The Most Powerful Idea in the World Part 2

The Statute became law in 1624. The immediate impact was barely noticeable, like a pebble rolling down a gradual slope at the top of a snow-covered mountain. For decades, fewer than six patents were awarded annually, though still more in Britain than anywhere else. It was seventy-five years after the Statute was first drafted, on Monday, July 25, 1698, before an anonymous clerk in the employ of the Great Seal Patent Office on Southampton Row, three blocks from the present-day site of the British Museum, granted patent number 356: Thomas Savery's "new Invention for Raiseing of Water and occasioning Motion to all Sorts of Mill Work by the Impellent Force of Fire."

Both the case law and the legislation under which the application was granted had been written by Edward c.o.ke. Both were imperfect, as indeed was Savery's own engine. The law was vague enough (and Savery's grant wide-ranging enough; it essentially covered all ways for "Raiseing of Water" by fire) that Thomas Newcomen was compelled to form a partners.h.i.+p with a man whose machine scarcely resembled his own. But it is not too much to claim that c.o.ke's pen had as decisive an impact on the evolution of steam power as any of Newcomen's tools. Though he spent most of his life as something of a sycophant to Elizabeth and James, c.o.ke's philosophical and temperamental affinity for ordinary Englishmen, particularly the nation's artisans, compelled him to act, time and again, in their interests even when, as with his advocacy of the 1628 Pet.i.tion of Right (an inspiration for the U.S. Bill of Rights) it landed him in the King's prisons. He became the greatest advocate for England's craftsmen, secure in the belief that they, not her landed gentry or her merchants, were the nation's source of prosperity. By understanding that it was England's duty, and-perhaps even more important-in England's interest, to promote the creative labors of her creative laborers, he antic.i.p.ated an economic philosophy far more modern than he probably understood, and if he grew rich in the service of the nation, he also, with his creation of the world's first durable patent law, returned the favor.

c.o.ke's motivation was not, needless to say, a longing to see steam engines decorating the English countryside, but rather a desire to see it filled with English craftsmen. A high level of craftsmans.h.i.+p alone, however, wasn't going to result in anything like Newcomen's engine, much less Rocket; artisans can be-frequently are-ingenious without being innovative. Craftsmans.h.i.+p needed to be married to a new way of thinking, one not yet known as the "scientific" method.

Luckily for history, a culture of observation, experimentation, and innovation was being cultivated in England at exactly the same moment that c.o.ke was advocating for her artisans. Luckily for historians, its patron saint was not only c.o.ke's contemporary, but his professional, political, and even romantic rival.

THE MAN WHO DIED in April 1626 with the t.i.tles Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Alban was born sixty-five years before with no t.i.tle at all. Though his name at birth-Francis Bacon-was decidedly less grand, it would be recollected* in dozens of biographies and writing on everything from the birth of empiricism to the process of inductive logic. His father, Sir Nicholas, was a high-ranking member of Elizabeth's court, the Keeper of the Great Seal. His mother, Anne, was not only one of the best-educated women in England, fluent in four languages and a translator of serious Christian scholars.h.i.+p into English, but also the sister-in-law of William Cecil, England's de facto prime minister. It was just the sort of family that would make schooling a priority, and the beneficiary was Francis, who started a fairly traditional medieval education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and continued at the University of Poitiers, the second-oldest university in France and the alma mater of Rene Descartes. Poitiers was the beginning of Bacon's French connection, an affinity that s.h.i.+nes a light on any number of subsequent events, not least his contrast with his rival Edward c.o.ke's almost obsessive (there is no other word) Englishness.

The rivalry that features in every biography of either man probably started the day that Bacon entered Gray's Inn, another of the four Inns of Court, on June 27, 1576, and began his career in the law. And while it was not inevitable that his professional goals would result in compet.i.tion with the most ambitious and successful lawyer in England-unlike c.o.ke, Bacon would have equally prominent careers as a diplomat and philosopher-it was likely, since at that moment in history, real success depended on securing the favor of the monarch, and the rise of one courtier almost always came at the expense of another. The compet.i.tion was exacerbated by what seemed to c.o.ke an unseemly attraction to the European continent. The younger, more elegant, and more charming Bacon not only had been educated in France; almost immediately after entering Gray's Inn, he left England on a diplomatic mission, spending three years in France, Italy, and Spain, where, in rumor at least, he had a love affair with Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Henry II and Catherine de Medici. Less romantically, but more significantly, his years traveling in Europe, particularly in France and Italy, exposed him to a legal philosophy very different from the one he absorbed in London. And he liked it.12 Almost all modern legal practice is derived from one of two distinct traditions. The first, the so-called civil law tradition, is a direct successor to the jurisprudence of the Roman Empire, and it dominates most of the legal systems of continental Europe; the second is the inst.i.tution known as the common law, used in Britain and its former colonies. The divergence between the two dates from the eleventh century, when the only surviving copy of the complete reworking of Roman law known as the Codex Justinia.n.u.s was discovered in an Italian monastery and percolated throughout Europe. The reasons for its diffusion are complicated; partly it was that it resolved an awful lot of messy contradictions between church law, local precedent, and even traditions dating back to the Visigoths. But while the kings who implemented the Justinianic Code may have liked its coherence, they adored its central theme: in Latin, quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem, "the will of the prince has the force of law."

Accident as well as geography probably ensured that the idea didn't find the ground as fertile on the British side of the English Channel, where the common law continued to evolve incrementally, even haphazardly, obedient to custom rather than a grand design. It's a simplification, though not a gross one, to say that the common law is more messily pragmatic, the civil law more theoretical and pure; these are also designations that might apply, respectively, to Edward c.o.ke and Francis Bacon.

So while c.o.ke would use the civil law, or even sketchier precedents, when needed-he even went so far as to cite it in Darcy v. Allein13-he remained the era's most eloquent champion of the common law, its great adversary. As c.o.ke put it, under the common law, every man's house is his castle, not because it is defended by moats or walls, but because while the rain can enter, the king may not; under the civil law, the king is bound by nothing at all. Which was, as we shall see, a clue to the puzzle of Britain's head start in industrialization, as well as one of the sources of friction between c.o.ke and Bacon.

It wasn't the only one. By the 1590s, and despite Bacon's connections through family and friends-he had entered into the circle surrounding the charismatic Robert Devereaux, second Earl of Ess.e.x, and another of Elizabeth's favorites-his legal career was not what one would call brilliant. In 1594, he was rejected in his bid for the position of Attorney General when the Queen selected c.o.ke, and then, insult to injury, for c.o.ke's former job as Solicitor General* in favor of Thomas Fleming-c.o.ke's choice. Four years later, the always-short-of-funds Bacon tried to mend his finances matrimonially, and he set his eye on one of the wealthiest, and certainly the most fascinating, women in England. Lady Elizabeth Hatton was beautiful, witty, rich, and, with the death of her first husband in 1597, eligible. To the brilliant, handsome, but impecunious Bacon, who had known her since they were children, she was perfect. He even enlisted Ess.e.x in the service of his courts.h.i.+p, and the Earl obliged with a letter to Lady Hatton's father that read in part, "I had rather match [Elizabeth] with Mr. Bacon than with men of far greater t.i.tles."14 Unfortunately for Bacon, the lady had other ideas.

The clever reader will see this one coming. c.o.ke's first wife, Bridget, with whom he was apparently deeply in love, died in June 1598. In what seemed even at the time to be the sort of haste that in later eras would have involved a shotgun, c.o.ke and Elizabeth Hatton were married that September. Though Lady Hatton's beauty and wealth were almost certainly decisive, it is tempting to think that one of the reasons c.o.ke pursued her so avidly was to frustrate his rival. If so, he paid for his momentary triumph with more than thirty years of grief, which included notoriously brutal domestic quarrels, vitriolic public fights, and property disputes so intractable, containing accusations of physical abuse and theft so scandalous, that they occupied England's Privy Council for three months. To call c.o.ke's second marriage the worst decision he ever made is to understate the case; upon his death, Lady Hatton wrote "we shall never see his like again,15 praises be to G.o.d." She was not alone in her distaste for her husband. In a famous argument in the chambers of the exchequer in 1601, shortly after c.o.ke had led the brutal prosecution of his onetime mentor, Ess.e.x, Bacon told his rival, "Mr. Attorney: I respect you;16 I fear you not, and the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I will think of it."

c.o.ke and Bacon were so hostile to each other that they would have reflexively taken opposite sides on a debate over the best way to prepare roast beef, but for the history of the Industrial Revolution, the most significant point of divergence between the two was the way they approached the idea of innovation. One of the most consistent themes in the life of c.o.ke, the pragmatic champion of inst.i.tutions designed to protect and promote the English artisan, was his belief that the state enjoyed the most prosperity when it encouraged those artisans to perfect their craft (or at least did nothing to discourage them). Bacon, on the other hand, had an equally powerful belief in the practice of empirical science, and he advocated for a state-supported foundation that would nurture it.

That advocacy began early in Bacon's life with a powerful attack on the medieval philosophy that had dominated scholars.h.i.+p for eleven centuries, subordinating Greek philosophy-particularly Aristotle-to the revealed wisdom of the Bible and the Church fathers. And not just philosophy: When natural phenomena conflicted with supernatural explanation, Christian faith demanded choosing the latter, which was clearly no way to advance an understanding of the natural world. However, since people in tenth-century Europe were just as smart as they had been a thousand years before (and would be a thousand years later), their brains had to exercise themselves on something, and the result, from the fifth century through the fourteenth, was a network of Christian schools, and later universities, that established a cla.s.sical curriculum emphasizing dialectic rather than experiment. Their leaders, known as scholastici, or Scholastics, filtered their Aristotle through a thoroughly Christianized screen that discarded the Greek philosopher's empirical bent and kept only his appeal to formal logic.

This was the edifice that Bacon set out to undermine when he published The Advancement of Learning in 1605, setting out his ambitious ideas for the reformation of education and philosophy. So ambitious were they that even listing Bacon's ideas tends to scant the depth of the footprint he left on the modern world. In fact, attempting to encapsulate his thought in a few lines or sentences is not only daunting, but insulting. Suffice it to say that before Bacon, the gold standard in inquiry was essentially contemplative and syllogistic; truth could be discovered by comparing opposing ideas. Afterward-particularly after he wrote Novum Organum, in 1622, in which he famously stated his belief that the compa.s.s, the printing press, and gunpowder had changed history more than any empire or religion-truth was something extracted from nature using the tools of observation and experiment. He didn't, as is sometimes suggested, invent the scientific method; he had too feeble a handle on hypotheses, and especially mathematics, to do so. But what he did understand about the scientific enterprise was profoundly important for the wave of inventions that would inundate the world a century after his death. He knew that to be self-sustaining, both science and invention needed to be social enterprises, depending utterly on the free flow of information among investigators. And since the state is the beneficiary of such a self-sustaining cycle of inventions, it was therefore inc.u.mbent on the state to make the information-about discoveries, techniques, and inventions-flow.

By 1608, he was making notes for the idea of a "college for Inventors17 [with] a Library, Vaults, fornaces [sic], Tarraces for Isolation, woork houses of all sorts" that could inst.i.tutionalize the idea of invention in service of the state. Those notes would eventually find their way into the the posthumous publication of The New Atlantis in 1626, one of the achievements that appears in even the briefest biographies of the man. Bacon's fictional Atlantis was the utopian kingdom of Bensalem, located somewhere in the South Seas and distinguished by (among other things) what can only be described as a government-funded Research & Development facility. The "College of Six Days Works," or Salomon's House, was home to hundreds of investigators into the mysteries of nature; the thirty-six most senior researchers were organized by the nature of their work. Those who performed new experiments, for example, Bacon called Pioneers, or Miners, while the ones who attempted to find applications for new discoveries he called Dowry-men or Benefactors. Tellingly, though Bacon had respect18 for artisans and craftsmen, they were prohibited from full partic.i.p.ation in Salomon's House. Instead, the highest honors were reserved for those "Dowry-men" who produced innovations that were of the highest value to the sovereign. In Bensalem, statues were automatically erected to honor inventors, with one of the highest to "the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder."19 Salomon's House was the explicit inspiration for the Royal Society, which was founded twenty-four years after Bacon's death in large part to honor his notion of science as a collaborative venture whose proper goal is the material improvement of mankind.

The material improvement of mankind, not of inventors. In Bensalem, inventors were not granted any property rights in their inventions: no patents. In the conflict over the Statute on Monopolies, as with much else, Bacon stood on the opposite side from c.o.ke, and his ideal society, not at all surprisingly, reflected his belief that the surest route to innovation was by relying on men who wanted only fame as a reward. Bacon's faith in progress20 through collective action by public servants obliged him to reward innovators; his sn.o.bbery made it impossible to make those rewards commercially valuable, particularly to anyone who might need the income, and especially in the form of owners.h.i.+p of inventions.

c.o.ke's pragmatic support for the artisan cla.s.s and Bacon's vision of invention as a collective endeavor were both, for their day, progressive-both were willing to grant the highest honors to any accomplished man of low birth-but nonetheless a bit nearsighted: Both could see the value of the innovator to society, but misunderstood how to align social benefits with individual rewards; and Bacon, in particular, was unwilling to grant inventors even a temporary property right in their ideas.

That sort of owners.h.i.+p required a revolution in the idea of property itself.

ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1689, the royal yacht Isabella docked at Gravesend carrying Mary Stuart, the daughter of King James II, on her last day as the Princess of Orange. A day later, in London, she would be acclaimed Mary II, Queen of England, thus putting an end to the most tempestuous four decades in English history. Any fifty-year-old Englishman at Gravesend that day had lived through two or three civil wars; the execution of one Charles and the exile of another; the autocratic rule of Oliver Cromwell; the restoration of Charles II; the 1665 recrudescence of the bubonic plague; and the Great Fire of London the following year. The fifty-year-old would be able to recall more recent events as well, including the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth and any number of near rebellions beginning with the 1685 death of Charles and the accession of his younger brother, James, whose conversion to Catholicism failed to reignite civil war only because his Protestant daughter, the wife of the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange, was the heiress presumptive.

So when the Isabella arrived with that same daughter, a few months after her husband had successfully a.s.serted her rights at the head of an invading army, she was conveying a much-longed-for respite from what, in the apocryphal curse, are known as "interesting times." And that wasn't all. The royal yacht led a flotilla that carried, as a pa.s.senger, a sometime poet, essayist, and physician, a fifty-six-year-old man who had been living as an exile in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Leiden, and Utrecht for the preceding four and a half years, using the nom de refuge of "Dr. Van der Linden." His real name was John Locke, and he was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, one of the three greatest men who ever lived (the other two were Isaac Newton-and Francis Bacon).

Son of a lawyer, grandson of a clothier, Locke had successively been a brilliant but bored student at Westminster School and at Christ Church College, Oxford, where his fellow students included John Dryden, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren. It is tempting to think that he cultivated the company of men who formed the kernel of the future Royal Society when they were all at Oxford, but if so, it has escaped the attention of hundreds of biographers.

Locke's Oxford career gave only hints of his future prominence. Despite his steady climb up the academic ladder, starting as a "student"-at the time, a formal t.i.tle more like "fellow"-by 1660 becoming a lecturer and reader in rhetoric, and by 1664 the "censor of moral philosophy," he wasn't what one might call an academic star. In the words of Lady Damaris Masham,* he "had so small satisfaction from his studies"21 that he failed to work very hard at them. Whether out of boredom or out of resistance to the pressures to take instruction as an Anglican clergyman, he subsequently dabbled in law, medicine, diplomacy, and natural philosophy. In the last capacity, he collaborated with Robert Boyle, who sponsored him for a fellows.h.i.+p in the Royal Society, though Locke's involvement was scarcely life-changing; in his four decades as a member of the RS,22 his only publication was a letter regarding a poisonous fish sent to him by a friend in the Caribbean.

What did change Locke's life in matters large and small was his relations.h.i.+p with Anthony Ashley-Cooper-Lord Ashley when Locke first met him, and later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, the Lord High Chancellor of England, President of the Privy Council, and ultimately the great political adversary of Charles II. It was in service to Shaftesbury, originally as a physician, that Locke developed temperaments heretofore absent, including a toleration of nonconformist ideas and, more relevant, an interest in the economic relations between men. In 1668 he even wrote a treatise with the wonkish t.i.tle Some of the Consequences that are Like to Follow upon Lessening of Interest to 4 per cent. And it was in service to Shaftesbury that Locke was forced to leave England not once, but twice. The first time he exiled himself as a precaution, after Shaftesbury's circle published a series of arguably seditious pamphlets; when the furor had died down, in 1679, he returned. Four years later, however, after the group planned, though never carried out, an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt on King Charles, Locke, now an accused traitor and fugitive, was forced to escape again, this time to Rotterdam, where he arrived on November 1, 1683, there to stay until he could return more than five years later. With him when he arrived on the Isabella that February day in 1689 was the draft ma.n.u.script for a work that would be published later that year under the t.i.tle Two Treatises on Government.*

As with Bacon, there is no way that Locke's thoughts on the nature of knowledge, religious freedom, political organization, or a dozen other subjects can be contained within a single book, much less a portion of a single chapter. Those wondering what on earth Locke's writings have to do with the world's first steam locomotive, however, will find that the relevant pa.s.sages from the Treatises concern Locke's views on the rather slippery idea of property: or, rather, the idea that ideas are property.

Despite much evidence to the contrary, the first word most children learn (after the local equivalent of "mama" and "papa") is not "mine." Nonetheless, the concept of owners.h.i.+p in some form is pretty universal, even in eras and cultures that deny it. This is because the idea of property is essential for a culture to be able to speak of the relations.h.i.+p between people and things. And some sort of property law is utterly necessary if a society is to resolve disputes between people over things. The difference between the way property is understood on Wall Street and in an Egyptian souk clearly shows that the concept is absolutely contingent upon culture, but in the societies that trace their legal and philosophical systems back to Greece and Rome, property traditionally has three characteristics, none of them absolute: Exclusive possession (which also obliges everyone else to keep away); Exclusive use; and Some right of conveyance, the ability to transfer the property right.

The Western idea of property is distinctive not because of these three characteristics, but because of its tendency to generalize them; in many non-Western societies, the rules for land may have little or nothing to do with the rules for animals, which in turn may be unrelated to the rules for objects. In the Western tradition, the default position is that individual possession/use/conveyance is the zero point from which exceptions may deviate. This perspective may have begun as nothing more than a convenience-it is easier to adjudicate disputes if all the rights in question are decided together-but like a ratchet that turns in only one direction, it has tended, over the centuries, to promote the acc.u.mulation of more and more individual rights over things, such as land, and even water, that were once held in common.

That "acc.u.mulation," of course, was generally done at the point of a sword, which seemed to Locke to be a historical fact, but not a historical right. And rights were what interested Locke. His development of a new definition of property rights evolved over decades, and it owed as much to the recent history of Britain as it did to the Roman idea of usufructus (the right to profit from a thing without owning it) or the medieval notion of seisin (possession of land without t.i.tle to it). The Civil War, in particular, had turned the world upside down in more ways than one; there was something dangerously explosive about gathering a large number of people by persuading them that G.o.d wants them to be free of both political and religious tyranny, and then giving them weapons. Four years after the start of hostilities, a ma.s.s movement within Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army (the first in history to give its soldiers a say in their own governance, an idea that seems as radical today as it did to Cromwell) demanded the right to vote in their "Agreement of the People" of 1647. The conflict prompted a public debate, at Putney in southwest London, between the self-named "Levellers," the element among the Parliamentarians most in favor of democratic reforms as part of the battle against the royalists, and the Army's more conservative leaders.h.i.+p, and the discussion moved inevitably from voting rights to property rights, since the former depended on the latter.

Common law tradition granted the franchise only to owners of either a specified amount of land or of a license to trade, under the logic that since laws are made to safeguard property, legislators should be elected only by those with an interest in those laws, or, as the conservative faction had it, "disposing of the affairs of the kingdom23 [requires] a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom." The Leveller response was that every man-almost every man; they excluded servants and beggars,24 for example-has property in his own person and has therefore an interest in parliamentary action.

If the Levellers were the radicalized members of the Parliamentary party, the Diggers, an agrarian communist movement that emerged in 1649, were the radical edge of the Levellers. Their concept of legitimate property was far different, as were their demands, including the right to common land: a return to the state of nature before the appropriation of that land by others. Gerard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, a onetime cloth merchant who lost his livelihood, and then his family's land, as a side effect of the Civil War, is remembered as being violently opposed to the very idea of property. In the Digger manifesto, a "Declaration from the Poor Oppressed of England," he pulled no punches, telling the gentry, "You and your ancestors got your propriety25 [i.e. property] by murder and theft, and you keep it by the same power from us." But his understanding of property was almost completely limited to that special form known as real estate. This made sense, of course; at a time when virtually everything of value, in Britain and everywhere, was either land or the produce of land, property and land were functionally synonymous. And since the amount of land was essentially fixed, it could be possessed by one man only if he dispossessed another.

Enter John Locke, whose central premise was that man has no right to own the work of G.o.d-to own land-but that rightful property is derived from the labor of man mixed with that of G.o.d. That is, when man combines his labor with the goods of the earth, he has created a natural right to the product. The right predates government, law, or kings, and is therefore present in his hypothetical state of nature. By deriving the right from the biblical grant by G.o.d to Adam of the earth for his subsistence, Locke reasoned his way to the idea that the earth is no good to any particular man unless someone labors to make it so. Locke thus triangulated between the democratic Levellers (and the Diggers who shared an enthusiasm for inventors and inventing: Winstanley wrote, in 1652, "Let no young wit be crushed26 in his invention.... Let every one who finds out an invention have a deserved honour given him") and the status quo, arguing that the then current division between haves and have-nots was legitimate so long as the cause of the division was labor.

THE PATIENT READER IS now asking, "What does this have to do with steam power?" (The impatient ones asked it twenty pages ago.) This: By equating labor with a property right, Locke found a right to property anywhere labor is added. The defining characteristic became the labor, not the thing. And labor, in Locke's formulation, was as much of mind as of muscle. "Nature furnishes us only with the material,27 for the most part rough, and unfitted to our use; it requires labour, art, and thought, to suit them to our occasions.... Here, then, is a large field for knowledge, proper for the use and advantage of men in this world; viz. to find out new inventions of despatch to shorten or ease our labour, or applying sagaciously together several agents and materials, to procure new and beneficial productions fit for our use, whereby our stock of riches (i.e. things useful for the conveniences of our life) may be increased, or better preserved: and for such discoveries as these the mind of man is well fitted."

So, while Edward c.o.ke's Statute on Monopolies established England's first patent law, the general acceptance of the notion of what we would now call intellectual property awaited its articulation by John Locke.* It is scarcely surprising28 that the Copyright Law of 1710 appeared so soon after Locke's works, followed by the 1735 Engraver's Act, which granted the same rights to prints as the Copyright Act did to literary works.

This does not mean that Locke's ideas swept all earlier ones away, any more than the Statute on Monopolies caused an immediate explosion in patent grants. Ideas, and the inst.i.tutions that promote them, take some time to take root. Locke's own protege, David Hume, was never persuaded that property rights derived from natural law. Eighty years after Locke's death, conservatives like Edmund Burke, and progressives like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, were still uncomfortable with Locke's idea of natural laws; Bentham called them "nonsense on stilts."29 The final victory, however, was Locke's; in 1776, Adam Smith was virtually channeling Locke's Second Treatise, writing in The Wealth of Nations, "The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable." Smith's French counterpart, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, echoed him: "G.o.d ... made the right of work30 the property of every individual in the world, and this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most imprescriptible of all kinds of property."

Recognition of a property right in ideas was the critical ingredient in democratizing the act of invention. However imperfectly, c.o.ke's patent system, combined with Locke's labor theory of value, offered a protected s.p.a.ce for inventive activity. The protected s.p.a.ce permitted, in turn, the free flow of newly discovered knowledge: the essence of Francis Bacon's program. Once a generation of artisans discovered they could prosper from owning, even temporarily, the fruits of their mental labor, they began investing that labor where they saw the largest potential return. Most failed, of course, but that didn't stop a trickle of inventors from becoming a flood.

The reason that that flood would, eventually, find its way to engine 42B and Rocket-and would become a river instead of a lake-was an unprecedented fusion of theory, experiment, and measurement, which is explored in the next chapter.

* In different parts of the world, the two functions of legal professionals-advising on the law and advocating before judges-are either split or fused. In the English tradition, the first function was traditionally performed by professionals known as solicitors, the latter by barristers, so named because of the literal bar that separated students from pract.i.tioners in the Inns of Court. In the United States, and increasingly in the United Kingdom (even to the point of permitting solicitors to wear powdered wigs), the functions are performed by the same lawyers.

* Probably very cold. In 1602, all of Europe was still experiencing the so-called Little Ice Age, during which the Thames froze over so frequently that Elizabeth I took her daily walks there.

* As distinguished from "Lorraine gla.s.s" or sheet gla.s.s, which was made from cylinders that were melted and formed into squares, Normandy gla.s.s was made from circles, or disks, and was later known as "crown gla.s.s." Aren't you glad you asked?

* For more about the Netherlands, see chapter 11.

* c.o.ke was neither the first, nor the last, to accept "national security" exceptions to his principles.

* Some of that recollection includes theories that can charitably be said to be on the fringe. It is impossible to write about Bacon without mentioning Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and the authors.h.i.+p of Shakespeare's plays. Consider them mentioned.

* Despite the t.i.tle, England's Solicitor General is almost always a barrister, not a solicitor. The position is really that of the Attorney General's chief lieutenant.

* The remarkable Lady Masham was not simply Locke's first biographer and friend but the first Englishwoman to publish philosophical writings on her own account, and a regular correspondent with, among others, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

* Or probably the ma.n.u.script. From internal evidence-references to "King James" rather than "James II" suggest that at least portions of the Treatises were written before James II's accession in 1685-it seems safe to a.s.sume that tucked away in the onetime exile's luggage were the draft treatises. Scholars still debate whether they were written in the heat of the controversy over the Exclusion Bill, a statute introduced by Shaftesbury to exclude the now publicly Catholic James II from the throne. If so, they are a powerful argument that engagement in the rough-and-tumble of political life is no barrier to producing original and hugely influential political philosophy.

* Three hundred years later, a group of mathematically minded economists would distinguish between tangible and intellectual property in much the same way, as we shall see in chapter 11.

CHAPTER FOUR.

A VERY GREAT QUANt.i.tY OF HEAT.

concerning the discovery of fatty earth; the consequences of the deforestation of Europe; the limitations of waterpower; the experimental importance of a Scotsman's ice cube; and the search for the most valuable jewel in Britain THE GREAT SCIENTIST AND engineer William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, made his reputation on discoveries in basic physics, electricity, and thermodynamics, but he may be remembered just as well for his talent for aphorism. Among the best known of Kelvin's quotations is the a.s.sertion that "all science is either physics or stamp collecting" (while one probably best forgotten is the confident "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible"). But the most relevant for a history of the Industrial Revolution is this: "the steam engine has done much more for science1 than science has done for the steam engine."

For an aphorism to achieve immortality (at least of the sort certified by Bartlett's Familiar Quotations), it needs to be both true and simple, and while Kelvin's is true, it is not simple, but simplistic. The science of the eighteenth century didn't provide the first steam engines with a lot of answers, but it did have a new, and powerful, way of asking questions.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this. The revolution in the understanding of every aspect of physics and chemistry was built on a dozen different changes in the way people believed the world worked-the invariability of natural law, for example (Newton famously wrote, "as far as possible, a.s.sign the same causes [to] respiration in a man, and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun") or the belief that the most reliable path to truth was empirical.

But scientific understanding didn't progress by looking for truth; it did so by looking for mistakes.

This was new. In the cartoon version of the Scientific Revolution, science made its great advances in opposition to a heavy-handed Roman Catholic Church; but an even larger obstacle to progress in the understanding and manipulation of nature was the belief that Aristotle had already figured out all of physics and had observed all that biology had to offer, or that Galen was the last word in medicine. By this standard, the real revolutionary manifesto of the day was written not by Descartes, or Galileo, but by the seventeenth-century Italian poet and physician Francesco Redi, in his Experiments on the Generation of Insects, who wrote (as one of a hundred examples), "Aristotle a.s.serts that cabbages produce caterpillars2 daily, but I have not been able to witness this remarkable reproduction, though I have seen many eggs laid by b.u.t.terflies on the cabbage-stalks...." Not for nothing was the motto of the Royal Society nullius in verba: "on no one's word."

This obsession with proving the other guy wrong (or at least testing his conclusions) is at the heart of the experimental method that came to dominate natural philosophy in the seventeenth century.* Of course, experimentation wasn't invented in the seventeenth century; four hundred years earlier, while Aquinas was rejiggering Aristotle for a Christian world, the English monk Roger Bacon was inventing trial-and-error experimentation-in Europe, anyway; experimentation was widely practiced in medieval Islamic cities from Baghdad to Cordoba. Bacon was, however, a decided exception. The real lesson of medieval "science" is that the enterprise is a social one, that it was as difficult for isolated genius to sustain progress as it would be for a single family to benefit from evolution by natural selection. Moreover, even when outliers like Friar Bacon, and to a lesser degree the era's alchemists, engaged in trial-and-error tests, they rarely recorded their results (this might be the most underappreciated aspect of experimentation) and even more rarely shared them. A culture of experimentation depends on lots of experimenters, each one testing the work of the others, and doing so publicly. Until that happened, the interactions needed for progress were too few to ignite anything that might be called a revolution, and certainly not the boiler in Rocket's engine.

It took a ma.s.sive s.h.i.+ft in perspective to create such a culture, one in which a decent fraction of the population (a) trusted their own observations more than those made by Pliny, or Avicenna, or even Aristotle, and (b) distrusted the conclusions made by their contemporaries, at least until they could replicate them. In the traditional and convenient shorthand, this occurred when "scientific revolutionaries" like Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, and Newton started thinking of the world in purely material terms, describing the world as a sort of machine best understood by reducing it to its component parts. The real transformation, however, was epistemological: Knowledge-the same stuff that Locke was defining as a sort of property-was, for the first time in history, conditional. Answers, even when they were given by Aristotle, were not absolute. They could be replaced by new, and better, answers. But a better answer cannot be produced by logic alone; spend years debating whether the physics of Democritus or Leucippus was superior, and you'll still end up with either one or the other. A new and improved version demanded experiment.

If the new mania for scientific experimentation began sometime in the sixteenth century, with Galileo-even earlier, if you want to begin with Rene Descartes-it took an embarra.s.singly long time to contribute much in the way of real-world technological advances. Francis Bacon might have imagined colleges devoted to the material betterment of mankind, in which brilliant researchers produced wonders that might allay hunger, cure disease, or speed s.h.i.+ps across the sea; but the technology that mostly occupied the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was improving scientific instruments themselves (and their close relations, navigational instruments). Science did build better telescopes, clocks, and experimental devices like von Guericke's hemispheres, or Hooke's vacuum machine, but remarkably little in the way of useful arts. The chasm that yawned between Europe's natural philosophers and her artisan cla.s.ses remained unbridged.

Describing how that bridge came to be built has been, for decades, the goal of an economic historian at Northwestern University named Joel Mokyr, who knows more than is healthy about the roots and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. In a series of books, papers, and articles, Professor Mokyr has described the existence of an intellectual pa.s.sage from the Scientific Revolution of Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton to the Industrial Revolution, which he has named the "Industrial Enlightenment"-an a.n.a.lytical construct that is extraordinarily useful in understanding the origins of steam power.

The beauty of Mokyr's a.n.a.lysis is that it replaces an intuitive notion-that the Industrial Revolution must have been somehow dependent upon the Scientific Revolution that preceded it-with an actual mechanism: in simple terms, the evolution of a market in knowledge.

The sixteenth and seventeenth century's Scientific Revolution was a sort of market, though the currency in which transactions occurred was usually not gold but recognition: Gaspar Schott saw Otto Gericke's vacuum experiments and wrote about them; Boyle read his account and published his own. Huygens, Papin, and Hooke all published their own observations and experiments. They had an interest in doing so; as a cla.s.s, they generally sought pride rather than profit for their labors, and were therefore paid with notoriety, along with some acceptable sinecure:3 professors.h.i.+ps, pensions, patronage. They even sometimes, as with Hooke's attempt to turn his discovery of the Law of Elasticity into a balance spring mechanism for a marketable timepiece, showed decided commercial impulses. But the critical thing was that a structure within which scientists could trade their newly created knowledge had been evolving for nearly a century before it was widely adopted by more commercially minded users.

Their need for it, however, was enormous. Prior to the eighteenth century, innovations tended to stay where they were, since finding out about them came at a very steep price; in the language of economists, they carried high information costs. For centuries, a new and improved dyeing technique developed by an Italian chemist would not be available, at any affordable cost, to a weaver in France, both because the inst.i.tutions necessary for communicating them, such as transnational organizations like the Royal Society, did not exist, and because the value of the innovation was enhanced by keeping it secret.

For a century, that was how things stood. Europe's first generation of true scientists produced a flood of testable theories about nature-universal gravitation, magnetism, circulation of the blood, the cell-and tools with which to understand them: calculus, the microscope, probability, and hundreds more. But this flood of what Mokyr calls propositional knowledge did not diffuse cheaply into the hands of the artisans who could put them to use, since the means of doing so depended on a sophisticated publis.h.i.+ng industry producing books in Europe's vernacular languages rather than the Latin of scientific discourse, and on a literate population to read them.

An even bigger problem was this: as the seventeenth century wound down, scientific knowledge was becoming a public good, partly because of what we might call the Baconian program. Francis Bacon's vision of investigators and experimenters working in a common language for the common good had inspired an entire generation; and, to be fair, the extraordinary number of related discoveries in mathematics, physics, and chemistry had indeed benefited everyone. But partly it was a matter of cla.s.s. Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though a highly inventive bunch, were members of a fraternity that depended on allegiance to the idea of open science-so much so that even Benjamin Franklin, clearly a man with a strong commercial sense, did not as a matter of course take out patents on his inventions. The result was what happens when work is imperfectly aligned with rewards: Science remained disproportionately the activity of those with outside income. Predictably, Bacon's New Atlantis model, which worked so well for the diffusion of scientific innovations, had built in a limit on the population of innovators.

By the start of the eighteenth century, however, things were changing, and changing fast. Artisans like Thomas Newcomen and itinerant experimentalists like Denis Papin were both corresponding with Robert Hooke. Engineers like Thomas Savery were demonstrating inventions in front of the physicists and astronomers of the Royal Society. Most important, mechanics, artisans, and millwrights, who had been taught not only to read but to measure and calculate, started to apply the mathematical and experimental techniques of the sciences to their crafts. Useful knowledge (the historian Ian Inkster calls it useful and reliable knowledge, or URK) became, in Mokyr's words, "the buzzword of the eighteenth century."4 The same mechanisms that spread the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution throughout Europe-correspondence between researchers, and publications like the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions-proved just as useful in the diffusion of applied knowledge. But because Europe generally, and Britain specifically, had a lot more artisans than scientists, the demand for commercially promising applications was far greater than those with a purely scientific bent. New ways of buying and selling applied knowledge emerged to meet the demand. J. T. Desaguliers, the same critic5 who had sniffed at Thomas Newcomen's mathematical training, spent decades giving a hugely popular series of lectures all across rural England and later collected them in his 1724 Course of Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy. By the 1730s, millwrights, carpenters, and blacksmiths were able to purchase what we would today call a continuing education in pubs and coffeehouses in the craft they had learned as apprentices. By 1754, the drawing master William s.h.i.+pley could found the Royal Society of Arts (at a time that made no distinction between fine, decorative, or applied arts) on a manifesto that argued, "the Riches, Honour, Strength,6 and Prosperity of a Nation depend in a great Measure on Knowledge and Improvement of useful Arts [and] that due Encouragement and Rewards are greatly conducive to excite a Spirit of Emulation and Industry...." Britain's artisans were now buyers at their own knowledge market, and they were doing so to fatten not their reputations, but their wallets.

One of the criticisms often made of economists is that they see all of human behavior as a kind of market. But neither steam engines in general, nor Rocket in particular, makes much sense without referring to an entire series of markets: one for transportation of Manchester cotton, another for the iron on which the engine ran, still another for the coal it burned, and so on. The most important of all, however, was the Industrial Enlightenment's de facto market in what would one day be called "best practices" from the craft world. By the first decades of the eighteenth century, a market had emerged in which an English ironmonger could learn German forging techniques, and a surveyor could acquire the tools of descriptive geometry.

But markets do more than bring buyers and sellers together. They also reduce transaction costs. One of those costs, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, was incurred due to the fact that an awful lot of the newest bits of useful knowledge were hard to compare, one with the other, because they described the same phenomenon using different words (and different symbols). As the metaphorical shelves of the knowledge market filled with innovations, buyers demanded that they be comparable, which led directly to standardization of everything from mathematical notation to temperature scales. In this way, the Industrial Enlightenment's knowledge economy lowered the barriers to communication between the creators of theoretical models and masters of prescriptive knowledge, for which the cla.s.sic example is Robert Hooke's 1703 letter to Thomas Newcomen advising him to drive his piston by means of vacuum alone.

The dominoes look something like this: A new enthusiasm for creating knowledge led to the public sharing of experimental methods and results; demand for those results built a network of communication channels among theoretical scientists; those channels eventually carried not just theoretical results but their real-world applications, which spread into the coffeehouses and inns where artisans could purchase access to the new knowledge.

Put another way, those dominoes knocked down walls between theory and practice that had stood for centuries. The emergence of a market in which knowledge could be acquired for application in the world of commerce had also increased the population capable of producing that knowledge. It would occur in the study of medicine, of chemistry, and even of mathematics, but nowhere was it more relevant to the future of industrialization than in the study of the science of heat.

TWO YEARS BEFORE HIS death in 1704,7 John Locke collaborated with William Grigg, the son of one of Locke's oldest friends, to produce an interlineary translation-that is, alternating lines of Latin and English-of Aesop's fables. One of those fables, "De sole et vento," or "The Sun and the Wind," famously recounts the contest between the two t.i.tle characters over which could successfully cause a traveler to remove his coat. It is among the earliest, and is certainly one of the best known, accounts of the debate between heat and cold. Or, as we would call it today, thermodynamics.

Though the equations of thermodynamics are obviously essential to understanding the machine that Newcomen and Calley demonstrated in front of Dudley Castle, they were just as obviously unnecessary for building it. What the ironmonger and glazier didn't know about the physics of the relations.h.i.+p between water and steam would fill libraries, while what they did know was mostly wrong. This is in no way a criticism of the inventors; what everyone knew, at the time, was mostly wrong.

Even the seventeenth century's newfound affinity for experimental science hadn't done much to correct misapprehensions about the nature of heat. When Francis Bacon (to be fair, more a philosopher of science than a scientist) attempted, in 1620, an exhaustive description of the sources of heat, he included not only obvious candidates like the sun, lightning, and the "the violent percussion of flint and steel," but also vinegar, ethanol ("spirits of wine"), and even intense cold. He also failed to produce anything like a testable theory; while he did nod toward equating heat with motion, he failed to realize that heat was a measurable quant.i.ty-the first thermometers that used any sort of scale date from the early eighteenth century; imagine, if you can, drawing a map without knowing the number of inches to the mile, and you can see the obstacle this presented. Galileo, Descartes, and especially Robert Boyle also tried explain how motion was related to heat, particularly friction. They each failed, which is not surprising; nearly three centuries later, Lord Kelvin himself was still unsure whether heat energy could be equated with mechanical energy.

The reason is that seventeenth-century heat theorists were hamstrung by the two existing models from the world of natural philosophy. The first was the notion that heat8 was an "elastic fluid" or gas; the other, that it was a consequence of exciting the motion of an object's const.i.tuent parts, which were known as "atoms," though those who used the term didn't mean the same thing as a modern chemistry textbook. Isaac Newton had demonstrated that the best escape from the prison of Aristotelian ideas about motion was an entirely new set of invariant laws, but Newton, curious though he was, showed only small interest in the scientific nature of heat. As a result, the first really useful theory of heat and combustion was being articulated elsewhere.

In 1678, less than a decade before Newton introduced the world to the laws of motion and universal gravitation in the first edition of Principia Mathematica (and two decades before Savery received patent number 376), the alchemist Johann Joachim Becher departed the patchwork quilt of grand duchies, princ.i.p.alities, and free cities that the Thirty Years War had made of Germany. By then, he had already served as a court physician to the Elector of Bavaria; as a secret agent in the pay of the Austrian Emperor; and as a special emissary for Prince Rupert, the onetime commander of royalist cavalry during the English Civil War. It was in the last capacity that he journeyed to Scotland and Cornwall, to examine and report on the coal and tin mines of Britain. He also had a personal motive: to discuss his discovery with the new Royal Society.

Becher called the substance he had "discovered" terra pingua, which confusingly translates as "fatty [by which he meant inflammable] earth." This was a thoroughly respectable attempt to reconcile the established belief that the world was made up of the ancient four elements-fire, water, earth, and air-with the observation that the phenomenon of combustion seems to involve them all; that in some way, the process that burns wood is similar to the one that causes iron to rust, if only because the absence of air prevents both. Becher's discovery, renamed in 1718 as phlogiston, replaced the Aristotelian elements with a different foursome: water; terra mercuralis, or fluid earth (i.e. mercury, and similar substances); inert earth, or terra lapida (that is, salts); and Becher's terra pingua, thus covering all possible forms of matter, and demoting fire from an element to a phenomenon. The theory that explained the behavior of Becher's inflammable earth still has, in some circles, the flavor of charlatanism, and to be sure, Becher wasn't completely free of the taint; he had spent years trying to sell a method for turning sand into gold. However tempting it is to poke fun at the scientific ignorance of our ancestors, though, in the case of the phlogiston theory, it is a temptation that should be resisted. Though phlogiston theory is wrong, it is considerably more scientific than is generally understood, and it was an early and necessary step on the way to a proper understanding of thermodynamics, and of the way in which Rocket transformed heat into movement.

At the core of the theory is the idea that anything that can be burned must contain a material-phlogiston-that is released by the process of burning. Once burned, the dephlogisticated substance becomes calx (an example would be wood ash), while the air surrounding it, which was known to be essential to combustion, became phlogisticated. Thus, burning wood in a sealed chamber could never result in complete combustion, because the dephlogisticated air necessary for burning became saturated with phlogiston. The reason that wood ash weighs less than wood, therefore, is because of the loss of phlogiston to the air when it is partially burned.

However, any theory of heat transfer that depended upon the swap of a substance demanded that it go somewhere. Phlogiston theory worked fine for those things that weighed less after heating something else, but it was vulnerable to an encounter with any substance that didn't. Magnesium, for example, seems to gain weight when heated (actually, it becomes magnesium oxide). Heat can be transferred even when "condensed phlogiston" doesn't change at all. A red-hot hunk of iron will cause water to steam even if it weighs the same after it is cooled by that same water.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, despite some truly pa.s.sionate devotees, most especially the English chemist Joseph Priestley, phlogiston theory was displaced, largely by the work of the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier. Which is why phlogiston theory deserves a bit more respect than it is generally given. It is a goofy theory, to be sure, with funny-sounding names for its fundamental concepts (though no funnier-sounding than quarks, Higgs bosons, or other notions from the world of quantum physics). But it is a theory, in a way that the four elements of antiquity were not. Phlogiston was incorrect in its particulars: The relations.h.i.+p between fire and rust is that both are examples of what happens when oxygen, which would not be discovered for another century, reacts with another substance. But it was also testable, in the sense made famous by the philosopher of science Karl Popper. Phlogiston theory could be proved false, and eventually was. The first to do so was a pioneering physicist and chemist at the University of Glasgow, a key figure in the evolution of the steam engine, named Joseph Black.

BLACK WAS A THOROUGHGOING Scot, despite his Bordeaux birthplace, an incidental consequence of his family's involvement in the wine trade, and his early schooling in Belfast. He matriculated at both Glasgow and Edinburgh universities, and subsequently served as professor of chemistry at first one and then the other, ending up at Edinburgh in 1766. Long before that, he had demonstrated a remarkable gift for experimental design, and what was, for the time, painstaking care in experimentation itself, particularly into the nature of heat.

The gift for designing experiments was much on display in Black's research into the nature of what a later science of chemistry knows as carbon dioxide. He was not, by all accounts, much interested in testing phlogiston theory when he began; instead, as a physician, he was looking for a way to dissolve kidney stones. His investigations accordingly began with an investigation into the then well known process by which chalk, or calcium carbonate, turns into the caustic quicklime, which was the name then used for calcium oxide. Black chose to work with a similar substance: magnesium carbonate, then known as magnesia alba. Since the transformation required combustion, at very high heat, phlogiston theory suggested that the reason was the absorption of the fiery substance by the chalk. Black, by careful experiment, showed that the magnesia alba weighed less after heating, but regained precisely the same amount when cooled in the presence of potash, from which he reasoned that the substance that departed the original substance-CO2-had returned. He did not, of course, put it quite that way, since oxygen itself still awaited discovery some decades later. Instead, he wrote, "Quick-lime [i.e. calcium oxide] therefore does not attract air when in its most ordinary form, but is capable of being joined to one particular species only, which is dispersed thro' the atmosphere, either in the shape of an exceedingly subtle powder, or more probably in that of an elastic fluid [which I have called] 'fixed air.'"9 Or, as your high school chemistry teacher would explain it, calcium oxide becomes calcium carbonate in the presence of carbon dioxide.

This discovery alone, which was the first test that phlogiston theory failed, would have purchased for Professor Black a place in the history of science. But what earned him a place in the story of steam power were his subsequent experiments on the nature of heat itself. Or, more accurately, on the nature of ice.

Water, as we have seen, is a most curious substance: In both its gaseous and solid states, it occupies more volume than it does as a liquid. It is also (practically uniquely) present on earth as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. By 1760, Black had become fascinated by the properties of water in its solid version, and even more fascinated by the transition from one phase to another. He was particularly intrigued by the fact that frozen water, whether in the form of ice or snow, did not melt immediately upon coming into contact with high heat, but did so gradually. For another curious fact is that a gla.s.s with ice in it will stay the same temperature-a little above 32F or 0C-whether it has six unmelted ice cubes in it or one. The temperature starts to rise only when all the ice is melted. In the same way, a pot of water brought to a boil does not thereafter increase in temperature, no matter how hot the fire underneath it. These are by no means intuitive results, but Black observed them again and again, once again finding phlogiston theory insufficient to explain the phenomena. Instead, he came up with an idea of his own, called latent heat, which he defined as the amount of heat gained or lost by a particular substance before it changes from one physical state to another-gas to liquid, solid to liquid. To Black, latent heat was the best way to explain the fact that water, when it nears its boiling point, does not suddenly turn to steam with, in his words, "a violence equal to that of gunpowder."10 The experiments that confirmed this hypothesis were simple, and ingenious. Black took a quant.i.ty of water and, using a thermometer, took its temperature. He then placed the water over heat11 and measured both the amount of time it took for the water to boil and the amount of time it took, once boiling, to boil away completely. By comparing the two, he established the amount of heat the water continued to absorb after its own temperature stopped rising. Many years later, Black described his discovery: I, therefore, set seriously about making experiments,12 conformable to the suspicion that I entertained concerning the boiling of fluids. My conjecture, when put into form, was to this purpose. I imagined that, during the boiling, heat is absorbed by the water, and enters into the composition of the vapour produced from it, in the same manner as it is absorbed by ice in melting, and enters into the composition of the produced water. And, as the ostensible effect of the heat, in this last case, consists, not in warming the surrounding bodies, but in rendering the ice fluid; so, in the case of boiling, the heat absorbed does not warm surrounding bodies, but converts the water into vapour. In both cases, considered as the cause of warmth, we do not perceive its presence: it is concealed, or latent, and I give it the name of LATENT HEAT ...

Thus, Black calculated that a pound of liquid water had a latent heat of vaporization of 960F; its latent heat of fusion-the amount of heat ice absorbs before completely melting-he measured at 140F.* That is a lot of latent heat. Water absorbs nearly three times the amount of heat before vaporizing as the same quant.i.ty of ethanol, one of the many reasons that your waiter can flambe brandy, but not orange juice. Again, Black's experimental and quant.i.tative mind used a different sort of arithmetic: He heated a pound of gold13 to 190 and placed it in a pound of water at a temperature of 50; when he took the temperature of the combined elements and found it to be only 55, he concluded that water had nearly twenty times more capacity for heat than did gold.

It took a pretty big fire, therefore, to boil the water in the atmospheric engine Thomas Newcomen had erected in front of Dudley Castle that day in 1712. Joseph Black had discovered a new way of measuring how big, but the relevant metric for Newcomen and Calley wasn't degrees Fahrenheit. It was fuel.

This simple fact was, in its way, as revolutionary as c.o.ke's Statute or Newton's Laws of Motion. For millennia, advances in the design of machines to do work had been driven entirely by measures of their output: a tool that plows more furrows, or spins more wool, or even pumps more water, was ipso facto a better machine. Prior to the seventeenth century, the choices for performing such work-defined, as it would be in an introductory physics cla.s.s, as the transfer of energy by means of a force-had been made from the following menu: Muscle, either human or animal; Water; or Wind.

Muscle power is, needless to say, older than civilization. It's even older than humanity, though humans are considerably more efficient than most draft animals in converting sunlight into work; an adult human is able to convert roughly 18 percent of the calories he consumes into work, while a big hayburner like a horse or ox is lucky to hit 10 percent-one of the reasons for the popularity of slavery throughout history. The remaining two were, by the seventeenth century, relatively mature technologies. More than 3,500 years ago, Egyptians were using waterwheels both for irrigation and milling, while at the other end of Asia, first-century Chinese engineers were building waterwheels linked to a peg and cord that operated an