The Greatest Story in the World, Period 3 by Horace G. Hutchinson

The realisation of the power of steam, and its application to / machinery, have made a greater difference in this Greatest Story than / any other single event that ever happened in it before or since. It / is a realisation that came just before the end of the eighteenth / century, and it made a greater difference between the story of the / nineteenth century and that of all the centuries before it than there / ever had been between any two former periods. That is indeed a large / claim to make for it, but it is none too large.

Hitherto, the force that man had made use of to do his work had been, / with few exceptions, the force of his own muscles or those of his / horses or oxen. He had used the winds to blow his ships along. He / had used both wind and water to turn his corn-grinding mills. He had / used explosive gunpowder to propel his missiles. Earlier still, he / had used the resilient force of wood, for his bows, to shoot his / arrows, and this was perhaps his first use of the forces of Nature / which surrounded him and which he, like everything else, without / knowing it, obeyed. But now, all at once, he discovered the use of / another exceedingly strong force, in steam. The real wealth of the / world consists more truly in man's power to control and turn to his / own use the forces of Nature than in anything else. Hitherto he had / possessed scarcely any of this {186} true wealth, because his force / was limited by the muscular power of himself and his domestic / animals. Now he had a servant whose power to do work for him was / almost without limit. The steam-engine was invented.

When we speak of a steam-engine the first idea it brings to mind is a / locomotive engine drawing a train or driving a ship; but it was not / to this that the steam-engine was turned on its first invention, nor / is it perhaps its most important use.

[Sidenote: The first steam-engine]

Its first use was as a stationary engine, and the purposes to which / those stationary engines could be, and soon were, turned are far too / many to tell. Already some previous inventions in hand-worked and / foot-worked machines had greatly increased the manufacture of textile / goods in England.

But now cotton and wool began to be made into thread by the / steam-driven machines. By them, the thread was woven into sheets and / pieces. They cut and finished metal and wood into the shapes needed / for a thousand different articles of daily use -- furniture, / agricultural implements, pots and pans, and so forth. They made and / combined and pieced together parts of new machines for the making of / yet more and more useful things. They had the power to hammer out / great sheets of metal, and the delicacy to make a thread of wire or a / needle. They became more and more efficient and fine as experience / led to improvements, but it would be true to say that even in the / very early days of their development a machine which it took only one / man to mind and keep in working order could do as much work as had / been done by twenty men who were served only by their own hands and / muscles. Thus, if we may regard the productive work accomplished as / the true wealth of the nation, we find it already increased by twenty / times as the result of this engine.

But it is no use producing more unless there are people who want that / increased produce. And that is exactly what there were just at this / moment. In spite of the wars, the population had been growing in / Europe, and when they ceased, in 1815, it began to grow even faster. / Besides, there was growth of humanity all the world over, and / especially in America. And the end of the wars allowed the produce / of one country to be freely carried across sea and exchanged for the / produce of another. It was especially in British ships that the / produce was carried; and this carrying trade, as it is called, was a / great cause of the wealth which Britain began to make in this century.

She needed that replenishment, because it was very largely by the / help of her money that the allies -- especially Prussia when she was in / the coalition -- had been able to keep their armies in the field / against France. The British were very heavily taxed in and after the / Napoleonic wars even as in and after what we now call the Great War.

This Industrial Era, of which the application of steam power was the / principal cause, had been in progress many years before the / steam-engines were used for drawing railway trains. Perhaps 1775 may / be given as the date of the first practical steam-engine in Great / Britain; yet it was not till 1830 that the first steam-worked railway / line was opened to the public. But once this new mode of travel was / introduced it quickly superseded the old mail-coach traffic and / gradually drove the coaches off the road.

Besides her carrying trade across the seas, Britain had the good / fortune to find iron ore close to her coal in her North Midlands. / Wherever those two were found together -- the coal to heat the water / into steam for the driving of the machines, and the iron as the chief / material of the machines themselves and of a thousand things made by / them -- the conditions favoured {189} manufacturing. So, in such / places, both in England and elsewhere, there grew up the large and / ever-increasing towns, as the people gathered to work together in the / factories. For though the machines might do the work of twenty men, / many more than twenty times the former total of work was performed / within the space that each of these big towns occupied.

[Sidenote: Hand loom and power loom]