[1] This story is told also of Boulton, Watt’s partner.  See Smile’s “Lives of Boulton and Watt,” p.1.  Newcomen had invented a rude steam engine in 1705, which in 1712 came into use to some extent for pumping water out of coal mines.  But his engine was too clumsy and too wasteful of fuel to be used by manufacturers.  Boulton and Watt built the first steam-engine works in England at Soho, a suburb of Birmingham, in 1775; but it was not until 1785 that they began to do sufficient business to make it evident that they were on their way to success.

Such was the increase of machinery driven by steam, and such were the improvements made by Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton in machinery for spinning and weaving cotton, that much distress arose among the hand spinners and hand weavers.  The price of bread was growing higher and higher, while in many districts skilled operatives working at home could not earn by their utmost efforts eight shillings a week.  They saw their hand labor supplanted by great cotton mills filled with machinery driven by “monsters of iron and fire,” which never grew weary, which subsisted on water and coal, and never asked for wages.

Led by a man named Ludd (1811), the starving workmen attacked a number of these mills, broke the machinery to pieces, and sometimes burned the buildings.  The riots were at length suppressed, and a number of the leaders executed; but a great change for the better was at hand, and improved machinery driven by steam was soon to remedy the evils it had seemingly created.  It led to an enormous demand for cotton.  This helped to stimulate cotton growing in the United States of America as well as to encourage the manufacture of cotton in Great Britain.

Up to this period the north of England had remained the poorest part of the country.  The population was sparse, ignorant, and unprosperous.  It was in the south that improvements originated.  In the reign of Henry VIII, the North fought against the dissolution of the monasteries (SS352, 357); in Elizabeth’s reign it resisted Protestantism; in that of George I it sided with the so-called “Pretender” (S535).

But steam transformed an immense area.  Factories were built, population increased, cities sprang up, and wealth grew apace.  Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Leicester, Sheffield, and Liverpool made the North a new country. (See Industrial Map of England, p.10.) Lancashire is the busiest cotton-manufacturing district in Great Britain, and the saying runs that “what Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.”  So much for James Watt’s POWER and its results.

564.  Discover of Oxygen (1774); Introduction of Gas (1815).

Notwithstanding the progress that had been made in many departments of knowledge, the science of chemistry remained almost stationary until (1774) Dr. Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen, the most abundant, as well as the most important, element in nature.