HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Kanefsky and Robey have compiled a survey of all the steam engines erected in Great Britain in the course of the eighteenth century.⁵ For each (known) steam engine erected during the period 1700–1800, Kanefsky and Robey recorded the year of construction, the type or design of the engine (i.e. Newcomen, Watt, Hornblower, etc.), the county, and the sector of application.⁶ It is worth remarking that this dataset intends to cover engine construction and not engine utilization. This means that besides the year of erection there is no other information on the time period over which the engine was actually used, and there is no information on the date at which the engine was scrapped or replaced.

As the authors would admit, the data collected by Kanefsky and Robey are probably affected by some biases in both upward and downward directions. The principal source of overestimation is the double counting of engines that were moved from one place to another, whereas underestimation is mainly due to small engines that have left no trace in the records. Notwithstanding these problems (which might result in some revisions in the future), the survey constitutes the most accurate attempt to trace the growth of steam power in Britain over the eighteenth century. In this work, we employ an up-to-date version of this dataset compiled by Kanefsky.⁷

On the basis of the historical outline presented in the previous chapter, the development of steam power technology in the eighteenth century can be divided rather naturally into three distinct "epochs". The first epoch goes from the invention of the Savery engine to the expiration of the Savery-Newcomen patent. This phase represents the early introduction of the new technology. The second epoch covers the period 1734–1774. The final phase goes from 1775 (the year of the first successful erection of a Watt engine) to 1800 (the year in which Watt's patent for the separate condenser expired).

For analysing the geographical patterns of steam usage in the eighteenth century, the county seems indeed the appropriate unit of analysis. Historians advocating the adoption of a regional perspective have actually used counties to identify the regional economic systems. Further, Langton has actually argued that the origins of economic regionalism in England are actually based on the growing autonomy of a "county society" during the seventeenth century, so that by the 18th century counties represented relatively coherent geographical units characterized by well defined and specific economic concerns and also cemented by well defined common social identities and cultures. Other studies focussed on specific regional dimensions of the industrialization process such as the dynamics of wages have used county level data.

The maps presented in Fig. 1 provide a preliminary "impressionistic" view of the geographical (county) distribution of the engines erected in these three periods. Darker (lighter) areas indicate a higher (lower) number of engines. White areas indicate that no engines were erected in that particular county. In addition, map 5 represents the geographical distribution of water-wheels (the "predominant" power technology of the period) and map 6 illustrates the prevailing level of coal prices in the various counties in (circa) 1800 (again, darker areas indicate higher prices, lighter areas represent lower prices and in this case white areas correspond to missing values).⁸

Geographical diffusion of steam technology, 1700–1800

Looking at the maps, the spread of steam power technology appears to have been, from the very outset, remarkably wide.⁹ There is some evidence that indicates that is highly likely that the first Newcomen engine was erected in Cornwall at the Wheal Vor tin mine in 1710. However, because of the high price of coal, Cornwall did not represent the most fertile soil for the diffusion of the new technology. The erection of the Wheal Vor engine remained a sporadic event and the introduction of Newcomen engines in Cornish mines actually took place only from the 1720s.

Coal mining areas represented of course a much more receptive environment for the new technology, since there coal would be relatively cheap. The Midlands coalfields (Stafford and Warwickshire) were the first location where Newcomen engines could take firm root. The commercialisation of the engine was at first controlled by the Newcomen–Savery partnership. As mentioned in the previous chapter, after Savery's death in 1715, a syndicate for the exploitation of the patent rights, the "Committee of Proprietors of the Invention for Raising Water by Fire" was constituted.

The Committee, under the direction of its secretary John Meres, promoted rather successfully the use of the engines for drainage in various mining areas by means of a network of agents and licensees.¹⁰ Apart from the Midlands, as the map of Fig. 1 indicates, by 1733, Newcomen engines, had been adopted in some numbers in Cornwall and in the coalfields in the North East (Northumberland and Durham).

Overall, during the monopoly of the "Proprietors" about one hundred Newcomen engines were constructed. As Smith has aptly remarked, for the time, this must be considered "by any standards a colossal business achievement". On the other hand, it should also be noted that historians have generally contended that the high level of royalties claimed by the "Proprietors" (up to £350 a year) hampered the diffusion process in this initial phase.¹¹

Be this as it may, one has to acknowledge that, under the "Proprietors", a group of skilled engine-builders emerged. As we have mentioned in the previous chapter, one of the main merits of Newcomen's invention was its relative easiness of construction and maintenance. Nonetheless, in this initial phase, the engine still represented a rather sophisticated piece of equipment and its erection probably called for more than ordinary engineering skills. Thus, the formation and consolidation of this base of engine-building skills presumably represented a critical factor for the successful introduction of steam power in various locations.

Among these engineers we may mention Henry Beighton, who worked for the Parrot-Sparrow partnership and compiled a table containing some rules of thumb for the proportions of the various components of the engine; Joseph Hornblower, who supervised the erection of various engines first in the Midlands and then in Cornwall¹²; Samuel Calley, the son of John Calley (the partner of Thomas Newcomen in the invention of the engine); and Marten Triewald, a Swedish engineer who installed various Newcomen engines in the North East and who would erect a (not very successful) Newcomen engine in Sweden at the Dannemora mine.

In the period 1734–1774 Newcomen engines continued to be built in mining areas. However, as we can we see from map 2, in this phase, steam power also penetrated new locations. This wider spread of the engine was mainly due to its adoption by the iron sector (Shropshire) where it was used to assist water wheels in blowing coke blast furnaces during drought periods. Newcomen engines also began to be constructed in some numbers in Scotland in the counties of the Clyde Valley.¹³

In this second phase, the "Proprietors" had completely ceased to control the market and Newcomen engines were typically erected by local craftsmen, leaving the cylinder, the cylinder bottom and a small number of other critical components to be manufactured by "specialist" firms and then shipped to the location of the engine. In this respect, it is worth noting that, up to the early 1780s, in Britain there existed only four ironworks that could supply cast iron cylinders for steam engines namely Coalbrookdale and New Willey (in Shropshire), Bersham (in Denbigh) and Carron (Stirling).

The period 1775–1800 is characterized by the competition between Watt and Newcomen engines. In this phase, typically textile counties such as Lancashire and Renfrew (cotton) and West Riding (wool) began to resort to some use of steam to power machinery. The main difference in the spread of the two types of engines is that Watt engines appeared capable of achieving some penetration (although in low numbers) in the counties of the South East, an area which appears, by and large, to exclude Newcomen engines.

Table 1 reports Moran I statistics for the three periods we are considering. Moran I statistic measures whether a variable displays a tendency to be systematically clustered in space, or, on the contrary, it is randomly spread. Higher values of Moran I statistic indicate a stronger degree of spatial autocorrelation. In other words, higher values of the statistic mean that counties with relatively high number of engines tend to be neighbouring.

*, **, *** indicate significance levels of 10, 5 and 1% respectively

Table 1 shows that Moran I statistic is higher for Newcomen engines than for Watt engines. Notably, in the case of Newcomen engines the coefficient appears to be significantly different from zero both when the original variable is assumed to be characterized by a normal distribution and when it is supposed to be generated by an unspecified one (randomized).

On the contrary, the Moran I statistic for Boulton and Watt engines does not turn out to be significant. This seems to indicate that the adoption of Boulton and Watt engines was less susceptible of being conditioned by specific local conditions. This finding may be accounted for by two possible sets of factors acting respectively on the demand and the supply side. On the demand side, given its superior fuel efficiency, it is likely that the adoption of Watt engines was less conditioned by the proximity to cheap coal (this is indeed consistent with the penetration of the Watt engine in the South East of England).

Concerning the possible existence of spatial constraints from the supply side, it is worth noting that apart, from the early period of the "Proprietors", the installation of Newcomen engines was typically in the hands of local millwrights and for this reason, the geographical adoption of the engine could have been limited to areas endowed with the necessary amount of engineering skills. On the contrary, as we shall see, Boulton and Watt instead adopted immediately a much wider horizon in their marketing of steam engines, aiming to serve the entire national market for power.