The Ascent of Man (25 page)

Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy Swains,

Because the Muses never knew their pains.

O’ercome by labour and bow’d down by time,

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?

The country was a place where men worked from dawn to dark,
and the labourer lived not in the sun, but in poverty and darkness. What aids there were to lighten labour were immemorial, like the mill, which was already ancient in Chaucer’s time. The Industrial Revolution began with such machines; the millwrights were the engineers of the coming age. James Brindley of Staffordshire started his self-made career in 1733 by working at mill wheels, at the age
of seventeen, having been born poor in a village.

Brindley’s improvements were practical: to sharpen and step up the performance of the water wheel as a machine. It was the first multi-purpose machine for the new industries. Brindley worked, for example, to improve the grinding of flints, which were used in the rising pottery industry.

Yet there was a bigger movement in the air by 1750. Water
had become the engineers’ element, and men like Brindley were possessed by it. Water was gushing and fanning out all over the countryside. It was not simply a source of power, it was a new wave of movement. James Brindley was a pioneer in the art of building canals or, as it was then called, ‘navigation’. (It was because Brindley could not spell the word ‘navigator’ that workmen who dig trenches
or canals are still called ‘navvies’.)

Brindley had begun on his own account, out of interest, to survey the waterways that he travelled as he went about his engineering projects for mills and mines. The Duke of Bridgewater then got him to build a canal to carry coal from the Duke’s pits at Worsley to the rising town of Manchester. It was a prodigious design, as a letter to the Manchester Mercury
recorded in 1763.

I have lately been viewing the artificial wonders of London and natural wonders of the Peak, but none of them gave me so much pleasure as the Duke of Bridgewater’s navigation in this country. His projector, the ingenious Mr Brindley, has indeed made such improvements in this way as are truly astonishing. At Barton Bridge, he has erected a navigable canal in the air; for it is
as high as the tree-tops. Whilst I was surveying it with a mixture of wonder and delight, four barges passed me in the space of about three minutes, two of them being chained together, and dragged by two horses, who went on the terrace of the canal, whereon I durst hardly venture … to walk, as I almost trembled to behold the large River Irwell underneath me. Where Cornebrooke comes athwart the Duke’s
navigation … about a mile from Manchester, the Duke’s agents have made a wharf and are selling coals at three pence halfpenny per basket … Next summer they intend to land them in (Manchester).

Brindley went on to connect Manchester with Liverpool in an even bolder manner, and in all laid out almost four hundred miles of canals in a network all over England.

Two things are outstanding in the
creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. Like Brindley, they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities
also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.

The other outstanding feature is that the new inventions were for everyday use. The canals were arteries of communication: they were not made to carry pleasure boats, but barges. And the barges were not made to carry
luxuries, but pots and pans and bales of cloth, boxes of ribbon, and all the common things that people buy by the pennyworth. These things had been manufactured in villages which were growing into towns now, away from London; it was a country-wide trade.

Technology in England was for use, up and down the country, far from the capital. And that is exactly what technology was
not
in the dark confines
of the courts of Europe. For example, the French and the Swiss were quite as clever as the English (and much more ingenious) in making scientific playthings. But they lavished that clockwork brilliance on making toys for rich or royal patrons. The automata on which they spent years are to this day the most exquisite in the flow of movement that have ever been made. The French were the inventors
of automation: that is, of the idea of making each step in a sequence of movements control the next. Even the modern control of machines by punched cards had already been devised by Joseph Marie Jacquard about 1800, for the silk-weaving looms of Lyons, and languished in such luxury employment.

Fine skill of this kind could advance a man in France before the revolution. A watchmaker, Pierre Caron,
who invented a new watch escapement and pleased Queen Marie Antoinette, prospered at court and became Count Beaumarchais. He had musical and literary talent, too, and he later wrote a play on which Mozart based his opera
The Marriage of Figaro
. Although a comedy seems an unlikely source book of social history, the intrigues in and about the play reveal how talent fared at the courts of Europe.

At first sight
The Marriage of Figaro
looks like a French puppet play, humming with secret machinations. But the fact is that it is an early storm signal of the revolution. Beaumarchais had a fine political nose for what was cooking, and supped with a long spoon. He was employed by the royal ministers in several double-edged deals, and on their behalf in fact was involved in a secret arms deal
with the American revolutionaries to help them fight the English. The King might believe that he was playing at Machiavelli, and that he could keep such contrivances of policy for export only. But Beaumarchais was more sensitive and more astute, and could smell the revolution coming home. And the message he put into the character of Figaro, the servant, is revolutionary.

Bravo, Signor Padrone –

Now I’m beginning to understand all this mystery, and to appreciate your most generous intentions. The King appoints you Ambassador in London, I go as courier and my Susanna as confidential attachée. No, I’m hanged if she does – Figaro knows better.

Mozart’s famous aria, ‘Count, little Count, you may go dancing, but I’ll play the tune’ (
Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino…
) is a challenge. In Beaumarchais’s
words it runs:

No, my lord Count, you shan’t have her, you shan’t. Because you are a great lord, you think you’re a great genius. Nobility, wealth, honours, emoluments! They all make a man so proud! What have you done to earn
so many advantages? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more. Apart from that, you’re rather a common type.

A public debate started on the nature of wealth, and since
one needn’t own something in order to argue about it, being in fact penniless, I wrote on the value of money and interest. Immediately, I found myself looking at… the drawbridge of a prison … Printed nonsense is dangerous only in countries where its free circulation is hampered; without the right to criticise, praise and approval are worthless.

That was what was going on under the courtly pattern
of French society, as formal as the garden of the Château at Villandry.

It seems inconceivable now that the garden scene in
The Marriage of Figaro
, the aria in which Figaro dubs his master ‘Signor Contino’, little Count, should in their time have been thought revolutionary. But consider when they were written. Beaumarchais finished the play of
The Marriage of Figaro
about 1780. It took him four
years of struggle against a host of censors, above all Louis XVI himself, to get a performance. When it was performed, it was a scandal over Europe. Mozart was able to show it in Vienna by turning it into an opera. Mozart was thirty then; that was in 1786. And three years later, in 1789 – the French Revolution.

Was Louis XVI toppled from his throne and beheaded because of
The Marriage of Figaro
? Of course not. Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door. What made Napoleon call the last act of the play ‘the revolution in action’? It was Beaumarchais himself, in the person of Figaro, pointing to the Count and saying, ‘Because you are a great nobleman, you think you are a great genius. You have taken trouble with nothing,
except to be born’.

Beaumarchais represented a different aristocracy, of working talent: the watchmakers in his age, the masons in the past, the printers. What excited Mozart about the play? The revolutionary ardour, which to him was represented by the movement of Freemasons to which he belonged, and which he glorified in
The Magic Flute
. (Freemasonry was then a rising and secret society whose
undertone was anti-establishment and anti-clerical, and because Mozart was known to be a member it was difficult to get a priest to come to his deathbed in 1791.) Or think of the greatest Freemason of them all in that age, the printer Benjamin Franklin. He was American emissary in France at the Court of Louis XVI in 1784 when
The Marriage of Figaro
was first performed. And he more than anyone
else represents those forward looking, forceful, confident, thrusting, marching men who made the new age.

For one thing, Benjamin Franklin had such marvellous luck. When he went to present his credentials to the French Court in 1778, it turned out at the last moment that the wig and formal clothes were too small for him. So he boldly went in his own hair, and was instantly hailed as the child
of nature from the backwoods.

All his actions have the stamp of a man who knows his mind, and knows the words to speak it. He published an annual,
Poor Richard’s Almanack
, which is full of the raw material for future proverbs: ‘Hunger never saw bad bread.’ ‘If you want to know the value of money, try to borrow some.’ Franklin wrote of it:

In 1732 I first published my Almanac … It was continued
by me about 25 years … I endeavoured to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand that I reaped considerable profit from it; vending annually near ten thousand … scarce any neighbourhood in the province being without it. I considered it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books.

To those
who doubted the use of new inventions (the occasion was the first hydrogen balloon ascent in Paris in 1783) Franklin replied, ‘What is the use of a new-born baby?’ His character is condensed in the answer, optimistic, down to earth, pithy, and memorable enough to be used again by Michael Faraday, a greater scientist, in the next century. Franklin was alive to how things were said. He made the first
pair of bifocal spectacles for himself by sawing his lenses in half, because he could not follow French at Court unless he could watch the speaker’s expression.

Men like Franklin had a passion for rational knowledge. Looking at the mountain of neat achievements scattered through his life, the pamphlets, the cartoons, the printer’s stamps, we are struck by the spread and richness of his inventive mind. The scientific entertainment of the day was electricity. Franklin loved fun (he was a rather improper
man), yet he took electricity seriously; he recognised it as a force in nature. He proposed that lightning is electric, and in 1752 he proved it – how would a man like Franklin prove it? – by hanging a key from a kite in a thunderstorm. Being Franklin, his luck held; the experiment did not kill him, only those who copied it. Of course, he turned his experiment into a practical invention, the lightning
conductor; and made it illuminate the theory of electricity too by arguing that all electricity is of one kind and not, as was then thought, two different fluids.

There is a footnote to the invention of the lightning conductor to remind us again that social history hides in unexpected places. Franklin reasoned, rightly, that the lightning conductor would work best with a sharp end. This was disputed
by some scientists, who argued for a rounded end, and the Royal Society in England had to arbitrate. However, the argument was settled at a more primitive and elevated level: King George III, in a rage against the American revolution, fitted rounded ends to the lightning conductors on royal buildings. Political interference with science is usually tragic; it is happy to have a comic instance
that rivals the war in
Gulliver’s Travels
between ‘the two great Empires of
Lilliput
and
Blefuscu
’ that opened their breakfast egg at the sharp or the rounded end.

Franklin and his friends lived science; it was constantly in their thoughts and just as constantly in their hands. The understanding of nature to them was an intensely practical pleasure. These were men in society: Franklin was a political
man, whether he printed paper money or his endless racy pamphlets. And his politics were as downright as his experiments. He changed the florid opening of the Declaration of Independence to read with simple confidence, ‘We hold these truths to be
self-evident
, that all men are created equal’. When war between England and the American revolutionaries broke out, he wrote openly to an English politician
who had been his friend, in words charged with fire: