Highways and Highway Transportation

by George R. Chatburn

Later the system of crop rotation came into vogue resulting in great improvement in the fertility of the soil.

In the same author’s “Book of Husbandry,” 1534, are described farm tools and their uses. There are explanations to show where a “horse plow” is better and where an “oxen plow.” It indicates that beans, peas, wheat, barley, and oats are common crops, and that some vegetables and root-crops were coming into use. Wheat was probably sowed after plowing up a pasture or “fallowe” field, for he observes,

the greater clottes (clods) the better wheate, for the clottes kepe the wheate warm all wynter; and at march they will melte and breake and fae in many small peces, the which is a new donynge and refreshynge of the corne.

The industries and arts of transportation continued to develop: ocean craft, especially, became more numerous and more efficient. Learning and art grew in harmony as the intercourse of the peoples of the country and of the world increased.

The Industrial Stage.

—This stage of economical civilization, while brought about gradually through many years as factories and special work shops came into existence, was nevertheless greatly accelerated by the inventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The invention of the canal lock (it is a disputed question whether in Holland or in Italy) in the fourteenth century had made practicable the building of many canals throughout Europe, one of the largest across France connecting the Bay of Biscay with the Mediterranean Sea. However, the building of important commercial canals began in England with the Bridgewater Canal from Worsley to Manchester, completed in 1767. Green[7] tells us that the main roads which lasted fairly well through the middle ages had broken down under the increased production of the eighteenth century. That the new lines of trades lay along “mere country lanes”; that much of the woolen trade had to be carried on long trains of pack animals at a large cost; that transportation “in the case of heavier goods such as coal distribution was almost impracticable save along the greater rivers.” In fact coal was ordinarily referred to as “sea coal” because it was brought to most ports by water routes. The Duke of Bridgewater and a young engineer of the name of Brindley solved the problem of transportation for the time being by beginning the great network of canals which later covered England to the extent of more than 3000 miles. Too great praise cannot be given to the engineers and constructors of these canals. Brindley considered canals not as adjuncts of rivers and bays, on the contrary “rivers were only meant,” he said, “to feed canals.” He carried this canal by means of an aqueduct over the river to Manchester, thus bringing the coal to a new thriving manufacturing city. Green further says (Paragraph 1528)

To English trade the canal opened up the richest of all markets, the market of England itself. Every part of the country was practically thrown open to the manufacturer; and the impulse which was given by this facility of carriage was at once felt in a vast development of production. But such a development would have been impossible had not the discovery of this new mode of distribution been accompanied by the discovery of a new productive force. In the coal which lay beneath her soil England possessed a store of force which had hitherto remained almost useless.

Not the least were the new methods of smelting iron with coal instead of wood, which changed the whole aspect of the iron trade and which made Great Britain for many years the workshop of the world. Lead, copper, and tin were also mined and smelted by the use of coal. The great advance of the “industrial revolution” did not come until Watt’s improvements upon the steam engines of Newcomen, Cawley, and Savery, which were themselves improvements over earlier inventions of Papin, della Porta, and Worcester, made practicable the transfer of energy stored up in coal to the movement of machinery. He changed the steam engine from a clumsy, wasteful, inefficient machine into a workable apparatus little differing from the reciprocating steam engines of the present. Up until the successful operation of the turbine engine, the principal advances upon Watt’s engine were mere details, though often of great importance. For instance the boilers for the generation of steam were improved; the enlarged application of the principle of expansion, developing better cut-off mechanisms and governors, to more economical construction due to better facilities and better knowledge of materials and their properties; and to the application of the steam engine in locomotives to propel transportation cars.

Watt’s claims and specifications for patents from 1769 to 1784 cover such inventions as:

1. Methods of keeping the cylinder or steam vessel hot by covering it with wood or other slow heat-conducting materials, by surrounding it with steam or other heated bodies, and by suffering no water or other substance colder than steam to touch it.