The first steam-engine
Its first use was as a stationary engine, and the purposes to which those stationary engines could be, and soon were, turned are far too many to tell. Already some previous inventions in hand-worked and foot-worked machines had greatly increased the manufacture of textile goods in England.
But now cotton and wool began to be made into thread by the steam-driven machines. By them, the thread was woven into sheets and pieces. They cut and finished metal and wood into the shapes needed for a thousand different articles of daily use—furniture, agricultural implements, pots and pans, and so forth. They made and combined and pieced together parts of new machines for the making of yet more and more useful things. They had the power to hammer out great sheets of metal, and the delicacy to make a thread of wire or a needle. They became more and more efficient and fine as experience led to improvements, but it would be true to say that even in the very early days of their development a machine which it took only one man to mind and keep in working order could do as much work as had been done by twenty men who were served only by their own hands and muscles. Thus, if we may regard the productive work accomplished as the true wealth of the nation, we find it already increased by twenty times as the result of this engine.
But it is no use producing more unless there are people who want that increased produce. And that is exactly what there were just at this moment. In spite of the wars, the population had been growing in Europe, and when they ceased, in 1815, it began to grow even faster. Besides, there was growth of humanity all the world over, and especially in America. And the end of the wars allowed the produce of one country to be freely carried across sea and exchanged for the produce of another. It was especially in British ships that the produce was carried; and this carrying trade, as it is called, was a great cause of the wealth which Britain began to make in this century.
She needed that replenishment, because it was very largely by the help of her money that the allies—especially Prussia when she was in the coalition—had been able to keep their armies in the field against France. The British were very heavily taxed in and after the Napoleonic wars even as in and after what we now call the Great War.
This Industrial Era, of which the application of steam power was the principal cause, had been in progress many years before the steam-engines were used for drawing railway trains. Perhaps 1775 may be given as the date of the first practical steam-engine in Great Britain; yet it was not till 1830 that the first steam-worked railway line was opened to the public. But once this new mode of travel was introduced it quickly superseded the old mail-coach traffic and gradually drove the coaches off the road.
Besides her carrying trade across the seas, Britain had the good fortune to find iron ore close to her coal in her North Midlands. Wherever those two were found together—the coal to heat the water into steam for the driving of the machines, and the iron as the chief material of the machines themselves and of a thousand things made by them—the conditions favoured manufacturing. So, in such places, both in England and elsewhere, there grew up the large and ever-increasing towns, as the people gathered to work together in the factories. For though the machines might do the work of twenty men, many more than twenty times the former total of work was performed within the space that each of these big towns occupied.
Hand loom and power loom