Electricity, oil and mass production
See how daily life changed more in two generations after 1880 than in the previous two thousand years, and learn why a truly important technology looks disappointing for its first twenty years.
BEFORE
What steam could not do
Steam from lesson 8 was enormously powerful and very awkward. It had to be made where it was used, it came in one large lump, and the power reached machines through spinning shafts and leather belts running the length of the ceiling. That dictated the whole building: several floors, machines crammed near the shafts, dark, noisy and dangerous.
And outside the factory, steam changed almost nothing. Light was still a flame. Water still came in a bucket. A message still went by wire or by hand. A field was still ploughed by an animal.
WHAT CHANGED
Three things, arriving together
Electricity: Edison opened a central power station in New York in 1882, and within twenty years cities were being wired. The internal combustion engine: Benz patented a petrol vehicle in 1886, and oil became an energy source you could carry with you. Mass production: interchangeable parts, worked out earlier in gun making, met the moving assembly line at Ford in 1913.
They fed each other. Electric motors made precise machine tools easier, precise tools made interchangeable parts possible, interchangeable parts made cars cheap, and cheap cars created a huge market for oil.
Check yourself
Negar asks what makes electricity so much more useful than steam, since both of them just turn machines. Which answer captures it best?
- It can be sent down a wire and drawn off in any size, from a lamp to a steel mill
- Electricity was an entirely new form of energy that had never existed in the world before
- Electricity is clean where it is used, and that cleanliness was the main gain of all
- Electricity is cheaper than coal, so a factory could simply afford to use more of it
Show the answer
It can be sent down a wire and drawn off in any size, from a lamp to a steel mill
Yes. Steam must be made where it is used and arrives as one large lump that you divide with belts. Electricity is divisible and transmissible: generate it at a waterfall or a coal station, send it fifty kilometres, and take exactly as much as you need.
General purpose technology
Not a product but a new input that nearly every industry ends up rebuilding itself around. Steam, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the computer are the standard examples. Two features come with the label: they spread into everything, and their payoff arrives late.
Keep this one. In lesson 12 you will use it to judge whether something happening now is a real turning point or a passing enthusiasm.
1890s A mill buys an electric motor.
It sits where the steam engine sat.
The shafts and belts overhead stay exactly as they were.
Output per worker: barely moves.
1910s A new plant. One small motor inside each machine.
No shafts, so machines are placed in the order of the work.
One storey, wide aisles, daylight, an overhead crane.
Output per worker: transformed.Same technology, twenty years apart, completely different results.This is one of the best-documented surprises in economic history. The motor was never the hard part. What took a generation was working out that the building, the layout and the jobs all had to be redesigned around it.
Check yourself
A factory that swaps its steam engine for an electric motor should expect output per worker to jump straight away.
Show the answer
False
False. Early electrified factories kept the old layout, with one big motor where the engine had been, still driving everything from shafts and belts. The gain came twenty or thirty years later, once engineers put a small motor in each machine, tore out the shafts and laid the building out by workflow. New technology pays when you rearrange around it, not when you buy it. Hold on to this: it is the single most useful idea in this lesson.
MASS PRODUCTION
The work comes to the worker
Two ideas together. Interchangeable parts: make every component to a tolerance so tight that any one fits any car, so assembly becomes fitting rather than filing and a repair means taking a spare from a box. The moving line: instead of workers walking to a stationary car, the car moves past them and each does one short task over and over.
At Ford in 1913, assembling a chassis fell from around twelve hours to around one and a half. The Model T's price dropped to roughly a third of what it had been. It also became work so monotonous that men quit constantly, which is why Ford doubled the wage to five dollars a day in 1914.
Check yourself
Match each change to what it made possible
Show the answer
- A small motor inside each machine → A factory laid out by the order of the work
- Interchangeable parts → A repair means taking a spare out of a box
- The moving assembly line → The work arrives at the worker, at its own pace
- A petrol engine in a vehicle → Energy you carry to a field or a road
- Fertiliser made from the air, 1913 → Harvests no longer capped by natural nitrogen
What it did to ordinary days
- Light. A switch on the wall ended the rule that useful hours stop at sunset, and it was far safer than an open flame indoors.
- Water and waste. Piped water, sewers and the treatment of drinking water from around 1900 cut child deaths more than any single medicine did.
- Housework. Fetching water, hauling fuel and washing by hand had eaten most of a woman's day. Taps, stoves and electric washing machines took hours out of it, which is one of the most underrated changes in this course.
- Distance. Refrigerated ships and rail brought meat and fruit from other continents. Trams and then cars meant you could live away from where you worked.
- Food. From 1913 a process for making fertiliser from the nitrogen in air began to lift harvests everywhere. Around half the world's food is now grown with it.
Check yourself
Energy sent, or energy carried?
- A tram running under overhead lines
- A lorry crossing a desert
- A village lamp connected to the grid
- A tractor ploughing a distant field
- A small motor inside a lathe
- An aeroplane in flight
Show the answer
Sent down a wire: A tram running under overhead lines, A village lamp connected to the grid, A small motor inside a lathe
Carried in a tank: A lorry crossing a desert, A tractor ploughing a distant field, An aeroplane in flight
The balance sheet
What it gave
Longer and healthier lives, above all for children. Hours of household labour handed back, mostly to women. Manufactured goods within reach of an ordinary wage for the first time in history. And the ability to move, speak and ship across distances that had defeated every earlier generation.
What it cost
Work chopped into fragments and paced by a machine. A new chemical industry fouling air and water. Cities rebuilt around the car across the century. And industry at a scale that could now arm, feed and move millions of soldiers, which is exactly where lesson 11 begins.
Check yourself
A country builds a national power grid and sees almost no change in output for fifteen years. Farhad concludes the money was wasted. What is the better reading?
- He is right: a technology that has not paid off in fifteen years never will
- Output figures cannot capture electricity at all, so the question has no answer
- The grid must have been badly built, because a good one pays for itself immediately
- General purpose technologies pay late, once industry is rebuilt around them
Show the answer
General purpose technologies pay late, once industry is rebuilt around them
Yes. That is what happened to electrified factories in the 1890s, and it happened again with office computers in the 1980s. Buying the technology is the easy part; redesigning the work around it takes a generation.
Lesson recap
- Steam was powerful but fixed, lumpy and confined to the factory; it barely touched the home.
- Electricity can be sent down a wire and drawn off in any size; oil is energy you can carry; mass production made the results cheap.
- A general purpose technology spreads into everything and pays late, because the world has to be rearranged around it first.
- In two generations ordinary life gained light, clean water, hours of freed household time, refrigeration, distance and cheap goods.
- It also produced fragmented work, new pollution, and an industrial scale that made the wars of lesson 11 possible.