Transcripts
This is threshold nonprofit, independent and
Eva Kalea:listener funded. Support the show at thresholdpodcast.org
Amy Martin:Okay, I'm looking at the Smethwick engine. I guess
Amy Martin:it's the oldest working steam engine in the world.
Amy Martin:I'm in a science museum called Think Tank in Birmingham,
Amy Martin:England, standing in front of a steam engine designed by James
Amy Martin:Watt in the late 1700s.
Amy Martin:And when I say engine, if you picture the thing that you look
Amy Martin:at when you open the hood of your car, wipe that image out of
Amy Martin:your mind. This is like it takes up at least three floors of this
Amy Martin:museum. It extends down below, and then it extends high above
Amy Martin:me.
Amy Martin:It's a big, hulking piece of equipment with iron rods and
Amy Martin:pipes and a thick wooden beam on top, rocking back and forth like
Amy Martin:a seesaw. But I didn't really come here to study the
Amy Martin:engineering. I just wanted to meet this thing face to face and
Amy Martin:grapple with what it means, because the watt steam engine is
Amy Martin:often credited with launching the Industrial Revolution, and
Amy Martin:the Industrial Revolution launched the climate crisis.
Museum Recording:It all started in 1763, the young Scottish
Museum Recording:engineer James Watt realized that the steam engines then in
Museum Recording:use could be improved by adding a separate condenser. This made
Museum Recording:the engine far more efficient and powerful.
Amy Martin:Welcome to Threshold. I'm Amy Martin, and
Amy Martin:this is the third episode of our season called Time to 1.5. We're
Amy Martin:investigating what we're doing and not doing with the time
Amy Martin:before temperatures rise one and a half degrees Celsius over pre
Amy Martin:industrial levels. And it's the last part of that sentence, pre
Amy Martin:industrial levels that led me here. Britain was the first
Amy Martin:place in the world to go through what we now call the Industrial
Amy Martin:Revolution, a transformation of an agricultural, rural society
Amy Martin:into a manufacturing powerhouse. And this is also where we get
Amy Martin:our first archetypal images of industrial damage, skies full of
Amy Martin:soot, children laboring in factories. One of the key
Amy Martin:concepts of the Industrial Revolution is acceleration. It
Amy Martin:was a massive speeding up of almost everything, urbanization,
Amy Martin:mechanization, transportation, production, trade, consumption,
Amy Martin:and all of those surges were fueled by a radical acceleration
Amy Martin:of the carbon cycle. The processes that began here in
Amy Martin:Britain in the 1700s kicked off a multi century fossil fuel
Amy Martin:binge, which is now knocking the climate out of whack. So the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution is when we started to move fast and break
Amy Martin:things, including the delicate carbon balance that has
Amy Martin:stabilized our climate for 10,000 years or more, as we
Amy Martin:learned in our first episode.
Justine Paradis:So we have already crashed through the
Justine Paradis:warmest temperature on Earth since we left the last ice age.
Justine Paradis:We've already gone through.
Amy Martin:But this revolution also led to unprecedented levels
Amy Martin:of personal comfort and ease, if you like, getting clean water
Amy Martin:from a tap, flipping a switch and having the lights come on,
Amy Martin:heating your house, driving a car, eating food from around the
Amy Martin:world, using a toilet or taking a hot shower, you have the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution to thank. You can also give it credit for
Amy Martin:antibiotics, vaccines and much longer lifespans. And all of
Amy Martin:this is an ongoing process, although we refer to the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution with a definite article in singular
Amy Martin:form, it's happened over and over, in place after place, and
Amy Martin:there are countless new industrial hubs about to emerge,
Amy Martin:or already on their way. Vietnam, Kenya, Indonesia. This
Amy Martin:revolution continues to sweep around the planet, bringing both
Amy Martin:prosperity and destruction in its wake. This is the central
Amy Martin:conundrum of our time. The Industrial Revolution sped up
Amy Martin:our ability to meet our needs and fulfill our desires, but it
Amy Martin:also sped up the ruination of our planet. So how can we stop
Amy Martin:doing something that feels like advancement, and how do we not
Amy Martin:stop doing something that's killing us? That's the dilemma
Amy Martin:we're grappling with in this episode and throughout this
Amy Martin:season, really. To get started, we're going to home in on two
Amy Martin:key developments in the very early days of the industrial
Amy Martin:revolution that set us on this paradoxical path. To see if
Amy Martin:there's anything in those stories that could help us set a
Amy Martin:new course now.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: This is the thing isn't it with the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution? It's the speed at which it takes off and
Amy Martin:the exponential increase in the need for everything.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: A lot of these industrial towns would be dirty
Amy Martin:and filthy and smelly.
Francina Dominguez:We know we're modifying the atmosphere
Francina Dominguez:in a way that's detrimental for all living species.
Francina Dominguez:Dr. Adelle Thomas: We need to get emissions to zero now,
Francina Dominguez:otherwise, things are going to be much worse.
Amy Martin:This village is like the definition of cute.
Amy Martin:Charming, really, more than cute.
Amy Martin:I'm walking through the village of Ironbridge, England, now
Amy Martin:about an hour away from Birmingham. There's a lovely
Amy Martin:church up on the hill in front of me. The River Severn is
Amy Martin:flowing along next to the brick sidewalk. It's all very English,
Amy Martin:complete with a fish and chips place and something called
Amy Martin:Ellie's world famous hand raised pork pies. As I come around to
Amy Martin:bend, I can see the structure that gives this place its name,
Amy Martin:a beautiful iron bridge arching over the river, the world's
Amy Martin:first major bridge made of cast iron. It's just one of many
Amy Martin:artifacts in this valley from the very early days of the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution.
Amy Martin:Hello!
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: How are you?
Amy Martin:I'm doing well, how are you, nice, how are you, nice
Amy Martin:to meet you.
Amy Martin:As I walk up onto the bridge, I meet my guide for the day, Dr
Amy Martin:Matt Thompson. He's the head collections curator for English
Amy Martin:Heritage, an organization that stewards hundreds of historical
Amy Martin:sites. And although a lot of stories about the birth of the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution start where I started a few minutes
Amy Martin:ago in big manufacturing cities like Birmingham, Matt says, If
Amy Martin:we really want to understand how this process kicked off, a
Amy Martin:better place to start is here in this verdant little valley in
Amy Martin:the early 1700s.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: Yeah, often I think we have a very tight
Amy Martin:historical understanding of the Industrial Revolution in the
Amy Martin:aftermath 1760 to 1830s the kind of real flourishing of it,
Amy Martin:whereas I would argue that in reality, we're looking at a
Amy Martin:story that begins much, much earlier, and this place, I
Amy Martin:think, embodies that narrative.
Amy Martin:It's a bright September day, and our View from
Amy Martin:the Bridge is much more Jane Austen than Charles Dickens.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: We're looking at a steep sided gorge, and it's
Amy Martin:very, very wooded. Now. It's kind of like a almost a sort of
Amy Martin:pastoral. It's kind of like a bucolic idyl, you know. But this
Amy Martin:really is the kind of heart of industry and this cradle of the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution, although it might not look like it right
Amy Martin:now.
Amy Martin:It doesn't look like it right now. So I asked Matt
Amy Martin:what this valley would have looked like when it was in its
Amy Martin:industrial heyday.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: What you would have seen in the 18th
Amy Martin:century, would have been a lot of masts.
Amy Martin:Masts from the many boats moving goods up and down
Amy Martin:the River Severn.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: All up along here where the warehouse is, you
Amy Martin:know, there could be too deep, you know, kind of moored up
Amy Martin:there. There would have been chimneys. There was a lead
Amy Martin:smelter down there. Cannon being cast. There were, there were
Amy Martin:furnaces and foundries, there would have been smoke, there
Amy Martin:would have been smell. The the river itself was kind of
Amy Martin:polluted, glassy, stained waters. It would have been a
Amy Martin:very, very different prospect.
Amy Martin:The heart of all this activity was iron working.
Amy Martin:There's a lot of iron ore in the land nearby, and Matt says
Amy Martin:people in this area had been mining it and using it to make
Amy Martin:all kinds of products for hundreds of years, long before
Amy Martin:the Industrial Revolution began. But in the early 1700s a man
Amy Martin:named Abraham Darby arrived here with an idea for how to change
Amy Martin:the iron making process, and Matt says we can draw a direct
Amy Martin:line from his innovation to our current climate crisis. It all
Amy Martin:went down just a few miles away from where we're standing. So we
Amy Martin:head to Matt's car to go check it out.
Amy Martin:Oh, I'm on the wrong side.
Amy Martin:He gently points out to me that I'm getting into his car on the
Amy Martin:wrong side because we're in Britain.
Amy Martin:And we're off.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: And this is a little side valley that we're
Amy Martin:going to go up now called Colebrookdale. And the whole
Amy Martin:area was called Colebrookdale in, you know, going back into
Amy Martin:sort of medieval times.
Amy Martin:And a Dale is a valley?
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah.
Amy Martin:As we drive up the valley, we pass by old buildings
Amy Martin:connected by small paths leading through the woods.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: This is where it all happened, like the 18th
Amy Martin:and 19th century. This is where the base of operations was, of
Amy Martin:the Colebrookdale foundry. You know, this big, innovative
Amy Martin:industrial complex.
Amy Martin:Matt says this whole hillside was peppered with
Amy Martin:places where people worked turning raw iron into finished
Amy Martin:products, cannons and cannonballs, horseshoes and
Amy Martin:nails, pots and kettles. It was a multi step process he says.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: You start at the top with big lumpy stuff,
Amy Martin:and it becomes more refined, right? So you raw. Kind of iron,
Amy Martin:as it were, ingots or pig iron, what have you at the top. And as
Amy Martin:you go down several different stops down the valley, you end
Amy Martin:up with it with a more finished product, until at the end of it,
Amy Martin:you're at the river with a finished product and a
Amy Martin:warehouse, put it on a vessel and take it down the river.
Amy Martin:The River Severn flowing along below, is a key
Amy Martin:character in the coal Brookdale story. It's the longest river in
Amy Martin:Great Britain. It starts in Wales, makes a backwards sea
Amy Martin:through Western England and eventually spills out into the
Amy Martin:ocean at Bristol, connecting this valley to the rest of the
Amy Martin:world. Matt says the river, the iron ore, and even the shape of
Amy Martin:the valley itself are part of what led to this place becoming
Amy Martin:so important in the history of the Industrial Revolution.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: Here you can almost see the kind of valley
Amy Martin:the Dale as a kind of machine of itself, with component parts
Amy Martin:being all of these different establishments and installations
Amy Martin:along the along the length of it. But the whole thing works
Amy Martin:with water gravity and the raw materials, you know, all comes
Amy Martin:together quite sophisticated stuff. Really, quite
Amy Martin:sophisticated stuff.
Amy Martin:We arrive at what today looks like a sort of park.
Amy Martin:There's a museum on one side and a large grassy area with a big
Amy Martin:iron fountain in the middle. The skies are blue. The hills around
Amy Martin:us are full of trees, and the only sound is from other
Amy Martin:visitors quietly walking about. But Matt says, for hundreds of
Amy Martin:years, this place would have been a hive of industrial
Amy Martin:activity, hard labor, hot smoke, the constant clatter of wagons
Amy Martin:coming and going. We head to the far end of the site, where a
Amy Martin:series of old brick walls encloses the space. The thing
Amy Martin:that Matt is most excited to show me is a crumbling structure
Amy Martin:in the middle, maybe 20 feet high, now protected under a
Amy Martin:glass shelter. It's called a blast furnace, and this is
Amy Martin:actually the first of several blast furnaces we're going to
Amy Martin:meet in this season of our show. So I'm going to take a minute to
Amy Martin:describe what they are and how they work. You can think of a
Amy Martin:blast furnace, sort of like a presto changeo machine, a tool
Amy Martin:for turning metals mined out of the earth into hot liquids,
Amy Martin:which can then be molded and shaped into whatever you want, a
Amy Martin:soup ladle, say, or a beam for a skyscraper. That process is
Amy Martin:called smelting. That's what happens inside a blast furnace.
Amy Martin:It's a chemical process that happens at very high
Amy Martin:temperatures, and it separates metals like lead and silver and
Amy Martin:iron from the rocks or ores they're found in naturally.
Amy Martin:Blast furnaces were first created almost 2000 years ago in
Amy Martin:China, and super sized versions of them are still widely used
Amy Martin:today. But until Abraham Darby came along, most blast furnaces
Amy Martin:ran on charcoal, and that's a totally different thing than
Amy Martin:coal. Coal, the stuff that we dig out of the ground. Charcoal
Amy Martin:is made from wood, and you need a whole lot of it to get a blast
Amy Martin:furnace hot enough to smelt iron. So in darby's day, making
Amy Martin:things out of iron meant chopping down a lot of trees.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: In the early 17th century, there's
Amy Martin:complaints. Writers talking about how terrible it is that
Amy Martin:the trees are all being cut down in Kent to feed the wheeled iron
Amy Martin:industry, you know. So people are really aware of this idea of
Amy Martin:deforestation for industrial purposes, like 400 years ago.
Amy Martin:Enter Abraham Darby. He arrives here in coal
Amy Martin:Brookdale in the early 1700s aiming to make a living
Amy Martin:producing iron. A lot of other people are doing the same thing,
Amy Martin:which means there's a lot of pressure on the local woodlands,
Amy Martin:but Abraham has an idea. He's going to run his blast furnace
Amy Martin:on coal.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: Probably the biggest single innovation to my
Amy Martin:mind would be the fact that Abraham Darby the first when he
Amy Martin:arrives here in the very early 1700s he comes up with a
Amy Martin:commercially viable way of using coal in the production of iron.
Amy Martin:Coal from the ground.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: Coal from the ground. People have been doing
Amy Martin:it before. People had experimented for quite some
Amy Martin:time, but it always been a challenge to make it
Amy Martin:commercially viable. Abraham Darby did manage that. He got
Amy Martin:the recipe right, basically.
Amy Martin:And he did so right here in 1709, he started by
Amy Martin:roasting the coal, which drives off impurities and concentrates
Amy Martin:it into a form called coke.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: And you use coke instead of charcoal.
Amy Martin:There's loads of advantages. First one is there's loads of
Amy Martin:coal in the ground here, right?
Amy Martin:Abraham Darby didn't invent or discover coke, what he
Amy Martin:did was figure out how to use it in a blast furnace for
Amy Martin:industrial purposes.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: People knew you could make it, but what he
Amy Martin:did is he put that little bit extra in that just tipped it
Amy Martin:over. So whereas previously it was experiments, there were
Amy Martin:always experiments. There. Whereas now there was a
Amy Martin:marketable product, you know, you could do it, you could do
Amy Martin:it. It's cheaper. It was easier. It was here. It was on site.
Amy Martin:Matt and I walk into the shelter, protecting the
Amy Martin:structure, and up a set of stairs to a platform where we
Amy Martin:can look right down into the big gaping hole at the top.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: So you can see, you can see the furnace
Amy Martin:here. So this is where the magic would happen, right? This is
Amy Martin:where the and it is magic, isn't it? You're taking things that
Amy Martin:are literally dug out of the hills just over there, and then
Amy Martin:you turn it into something like that incredible cast iron
Amy Martin:fountain there, you know? So you're going from rocks to that.
Amy Martin:To art, essentially.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: Yeah, and that is that there is a magic in
Amy Martin:And by switching fuels from wood to coal, Darby
Amy Martin:that, you know.
Amy Martin:was able to make that magic happen faster and more
Amy Martin:efficiently.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: And it took quite a while for other people
Amy Martin:to adopt it. But then, of course, in the end, everybody
Amy Martin:did it. No one was going to make, you know, it's like, oh,
Amy Martin:make you know, it's like archaic using charcoal.
Amy Martin:Cook pots were one of the main products to come out
Amy Martin:of this iron works in the early days, and they're a good example
Amy Martin:of the process of acceleration that defines the Industrial
Amy Martin:Revolution. Before Darby, cook pots were usually imported from
Amy Martin:other parts of Europe, which made them very expensive, but
Amy Martin:using his new coal fueled process, Darby was soon able to
Amy Martin:create high quality cook pots faster and more cheaply than his
Amy Martin:competitors, making them affordable for a whole new group
Amy Martin:of people. And as more people got them, more people wanted
Amy Martin:them, which required more iron and more coal.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: You know, you hardly need a picture drawing.
Amy Martin:Do you Where does that line go for use of coal in industry? You
Amy Martin:know.
Amy Martin:If you do need a picture drawing, look up the
Amy Martin:Keeling Curve. That's the steadily upward trending line
Amy Martin:tracking the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere before
Amy Martin:we started burning fossil fuels on a mass scale, the Earth had
Amy Martin:about 280 parts per million CO two in the air. In 2021 we had
Amy Martin:around 416 parts per million. And the difference between those
Amy Martin:two numbers, 280 and 416 is us, our cars and air conditioners
Amy Martin:and furnaces and our industrial processes.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: Large scale industrial use of mineral fuel.
Amy Martin:I mean, you absolutely can put that here. That's the That's the
Amy Martin:legacy.
Amy Martin:Abraham darby's world might seem very far away
Amy Martin:now, but his technology is still with us. The process has been
Amy Martin:tweaked, but we are still concentrating coal into coke and
Amy Martin:burning it in blast furnaces, especially in the production of
Amy Martin:steel. And the emissions produced by Darby's furnace and
Amy Martin:every one of its successors are still with us too, because once
Amy Martin:carbon is released into the air in the form of carbon dioxide,
Amy Martin:it sticks around for 300 to 1000 years. There's no single moment
Amy Martin:when the countdown to 1.5 degrees of global heating began.
Amy Martin:But if I was forced to choose, Coalbrookdale in 1709 would be a
Amy Martin:top contender, once Darby figured out how to use coal to
Amy Martin:smiled iron, it was a short leap to doing the same thing with
Amy Martin:lead and silver and tin and copper.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: Once it's caught on, then, of course,
Amy Martin:yeah, you know, coal becomes the fuel, and then you see an
Amy Martin:exponential increase, really, in the amount of use.
Amy Martin:And an exponential increase in the need for
Amy Martin:everything else in the production process.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: So that's not just kind of materials and fuel.
Amy Martin:It's also what it needs in terms of people, human resource, you
Amy Martin:know, human capital that goes through the roof. This is the
Amy Martin:things knit with with the Industrial Revolution. It's the
Amy Martin:speed at which it takes off, and the exponential increase in the
Amy Martin:need for everything in the same way as you see the shift almost
Amy Martin:over within a generation, you know, of people living in small
Amy Martin:rural settlements or market towns, and then this incredible
Amy Martin:explosion of cities in terrible conditions, you know. And you
Amy Martin:see a rural population, suddenly, within what we would
Amy Martin:kind of recognize as an urban environment, huge changes and
Amy Martin:kind of psychologically that must have had an impact. Well,
Amy Martin:it did have an impact.
Amy Martin:And it impacted this little valley too. Three
Amy Martin:generations of Darbys kept this furnace burning strong, and
Amy Martin:their success meant that this area became clogged with coal
Amy Martin:smoke. Matt says, One writer described it this way.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: This idea that if a man was to sort of
Amy Martin:fall asleep and just be transported to the to the
Amy Martin:furnaces around here, and then wake up, he would think he was
Amy Martin:waking up in hell, and that all these people working around him
Amy Martin:were demons, you know, because there were flames and fires
Amy Martin:everywhere.
Amy Martin:Abraham Darby the Third ran the Iron Works in the
Amy Martin:late 1700s and it was his idea to build the cast iron bridge as
Amy Martin:a sort of advertisement for the skill and techniques developed
Amy Martin:here. And it worked. People came from all over the world to see
Amy Martin:the bridge and marvel at its beauty and strength. But not
Amy Martin:everyone came away with the story that the Darbies wanted
Amy Martin:told. A writer named Anna Seward came to visit and wrote a poem
Amy Martin:called Colebrook Dale. The second line is-
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: -O violated Coalbrook. And in it she
Amy Martin:pictures industry as the Cyclops. The Cyclops was the
Amy Martin:assistant of Vulcan at the forge, you know. So Cyclops
Amy Martin:represents industry, effectively having a sort of battle with all
Amy Martin:the niaids and dryads, you know, kind of, you know, tree spirits,
Amy Martin:water spirits, fairies, all these sort of stuff of the
Amy Martin:natural environment. And she talks about the sort of
Amy Martin:sulfurious air and the glassy, oil stained waters. She sees a
Amy Martin:landscape that has been despoiled by by by by industry.
Amy Martin:You know, Cyclops wins, yeah.
Amy Martin:And Cyclops was just getting started. If Anna Seward
Amy Martin:found the changes at Coalbrookdale worthy of
Amy Martin:grieving, imagine what she would make of Chernobyl or just any
Amy Martin:ordinary industrial city today, our transformations of this
Amy Martin:planet are stunning. The physical stuff we have made now
Amy Martin:weighs more than all living biomass on Earth. It's nearly
Amy Martin:impossible to find places on land or sea where the noise of
Amy Martin:our own activity doesn't intrude. And since the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution, hundreds of species of plants and animals
Amy Martin:have been lost forever, with many more teetering on the
Amy Martin:brink. According to the International Union for
Amy Martin:Conservation of Nature, 13% of bird species are at risk of
Amy Martin:extinction today, one quarter of the world's mammals, 40% of
Amy Martin:amphibians. So this is another thing that has accelerated since
Amy Martin:the Industrial Revolution, the extinction rate. Of course, it
Amy Martin:would have been impossible to foresee all of this when Abraham
Amy Martin:Darby started burning coal in this furnace. In fact, as we
Amy Martin:walk away, Matt tells me early industrial processes were still
Amy Martin:very much governed by nature. For example, water power. It was
Amy Martin:essential to the smelting process in the early 1700s, so
Amy Martin:Darby couldn't have set up his Ironworks just anywhere. He
Amy Martin:needed to be close to the stream that still flows through this
Amy Martin:site today.
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: You had to be where the water was, simple as
Amy Martin:that.
Amy Martin:Water told you where you could smelt iron. And also,
Amy Martin:when, Matt says, in the late spring and summer, as the
Amy Martin:rainfall dropped off here, it became harder and harder to keep
Amy Martin:the furnace going,
Amy Martin:Dr. Matt Thompson: They'd let it go out, and they'd maybe carry
Amy Martin:out repairs, reline it, do this, that and the other so over the
Amy Martin:summer, it would be out of blast. And that same time, a lot
Amy Martin:of people who might have been working in the furnace would
Amy Martin:perhaps be needed on the harvest, you know, so you can
Amy Martin:see, you know, this idea of industry actually intimately
Amy Martin:entwined with the environment that we see around us, including
Amy Martin:the weather and the seasons, you know.
Amy Martin:But all of that was about to change. Soon, the idea
Amy Martin:of timing industrial processes around the rhythms of the Earth
Amy Martin:would seem old fashioned and then be forgotten altogether.
Amy Martin:And this place would go from being called Coalbrookdale to
Amy Martin:Ironbridge. Instead of being defined by three natural
Amy Martin:features, coal, brook and dale, it's now defined by what humans
Amy Martin:did and made here.
Amy Martin:We'll have more after this short break.
Erika Janik:Hey everybody, this is Erica Janik,Janek,
Erika Janik:Threshold's Managing Editor. Did you know that we have a
Erika Janik:Threshold newsletter? Our newsletter is a great way to
Erika Janik:stay connected to Threshold between seasons, find out what
Erika Janik:we're thinking about and what we're reading, listening to and
Erika Janik:watching. So subscribe to the Threshold newsletter today using
Erika Janik:the link in the show notes or on our website,
Erika Janik:thresholdpodcast.org.
Amy Martin:Welcome back to Threshold. I'm Amy Martin, and
Amy Martin:we're in England for this episode investigating how the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution, and thus the climate crisis got started,
Amy Martin:and we're about to head to Birmingham to explore the story
Amy Martin:of the inventor James Watt. You've heard of him, even if you
Amy Martin:don't know it. Remember Back to the Future?
Amy Martin:Yes, James Watt made such an impression on the world that he
Amy Martin:has a unit of power named after him, the watt. In just a minute,
Amy Martin:we're going to talk about why he gets so much credit and maybe
Amy Martin:some blame for launching the Industrial Revolution. But
Amy Martin:first, I want to pause here and get a little meta on you. I want
Amy Martin:to call attention to how I'm telling this story. We started
Amy Martin:out with Abraham Darby and his blast furnace. Now we're moving
Amy Martin:to watt and his steam engine. This is a very familiar
Amy Martin:template. Individual genius invents new technology that
Amy Martin:changes our lives. The genius is almost always a man and white,
Amy Martin:and his invention is almost always framed in a narrative of
Amy Martin:progress. There are endless examples. Eli Whitney and his
Amy Martin:cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, Elon
Amy Martin:Musk and his Tesla. We tell ourselves this story over and
Amy Martin:over. These men and their machines made our lives better.
Amy Martin:No further questions. It's neat and tidy. It goes down as easy
Amy Martin:as a fairy tale. There are reasons for this narrative, but
Amy Martin:there are also some very good reasons to question it. So let's
Amy Martin:just keep our eye on that as we explore the life of the man
Amy Martin:whose last name is on all of our light bulbs: James Watt.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: James Watt was born in 1736 in Greenock in
Amy Martin:Scotland, and he showed at an early age considerable skill in
Amy Martin:making things and repairing things.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick is the director of the Centre for
Amy Martin:West Midlands History at the University of Birmingham, and he
Amy Martin:says Watt didn't grow up in poverty, but he wasn't rich
Amy Martin:either.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Watt seems to have been quite a sickly child,
Amy Martin:so a lot of his education was at home.
Amy Martin:Watt never studied at university, but his
Amy Martin:mechanical skills allowed him to get a job at one he worked at
Amy Martin:the University of Glasgow, about 300 miles north of Birmingham,
Amy Martin:and his job was to make and repair scientific instruments.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: And through that work, he was introduced to
Amy Martin:a model of an early steam engine, a Newcomen steam engine.
Amy Martin:These engines were designed by a man named Thomas
Amy Martin:Newcomen, and some of their parts were actually manufactured
Amy Martin:by the Darbys in Coalbrookdale. They were fueled by coal and
Amy Martin:produced steam power, which was used to pump water out of the
Amy Martin:bottoms of coal pits so the miners could keep digging.
Amy Martin:Previously that water had to be hauled out by hand, so these
Amy Martin:engines were a big leap forward, but they were also really
Amy Martin:expensive to run because they consumed massive amounts of
Amy Martin:coal. James Watt was asked to repair a model the Newcomen
Amy Martin:engine at his job at the university, and after studying
Amy Martin:it, he went on what has become a famous walk through a park in
Amy Martin:Glasgow in May 1765. That's when he had an idea for a significant
Amy Martin:improvement in the engine's design.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: He developed what was called a separate
Amy Martin:condenser, in essence, that was a device that prevented the
Amy Martin:machine cooling down between the beats of the steam engine as it
Amy Martin:moved up and down. And what got really interested in this.
Amy Martin:He made a prototype and discovered his design was
Amy Martin:three times more efficient than newcomens. For every ton of coal
Amy Martin:burned in Watts engine, you could do three times as much
Amy Martin:work. To be clear, Watt wasn't trying to burn less coal because
Amy Martin:of environmental concerns. He was just trying to make a
Amy Martin:machine that worked more efficiently, and he succeeded.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Now that brought what into the notice of
Amy Martin:other people.
Amy Martin:Including members of something called the Lunar
Amy Martin:Society.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Which was a group of individuals who met on
Amy Martin:the first Monday after the full moon- hence the name Lunar
Amy Martin:Society- in each other's homes.
Amy Martin:This was the Birmingham version of something
Amy Martin:that was happening in many European cities at the time- the
Amy Martin:salon. The physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles,
Amy Martin:was a member, as was Joseph Priestley, a religious dissenter
Amy Martin:and discoverer of oxygen and nine other gasses. The Lunar
Amy Martin:Society was a group of inventors and manufacturers, thinkers and
Amy Martin:political writers with a keen interest in the natural world
Amy Martin:and the important topics of the day. They had visits and
Amy Martin:correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and
Amy Martin:Anna Seward, who wrote the poem about Coalbrookdale.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: They were people who were brought up, if
Amy Martin:you like, and what we call the Enlightenment, and they absorbed
Amy Martin:many progressive ideas, including the belief that you
Amy Martin:could improve the world by investing in it and exploiting
Amy Martin:its resources and manufacturing products. They believed that
Amy Martin:things were getting better.
Amy Martin:And by testing out ideas on each other and helping
Amy Martin:each other make connections, Malcolm says the lunar society
Amy Martin:played a significant role in the birth of the Industrial
Amy Martin:Revolution. We're actually talking at the home of one of
Amy Martin:their most dynamic members, Matthew Boulton.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: so we're at Soho House, which is one of the
Amy Martin:few surviving 18th century buildings in Birmingham.
Amy Martin:Boulton was the son of a prosperous Birmingham
Amy Martin:manufacturing family, and he frequently hosted the Lunar
Amy Martin:Society here. And Malcolm says the surviving records from Soho
Amy Martin:House show that Matthew Boulton knew how to throw a party.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: They drank port, they drank wine. In fact,
Amy Martin:Soho House is an extensive cellar, and you can imagine it
Amy Martin:being filled with all kinds of goodies.
Amy Martin:I visited Soho House on a warm, bright afternoon, but
Amy Martin:as Malcolm and I talked, I was picturing a moonlit night, 250
Amy Martin:years ago, with members of the Lunar Society wandering around
Amy Martin:these grounds, philosophizing and maybe discussing the quirky
Amy Martin:Scotsman named James Watt, who had a clever new design for a
Amy Martin:steam engine.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Watt and Bolton got to know each other.
Amy Martin:Bolton was able to offer watt a partnership.
Amy Martin:Watt had an abundance of ideas and technical
Amy Martin:skills, but to unleash his full potential, he needed things he
Amy Martin:didn't have. Money, manufacturing, space, skilled
Amy Martin:workers, customers for his products. He needed capital and
Amy Martin:a front man, and he found those things in Matthew Boulton. Watt
Amy Martin:moved down to Birmingham from Scotland, joined the Lunar
Amy Martin:Society, and soon the partnership of Bolton and watt
Amy Martin:was up and running.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Boulton was the extrovert. He was good at
Amy Martin:dealing with politicians and aristocrats and selling goods.
Amy Martin:That was not what was good at what was a different
Amy Martin:personality. We might say today that he had manic depression. He
Amy Martin:had moods that went up and down. We often read in his letters
Amy Martin:about him not being able to do anything. He gets very
Amy Martin:depressed. Certainly, he was devoted to his first wife who
Amy Martin:who died, and that's another reason why he moved down from
Amy Martin:Scotland, because, you know, I think the atmosphere was too
Amy Martin:difficult for him, and the Lunar Society provided support, and
Amy Martin:not only from Boulton, but also from Erasmus Darwin, who was a
Amy Martin:superb doctor in terms of dealing with anxious patients.
Amy Martin:So was he Watt's doctor?
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: He was Watt's doctor.
Amy Martin:So here's James Watt, poised on the precipice of
Amy Martin:becoming a world famous inventor, one of the prototypes
Amy Martin:for the genius sparks progress narrative, but he didn't get
Amy Martin:here alone. In fact, we may never have heard of Watt if it
Amy Martin:weren't for the people who were propping him up, promoting his
Amy Martin:endeavors, drawing him out of his workshop and his melancholy
Amy Martin:and into the world. That's not to take anything away from Watt,
Amy Martin:it's just to recognize that he needed people who believed in
Amy Martin:him and supported him, because we all do. Whatever progress
Amy Martin:humanity can claim has always been a group project.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: We shouldn't forget the role of the women in
Amy Martin:the families. Watt had two wives. His first wife was
Amy Martin:extremely important, I think, in getting him through some initial
Amy Martin:difficulties. His second wife was extremely well organized and
Amy Martin:provided an environment sort of stability where he could get on
Amy Martin:with his work without being distracted by having to wash the
Amy Martin:dishes or make food or sweep the floors or manage the servants
Amy Martin:more importantly.
Amy Martin:So, with watt working away undisturbed on his
Amy Martin:designs, and Bolton providing the money and the marketing
Amy Martin:savvy, word began to spread, there was a new steam engine
Amy Martin:that did everything the Newcomen engine could do, and more, but
Amy Martin:using a lot less fuel. Soon everyone wanted one.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: You got hundreds of machines being
Amy Martin:produced for all kinds of purposes, initially the textile
Amy Martin:industry, the spinning and then weaving used it.
Amy Martin:People started setting up steam engines in all
Amy Martin:kinds of places. They've never been tried. Died before
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Used in agriculture for threshing corn,
Amy Martin:for example.
Amy Martin:And then they were used in mills to grind the grain
Amy Martin:into flour.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Steam engines become very common to pump
Amy Martin:sewage away.
Amy Martin:Imagine how transformative that was.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: They have a remarkable range of applications
Amy Martin:And perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was the
Amy Martin:way Watt's engine broke the bonds tying industry to nature,
Amy Martin:or at least that's what it seemed to do. As Matt Thompson
Amy Martin:described in Coalbrookdale, early industrial processes were
Amy Martin:governed by natural processes. They were embedded in specific
Amy Martin:landscapes. Abraham Darby, the first could only run his blast
Amy Martin:furnace if that particular stream was flowing. But Watt's
Amy Martin:steam engine could be run anytime, night or day, summer or
Amy Martin:winter, as long as you had coal. This was a radical new concept.
Amy Martin:Power became portable and constant, and industrial
Amy Martin:processes began to detach from the rhythms and requirements of
Amy Martin:the Earth. People began to imagine that they could sever
Amy Martin:themselves from the rules of nature. But there was a catch.
Amy Martin:Watt's innovation, combined with Darby's and many others, kicked
Amy Martin:off a mass migration of carbon from under the ground to up in
Amy Martin:the air. Planet warming gasses that had been locked away in the
Amy Martin:Earth's crust are now circulating in our atmosphere,
Amy Martin:knocking the climate that sustains us out of balance. So
Amy Martin:we actually never did break free from the laws of nature. We've
Amy Martin:just been temporarily ignoring them.
Amy Martin:In the mid 1770s with the American colonies revolting
Amy Martin:against the British Crown, Boulton and watt started selling
Amy Martin:their new steam engines later. Parts for some of those engines
Amy Martin:were manufactured by the darbys in Coalbrookdale, and this is a
Amy Martin:classic feature of the Industrial Revolution. Different
Amy Martin:innovations intersect and help each other to grow one of the
Amy Martin:great ironies of Watt's story is that his steam engine burned
Amy Martin:less coal than its predecessor, but that very efficiency made it
Amy Martin:wildly popular, which led to a huge increase in coal use. When
Amy Martin:Watt died in 1819, more coal was being burned than ever before.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: Well exactly it contributes to what we call
Amy Martin:pollution. Pre industrial revolution, cities were
Amy Martin:polluted, but you've got it on a larger scale, and you've got
Amy Martin:coal being used in manufacturing, and you've got
Amy Martin:all sort of chemicals being produced from different
Amy Martin:processes as well, pouring into the atmosphere. So a lot of
Amy Martin:these industrial towns would be dirty and filthy and smelly.
Amy Martin:The air in many places became so polluted that
Amy Martin:it produced acid rain. Malcolm says the stone walls of some
Amy Martin:beautiful old cathedrals started to get worn away by the toxic
Amy Martin:air. And although there were definitely more things for
Amy Martin:people to buy at a price, more people could afford, the process
Amy Martin:of making those things wasn't pretty.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: If we went into a 19th century town or
Amy Martin:factory, we would see dirt, smoke, a lot of people being
Amy Martin:injured, probably a lot of people looking sick, women who
Amy Martin:would be doing a lot of sort of semi skilled and lowly paid
Amy Martin:work. We'd probably be quite horrified to see the reality of
Amy Martin:that, you do have recreated factories, but obviously they
Amy Martin:don't create everything. They can't necessarily create the
Amy Martin:sort of atmosphere, the smells or the injuries people had, or
Amy Martin:people coming in with infectious diseases, or the brutality that
Amy Martin:might exist, as far as punishments were concerned.
Amy Martin:If we want to get a glimpse of the horrors of
Amy Martin:industrial labor in the absence of protections for workers and
Amy Martin:the environment, we don't actually have to try to imagine
Amy Martin:England in the 18th and 19th centuries. All we need to do is
Amy Martin:look up factory conditions in China or Cambodia right now,
Amy Martin:instead of learning from the grim history of early industrial
Amy Martin:Britain, we seem to keep repeating it.
Amy Martin:And this takes us back to the notion that the Industrial
Amy Martin:Revolution was all about progress led by individual
Amy Martin:geniuses and their machines. The full story has always been way
Amy Martin:too messy to fit into that nice, clean narrative. Take the city
Amy Martin:of Birmingham, sometimes described as the first modern
Amy Martin:industrial city.
Amy Martin:Dr. Malcolm Dick: So Birmingham was really an important place.
Amy Martin:There were links between Birmingham and the wider world.
Amy Martin:It was already a global city in the 18th century. Its trade
Amy Martin:extended not just to Europe, but to North America, the Caribbean,
Amy Martin:Africa. There were links with the slave trade.
Amy Martin:Britain had been involved in the slave trade
Amy Martin:since the 1500s but as with everything else, the Industrial
Amy Martin:Revolution accelerated the speed and scale of slavery and its
Amy Martin:brutality. Malcolm says, guns made in Birmingham were sold to
Amy Martin:people who were enslaving other human beings in Africa.
Amy Martin:Ironware, made in this part of England, maybe even in
Amy Martin:Coalbrookdale, was also sold to enslavers. Think shackles and
Amy Martin:chains, but that's really just the surface layer here. The
Amy Martin:industrialization of Britain and later the United States was
Amy Martin:utterly intertwined with slavery. Take the iconic British
Amy Martin:textile trade as just one example. By 1860 almost 90% of
Amy Martin:the cotton textiles coming out of British factories were made
Amy Martin:with cotton grown and picked by enslaved people in the US.
Amy Martin:Sugar, tobacco and other early industries were also made
Amy Martin:profitable through slavery. So from the very beginning, the
Amy Martin:Industrial Revolution was never only about progress. It brought
Amy Martin:both increased comfort and increased misery simultaneously.
Amy Martin:As we built, we destroyed. As we advanced, we also regressed.
Amy Martin:Things got better and worse, and everything in between all at
Amy Martin:once, and they still are. The transition from combustion
Amy Martin:engines to electrical vehicles is happening, and that's a big
Amy Martin:win for the climate, but some of the cobalt used in those
Amy Martin:electric vehicles is being mined by people, including children,
Amy Martin:who are working in horrible conditions in the Democratic
Amy Martin:Republic of Congo. Clearly, we need to get more electric
Amy Martin:vehicles on the road as quickly as possible, but if human rights
Amy Martin:are being abused in order to make that happen, can we call it
Amy Martin:progress?
Amy Martin:This is the poisoned apple at the heart of the fairy tale of
Amy Martin:endless advancement. It celebrates achievement but
Amy Martin:doesn't reckon with the costs. It's a story in which some
Amy Martin:people get to prosper while ignoring how their increased
Amy Martin:comfort depends on the suffering of other people and the
Amy Martin:destruction of other places. Not only is this unjust, it's
Amy Martin:unsustainable, because eventually there are no other
Amy Martin:people or other places. There's just us, here, together. So I
Amy Martin:think what the climate crisis is showing us is that we need a new
Amy Martin:definition of progress rooted in the understanding that our
Amy Martin:advancement is completely bound up with the health of the Earth
Amy Martin:and each other. I'm back in Coalbrookdale walking alone
Amy Martin:through the forest that's just behind Abraham Darby's blast
Amy Martin:furnace.
Amy Martin:This place, this quiet, little natural area, this is as much a
Amy Martin:part of the Industrial Revolution as the furnace that's
Amy Martin:just behind me.
Amy Martin:Everything around me here helped to birth the Industrial
Amy Martin:Revolution, the woods, the stream, the iron ore, the coal,
Amy Martin:the river. We tend to edit nature out of this story and
Amy Martin:focus almost exclusively on our own ingenuity. But actually,
Amy Martin:everything our species has accomplished has been a
Amy Martin:collaboration with the natural world, and our continued
Amy Martin:survival depends on our ability to keep that collaboration
Amy Martin:going.
Amy Martin:I think it's worth paying attention to the fact that the
Amy Martin:so called Industrial Revolution was really an industrial
Amy Martin:evolution, and like all forms of evolution, it emerged out of
Amy Martin:prior forms. And I guess maybe where I'm going, or where I'm
Amy Martin:arriving is, I think that's actually hopeful. I don't know
Amy Martin:it feels to me then like there's much more potential for it to
Amy Martin:continue to evolve as our human needs and awarenesses evolve.
Amy Martin:To solve the climate crisis, we don't only need different forms
Amy Martin:of energy. We need different stories, different guiding
Amy Martin:myths. We need to revise our concept of what it means for us
Amy Martin:to advance
Amy Martin:Now there's an awareness that we have the potential to do great
Amy Martin:damage. And I think that awareness can matter. If we want
Amy Martin:it to.
Amy Martin:What if, instead of trying to break the planet's rules, we
Amy Martin:applied our intelligence toward understanding them and figuring
Amy Martin:out how to live well within them together. What if we spent the
Amy Martin:next 300 years defining progress as something that improves human
Amy Martin:lives and contributes to the health of the planet? I don'tI
Amy Martin:don't know what that world would look like, but I hope someday
Amy Martin:somebody gets to find out.
Justine Paradis:I'm Justine calling from Concord, New
Justine Paradis:Hampshire. Reporting for this season of Threshold was funded
Justine Paradis:by the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, the Pleiades
Justine Paradis:Foundation, NewsMatch, the Llewellyn Foundation, Montana
Justine Paradis:Public Radio and listeners this work depends on people who
Justine Paradis:believe in it and choose to support it. People like you.
Justine Paradis:Join our community at thresholdpodcast.org
Amy Martin:This episode of Threshold was produced and
Amy Martin:reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Nick Mott and Erica
Amy Martin:Janik. The music for this season of our show is by Todd
Amy Martin:Sickafoose. The rest of the Threshold team is Eva Kalea,
Amy Martin:Taliah Farnsworth, Shola Lawal, Casyi Simpson and Deneen Weiske.
Amy Martin:Thanks to Sarah Sneath, Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana
Amy Martin:Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara
Amy Martin:Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz and Gabby
Amy Martin:Piamonte. Special thanks to Adam Reed and David Nye.
