australia news of the escape failed to reach Britain in timeand the Irish rebels made good their escape.
The interplay of technological progress in this episode is fascinating. The escapeworked because transportation technology made it possible to travel freely around theglobe, but information technology had not quite caught up.
As James Burke points out in The Day the Universe Changed, until recently, thenumber of people living at any one time depended fundamentally on the weather, which inturn dictated the harvest. It is still true, as Nobel Prize winning agronomist NormanBorlaug pointed out, that "the single most important event on Earth each year is theharvest." The single biggest seasonal rhythm faced by humans was cyclic foodavailability and variety. New crops and farming techniques in the 18th century created newfood surpluses, and the development of reliable canning techniques in the early 19thcentury made it possible to eat a variety of foods at all seasons of the year. If cannedfoods seem bland to today's palate, they were amazing to those who experienced them forthe first time. Wrote one admirer:
M. Appert [the first successful commercial canner] has found the art of fixing the seasons. At his hands spring, summer and autumn live in bottles, like those delicate plants which the gardener protects under a dome of glass against the intemperate weather.
The invention of refrigeration opened new horizons in food preservation. Even beforethere were refrigerators there was ice - cut off northern lakes in winter, protected bysawdust, and shipped as far as China in the 19th century. Improvements in transportation -first rail, then truck, now air - make it possible for consumers in the developed world tohave fresh food at all seasons of the year.
The daily rhythm of sunrise and sunset began to change in the early 19th century withthe advent of gas lighting. Before this time, lighting was provided mostly by candles,which were made of wax (expensive) or tallow. Shorn of all the folksy and quaint imagery,burning a tallow candle amounts to burning congealed grease, and smells exactly asappetizing as it sounds. Candles of any kind provided poor light at best and coatedeverything with soot. Gas for lighting was initially a byproduct of manufacturing coke,and was first used in lighting nearby factories. It was so successful, as well as beingcheaper than candles, that investors began looking to expand the market. By 1807 prototypelighting systems were installed along a few London streets, by 1823 all the major citiesin England had gas lighting (300 miles of gas mains) and by 1850 there were 2000 miles ofgas mains in England. Gas also caught on in America; Baltimore had gas lighting beforemany European cities.
The good news was that improved lighting made the streets safer and made it possible tohave a vastly greater array of social activities in the evenings. The bad news was thatlighting made it possible to have longer work hours. The good news about the bad news wasthat productivity rose, prices fell, and the workers got to use at least some of thenewly-available evening time for themselves. In addition to recreation, workers'organizations set up evening classes teaching a wide variety of subjects. Here again,while the upper classes were debating how much, if at all, to educate the lower classes,the lower classes were settling the issue on their own.
What if you live too far from cities to take advantage of gas lighting, as was the casefor most Americans? The best lighting material available about 1800 was sperm oil fromwhales. Sperm whales have a large fluid-filled cavity in their skulls, the function ofwhich is still not entirely clear, but it is a clean, bright-burning illumination fuel. Inthe early 19th century American whalers roamed the seas hunting whale oil. But thecoke-manufacturing process generated liquids as well as gases, and these turned out to becheaper and superior to whale oil (fortunately for the whales). The manufacture of coaloil for lighting soon became an industry in its own right, and kerosene derived fromnatural petroleum seeps also came into use. In 1857 the first deliberately-drilledpetroleum well was sunk in Pennsylvania and kerosene soon became the dominant lightingfuel. The distillation process also generated other fluids, too light, volatile, andflammable to be suitable for use in lighting, and these were dumped or burned as wasteproducts. The term applied to this waste material was gasoline. (Before you recoilin horror, the scale of the 19th century petroleum industry was so small that the totalamount wasted was insignificant by modern standards.)
In cold climates, heating has always been a matter of survival as much as comfort. Whathas really changed the seasonal rhythm of the world is air-conditioning. On a tripto Hawaii, I noticed that the airport concourses were simple elevated troughs with slabroofs and no windows. I'd seen open hotel lobbies, but I just assumed they could be closedoff if necessary. But these concourses were never closed off, because it nevergets cold in Honolulu (the all-time record low temperature there is 59 degrees.) Imagineliving in a place where it never, ever, gets cold, where working hard meansoverheating and taking hours to recover from it. What would that do to your concept ofwork? Your sense of urgency to get things done? Many stereotypes of the pace of life inthe tropics have a strong element of Western ethnocentrism and racism (though, curiously,nobody considers it racist or ethnocentric to observe that "mad dogs and Englishmengo out in the midday sun") but they also contain a great deal of truth, based solidlyin climatology and human physiology.
Artificial heating is as simple as building a fire, but artificial cooling is a lotharder. In many hot regions people have devised technical and cultural innovations tolessen the effects of heat, but true cooling could only be achieved by either going tosomeplace cool (say the mountains) or storing snow and ice into the summer. Both werelargely limited to the rich. Artificial refrigeration units were invented in the mid-19thcentury, and air-conditioning for buildings came into use in the 20th century. Reallywidespread air conditioning only became available after World War II. It's safe to say theeconomic vitality of the Sun Belt is largely due to air-conditioning (imagine trying tolive in Houston without it!)
More than other elements of the modern world, the quest for speed has older roots.Water and wind had been used to drive machines for centuries, but they are subject toweather conditions and restricted in location. They are not always located where they areneeded. The search for some other power source began about 1690 when Denis Papin conceivedof using gunpowder to drive a piston. He failed to come up with a workable machine. About1700 Thomas Savery devised an engine for lifting water using the expansion of steam in acylinder. It worked, after a fashion, but was very inefficient. After doing the work, thecylinder was cooled with a jet of water. About 1705 Thomas Newcomen happened to be presentwhen a seam broke on a Savery engine and water got inside. The steam condensed instantly,sucking the piston back down with enough force to wreck the machine. Newcomen was soimpressed he designed an engine where the "accident" happened every stroke. Thisengine was a lot faster and more powerful than Savery's, and Newcomen engines were in usepumping mines around the world right into this century.
In defense of Papin, eventually a machine was built that operated a piston withgunpowder, but something radically unlike what Papin envisioned. Automatic weapons areeffectively piston engines run by gunpowder. The gunpowder actually powers two pistons.One is the bullet. The other is the bolt, which is driven backward, allowing the nextbullet to be loaded, by which time the bolt is driven forward by a spring and the weaponis ready to fire again. His concept of using explosives to drive pistons in an engine wasfinally realized in the internal-combustion engine, although the explosive is a fine mistof gasoline.
According to legend, James Watt was watching the tea kettle boil in his mother's weecottage in Scotland when he got the idea to launch the Industrial Revolution. As usual,the legend is wrong and the reality is a lot more interesting. Watt was part of abrilliant circle called the Scottish Enlightenment that arose in Edinburgh in themid-1700's. Watt was the instrument maker for the University of Edinburgh, and whilefixing a model Newcomen engine, he realized that the act of alternately heating andcooling the same vessel was very inefficient. He devised a different design that bled thespent steam off into a separate condenser, so that the steam cylinder was always hot andthe condenser always cool. The Newcomen design had been quite suitable for pumping mines,but the new engine's speed was governed only by how fast the steam could be let in anddrawn off. Since it was faster, it could be used for powering applications undreamed ofwith Newcomen's engine. Since it was more powerful, it could be made smaller than aNewcomen engine. It was possible to power individual machines. It could be put onvehicles.
In addition to faster machines, modern productivity required a conceptual advance: massproduction. The British Navy was already using mass production to make pulleys for itsvast fleet, and if individual pulley parts varied a bit, it didn't really matter. It ishard for us to realize that two centuries ago every single object was one of a kind,handmade. Individual nuts and bolts, once made, were tied together by string becauseevery single one had slightly different diameter or threads. The American, Eli Whitney(inventor of the cotton gin) conceived of making identical parts and persuadedCongress to put up some money for the experiment. It took some doing - doubters said itwas impossible - and as usual the doubters were right. The machine tools of the dayweren't quite up to the task and the parts had to be hand-finished. Nevertheless, Whitneydumped the parts of a dozen muskets on a table, grabbed parts at random, assembled a dozenmuskets, and every one worked. The impact was tremendous - imagine pulling parts at randomfrom a junkyard and building a working car - and Congress easily allotted Whitney thefunds to perfect the technology. Thus Whitney became the father of another staple ofmodern America - the defense contract cost overrun.
If America had the machines and concepts for mass production in the early 19th century,why is the 20th century the age of consumer goods? The answer is that to create a consumersociety, it's not sufficient to produce the goods, they have to be
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Created 18 September 1998, Last Update 10 December 1998