Contemporaneously with the canal period in England came an industrial revolution which was to place this country—hitherto distinctly backward in the development of its industries—at the head of manufacturing nations, but was, also, to show that, however great the advantages conferred by canals, as compared both with rivers and with roads, even canals were inadequate to meet the full and ever-expanding requirements of trade and transport.
The main causes of this industrial revolution were—the application of a number of inventions and improved processes to leading industries; the incalculable advantages derived from steam power; the immense increase in the supplies of cotton, coal, minerals and other raw materials; the greater wealth of the nation, allowing of much more capital being available for industrial enterprises; and the improvement, not alone in inland communication, but in ship-building and the art of navigation, foreign markets being thus reached more readily at a time when the general political and economic conditions were especially favourable to the commercial expansion abroad which followed on our industrial expansion at home.
Woollen manufactures, originally established here with the help of workers introduced from Flanders in the time of Edward III., had had a long pre-eminence, obtaining a vested interest which led to the advent of a new rival, in the form of cotton manufacturers, receiving, at first, very scanty encouragement. Woollens had made such progress that, even before the Restoration, a market was (as Dowell tells us) opened for our goods, not only in Spain, France, Italy and Germany, but also in Russia and Baltic and other ports, while they were carried by way of Archangel into Persia, and also made a market for themselves in Turkey. {187}A great part of England was turned into sheep farms for the production of wool, and by 1700 the value of woollen goods exported had risen to ￡3,000,000.
At this time the import of raw cotton was only about 1? million lbs.[26] To such an extent had the woollen, and, also, the linen, industries been placed under the "protection" of the governing powers that until 1721 it was a penal offence in England to weave or sell calico—that is, a fabric consisting entirely of cotton; and down to 1774 anyone who made or sold a fabric having more than half its threads of cotton was liable to prosecution. Not until 1783 was the prohibition of British-made calicoes removed and the production in this country of all-cotton goods allowed by legislators who had been unduly solicitous of the welfare of British industry. When, in 1776, Adam Smith published his great work on "The Wealth of Nations," he certainly did state that Christopher Columbus had brought back from the New World some bales of cotton, and had shown them at the court of Spain; but he did not think it necessary to mention that a cotton industry had been started here, and was likely to contribute to the wealth of the United Kingdom.
The imports of raw cotton slowly increased to 2,000,000 in 1720, and to 3,000,000 lbs. in 1751. In 1764, the year in which Hargreaves introduced the spinning jenny, they were still not higher than 4,000,000 lbs. But the successive inventions, during the course of about three decades, alike of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright and others gave such an impetus to the industry that by 1800 the importation of raw cotton (greatly facilitated by the further invention, in 1793, of Eli Whitney's appliance for separating cotton from the cotton seed) had risen to 52,000,000 lbs., while the value of all kinds of cotton products exported increased between 1765 and 1800 from ￡800,000 to ￡5,800,000.
This rapid progress would not, however, have been possible but for the facilities for obtaining cheap power afforded by the condensing steam-engine of James Watt, who had taken out a patent for his invention in 1769, though it was not till 1776 that he built and sold his first engine, on which he further improved in 1781. Steam-power, of far greater force {188}and utility, and capable of being produced anywhere, thus took the place of the water-power, only available alongside streams, on which, as we have seen, the earlier success of the woollen industry, especially as carried on among the hills of Yorkshire, had been established. It was by water-power that the spinning machine so recently introduced by Sir Richard Arkwright was operated until James Watt had shown that steam could be used to better advantage. Then the setting up at Papplewick, Nottinghamshire, in 1785, of a steam-engine for the operation of cotton machinery marked, also, the decline of domestic manufactures and the advent of that factory system which was to bring about a complete transformation in the industrial conditions of the United Kingdom.
Yet just as the improvements in cotton production would have been incomplete without the steam-engine, so, also, would the invention even of the steam-engine have been of little service but for an abundant supply of coal, and but, also, for the possession of a ready and economical means of moving the coal from the localities where it was to be found to those where it was wanted for the purposes of the "steam age" that was about to open.
The greater demand for fuel and the increased facilities for supplying it led to the greater development of various inland coal-fields, in addition to those already long in operation in the Newcastle district, and having there the advantages of river and sea as an aid to distribution. The need, also, of coal for the operation of the steam-engine in the countless number of new industries or new works that followed on James Watt's improvements had an important influence on fixing the location of fresh industrial centres.
Coal-mining, again, was powerfully accelerated in the same period by the iron industry, which itself was undergoing developments no less remarkable than those attending the expansion of the cotton industries, and having no less a bearing on the problem of efficient inland transport.
Down to the year 1740 the smelting of iron-ores—an industry carried on here from very early days in our history—was done entirely with wood charcoal. For this reason the early seat of the iron industry was in the forests that, as already told, once covered so large an area in Sussex, Kent {189}and Surrey, and afforded what may, at one time, have appeared to be a practically limitless supply of fuel.
The three counties in question thus attained to a high degree of industrial importance and prosperity at a time when Lancashire and Yorkshire were still regarded by dwellers in the south as inhabited by a scarcely civilised people. Lord Seymour, who was made by Henry VIII. Lord High Admiral of England, and ended his life on the scaffold in 1549, was the owner of iron-works in Sussex. The cannon and shot which Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher took with them on their ships were supplied by these southern foundries. Of the position of the industry in 1653, when there were 42 forges and 27 furnaces in the Weald of Sussex, the author of "Glimpses of our Ancestors in Sussex" says: "Sussex was then the Wales and the Warwickshire of England. Foreign countries sought eagerly for its cannon, its culverines and falconets.... Its richly decorated fire-backs and fantastic andirons were the pride of lordly mansions. London sent here for the railings that went round its great cathedral; Sussex ploughshares, speeds and other agricultural implements and hardware were sent all over the kingdom."
Fears, however, had already been excited in Henry VIII.'s day that the continued destruction of forests, in order to supply the iron-works with fuel, would lead to a timber famine; and in Queen Elizabeth's reign such a prospect, foreshadowing a shortage of timber for shipbuilding purposes at the very time when a conflict with Spain was regarded as inevitable, was looked upon as involving a possible national disaster. A subsidiary complaint against the industry was that the traffic to and from the iron-works injured the roads. Legislation was therefore passed prohibiting, under severe penalties, any increase in the number of iron-works in the three counties mentioned, except on land already occupied or able to furnish of itself a sufficient supply of timber. Exportation of iron was also prohibited, and it was even considered good policy to import iron, rather than to make it, and so preserve the still available timber for other purposes.
By the early part of the eighteenth century the iron industry, after exhausting the timber supplies of Sussex, had disappeared from that county; but it flourished in Shropshire, where it found both fuel and iron-stone in the Forest {190}of Dean, while the Severn provided water-power and inland navigation. The industry was also carried on in Staffordshire; and here, in the reign of James I., some important experiments were made in the direction of using coal instead of wood in the manufacture of iron; but this idea was not fully developed until Abraham Darby had shown, in 1735, how coke, in combination with a powerful blast, could be substituted for wood. What is regarded as the real turning-point in the iron industry followed in 1760, when Dr Roebuck built, at the Carron works, his new type of blast furnace, in which coke was to be used.
An impetus was thus given to the industry, and an impetus it certainly needed, inasmuch as the production of iron in the United Kingdom had sunk in 1740 to 17,350 tons. Then, in 1783, Henry Cort, of Gosport, patented his process for converting pig-iron into malleable iron through the operation of "puddling" in a common air-furnace consuming coal, and in 1784 he patented a further process for turning............