Making things

Watt's steam engine

James Watt didn't like the system. As a young man in 18th century Scotland, he'd always wanted to start his own workshop to make and sell instruments. James was a genius with his hands, and as good a craftsman as any who has ever lived, but the Guild system refused to allow him access until he completed a seven-year apprenticeship. But he was already 20 and better than any of them. "Sorry Jamie boy, thir's the laws o' it."

A word about the guild system. Before the industrial revolution, everything was handmade in Europe. There were guilds for every single item: furniture, textiles, tools, instruments, and just about anything a middle-through-enlightenment-ages European would need. Because skills varied widely among craftsmen, guilds were established with standardized methods to ensure people could trust the products they bought. And people would go to these craftsmen's shops and buy whatever they needed. By Watt's time, the guild system was the reason Europe was so advanced compared to the rest of the world and had superior instruments, weapons, and economies.

Because he was an outsider, James got a job at the University of Glasgow as a mathematical instrument maker. Not as good as his own place, but it was something. There, he would make acquaintance with some of the smartest men in the world, including one, Adam Smith. Economists know him. But he'd be particularly close friends with Dr. Joseph Black, discoverer of latent heat.

James Watt was always interested in science, and there, he could talk over ideas as he made them. One oddity at the time was the Newcomen steam engine; it was an impractical but fascinating oddity. James Watt, working with Joseph Black, had an idea. Using the newest scientific ideas of latent heat, he could make a practical steam engine. And that device, he felt, could change the world.

The steam engine could convert heat into useful mechanical energy that could lift things, build things, and, most importantly, change things forever. It democratized, for the first time ever, physical power. And machines run on physical power.

A word on machines. A machine is any device that uses energy to perform work. Throughout human history, we've used machines to save energy, starting with the lever, the principle of which was formalized by the divine Archimedes, starting a long tradition of science and machinery being closely linked. Now, by James' time, the Enlightenment had come along, and the scientific knowledge given to us by Newton and his fellows created countless opportunities for mechanical miracles.

But go back to the definition of machine. Energy's in there. And we didn't really have a reliable way to produce energy to match mechanical capacity. Beasts of burden, water power, and wind power. Barely anything, really. So, energy was the bottleneck, limiting machines.

You see, what the guild systems were was a way for master craftsmen to multiply themselves. But very often, there was a lack of very good craftsmen, and because there weren't that many people who could make good things, there weren't that many good things. The average product was shitty in the guild days. Through automation, machines could fix this, as a machine could be made to do any repeatable process. And most of making things is a repeatable process.

Early on, James Watt experienced this problem. He couldn't find that many craftsmen as good as him to make his steam engines. The precision, painstaking effort, and the will to make it. So for the first few decades, James Watt couldn't make that much money because there weren't a lot of good steam engines to sell.

But his own invention would make it possible for any master craftsman to multiply himself indefinitely. Because energy was democratized now, a master craftsman could craft a system of creation using machinery, which is a lever for their own unique brain. A person could make a machine to do a job, any job.

But each machine was more than that. It was the physical manifestation of its inventor's thinking process. Its very design is such that it can carry out something. For most of human history, other humans provided the energy for simple machines like hammers. That's why Watt's engine was so genius; the energy came from elsewhere, and it was more than enough.

And since Britain had embraced James Watt the most, the revolution happened there. And Britain had exactly what it took to take over the world. They would just outbuild you. Make more guns and ships, and so the balance shifted to the favor of that little island first.

But there was a problem as the industrial revolution was happening. The guilds. The average craftsmen, whose jobs were just to multiply the work of master craftsmen, were left without a job. In Britain, you got Ned Ludd and his group, who destroyed and resisted machinery. The old system will always fight the new.

Now, we go across the Atlantic to England's old colony, America. And they had been trying to build a guild system for ages. They were tired of being the place that just produced raw materials from slave labor. America was largely agrarian, plus mining and possibly whaling. But America knew it needed to learn how to make things. But setting up a guild system would be too hard. It took Europe five hundred years to set up theirs. And as we saw earlier, guilds weren't exactly pro-freedom, which would be a problem for the land of the free. Add the fact that guild systems can only work in dense cities; America was too vast, and their population too spread around for that to work that well.

Then Watt's steam engine came along. And now, all of a sudden, you didn't need a guild system. You could just buy some machinery, set it up, and start cranking out product. And America had a good, large population and lots of natural resources. Thanks to the steam engine, railways could transport materials all around the states cheaply (ever wondered what "choo-choo" was) to industries for the products to be made by people who didn't need seven years to train. All of a sudden, America's natural disadvantages became advantages.

Let me reiterate here for a minute. The steam engine democratized the skills the guilds had kept so jealously. If you were good at making something in Enlightenment Europe, they literally wouldn't let you leave. But a machine is expertise incarnate. So Europe could keep its experts.

This is what happened when physical energy was democratized. Anyone could make a physical good. And the lay craftsman was cut out, while the master craftsman became exponentially more valuable.

Now, readers, I would like to leave you with one point. All that happened when physical energy was democratized. Imagine what's going to happen when intellectual energy is?