Drought, Not Lack of ‘Working Rivers’, May Have Helped Spur Transition to
Steam Power in Britain’s Industrial Revolution
Denver, Colo., USA: Britain’s transition from water power to coal-based
steam power set the stage for the 19th century Industrial Revolution, which
transformed much of Europe and North America into predominantly urban and
industrialized societies. One long-held argument for this move “away from
the water” has been that Britain no longer had sufficient water resources
to satisfy the increasing power demands of its textile mills.
Now new research to be presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of The
Geological Society of America indicates that the potential stream power of
only a few English river basins had been fully tapped by the mid-19th
century. Instead, historical precipitation records suggest that low stream
flows caused by periodic drought may have played a much more important role
in the country’s shift toward steam power.
“The causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution have remained a
hot topic of scholarly debate since the term was popularized in the 1880s,”
says Tara Jonell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow’s
School of Geographical and Earth Sciences. “Most of the literature has
focused on the role of steam power driving the Industrial Revolution, but
our team has found further evidence supporting previous scholarship arguing
that water provided most of the power during the revolution’s first four to
six decades.”
The team, which includes principal investigators Adam Lucas and the late
Paul Bishop, also found indications that Scotland continued using water
power longer than England did. This is significant, says Jonell, because
the prevailing narrative has been that the British textile industry largely
abandoned water power either because steam power became cheaper, or because
existing water resources had been exhausted. “We have found that neither of
these claims is credible,” Jonell says.
Mapping the transition
Bishop and Lucas initiated this project after determining that almost no
attention had been paid to the roles that climate and physical geography
played in Britain’s transition to steam power. Only one previous study from
1983 had attempted to evaluate this historic change based on real-world
observations and cost analysis. But those results relied on modern rainfall
records and were only generated at the scale of individual river basins, so
Bishop and Lucas sought to revisit historical water power.
To generate national-scale historical power potential maps, the researchers
adjusted topographic datasets with “true-to-life” stream geometries and
combined these with precipitation and evaporation grid datasets calibrated
by historical rain-gauge measurements. Because the researchers’ period of
focus is from 1770–1890, they also assembled a database to correct for
modern infrastructure, including thousands of dams, weirs, crossing
bridges, and aqueducts. These create artificially steep and powerful
regions of the river that would lead to errors that would skew the data and
therefore must be corrected for, according to Jonell. The team then
compared the potential power of English and Scottish river basins with
their reported demands to estimate the degree to which each basin’s water
resources were utilized during that 120-year period.
The results indicate that by about 1838, many English and Scottish basins
remained underutilized, and that water demand far exceeded water
availability only in the most crowded industrial water corridors. The team
also found that under average hydrological conditions, Scotland provided
more power potential than northern England. “Our findings to date
demonstrate a much more nuanced regionality to power availability and
utilization across Great Britain than traditional Industrial Revolution
narratives suggest,” says Jonell.
Drought as a driver
Because the only prior study to look at water-power potential used modern
(post-1960s) precipitation, the researchers also collated historical
moisture grid datasets and re-calculated the results to see how the older
data would affect their estimates for power. They found that northern
England and Scotland may have experienced periods of low river flow,
suggesting that episodic drought may have been an important yet
underestimated natural driver in the dynamic evolution “away from the
water.”
“We know from archival evidence, including testimony to a variety of
parliamentary inquiries in the early 1800s, that seasonal fluctuations in
rainfall created real problems for manufacturers who used waterpower,” says
Peter Jones, a University of Glasgow postdoctoral researcher working on the
social and environmental history of the project. “Lack of water in summer
and floods in fall or winter meant that many mills experienced significant
periods of reduced work, and in the worst years they could effectively
close mills for days, or even weeks, at a time.”
This, explains Jones, was nothing new: It was something that corn (grain)
millers had faced since at least the Middle Ages. But as water power was
applied to increasingly larger manufacturing operations from the 1770s
onward, the problem became acute enough that it could threaten a business’s
viability. “It is only a short step to recognizing that in some locations,
elevated or extended periods of drought could threaten entire sectors of
water-powered industry,” Jones says.
By mapping out when, how, and why the transition from water to steam power
occurred in different regions for different textiles, the researchers hope
to demonstrate that renewable forms of energy were far more important to
the Industrial Revolution than has hitherto been acknowledged, and that
Scotland was neck-and-neck with England in terms of technology and
production into the 19th century. “Both findings will hopefully provide
correctives to the common perceptions that England was the first, only, and
foremost powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, and that reliance on
renewable forms of energy in the early modern period was an obstacle
to—rather than an enabler of—technological development and economic
growth,” conclude Lucas and Jonell.
Away from the Water: Tracking the Legacy of Landscape and Climate in
Early Industrial British Textile Mills
Tara Jonell, University of Glasgow,
Tara.Jonell@glasgow.ac.uk
Tuesday, 11 Oct., 2:45 p.m.:
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2022AM/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/381539
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