Greatest invention/breakthrough in industrial history?

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Colon™


Which sounds like a bull**** theory to me, unless you can show the cottage industry couldn't simply grow in proportion to overall population growth (didn't it after all have more working hands available?). At one time economic historicians claim population decreases led to economic (productivity) progress* and the other time they do the exact opposite.

*the black death supposedly had this effect because there were fewer people around to do all the work - as if less people to produce doesn't also mean less people to consume.

The cottage industry may have been able to grow commensurately, but it would not be the most efficient method I would think. But then that is a red herring argument.

The argument should be, could industrialisation have happened without an increased population (and with the historically much higher percentage of people working in agriculture).

I may be wrong, but I would think mass production needs mass markets. Or at least, the larger the market the more effective the use of such industrial techniques. You are the economist, you tell me.

The final point seems a bit odd to me - did the black death lead to industrialisation? No, so it doesn't suggest decreasing population leads to industrial processes. It lead to economic change, but my knowledge of what that entails is limited. Most of my recalled knowledge is limited to 18th/19th century British socio-economic history.

[molly bloom]

Harrison's chronometers.

The Harrison Chronometers.


John Harrison: born March 23rd 1693 at Foulby, Nr Wakefield Yorkshire.

Trained as a carpenter he turned to clockmaking. Three of his early wooden clocks survive (1713 London Guildhall , 1715 Science Museum London and 1717 Nostell Priory, Yorkshire).


In 1714 an Act of Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 for a solution to the longitude problem...to provide longitude to within half a degree. [Equivalent to well over £1,000,000 today!]


In 1730 Harrison consulted with Halley ...the then Astronomer Royal who passed him on to George Graham, a leading London clockmaker, who extended the offer of a loan. Over the next 5 years Harrison and his younger brother James worked at H1 the first practical marine timekeeper using interlinked balances instead of a pendulum and temperature compensation...34 kg and 63 cms high...taken on trials to Lisbon in 1736.

Harrison devised some improvements and the Board of Longitude gave him a £250 advance to build H2 which was larger and heavier than H1 and completed by 1741.

Realising a design deficiency he started on H3 for which another £500 was awarded. This incorporated the first ever caged roller bearings. [We may note that Harrison was the first person to do any government sponsored research and development!]


By 1753 Harrison made a further breakthough introducing a high frequency balance and the extensive use of jewelled bearings...producing in 1759 H4 which was only 13 cm in diameter and weighing only 1.45 kg. Trials of H3 and H4 during the period 1760 to 1762 showed they were a remarkable success. For example, his son William took H4 to the West Indies and it was only 5.1 secs slow at arrival in Jamaica after a voyage of 62 days. However, problems occurred to do with various small print type conditions in the wording of the prize which were not helped by the new Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, who was advocating an as yet unproved lunar method of determining longitude.


By 1764 further trials with H4 showed only an error of 39.2 secs after a 47 day voyage, which was still three times better than the performance needed to win the £20,000 longitude prize. Captain Cook used a copy of H4, known as K1, with unprecedented navigational success, on his second and third voyages charting the Pacific.

The Board under Maskelyne dragged its feet and by 1772 Harrison appealed to the King, George III, whose private astromnomer tested and supported the claims to accuracy of what by then was H5. After involving the Prime Minister, Lord North, and a specially appointed parliamentary Finance Committee Harrison was eventually awarded the full prize in June 1773 and the recognition he deserved for his achievements...John Harrison had solved the longitude problem.

Within three years he died in 1776 aged 83 years.


The Harrison marine chronometers are displayed in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The above information was obtained from a booklet by J Betts entitled John Harrison and published to mark the 300th anniversary of Harrison's birth.

http://www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/~uhap045/290/290note4/290note4.html

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/index.cfm/category/chronometers

[TheStinger]

Del Boy found one of those didn't he

[Colon™]

Originally posted by Dauphin


The cottage industry may have been able to grow commensurately, but it would not be the most efficient method I would think. But then that is a red herring argument.

The argument should be, could industrialisation have happened without an increased population (and with the historically much higher percentage of people working in agriculture).

I may be wrong, but I would think mass production needs mass markets. Or at least, the larger the market the more effective the use of such industrial techniques. You are the economist, you tell me.

The final point seems a bit odd to me - did the black death lead to industrialisation? No, so it doesn't suggest decreasing population leads to industrial processes. It lead to economic change, but my knowledge of what that entails is limited. Most of my recalled knowledge is limited to 18th/19th century British socio-economic history.

I didn't say the black death lead to industrialisation. Industrialisation isn't the only kind of economic advance that can take place in history. I said it is been claimed the black death lead to it because it supposedly redistributed the means amongst less people.

So you couldn't have a mass market of a population of, say, 10 million, rather than 20 million? Was a given number of potential factories (say, 200 rather than 100?) required before there could be any starting to the industrialisation? If population was the determining factor then wasn't the industrial revolution ignited in far more populous places such as France, Russia or China?

No, the cottage industry wouldn't have been the most efficient method. Why reason that a bigger population is needed to implement the most efficient method?

The question should be: could industrialisation have happen without freeing up labour from agriculature? The agricultural efficiency gains was a major factor that allowed industrialisation. The greater population was a simultaneous result, not a cause.

[aemond]

Originally posted by Colon™


If population was the determining factor then wasn't the industrial revolution ignited in far more populous places such as France, Russia or China?

I'm certainly not an expert, but it seems to me that a big factor in catalyzing an industrial boom is the coexistence of population growth and the lack of agricultural means to support such growth. In the examples above, these areas possess greater land resources and, thus, are able to satiate the hunger pangs of an agrarian economy. England and Japan didn't.

[Colon™]

Uhm, if advances in agricultural techniques, allowed for a given amount of food to be produced with less people, resulting in the surplus labour moving to work in factories, then how can you argue that Britain industrialised because it wasn't able to feed its population?

And please, try to reason in proportional terms. Greater lands and resources, but also greater populations. France actually was more densely populated than Britain and probably so was China. A greater acreage of agricultural lands in total doesn't equal greater acreage per capita.

[Colon™]

Seriously, you got things throughly messed up if you believe the population growth was independent of agricultural advances.

[TheStinger]

England underwent large scale enclosure in the 18th centrury which imroved agri output, the effect of empire also enabled the UK to import foodstfuffs from overseas freeing up labour.

[aemond]

Originally posted by Colon™
A greater acreage of agricultural lands in total doesn't equal greater acreage per capita.

Greater acreage per capita is exactly what I was inferring. But that is acreage of fertile land. This is assuming that all land is created equal, which, of course, is not true. There are a trillion factors that go into determining the arability of land for comparison. This is not my specialty and I could be very wrong, but I suspect that the quality of land in comparison to the three nations you listed (however, I'm not sure about Russia) are superior to the Brits. I mean this holistically, when many factors, such as population size, are accounted for.

Originally posted by Colon
Seriously, you got things thoroughly messed up if you believe the population growth was independent of agricultural advances.

Never said that. But I don't believe it is a strict causal relationship. I don't think A created B, but the relationship between industry and population growth was a bit more symbiotic. It comes down to basic arithmetic than anything else. When two people have more than two children together populations grow despite not having technological advances. It's not as if the Earth's population remained relatively stable for thousands of years and only started growing after industry arrived. Populations grow because it is the basic tenant of human survival, not the result of "agricultural advances." However, they do complement each other.

[Colon™]

The trouble is that population growth can only be sustainable when there's enough food. And Britain's population exactly increased rapidly after agricultural advances that increases agricultural output. China knew many, many occassions in which the population size crossed the speed limit, with famines as a result, and a realignment of the population in line with the ability of agriculture to support it. No industrial revolution or otherwise rapid technological advances ever ensued because of these famines.

[aemond]

Possibly, but there is only so much you can exploit the land for. Land is finite, and despite improving farm tools there is a wall that you eventually hit. But just because you hit that wall doesn't mean that people stop having more kids. In fact, the opposite is probably true. Financial disparity in agrarian societies can produce more children in a last ditch attempt at salvaging one's own survival. Because the prospects of agricultural stability ended sooner for England, it allowed them to look elsewhere for Empire building. This came in the form of colonization and improving trade routes to import the foods their land could not provide for them.

[Colon™]

But the surging yields didn't hit a wall...

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by aemond
Possibly, but there is only so much you can exploit the land for. Land is finite, and despite improving farm tools there is a wall that you eventually hit. But just because you hit that wall doesn't mean that people stop having more kids.

That may well be true, but wasnt in fact the situation in Britain in the mid 18th c. Agricultural productivity was going up. IIRC there were major improvements in crop rotation, and other advances.

Now in the early to mid 19th century they WERE hitting a wall, which they solved by opening up more to imports from North America, the continent (?) and later Russia.

[molly bloom]

The diet of the poor in Great Britain in the late 18th Century was significantly worse, nutritionally, than that of the indigenous Australians.

Although they were mostly still hunter gatherers with some farming of eels and edible grasses, their diet was richer in protein and essential nutrients.

It was also noticeably lacking in refined sugar.

The problem for the urban poor was that ale and beer had been replaced in part by cheap gin and also tea and coffee, which while offering some benefits, did not play the part which small beer or ale had played in the diet of the poor in earlier times.


Add to this a vogue for refined white bread, poor understanding of nutrition, a lack of birth control and increasing air pollution and you end up with the scenes depicted in Hogarth's 'Gin Lane' and Daumier and Dore's depictions of urban squalor in Paris and London.