How the Scots Invented the Modern World (51 page)

At each stage Telford had to find a solution to a new engineering problem. There was dredging out the entrance to an existing loch, or cutting a new channel, or finding a secure bottom for his massive stone canal locks (at one point the bottom was so soft “that it was pierced with an iron rod to the depth of sixty feet”), or simply moving the enormous quantities of earth the construction of each lock required. He designed a huge dredging machine, powered by one of Watt’s steam engines, that could bring up eight hundred tons of mud a day. His friend and fellow poet Robert Southey saw it in operation when he came to visit in 1819. Southey also watched the building of the series of locks connecting Loch Lochy and Loch Oich, or “Neptune’s Staircase,” which could raise a ship nearly one hundred feet above sea level—“the greatest work of its kind which has been ever undertaken in ancient or modern times.” Southey was a romantic reactionary. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was more inspired by the beauty of mountains and lakes than by industrial machinery. But even Southey could appreciate the breathtaking sight of Telford’s soaring suspension bridges, such as the one at Bonar: “Oh! It is the finest thing that ever was made by God or man!” And Scott said much the same when he saw Menai Bridge, calling it “the most impressive work of art I have ever seen.”

But what most impressed Southey was Telford himself. “There is so much intelligence in his countenance, so much frankness, kindness, and hilarity about him. . . .” He concluded, “Telford’s is a happy life: everywhere making roads, building bridges, forming canals, and creating harbours—works of sure, solid, permanent utility. . . .” Permanent was right. More than 75 percent of Telford’s projects are still in operation to this day. It was a life’s work that flowed from a bottomless reservoir of creativity and self-confident energy. It continued to flow right down to his last years, when Telford began to work on a plan to build a canal in South America to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The place he chose for it was the narrowest point on the North-South American land bridge, at Darien—the same place where William Paterson had launched his ill-fated colony 136 years earlier, when Scotland was starting its first tentative steps into the modern world.

Telford never got started on his new canal. He died in 1834, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, joining the growing contingent of Scottish geniuses laid to rest in that hallowed shrine to British achievement. Others recognized Darien’s potential, however. The world would have to wait another fifty years before work would finally get under way. William Paterson’s vision of the isthmus of Panama as “the door of the seas” would finally be realized—by Americans this time, not by the British, athough the first chief engineer on the Panama Canal would happen to be a Scot by descent, John Findlay Wallace.

Canals, roads, bridges, and renovated harbors were all crucial to the network of self-interested exchange that held together modern commercial society, and now industrial society. The next logical step was to improve the means of transport on those thoroughfares, with the help of Watt’s steam engine. Strangely, Watt himself was reluctant to do this. He seems to have believed the tremendous power generated by his invention would make any ship or vehicle too dangerous to handle. Instead, it fell to a series of other visionary Scots, and inventors of Scottish extraction, to turn the energy of steam into the new transportation of the industrial age.

Henry Bell put his steam-powered boat Comet on the river Clyde in 1812. It was an idea borrowed, as usual, from someone else (a Scot named William Symington, who sailed the first working steam-powered boat, Charlotte Dundas, back in 1788 on Loch Dalswinton); but Bell showed that it could power genuine seagoing vessels, not just light rivercraft or demonstration toys. By 1823 there were more than seventy-two steamships operating up and down the Clyde, almost 60 percent of Britain’s total steam-powered shipping. An American of Scottish descent, Robert Fulton, made the idea functional in North American waters, as well. Fulton usually gets the credit for inventing the steamboat, but it was Bell who first made it commercially and nautically feasible, while Glasgow’s dockyards became home to generations of increasingly advanced and powerful oceangoing steamships.

George Stephenson’s background was very much like Thomas Telford’s. His paternal grandfather was a Scot who settled in northern England near Newcastle, a region similar to Lowland Scotland across the border, with a history of religious dissent and austere poverty, but high levels of literacy and a tendency to turn out ambitious, self-made men. George fell in love with steam engines while working as a teenager in the West Moor Mines. Stephenson took up a Cornishman’s invention, a locomotive engine powered by steam, and used it to build the first modern railway. Not surprisingly, Thomas Telford was thinking along the same lines, except he envisioned steam-powered cars moving along his sturdy and well-built roads, not on rigid iron rails. The lobby for rails won out, however, and by the end of the 1820s Stephenson and his team of engineers were building an intricate network of iron railways and bridges for their steam-powered locomotives.

A new chapter in the industrial age was about to begin, as hundreds of miles of rails reached out to connect the major cities and industrial centers of Britain, north and south. It was the most massive national construction project in history. Telford’s dream of a national network of highways with motorized vehicles and passenger cars would have to wait for another century, and another form of power—gasoline rather than steam.
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There was one other unforeseen consequence of Watt’s steam engine, which many contemporaries missed, but which a perceptive German observer named Karl Marx did not. Steam power allowed a factory or mill owner to build his place of business where it suited him, rather than having to rely on geographical accident, such as a swift-running river or access to cheap fuel such as coal, to dictate his choice of location. Where it suited him usually meant close to routes where he could transport his products and supplies cheaply, and where he could find a cheap and ready supply of labor—which in turn usually meant a city. In other words, Watt made industrial production an essentially urban activity. The classical industrial city was the result: Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Essen, Lyons—and Glasgow.

Glasgow epitomized nearly every aspect of this development, and foreshadowed many of the rest. By 1801 it was Scotland’s largest city. The era of the great tobacco lords and merchant capitalists was finally and decisively over. Instead, textiles, ironworking, and modern shipbuilding were the driving forces of economic and demographic growth. Smokestacks, brick factories, and fiery, glowing foundries ringed the city, as the austere old warehouses along Gallowgate were submerged by workers’ tenements. The city’s population expanded from 77,000 in 1801 to nearly 275,000 forty years later: almost a fourfold increase. In the earliest boom years, between 1801 and 1811, the population grew by 30 percent a year.

Archibald Buchanan built the very first “integrated” cotton mill in Britain at Glasgow in 1807, combining all its component processes under one roof. The manager of the Glasgow Gasworks, James Neilson, transformed the iron industry by developing the modern blast furnace in 1827, which likewise helped to integrate ironworking and the production of pig iron. Glasgow soon outstripped both England and Wales in its iron output, rising over twentyfold to half a million tons. Glasgow managers and manufacturers were famous for their technical skill, their efficiency, and their willingness to innovate and develop new materials or techniques. By the early 1830s, Glasgow was making much of the machinery used by the rest of Britain’s industrial plant: “In these works,” wrote one observer, “everything belonging to, or connected with, the Millwright or Engineer department of the [British] manufacture is fabricated.”

Glasgow’s emergence as a major industrial city made fortunes for business dynasties such as the Finlays, the Dunlops, who successfully made the transition from importing tobacco to making pig iron, and the Bairds of Gartsherrie, who eventually became the world’s leading producers of pig iron. At the end of the century, William Baird was counted among the forty wealthiest men in Britain.

However, all this growth soared far beyond the city’s capacity to offer safe and affordable housing, or even adequate sewage and sanitation. The tens of thousands of rural immigrants who flocked in looking for work had to cram themselves into the old decaying inner city of Glasgow, abandoned long ago by Glasgow’s middle class. Just in the narrow area where Gallowgate intersects High Street and the Saltmarket, more than twenty thousand people were jammed together, dumping their refuse into the streets and behind their tenements, where, as one official put it, “sanitary evils existed to perfection.”

Who were they? Contrary to myth, few were Highlanders fleeing the Clearances—perhaps no more than 5 percent at the beginning. The vast majority were Irish, who abandoned the abject poverty of their homeland for the low but real wages they could earn in Glasgow’s cotton mills, iron foundries, and linen dye works. It beat starving for nothing. Clydeside’s Irish were the precursors of the armies of unskilled but hardworking “guest workers” of modern industrial Europe, and of the flood of cheap Irish labor that would emigrate to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. By the time of the First Reform Bill, in fact, one out of five Glaswegians had been born in Ireland. Locals resented them because they were Catholics. Most were stuck in “casual” or part-time employment at the lowest possible wage. Most were also women. Women, married and unmarried, made up fully 60 percent of workers in the Glasgow mills. Their children found jobs as chimney sweeps as young as five or six. When wages fell and the mills closed, as they did in 1815 and later in the 1820s, life became as horrible as anything portrayed in a Dickens novel—certainly worse than what Friedrich Engels saw in Manchester in the early 1840s, which moved him to write his
Conditions of the Working Class in England.

Squeezed between squalid living conditions and falling wages, Glasgow’s workers fought back. The violent confrontations between employers and employees in those years surpassed anything happening in any other British or European city of the time. Labor unrest culminated in the general strike and massive uprising of the so-called Radical War of 1820, which Glasgow activists hoped would spark workers’ revolts across the rest of Britain. Instead, it ended in a battle with local cavalry at Bonnymuir, and the hanging of three rebel ringleaders: James Wilson, Andrew Hardie, and John Baird—all this little more than two years before the royal visit.

These battles foreshadowed the future of relations between labor and capital for the next hundred years, the “class struggle” that would embroil Europe’s major industrial cities and perplex politicians and intellectuals right down to our own day. It also foreshadowed its end. Glasgow’s workers did not set off a revolution of the proletariat because that was not what they wanted. In the end, early Scottish unions such as the Operative Turners Association and the Glasgow Cotton Spinners Association simply wanted a decent living, with a higher wage but also a sense of individual dignity and independence. In other words, like Scots everywhere, they wanted to be part of progress, not head it off at the pass.

This working-class challenge required a middle-class response. It came in two forms.

David Dale was a self-taught industrial entrepreneur who rose from weaver’s apprentice to branch manager of the Royal Bank of Glasgow and founding member of Glasgow’s Chamber of Commerce. In 1786 he set up a cotton mill at New Lanark, in partnership with the English inventor of the spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright. Deeply religious and personally scrupulous, Dale wanted the factory to be a model of its kind. His employees put in an “easy” schedule of only eleven hours a day, with a two-hour break for dinner, and had free housing. By 1800, New Lanark employed more hands than any factory in the world, two-thirds of whom were women and children recruited from local orphanages. Dale gave them clothes, including a Sunday suit, schooling, and a wholesome diet of porridge and milk, potatoes and barley bread, with beef and cheese. A visitor said, “[I]f I was tempted to envy any of my fellow creatures it would be men such as . . . Mr. Dale for the good they have done to mankind.”

Dale’s son-in-law, an English industrialist named Robert Owen, took over that same year. Owen was determined not just to maintain Dale’s magnanimity, but to expand it. He wanted to turn New Lanark into
A New Kind of Society,
as he titled his first book, in which the character of man, debased by the greed of commercial society, would be elevated and transformed by Owen’s orderly but benevolent regime. It became the first secular utopian community, and a new political system—socialism—was born.

In 1824 Owen moved his utopian dreams to America. In New Harmony, Indiana, he eventually found a home for his experiment in abolishing private property. It never worked out quite as well as Owen had imagined; the residents quarreled over who got what and refused to work, and after only three years New Harmony had to be abandoned. It turned out Lord Kames’s basic law of human motivations—“Man is designed by nature to appropriate”—was more durable than Owen’s belief, or that of subsequent generations of socialists, that man should be made to share.

The other type of response proved more long-lasting. Scottish middle-class liberalism learned to extend the benefits of civilization to those it had left behind. Liberal lawyers such as Francis Jeffrey and Henry Cockburn volunteered to defend labor leaders and radicals in the great sedition trials of 1817. The Scottish Reform Act of 1832 broke the back of the old Dundas patronage system by extending the franchise and giving the vote to Scottish cities. It set in motion events and trends that would ultimately bring the vote to working-class Scots and heal old wounds. Political change did not come as quickly or with as wide a reach as in England, but by 1868, fully two-thirds of Glasgow’s electorate was working class. They and their middle-class employers cast their votes together for a Liberal Party that totally dominated Scottish politics for the next fifty years. During the second half of the nineteenth century, historian Thomas Devine has stated, “Liberal values represented Scottish values.”