Manufacturing: Internal Combustion

 Oil had been discovered in coal mines as a source of combustible fluid and hence power. It could be burnt to heat water and so make steam. It could also be made to combust in an enclosed cylinder, driving a piston. 

The bicycle had sewn the seed, and, particularly, the French began to explore adding power, from internal combustion, to bicycles. Once the famous Red Flag had ceased to control speed on British roads, engineers and entrepreneurs began to build an industry that would dwarf textiles, iron and steel and coal.

Why stay on the ground? Thinking, that had been around since the time of the Great Exhibition, could be given its wings, and man flew. Ships were powered by diesel.

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Manufacturing: the sewing machine and bicycle

 “No useful sewing machine was ever invented by one man; and all first attempts to do work by machinery, previously done by hand, had been failures. It was only after several able inventors had failed in their attempts, that someone with the mental powers to combine the efforts of others, with his own, at last produced a practical sewing machine.’

It is the story of this book: the way one idea builds on another, until finally an answer is found. The sewing machine was ultimately an American invention, vital to the textile industry but also to many homes across the land. It brings in another aspect, how more and more inventions were crossing borders, with people of different nations building on the work of others. It is also the story of how one invention leads to another: first the sewing machine, next the bicycle. You can read more by following this link

Manufacturing and the nineteenth century home

 The seventy years between the Great Exhibition and the start of the Great War had seen great changes in the way many people worked and travelled. Yet, the way food and homewares were produced hadn’t changed a great deal. The local butcher, baker, grocer and green grocer supplied daily needs. A carpenter might make furniture, a seamstress a dress, a cobbler boots, a tailor a suit of clothes. Change thought was afoot, and I seek to tell it through the prism of my father who was born in 1891.

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The house in Dulwich where my father was born. You can read about his remarkable life in Dunkirk to D Day

Manufacturing and Armaments

 Instruments of war have been manufactured for centuries: swords by cutlers, pistols and muskets by gunsmiths and cannon by iron foundries. It would be logical to suggest that these manufacturers simply grew and developed over time. To a small extent this is true, and the Arsenal at Woolwich was, for many years, clear evidence of this. The story of British armament manufacturing is more complex and grew out of the industrial revolution, but particularly the rivalry which it inspired. From the time of the Crimea, shipbuilders became gun makers.

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Weeding  barracks 

Manufacturing and Communication

 The growth, that steam enabled, demanded an administrative infrastructure: clerks who could keep records, newspaper men who could disseminate news. People, receiving ever better education, were hungry for ideas and entertainment. Printing and paper making were key. London was the epicentre, and was becoming revolutionised by railway connections. Electricity too dates from decades before the Great Exhibition and first found use in the telegraph, initially using cables laid alongside railway lines, linking the nation.

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Manufacturing and Steam and Steel

 No-one visiting the Great Exhibition could have been in any doubt of the fundamental importance of steam; indeed many would have travelled to the exhibition in a carriage pulled by a steam railway engine (though not by the Flying Scotsman!) Some may well have come on a Cook’s Tour. In the early nineteenth century, the production of coal and iron and indeed textiles had been held back by the power then available, that of running water and horses. Something more was needed and steam was to be the answer. Newcomen and others invented the steam engine, developed further by Watt, Stephenson and others. It transformed the world of work, in some ways making it more dangerous. But, it enabled dry and ventilated mines, it carried the coal from the face to the shaft and up to over ground railways and thence to steam ships. Railways extended from the mines across the country and beyond. Iron works grew. Steel was invented. Britain now exported coal and iron and steel as well as cotton, and more ships were built.

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The stuff of manufacturing: textiles

 At the Great Exhibition, the number of exhibits relating to the textile industry was not great, but the Census of 1851 had pointed to the huge number of people the industry employed. It was highly significant, but where had it come from, not least those dark satanic cotton mills? Many families set up in Lancashire as a cottage industry supplementing the living they earned from their small holdings. They mirrored their sister families in Yorkshire and elsewhere who had spun and woven wool for centuries. The Napoleonic wars changed everything. The European market disappeared for British goods, demand tumbled and prices crashed. For the small holders this was disaster; for the merchants it was a crisis from which opportunity came. They began to mechanise the cotton industry in mills with machines powered by water. What was needed was more power.

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The building blocks of manufacturing: coal and metals

 Coal had ‘tentacles in every part of this changing society’. Landowners loved it, for it lay under their land; farmers benefitted from its use in burning lime for fertiliser; textile manufacturers used its heat in bleaching and dyeing; houses were built from brick and glass both made by the heat of coal; many small workshops across the land, as we shall see, used it to enhance their productivity. Metal was not only needed for large machines, but also for small machines, clocks, guns, instruments and ‘toys’  - small decorative items to delight the growing middle class. Shipbuilders began to explore the use of metal for ships. 

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Key to the effective use of coal and metals were the canals.

The beginning of manufacturing

I am planning to post extracts from my books on British Manufacturing history 

As a process the Industrial Revolution really only became visible after it had been running for some years; there was no big bang. A number of interrelated factors contributed to it. I start by recognising features of the island nation.

Seafaring was a way of life for a sizeable minority, and this involved exploration of foreign lands as well as the more obviously fishing and coastal transport. The British were an adventurous people. They were also a trading people, and foreign lands offered opportunities for buying and selling. The British had been building ships in hundreds of places around our coastline for centuries. Ships were made of wood and powered by sail. As trade increased, so did the need for size and speed. A shipping industry began to grow. It was driven all the time by the magnetism of trade as adventurers discovered countries and their exotic produce, and merchants imported raw materials and exported goods in ever growing quantities and people in ever growing numbers.

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