By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--July 3, 2023
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The occasion of a storm, especially if it brings a power outage, has always been an opportunity for reflection, at least to me.
On Thursday we had a significant weather event. A bow-shaped line of severe storms plowed left-to-right across our part of the Heartland bringing much needed rain for thirsty crops and gardens. As it arrived, tall trees in the woods bent to their upper trunks under a roaring wind and rain pelted the hard ground. Down in protected valleys and up on the more level ground, branches snapped and roots came up from the ground as big tops fell, leaving widespread power outages. As in the old song from years back, the lightning danced about. The top of a big beech fell toward a smaller one which snapped and came down on our little branch power line. Everybody down our way went dark and stayed that way all night.
This column begins on battery power for the laptop. We had our tea and coffee this Friday morning in the dark, courtesy of matches and propane to heat water. It was the same for breakfast, but with growing light outside by around 5:30. The morning chorus was delayed and then subdued.
I immediately became concerned about the comforts and conveniences bestowed upon us by the industrial revolution, particularly refrigeration at this time of year. It’s the idea of the threats “this time of year” that moved me to appreciate the concern for the tyranny of the seasons back in the olden times. But for now, off to work here and there while the line crews get started somewhere, I hope.
. . . Now it’s Saturday afternoon and the juice still has not come back on. Soon, we hope. My perspective on the past is even sharper now as we slowly slip back toward a 20th Century lifestyle. On a farm, it’s about 1935 or thereabouts.
It’s very difficult for us to really imagine a pre-industrial world. It’s why I always felt the profound truth behind Dr. Kerby’s admonition to us that we should pass this truth along to students: Things have not always been the way they are today.
It’s so much fun to teach the Industrial Revolution because it is essential for understanding our own world. But it first requires us to go back to the preindustrial era to show what life was like before it changed everything.
Movement came from wind, water, and muscle. Windmills could be used for processing food, pumping water, for sawing and sharpening. Sailing vessels used the wind for transporting goods on seas and rivers. Transportation over water was much more efficient than on land, and moving water could be used to operate mills and certain other machines. For most tasks, however, it was muscle that performed most of the work. This could mean human muscle, but as time went on, human muscle combined with working animals came to dominate work of all kinds. For thousands of years these three means were the ways work was done.
In that preindustrial world, limitations of power meant that efficiency levels were low. The way to increase output was to have more hands at the task, and thus farm families were large while farm sizes were small. Doing the work to feed a family with a few draft animals along with domesticated sheep and birds meant long hours for all. Child labor was a preindustrial given, and wages were low. Most people, 90% or more, worked the land to produce food, and the farm families were large, providing more hands to do the work. Before the industrial revolution, children were expected to do menial tasks that even a child could do alongside more skilled family members. Starting around age 14-16, women usually began marrying and bearing children according to the old cycle of pregnancy, birth, nursing, weaning, and pregnancy about every two years. If capable of bearing children in that way, it was common for women to be pregnant 15-20 times over the ages of 15-50.
Transportation was costly and difficult for preindustrial populations. Wagons were crude and handmade. Horses and oxen were slow and ate a lot. Roads were ghastly or nonexistent. Food was bulky and difficult to package and store. Transport made it difficult to raid the neighbors, too. Fernand Braudel’s insightful reminder from 16th century Europe went like this: “No barley harvest, no war.” If there was no barley harvest there would be no high-energy rations for horses. Without horses, troops could not carry enough to sustain themselves in a war. Logistics, an essential consideration in any military operation, depended on muscle, and feed for the muscle to make it possible. The baggage train makes it possible to keep going.
Similarly, famine was a preindustrial phenomenon. Because land transport was so costly and slow, crop failure in a region of any size meant starvation because large quantities of food could not be moved easily.
Sunday morning now and it’s cups of tea and coffee in the dark again.
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The motive power sources wind, water, and muscle were subject to the whims of the seasons. Without wind, mills and ships sat idle. For water mills, fall and winter brought shrinking rivers and then ice. In preindustrial areas, winter was usually a time of enforced idleness when mills were shut, ground was frozen, and canals were for skating. Animals needed to work and move in the winter depended on stored feed. Heavy work required grain for calories, but even idleness required great quantities of hay. All that hay produced great piles of dung, which meant more heavy work in the spring to spread it on fields. The tyranny of the seasons refers to the restrictions, particularly in the cold months, upon human and animal activity. Remember also the fact that from about 1300-1850 the Northern Hemisphere endured what has been called the Little Ice Age. That’s more than 500 years of bitter Winters and late Springs. Brrrrr!
Historians generally date the start of the Industrial Revolution to around 1750, and it began gradually. Advances in steam engines that made repetitive motions first saw work in mines pumping water. Also in mines the carts that ran metal wheels on metal-topped rails made for more efficient removal of ores. When steam engines became capable of moving themselves it was not much of a stretch to pull loads behind them on metal rails. Even early railroads had much smoother roads than any overland wagon.
The changes in transportation allowed movement of people and food as alternatives to famine and starvation. Steam engines mounted on ships and boats driving screws through the water allowed industrialized countries to end famine first, at least so long as government didn’t block the way. The Irish famine of the 1850s, based on a crop failure, occurred in a preindustrial country and was aided by high tariffs on foods. That famine and the courageous work of Cobden and Bright brought an end to the Corn Laws and their fatal effects on the rural Irish population. The era of real free trade began in the middle of the 19th Century and brought remarkable advances to the entire world.
Repetitive motion then transformed one trade after another. By the end of the 18th Century, industrialization began to change spinning and weaving, taking them out of garrets and attics and spreading them through vast mills running on water power, then on more reliable steam. The seasons became less tyrannical. Combined with the enclosure movement that prompted large numbers of people to migrate from farms to rapidly growing cities, industrialization provided well paying jobs at just the time when growing populations needed them most. Unskilled farm labor could work for industrial wages immediately upon arrival in burgeoning towns.
Industrialization at its heart brought a quantum boost in productivity. People kept working hard, but that work could be multiplied through the application of capital and machinery. Wages were good, output went way up, quality improved, and costs shrank all at the same time. It had the effect of a miracle, a tide that raised all boats. In time, this economic transformation allowed people to reach higher economic levels. Instead of working all their lives merely to avoid starvation, people became better off. It wrecked Marx’s idea of a rigid class structure.
So industrialization improved people’s lives and provided an upward path. It tackled and solved a myriad of problems long thought to be just a part of the human condition. It provided the wealth used to finance improvements in public health, medicine, sanitation, and housing.
Not content to use water power or steam to do all the needed work, capitalists and engineers developed even more alternate means of producing repetitive motion, such as electricity and petroleum-based fuels and lubricants like gasoline and diesel. It was John D. Rockefeller who saved the whales from extinction by producing kerosene for lamps that had previously burned whale oil. When Standard Oil incorporated, kerosene was 26 cents per gallon. When Standard Oil was prosecuted for antitrust violations, kerosene was 3 cents per gallon.
Other capitalists solved more human problems. One of the big ones was keeping things cold. The preindustrial way was to cut blocks of ice off a pond in the winter and pack it in sawdust for use in the warm weather. The industrial solution was to invent machinery that would produce cold in a chamber so ice could be made anywhere. In the process they invented commercial refrigeration so meat and produce could be transported by rail before consuming it. Combine refrigeration with electricity and fans and it isn’t far to air conditioning. Air conditioning didn’t become anything like commonplace until the end of the 1930s, and then it was first in theaters. Residential and auto air conditioning would wait until the 1950s to reach common folk.
Industrialization and industrial wages gave us the concept of leisure time for the general population. This didn’t begin to manifest itself until the middle of the 19th Century. Games played in public before large crowds of common people developed rapidly after the Civil War in the US. Ever heard of a weekend? That’s a pretty recent idea, too. Leisure time just wasn’t something that was very likely when everybody was still down on the farm hoping to avoid the next famine.
To this historian, however, one of the greatest gifts of industrialization to all of mankind was the idea of a happy childhood. No longer tied to a lifetime of manual farm labor for minimal returns, families earning industrial wages could keep their children at home for all the developmental years. At home they could be cared for, fed, and allowed to develop in a richer environment than a farm field or barn. They could be educated and pointed toward an even better future. The idea of a happy, innocent childhood with toys and healthy conditions became a dream for many where it had only been possible for the very wealthy before.
We owe nearly all of our comforts to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. They produced what people needed and wanted at prices we could pay voluntarily.
I’m reminded to be patient and humble and appreciative while we await the return of the industrial miracle to our lives. What do I miss most right now on a warm Sunday afternoon? Lights let me decide when bedtime should be. Now, as in the olden days, when it gets dark it’s time to turn in and there’s no work to be done until the sun comes up. A fan would be nice now and during the night. The water for last night’s shower felt like about 65-70 degrees. That’s not even close to warm. Without the water heater kicking on soon, there will be a trip to an inn about 30 miles away where the Industrial Revolution still holds sway.
No, things have not always been the way they are today. Even when the power’s on and everything is cool, we should not let a day go by that we don’t thank our lucky stars that we came along after the miracle of the Industrial Revolution. Grab something cold out of the fridge for me, would you? And turn that fan up, if you would. I’m getting a little warm.
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Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.