Chapter 39: The Age of Invention
At the tail-end of the First Industrial Revolution, a flurry of new goods and tools were invented by professional and hobbyist inventors alike, hoping to get rich in this new era of opportunity. Among the most significant of these breakthroughs were three tools I'm going to tell you about in this episode.
Sources for this episode include:
Bellis, Mary. “The Sewing Machine and the Textile Revolution.” ThoughtCo. Feb 23, 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/textile-revolution-sewing-machine-1991938
Eves, Jamie H., Beverly L. York, Carol Buch, and Michele Palmer. “Sewing Revolution: The Machine That Changed the World.” Windham Textile and History Museum. https://millmuseum.org/sewing-revolution/
Forsdyke, Graham. “A Brief History of the Sewing Machine.” International Sewing Machine Collectors’ Society. http://ismacs.net/sewing_machine_history.html
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. Yale University Press. 2013.
Herring, Richard and George Croly. Paper & Paper Making Ancient and Modern. Longman, Roberts and Green. 1863.
Hunter, Dard. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. Courier Dover Publications. 1978.
“Isaac Singer: American Inventor.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Oct 2014. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Singer
Johnson, Steven. “American Innovations” (Wondery). Season 11. 2019. https://wondery.com/shows/american-innovations/
Johnson, Steven. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Riverhead Books. 2014.
Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Knopf. 2011.
Mares, G.C. The History of the Typewriter: Being an Illustrated Account of the Origin, Rise and Development of the Writing Machine. G. Pitman. 1909.
Mills, Allan A. “The Early History of Insulated Copper Wire.” Annals of Science, Vol 61, Num 4, pp 453-467. 2004.
Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. PublicAffairs. 2012.
Norman, Jeremy. “Louis-Nicolas Robert Invents the Papermaking Machine: 1798 - 1840.” http://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=500
“Obituary: Elias Howe, Jr.” New York Times. Oct 5, 1867.
Peirce, Bradford K. Trials of an Inventor: Charles Goodyear. Carlton & Porter. 1866.
Prescott, George B. History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph. 4th Edition. 1866. Reprinted by Frank Jones (1972).
Somma, Ann Marie. Charles Goodyear and the Vulcanization of Rubber. Connecticut History. Dec 29, 2014. https://connecticuthistory.org/charles-goodyear-and-the-vulcanization-of-rubber/
Stamp, Jeremy. “The Many, Many Designs of the Sewing Machine.” Smithsonian Magazine. Oct 16, 2013. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-many-many-designs-of-the-sewing-machine-2142740/
“The Story of the Sewing-Machine.; Its Invention Improvements Social, Industrial and Commercial Importance.” New York Times. Jan 7, 1860.
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In 1790, as the French Revolution was getting underway, one French soldier left the army and began a career in the papermaking industry. Indenturing himself in an apprenticeship to the Didot family, he eventually started working as an inspector at their factory in the Paris suburbs.
This factory, at Corbeil-Essonnes, had been hand-making paper since 1355, and counted the Ministry of Finance among its clients. The process of hand-making paper was pretty time-intensive, as it had to be done one sheet at a time. A worker would dip a rectangular frame or a mold with a screen bottom into a vat of pulp. Then it would be removed from the vat and water would get pressed out of the pulp. And then the frame would just sit there as the remaining pulp dried out.
So, you can just imagine the factory full of these drying frames, as a few workers are effectively producing just a handful of sheets per hour.
And apparently, the workers in this factory weren’t great, at least not in the opinion of their managers. One has to imagine that the increasingly radical revolution outside the factory walls could have had something to do with it.
In any event, one of those managers – the former solider I was telling you about – decided to do something about it and create a labor-saving papermaking machine. His name was Louis-Nicolas Robert.
You might recognize this name. Robert has come up before, in chapters 33 and 38. In 1798, Robert completed a working model of his machine, after a couple failed prototypes the year before. It included a moving screen belt which would take in a continuous flow of stock and produce an unbroken sheet of wet paper. It would then be squeezed in a pair of rollers and hung over drying racks.
Robert’s boss, Saint-Léger Didot, encouraged him to apply for a patent. Writing to the French Interior Minister, Robert explained,
“It has been my dream to simplify the operation of making paper by forming it with infinitely less expense, and, above all, in making sheets of extraordinary length without the help of any worker, using only mechanical means.
Through diligent work, by experience, and with considerable expense, I have been successful and a machine has been made that fulfils my expectancy. The machine makes for economy of time and expense and extraordinary paper...
I solicit you, Citizen Minister, for the patent of my invention, which ought to assure me my property, and work for myself. My fortune does not permit me to pay the tax of this patent at once, which I desire to have for fifteen years, nor do my means permit me the cost of a model. This is why, Citizen Minister, I implore you to name a number of commissioners to examine my work, and in view of the immense usefulness of my discovery grant me a patent gratuitously.”
The minister sent some folks to check it out, including a member of the Bureau of Arts and Trades. A few months later, the Bureau declared,
“Citizen Robert is the first to imagine a machine capable of making paper from the vat; this machine forms paper of great width and of indefinite length. The machine makes paper of perfect quality in thickness and gives advantages that cannot be derived from ordinary methods of forming paper by hand, where each sheet is limited in size in comparison with those made on this machine. From all reports it is an entirely new invention and deserves every encouragement.”
Robert received his patent in January 1799 and quickly sold it to his boss, Didot, for 25,000 francs, to be paid in installments. But Didot soon fell behind in the payments and the two men had a falling out. Legal proceedings followed and the patent rights were restored to Robert in 1801.
But not before Didot had granted permission to his brother-in-law, an Englishman named John Gamble, to take the idea back to Great Britain and apply for a British patent for the machine. The next year Gamble took Robert’s model to England and developed it further with two brothers of French Huguenot descent, Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier.
After six years of tinkering with the model, they finally patented the machine. And as was so common in the first Industrial Revolution, everybody took the patent, copied the design to build the machine for themselves, and started making enormous amounts of paper illegally. The Fourdriniers spent £60,000 – basically, all of their money (it comes out to over $7 million in modern terms) – fighting patent infringers and continuing to improve the technology. Eventually, Parliament learned what happened, took pity on the family, and bailed them out.
Within a decade, new paper mills using these machines went into use around the world. One such machine in the United States could produce a whopping 1,800 square feet of paper per minute.
Unfortunately, there’s no good data out there for how much paper production increased during the Industrial Revolution, but it must have been an explosion. This is when wallpaper became a viable option in interior design. Lumberjacks spread out across North America, chopping down millions of trees throughout the 19th Century – in part to clear land for farms, in part to fire stoves, and in part to supply pulp to hundreds – maybe thousands – of paper mills across the continent.
And newspaper sales skyrocketed. In London, for example, The Times saw its readership increase by a factor of ten during the first half of the 19th Century. And this attracted new publishers to enter the market and try their luck with their own newspapers, like The Guardian.
To print all these newspapers, new rotary printing machines were needed as well. In Chapter 33, I told you about the ones invented by Friedrich Koenig and Richard March Hoe.
But still other printing machines were in the works too – machines that could rapidly speed up the printing of unique messages.
It was way back in the year 1714 when an English engineer named Henry Mill obtained a patent for what he said “brought to perfection at great paines and expence” a machine that could impress letters on paper as in writing. It was a concept that was further advanced in 1829 by an American inventor, millwright, and politician named William Austin Burt, which used a dial to select letters and stamp them on the page. Several other American and Italian inventors – as well as a Brazilian priest – tried to accomplish the same thing.
These were the first typewriters.
Here’s the thing about invention: It breeds more invention. When you invent a new good that makes life better, or a new tool that makes work more productive, people want to buy it from you. And that when you produce that new good or that new tool, it generates new income in the economy. It is, in the most microscopic sense, economic growth.
And as economic growth accumulates in the form of capital, it gets invested in new people – new inventors – as well as the tools and raw materials needed for even greater experimentation and even greater inventions.
This has been the case throughout history, of course, but by the early 19th Century, the rate of economic growth and new inventions totally exploded. By the end of the First Industrial Revolution, professional and hobbyist inventors alike were creating all sorts of new goods and tools, hoping to get rich in this new age of opportunity.
Most new inventions were flops. Some of them just needed more time and development. (The typewriter, for example, wouldn’t become commercially viable for another half century.) But a few of these new inventions wouldn’t just stand the test of time – they would become so integrated into the world we inhabit today that we simply can’t imagine life without them.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 39: The Age of Invention
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Welcome back, dear listeners.
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Today, I’m going to tell you about some of the most important new inventions that came at the tail-end of the first Industrial Revolution. All of them would have world-changing implications, although not always right away.
Let me start by reading you this, from an 1860 column in the New York Times:
“The inventive genius of man, ever alert to furnish the world with machinery for saving labor and cheapening the cost of manufactures, seemed to regard man as the only laborer... The carpenter, with his planing, matching, and other machinery, was relieved from the drudgery of his trade, but, on returning home at night, found no labor-saving machinery to relieve, his wife in her toil with the needle. The farmer, with his reaper, and threshing machine, gathers his harvest and prepares his grain for market with ten times the rapidity and ease that he could before these were invented; but his companion and helpmeet found no machinery to speed her labor and ease her toil, until the advent of the sewing-machine.”
As early as 1790, an English cabinet maker named Thomas Saint received a patent for a machine with which an awl made a hole in leather and then allowed a needle to pass through. This would have been the first-known sewing machine, except, there’s no evidence that Saint ever built a working model. He might not have had the funding to do so, but, more likely, he tried building a working model and it failed – because, 90 years later, when historians used his design to try building a replica they couldn’t get it to work.
In the 1810s, several inventors tried their luck building sewing machines on the continent – all to varying degrees of success, but none of the models really took off. A pair of inventors also tried making one in the United States around this time.
It wasn’t until 1830 that a real breakthrough was made. That year, the French government awarded a patent to one Barthelemy Thimonnier, who built a wooden machine with a barbed needle for embroideries, but which he believed could be converted for sewing.
He was then awarded a contract for the French army. Within a year, Thimonnier had built a factory in central Paris with 80 of his sewing machines producing army uniforms.
But then he encountered a problem that would have been quite familiar to English industrialists a generation earlier, who had lived through the violence of the Luddites.
About 200 Parisian tailors, rightfully afraid that these machines would put many of them out of work, gathered the night of January 19th, 1831, torches in hand. In the early hours of the next morning, they stormed the factory, destroyed the 80 machines, and set the building ablaze. Thimonnier, who was sleeping inside, narrowly escaped with his life.
Determined to start over, Thimonnier picked up a new business partner and built even better versions of his sewing machines. They rebuilt the factory and got production up and running again. And so, the tailors attacked again, destroying the factory and all but one of the new machines.
Thimonnier took that one remaining machine to England, where he planned to get his operation up-and-running away from the Paris mobs. But he never managed to succeed there. He died in a poorhouse in 1857.
Throughout the 1830s and 40s, several more inventors tried making sewing machines. Some didn’t have technically-proficient designs, others couldn’t raise the capital to build them, others built great machines for similar purposes and didn’t see their full potential.
It was finally a Massachusetts industrial worker who completed his first sewing machine prototype in 1844.
Elias Howe Jr. was born to a farming family in Spencer, Massachusetts in 1819. Around the age of 16, he was sent to the growing town of Lowell to begin work as an apprentice in the textile mills. But when the Panic of 1837 hit, the mill closed and Howe was forced to move. He settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he got a job at his cousin’s machine shop, working as a mechanic on carding machines. He stayed in Cambridge when he transferred to his next job, a machine shop owned by one Ari Davis, who was producing and repairing some of America’s first chronometers and other precision instruments.
It was while working in this shop, Howe first began developing his ideas for the sewing machine, mostly along the same failed lines of his predecessors. He hoped it would help his wife’s sewing work, and he tried creating a machine that would replicate her hand motions. The problem was: the eye of the needle was at the top of the needle. How was a machine supposed to pass the entire needle through the fabric, catch it, and pass it back up again?
Then, one night, (at least according to his descendants) the innovative breakthrough came to him in a crazy dream.
He dreamed he was in an exotic land and was charged with building a sewing machine for a savage king. The king gave him 24 hours to complete the machine and, if he could not meet the deadline, he would be put to death. But, just like in real life, Howe struggled to figure out how to do it with the needles of the day, with the eye of the needle being where it was. He thought and thought but nothing came to him. Finally, as he was about to be executed, he noticed the king’s guards were carrying spears that were pierced through their heads. At this point he had a eureka moment, turned to the king to beg for more time, and awoke in excitement. He then got out of bed, ran to his workshop, and by 9 AM had produced a needle with the eye at its point.
With this needle, Howe was able to create the lockstitch design of the sewing machine that is still used today. Only the bottom of the needle would need to go through the fabrics. And with an automatic feed and a shuttle operating beneath the cloth to form the lock stitch, the process of sewing the fabrics would speed up significantly.
Howe got a $500 investment from a local coal merchant and got to work building his prototype. He finally patented his lockstitch sewing machine in 1846. But, like so many of the sewing machine inventors before him, he struggled to attract investors, build sales, and get the business off the ground.
Instead, it was a truly eccentric actor, inventor, and businessman who took Howe’s idea and turned it into an empire.
Isaac Merritt Singer was born in Pittstown, New York, in 1811. After his mother abandoned him and his family, Singer left home at age 12 to follow a traveling stage troupe from Rochester. He worked as an actor on and off for the next couple decades. When not acting, he’d find work operating machine tools. This experience led him to invent a rock-drilling machine and later a metal- and wood-carving machine.
It was in 1851, when working in a Boston machine shop, Singer was tasked with repairing an old, pre-Howe sewing machine. Instead, over the next 11 days, he designed and built his own sewing machine, using a curved-needle design. He quickly patented it, built his machines, and sold them through his new business, I.M. Singer & Company.
While his curved-needle design was unique, many other elements of the Singer sewing machine were stolen from other manufacturers, including Howe. So began an infamous Patent War, in which Singer and the firms Grover & Baker and Wheeler & Wilson all sued each other for infringements. They finally met in Albany, New York, agreed to pool their patents, and brought in Elias Howe for his critical eye-pointed needle. Howe would receive massive royalties for sewing machine sales for the rest of his life, totaling millions of dollars.
But Singer’s legacy is perhaps the most critical because unlike the many, many sewing machine inventors who came before, he was able to sell the invention en masse. One of the most important means he used to sell it was advertising to women. Even though men controlled family finances in the 19th Century, Singer believed middle class women were the key to driving sales. He hired women to demonstrate the machines in store windows and at fairs, pictured them using the machines in his company’s trade cards, manufactured toy sewing machines for girls, and offered sewing machines at half price to ministers’ wives, knowing they’d make the machines available to charity sewing circles.
All of this was to show men they could buy these machines for their wives because – guess what? – women are smart enough to operate modern machinery. Yes, this was a major hurdle he had to consider thanks to the state of the patriarchy in those days.
And this is where a major game change starts to take route.
You see, in the 10,000 years before the Industrial Revolution, families would need to have a lot of children in order for a few children to survive into adulthood keep the population going. And, as anyone who has had children knows, it’s a pretty exhausting process. Women would often spend half their teenage years, all of their 20s, and most of their 30s (if not beyond) trying to get pregnant as much as possible. Once they were pregnant, they would have to take precautions so as to not miscarry.
After the pregnancy was completed, a woman would need to recover from childbirth and nurse the baby. And when this is happening year after year, with more and more babies to feed and more and more kids running around (albeit, some of whom wouldn’t be long for the world), it meant that women were kind of permanently stuck at home.
Now, for farming families, this was just as well. Men and women would both work the farms. But for non-farming families, it meant there would be a clear division between work for men and work for women.
Unlike their wives, men could leave the home to find an income in an ironworks or a coal mine or a shipyard. Women would often still work to provide for the family but doing things that could happen with the baby in view. They’d spin fibers into yarn or do things for the neighbors, like make baked goods to sell them or repair shoes or clothing for them.
What’s peculiar is that, after industrialization picked up, these sorts of labor divisions remained. Women would go into the textile mills, still spinning cotton, just with massive machines now. But that was about the only option available to them. Men could go into the other factories, machine shops, mines, ironworks, gasworks, etc. They had a lot of opportunities by contrast.
But one task that both men and women did was work with needles. For men, this usually meant tailoring – producing new clothes, often times for upper-class customers. For women, this usually meant repairing garments inside the home. But both sexes were sewing.
The sewing machine became a great equalizer in this labor.
With a Singer sewing machine, you could sew garments 50 times faster than by hand. Those productivity gains could bring with them major profits, yes, if you could afford to buy a machine. Most of the working-class tailors and most households could not.
Well-financed capitalists, however, could afford to buy the sewing machines in bulk purchases and set up factories to produce new clothing. This would cut out those traditional tailors, who often went into the factories as the only option left to them in the changing market conditions of the 19th Century.
But when those same capitalists realized that women could operate the modern machinery as easily as men could, they realized they could get the exact same labor for a lower wage. Because, remember, women had fewer job options available to them at the time.
This process – of replacing male workers with female workers to save money on wages – was repeated several times over the next century, first with school teachers, then with secretaries using those typewriters, then with telephone operators, etc. etc. etc.
More and more, women entered the workforce from a place of disadvantage until, finally by the 1960s, a tipping point was reached, and women justly began demanding equal pay for equal work. And even though we’re still grappling with that issue today, it all really begins here, with the invention of the sewing machine.
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The works of the rival Italian physicists Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani – at the start of the 19th Century – had ushered in a new age of electrical experimentation. And over the next 50 years, these experiments would draw humankind closer and closer to harnessing the power of electricity to bring us the comforts of modern life.
And the forebearers of this electric age include some familiar names, like Sir Humphrey Davy and his protégé Michael Faraday. But among the problems they ran into was how to move the science forward without encountering electrical leakage.
You see, when creating electric currents through wires, some of it flows out when the wire is touching another object, like the ground, or a table, or (in more dangerous circumstances) a human body. On top of that, in electrical experiments, you often run into the problem of several different wires touching each other. Plus, if you’re looking to put the breakthroughs of the experiment into practical application, there’s the problem of wires corroding over time.
For centuries, scientists would deal with these problems either by wrapping a soft fabric (usually silk) around their wires or coating them in a wax solution (sometimes a resin-beeswax mixture, sometimes a harder shellac-based sealing wax).
In 1831, Faraday ran an experiment by inserting a bar magnet into a coil of copper wire. He then created a current through a galvanometer connected to the ends of the coil. When the magnet was withdrawn, the direction of the current reversed. This groundbreaking research demonstrated a link between magnetism and electricity. It was motion.
To pull it off, Faraday needed to tightly wrap thin copper wire around that coil and insulate it with calico string. That was easier said than done. And to do it outside the laboratory was, frankly, unrealistic. Someone was going to need to come along and offer an alternative.
William Thomas Henley was born to a poor family in Midhurst, Sussex, in 1814. As a boy, he was apprenticed to a leather worker, but hated the trade. So, at age 16, he left for London to get work as a laborer at the docks. But work was limited and he ended up with a lot more free time than he wanted. Henley decided to use that free time to learn a new trade. With some money his aunt gave him, he bought an old lathe and started teaching himself cabinet-making.
Among his best customers from this side-hustle was a banker and amateur scientist named J.P. Gassiot, a friend of Faraday and other notable scientific minds. Gassiot introduced Henley to telegraph innovator Charles Wheatstone (shout out Chapter 35!) and photography innovator William Henry Fox Talbot (shout out Chapter 37!). As a result, Henley became more and more interested in science and started running his own experiments with what money he had left over from his cabinet-making and dock-working.
How the breakthrough was made I’m not quite sure. But it was probably from his conversations with scientists like Wheatstone that Henley realized a major commercial opportunity.
During the 1830s, one of the big fashion trends were the large poke bonnets worn by ladies to accommodate their increasingly elaborate hair styles. To support the wide brims of these bonnets, the manufacturers used a lathe process to cover springy iron wires in cotton. Scientists, including Faraday, realized this would be a great solution for electric wires. If only they used a material like copper instead of iron.
But nobody was doing it. That is, until, William Thomas Henley.
Around 1837, he converted his lathe from a woodworking machine to a wire-covering machine. By 1846, he was employing 23 people as part of his W.T. Henley’s Telegraph Works Company. They went on to produce insulated telegraph lines between London and Manchester, Manchester and Liverpool, and Dublin and Belfast. Henley even set up a factory to produce submarine cables and produced the shore-end sections of the famous transatlantic telegraph cable, laid down by the SS Great Eastern.
And yet, for all his innovations, the most critical developments in wire insulation came later, thanks to another one of the Industrial Revolutions’ most important inventions.
Charles Goodyear was born into an old New England family in New Haven, Connecticut in 1800. His father, Amasa, had set himself up as a hardware manufacturer in the new industrial mills of area during the War of 1812, to supply buttons to the American military. In addition to running an adjacent farm, Amasa continued the manufacturing business after the war, producing buttons, as well as all kinds of farm equipment, like pitchforks.
Growing up, Charles was a religious child and he intended to pursue a career in ministry. But that would require a formal education. Amasa, busy with the manufacturing business, needed Charles to work the farm and didn’t allow the boy to go to school. Instead, Charles learned the manufacturing trade and, at age 17, left home for a hardware apprenticeship in Philadelphia. Afterward, he returned home to help his father’s farm and factory. They continued building the business and were fairly successful, especially in the production of pitchforks.
In 1824, Goodyear married one Clarissa Beecher, who would go down as perhaps the most patient wife in history. A couple years later they moved back to Philly so he could open a hardware store, selling his dad’s pitchforks and other farming equipment in the city. This turned out to be a bad business move, not because there wasn’t an agricultural market in this urban setting (like all American cities, Philly was still extremely small at the time), but rather because the Philadelphians were really skeptical of American-manufactured goods.
It’s important to remember that, up until this point, most hardware was being imported from Europe. The Goodyears were producing some of the first American-made farm equipment. Unable to earn enough trust for their tools, Charles was facing financial ruin. (And a near-terminal illness he suffered around this time didn’t help either.)
Soon after, Goodyear would serve his first of many stints in debtors prison. And what drove him there was actually his plan for getting out of debt – by becoming a great inventor. And the specific invention he planned for was a better kind of rubber.
Found in a variety of tropical trees, rubber in its natural form comes from a milky, sap-like goo called latex. The most common rubber tree – Hevea brasiliensis – had existed solely in the Amazon rain forest for thousands of years. Thanks to Goodyear, its now found on tropical plantations across the world. Indigenous peoples across the Americas had been using rubber for a variety of purposes – most famously for a variety of games played by Mesoamericans with the world’s first rubber balls.
Westerners were slow to appreciate the benefits that rubber could yield though. The first thorough experiments with it didn’t happen until the 1740s, and even then it would be a good 150 years or more until scientists really became interested in it. In 1805, a scientist named John Gough discovered that rubber heats up when stretched – an important finding for later innovations. Yet, at the time, Gough didn’t find the substance to be particularly useful.
But beginning in the 1820s, New England merchants began importing rubber boots from Brazil. Villagers who had been making rubber shoes for centuries were now fitting the process to meet the fashion specifications of these merchants – including all kinds of new rubber garments – and Americans started to see rubber differently. After all, it could serve as a cushion, it was watertight and airtight, it could be stretched and molded to countless existing tools and clothing.
But there was a problem. Traditional rubber can’t handle big changes in temperature. It became brittle in cold weather. The famous American statesman Daniel Webster liked to tell a story about how he received a rubber cloak and hat as a gift. He wore them out one night and, by the time he reached the destination, the cold weather had made his outfit so rigid he could stand it up straight outside the front door. On the flip side, rubber would also melt in heat, making it useless if it came close to a fire or even when spring turned to summer.
But, for whatever reason, Goodyear believed he could fix these problems and make rubber a useful product. And I say “for whatever reason” because he didn’t have any training in chemistry or anything, he just thought “oh man, I’m gonna fix rubber and get out of debt!” And this turned into a full-on obsession which led to more and more and more and more debt throughout his life.
Okay, so Goodyear continued this work in his prison cell, mashing bits of rubber (which was pretty cheap at the time) with his wife’s rolling pin. He also tried heating it, working it with his hands, and mixing in magnesia, which seemed to reduce the stickiness.
Upon his release from prison he enthusiastically told friends he had solved the problem, started raising investments, and got to work making rubber shoes in his house with the help of his wife and children. But he had not solved the problem, sales failed, and his creditors cut him off. So, then he sold all his furniture and moved into an attic to continue his research.
For years, Goodyear would move around the northeastern United States dodging bailiffs, his poor family always following along. They lived in a number of abandoned rubber factories as he sold off more and more of their possessions to fund his super-shoddy experiments, desperately mixing whatever toxic chemicals he could get his hands on trying to make rubber more stable – toxic chemicals that nearly killed him one time and always made the house smell terrible. Two of his kids died during this time as the family was (quite possibly) literally starving.
Finally, Goodyear tried mixing sulfur into rubber. Now, that alone didn’t yield consistent results. But when he accidentally dropped a lump of this sulfur-treated rubber onto a hot wood stove, the consistency of it changed. To his surprise, the rubber didn’t melt. It retained its shape and elasticity.
Goodyear tried reproducing the accident, begging his neighbors to lend him their stoves. Sometimes the process worked, sometimes it didn’t.
When he was thrown into debtors’ prison once again, he wrote to his acquaintances from his cell, seeking loans to build a new rubber factory. Amazingly, he managed to raise a few investments and get out of prison. (Although he’d be back in debtors’ prison within a month.)
Collaborating with a regional businessman named Nathaniel Hayward – who became a bitter enemy of his years later – Goodyear filed for a patent for this new process of creating vulcanized rubber. It was awarded to the two men shortly thereafter in February 1839.
By 1842, Goodyear’s position was becoming more stable. He opened a factory with some friends and family in Springfield, Massachusetts. By 1844 then, they had perfected the process for vulcanizing rubber and secured a new patent. Using machines to mix latex with chemicals – sulfur being the most important – they could produce significant quantities of highly-stable vulcanized rubber.
Goodyear’s troubles weren’t over. In 1852, he travelled to England where he met with his old friend, an industrial scientist named Thomas Hancock.
Goodyear had befriended Hancock – himself interested in rubber – at some point in the 1830s and shared his progress. Hancock then went about vulcanization on his own and, more or less, figured out how to accomplish the process around the same time as Goodyear. He received a British patent for the process in 1844. Hancock subsequently won a court battle, proving his work was independent of Goodyear’s, and Goodyear never received royalties from the growing British rubber industry.
Still, he showed off his many rubber products at London’s Great Exhibition in 1851 and at Paris’s Exposition Universelle in 1855. He was to rubber what John Wilkinson was to iron, and Charles “Rubber-Mad” Goodyear’s displays included rubber doormats, chairs, waterbeds, eyeglasses, canes, combs, diamond-studded jewelry, and even a rubber-bound memoir he published.
For theses feats he met the new Emperor, Napoleon III. Days later, the emperor sent Goodyear the Grand Medal of Honor and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. They arrived to Goodyear in a Paris prison cell, where he had been taken – once again – for debt.
Although the days of most stinging poverty were behind him, Goodyear would still die in debt in 1860. As he famously wrote,
“In reflecting upon the past, as relates to these branches of industry, the writer is not disposed to repine, and say that he has planted, and others have gathered the fruits. The advantages of a career in life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents, as is too often done. Man has just cause for regret when he sows and no one reaps.”
Vulcanized rubber allowed the modern world to take shape. Its most obvious applications are in tires – for automobiles, bicycles, airplanes, etc. And that alone is amazing. None of these vehicles would be able to exist as they do today had it not been for the pioneering and sacrificial work of Charles Goodyear. Seemingly everything about the modern world – how we transport goods, choose what homes to live in, grow our tourism industries – revolves around these vehicles with their rubber-tire wheels.
But beyond that, the insulated wires that power our homes, gave us telephones and modern computers, were made possible with rubber. The medical profession relies on countless tools like rubber syringes and tubes that have saved God-knows-how-many lives. The sports we play – football, basketball, hockey – are thanks to rubber – even the shoes used by athletes are made possible thanks to rubber soles. And rubber is used in manufacturing processes in countless hidden ways too.
For these reasons, Goodyear’s incredible personal sacrifices made him a hero in American industrial history. Future inventors and industrialists would lionize him. When, in 1898, businessman Frank Seiberling opened a factory in Akron, Ohio to make bicycle tires, he named it the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in recognition of the inventor. It’s the Goodyear corporation we know today.
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Again, most of the inventions I’ve mentioned today came at the end of the First Industrial Revolution. The typewriter, sewing machine, and vulcanized rubber were technologies put into full use during the Second Industrial Revolution, from 1870 to 1914.
But there was one invention made during the First Industrial Revolution that was so ahead of its time that it needed to wait until the Third Industrial Revolution – with the end of World War II – to see any practical development.
Charles Babbage was born in London in 1791. His father – a City banker – was able to afford a world-class education for his children, including the gifted Charles.
In 1812 he went to Cambridge to pursue mathematics, where he was (likely) the most gifted student of the time. He graduated without examination and without honors after defending a radical thesis. From there he took a lecturing position with the Royal Institution and was elected to the Royal Society. Eventually he was hired to teach at his alma mater and for 12 years was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics – a chair once occupied by Sir Issac Newton and later occupied by Stephan Hawking.
In the 19th Century, mathematical sciences required access to thick volumes of standardized tables – functions like sines and logarithms – to assist with calculations. This way, the decades of painstaking mental labor that went into these calculations wouldn’t need to be repeated over and over.
The problem that Babbage and others encountered was that even the best tables were riddled with errors – not with the calculations themselves, but in their transcriptions. He began to conceive of a machine that could compute and print these tables without error. He called it the “Difference Engine.”
By 1822, Babbage constructed a basic version of this mechanical calculator. It was able to rapidly calculate basic arithmetic of up to eight figures. Backed by the Royal Society, he convinced the British Treasury to invest £1,500 to build a bigger, better such machine, which he believed would take two or three years to build.
With government support and his own personal investment of up to £2,500, Babbage hired Joseph Clement, a former protégé of the great machine maker Henry Maudslay. (Shout out Chapter 14!)
But even for a skilled precision engineer like Clement, there was no way he could complete Babbage’s design in two or three years. It took a decade to build just one section of the machine and went way over budget. Babbage demanded more money from the government and managed to raise a personal investment of £4,500 from the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. Eventually though, worn thin by Babbage’s desperate haggling, Clement quit.
For what it’s worth though, this section of the Difference Machine could produce a portion of the tables Babbage had promised the government in his proposal. It has even been called “the most refined and intricate piece of mechanism constructed up to that time.”
With Clement out and no completed prototype to show his investors, Babbage switched gears a bit. He conceived instead of a totally new design for a mechanical computer – a machine he called the “Analytical Engine.” Powered by steam, this device would be able to run entirely without human inputs.
Key to this machine would be what Babbage called “the mill” – nothing less than a 19th Century version of a central processing unit (a CPU). The Analytical Engine would use Random Access Memory (or, as we call it, “RAM”). But perhaps the most insightful breakthroughs came from a friendly correspondent of his – the Countess of Lovelace.
She was born Augusta Ada Byron in London in 1816. She was the only legitimate daughter of the famous Lord Byron – although Byron would have several children by other women, including probably by his half-sister.
Just months after her birth, Lord and Lady Byron officially separated. He never saw this daughter again. Instead he went off to fight in the Greek War of Independence, where he died when she was 8 years old.
Young Ada was raised by her mother. Unlike other girls of the era, she was not instructed in any kinds of arts, since her mother believed art is what drove her father mad. Instead, tutors were hired to educate her in the unladylike field of mathematics.
At 19, Ada was married to an English Baron – later elevated to become Earl of Lovelace – and the couple had several children, including a male heir. But by her mid-20s, Ada Lovelace was getting bored with domestic life, and so she wrote to her old friend, Charles Babbage.
“I am very anxious to talk to you. I will give you a hint on what. It strikes me that at some future time, my head may be made by you subservient to some of your purposes & plans. If so, if ever I could be worth or capable of being used by you, my head will be yours.”
Babbage took her up on her offer, first by asking her to translate an essay about his Analytical Engine, written by the Italian mathematician (and future Prime Minister of a unified Italy) Luigi Menabrea. Babbage then encouraged Lovelace to offer her own thoughts on the machine. She did so with a series of footnotes in her translated text, which proved much more valuable than the text itself.
The footnotes contained a series of elemental instruction sets that could be used to direct the calculations of this still hypothetical machine. And it could “arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols.”
She continues,
“Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and musical composition were susceptible of such expressions and abstractions, the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
In the 19th Century, Ada Lovelace had conceived of computer software and perhaps even AI.
But they were not to be, at least not for anytime soon. The designs Babbage and Lovelace conceived for the Analytical Engine were largely forgotten – only to some extent being used to design a new Difference Engine 2.0 (okay, they called it #2, not 2.0).
Using some 8,000 whirling parts, we know today that this design of a new Difference Engine could have actually worked – it was eventually constructed and tested in the 1980s. But In the 1840s and 50s, the government decided instead to cut its losses, writing, “Mr. Babbage’s projects appear to be so indefinitely expensive, the ultimate success so problematical, and the ultimate expenditure so large and utterly incapable of being calculated, that the government would not be justified taking upon itself any further liability.”
Afterall, its not like the world was starved for new ideas at the time. New inventions were coming out constantly. And as they were changing the world, so too was that burgeoning political and economic philosophy – liberalism – spreading across the world. The liberals were beginning to remake Europe in their own vision – next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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For this episode, I want to thank Karl Larson for some research assistance and everyone who is supporting the podcast on Patreon, including John Bartlett, Elizabeth Brooking, Eric Hogensen, Brian Long, Brandon Stansbury, and Walter Torres.
If you want to join the ranks of these Industrial Revolutionaries, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod to give your support. That’s Patreon.com slash I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D.