prescottyork
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Model of Newcomen Steam Engine at the University of Glasgow repaired by James Watt in 1765.
A plaything to start with, but ‘everything became science in his hands’
Not immediately disruptive.
Partnership with Boulton and move to Birmingham was key.
Development of Sheffield as a steel city
• 1740: Huntsman’s first experiments with crucible steel• 1770: Huntsman’s process begins to be used by other
Sheffield cutlers• 1786: steam power first used to power hammers in the city • 1851: less than a quarter of city’s workers in heavy industries• 1859: Bessemer opens his new steelworks in Sheffield
because he wanted to shock the conservative steelmakers there
• 1891: two thirds of city’s workers in heavy industries• The creation of a ‘steel city’ took over 150 years – perhaps
even longer
Sidney Pollard on the Industrial Revolution in Sheffield and Birmingham
“a visitor to the metalworking areas of Birmingham or Sheffield in the mid nineteenth-century would have found little to distinguish them superficially from the same industries a hundred years earlier. The men worked as independent sub-contractors in their own or rented workshops using their own or hired equipment … These industries .. were still waiting for their Industrial Revolution”
Changes to Environment
• Wheels powered by steam• New gadgets available to speed up tasks such as
stamping and cutting• Workshop lit by gas and has water supply• Railways improve distribution• Cheap advertising increases demand• Is much of what we are seeing similar to the
experience of the ‘small mester’ in the industrial revolution?
I K Brunel on the myth of disruption
I believe that the most useful and novel inventions and improvements of the present day are mere progressive steps in a highly wrought and highly advanced system, suggested by, and dependent on, other previous steps, their whole value and the means of their application probably dependent on the success of some or many other inventions, some old, some new…In most cases they result from a demand which circumstances happen to create. Most good things are being thought of by many persons at the same time.
Christine McLeod, Heroes of Invention, p. 267
The Industrial Revolution was by no means as ‘transformative’ as the Olympic opening ceremony might suggest:• Impact often very localised and patchy• Micro invention just as important as large-scale
innovation• Social as important as technical: Lunar Society• Economic growth hard to show: Crafts suggests
annual economic growth of just 2%• Changes in communication, advertising, access to
markets as important as chane in manufacturing
What of Other Transformations?
“the Gutenberg Bible led to religious reformation while the Web appears to be leading towards social and economic reformation. But the Digital Industrial revolution, because of the issues and phenomena surrounding the Web and its interactions with society, is occurring at lightning speed with profound impacts on society, the economy, politics, and more”.
Michael Brodie, Verizon
When you start to unpick the nature of the historical discipline, it is tied up with the technologies of the printed page and the book in ways that are powerful and determining. Our footnotes, our post-Rankean cross referencing and practises of textual analysis are embedded within the technology of the book, and its library.
if, as historians, we are to avoid going the way of the book, we need to separate out what we think history is designed to achieve, and to create a scholarly technology that delivers it
Tim Hitchcock, ‘Academic History Writing and its Disconnects’, Digital Humanities Now, 31 January 2012
• Does the digital revolution (after some decades) amount to no more than pdfs of journal articles?
• Is linking library, archive, museum catalogues enough?
• Do digital images offer that much more than microfilm?
• Is being able to work faster, more accurately and in different places enough?
• Is that truly transformative?
http://dhpoco.org/blog/2013/05/10/open-thread-the-digital-humanities-as-a-historical-refuge-from-raceclassgendersexualitydisability/
This is evidently a new type of scholarly communication, but does it change the way we approach scholarship?
Imaging of the Beowulf manuscript using fibre optic backlighting to reveal letters and words concealed by nineteenth-century conservation work
Tinkering with conjectural restorations: a new type of scholarly activity?
Visualisation by Mitchell Whitelaw of the series structure of a large archive:
visiblearchive.blogspot.co.uk
Slide from Nicole Coleman and Erica Savig, Common Design Strategies for Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell Motility in Biology
New types of cross-over – new types of engagement and shared modelling
Data objects developed by Ian Gwallt, Sheffield Hallam University: http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/projects/data-objects
• The process of transformation is more complex and incremental than we often think
• It can be patchy in its effect and shape
• Watt and the steam kettle is not a safe paradigm for understanding processes of transformation
• We may need to build new dialogues and make new connections particularly through the arts
• The revolutionary and truly transformative may take time to percolate through
