Locomotion No. 1 (replica) at Beamish Museum.
A replica of Locomotion No. 1, designed by George Stephenson, on the Pockerley Waggonway in Beamish Museum, County Durham. The original was the star of the opening day of the Stockton and Darlington Railway on September 27th, 1825, when for the first time anywhere in the world fare-paying rail passengers rode waggons hauled by a steam locomotive. See The Stockton and Darlington Railway. The revolution had begun some fifty years earlier with Boulton and Watt’s commercially viable engines for steam-powered machinery. Many feared mass-production would put millions out of work, but it created more jobs, and as Alfred Marshall pointed out, also put feudal barons and slave-owners out of business.
Part 1 of 2
TO us, more than to any other nation on the globe, dearth of coal means material ruin. The enormous changes effected both here and elsewhere during the last hundred years by the aid of British coal have been described again and again.
We are perfectly familiar with such facts as that the population of this country has increased five-fold during that time: that the exports and imports have increased considerably over ten-fold: that in the interval portions of the globe amounting in area to something over a hundred times the area of the British Isles have been largely colonised and settled by British subjects, and are now the seats of ordered industry and intelligence comparable with those of the mother country herself: and so with endless other facts, all tending to show that a development of power and an increase of wealth have been witnessed in the past century, with which nothing whatever in the previous history of the world can be compared.
Précis
In 1878, economist Alfred Marshall rehearsed the extraordinary benefits that had come to the British Isles from a century of coal mining. He mentioned three in particular: a fivefold increase in population, a more than tenfold increase in overseas trade, and the raising of peoples all over the world to a state of equal prosperity and education. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
Traction engine at the Co-op in Beamish Museum.
Marshall, Sons & Co. traction engine No. 17134 Mary Margaret (1889) outside the Co-op in Beamish Museum’s Town. Engines like these helped to empower the labourer, freeing him from his master and raising his standard of living. Happily, oil, gas and nuclear power proved worthy of replacing coal and keeping us in the liberty to which we had grown accustomed. Now, however, we are looking at new sources of power, and for the first time their ability to produce energy is not their most important quality. What changes should we fear, not just economic but social, cultural and moral, if they cannot keep up with coal, and those tireless, disposable, unemotional machines begin to fall idle?
TWO main causes may be adduced for these wonderful phenomena, the growth of our coal-driven industries and the liberation of labour; the period begins with the invention of the steam engine:* it also begins with the French revolution.* It is outside our purpose to discuss the latter of these influences, one which of course is by no means entirely or mainly British: but it is questionable how far the growth of popular freedom could have reached, consistently with the preservation of culture and the liberal arts, had it not been that as the chains fell from the labouring classes of Europe,* a new bondsman* more powerful far in some respects than the other, was found in coal.
When we consider that in the coal raised in Great Britain alone in 1876 an amount of energy was contained equal to the labour of more than 3,000,000,000* adult slaves labouring daily throughout the year we may well understand how it is that human slavery has so utterly died out in all civilised, that is, all coal-using, countries since 1778.
* Thomas Savery developed a rudimentary though pioneering steam-powered pump in 1698, which his partner Thomas Newcomen significantly improved in 1712. James Watt, James Murdoch and Matthew Boulton made mass-produced and efficient commercial steam power possible with progressive new designs between 1769 and 1800. Richard Trevithick drew on Murdoch’s designs to operate the first steam locomotive in 1803. See The First Train Journey by Steam.
* The French Revolution broke out in 1789. King Louis XVI was executed in 1793, during the State-sanctioned bloodbath known as the Terror.
* When it first started, many in England thought the French Revolution was very British, and supposed that France was going through much the same process that England went through in Home Page. They quickly discovered that prominent doubter Edmund Burke had been right. See also Samuel Smiles on A Rush to Judgment.
* The last remnants of European serfdom were swept away in Prussia (1807), Austria (1848), Russia (1861) and Poland (1864). The Royal Navy cracked down on global slave trading from 1807 and slavery in British colonies was legally abolished by our Government in 1833. Slavery was abolished in the USA in 1861.
* A ‘bondsman’ in this context is a slave, a man in bonds. Marshall means that coal was working as a substitute for human slaves. See also Samuel Smiles on A Monument to Liberty.
* Alfred Marshall would have read this figure out as ‘three thousand million’, reserving the term ‘three billion’ for three million million, or 3,000,000,000,000. Since 1974, however, the United Kingdom has adopted the American convention of using the term ‘a billion’ for a thousand million, or 1,000,000,000, and a trillion for a million million, or 1,000,000,000,000.
Précis
Marshall noted that this century of rapid social progress had begun with the invention of the steam engine and the outbreak of revolution in France. Perhaps the events of 1789 played a part, he said, but he felt sure that by rendering slavery obsolete, coal and steam power had been the century’s most effective liberators. (54 / 60 words)
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