Wealth

Part 2 - PRODUCTIVITY

 3002 PRODUCTIVITY 250313   

Wealth is created when goods and services are produced more efficiently and are thus cheaper. Initially, the wealth goes to the producer but typically competition passes some of the wealth to customers in the form of lower prices. Lower prices attract more customers which encourages more investment and hiring to produce more goods and services. This results in economic growth, higher standards of living and more opportunities for individuals to invest in more growth.

The discoveries of stone tools and the use of fire to cook food were among the first uses of technology to improved peoples' lives. But the hunter/gather way of life was limited until the development of systematic agriculture that reliably provided more food and with much less effort. 

 Growing plants and domesticating animals required more technology like plows, spades and irrigation. The invention of the shaduf (a lever hung from a tree branch that could be pulled down, to fill a bucket, counter balanced by a weight at the other end of the lever) allowed one man to lift water (from a stream or a well to an irrigation canal) with less effort than lifting the bucket directly. 

 Farmers and metal smiths gradually devised techniques and tools that allowed them to produce more with less effort and to trade the increased output for food and goods they did not make.

The cart wheel and potter's wheel (used to make clay storage jars) were invented between 4500 and 3300 BCE.

Around this time people devised boats that were propelled by the wind, which led to windmills, while they also invented water powered mills for grinding seeds and sawing wood and stone.

And, in 1712, Thomas Newcomen produced the first power source that did not require wind, flowing water or human and animal muscle.

He built the world's the first commercially successful coal fired steam engine. And, by 1735, there were over 100 of these pumping water out of mines in Britain.

By 1800 there were about 2,000 engines in operation, made more efficient with the use of James Watt's separate steam condenser.

Watt rapidly developed high pressure steam engines providing a rotary motion (suitable for driving spinning and weaving machines) while also creating a new machine tool industry necessary to make the steam engines. These steam engines were also used to power the machine tools (metal working machines that cut or forged metal).The steam engines made it possible to site factories wherever convenient instead of near sources of water. Steam engines rapidly replaced wind and water mills for most industrial purposes by the end of the century.

Steam engine technology was also adapted to power ships and road and rail transport as well as agricultural machinery.

Meanwhile, the ancient thread spinning wheel was improved with a foot treadle drive (about 1530 CE) but, before the Industrial revolution, in Britain, it took at least five spinners to supply one weaver.

Between 1738 and 1779 several invention were combined in Samuel Crompton's spinning mule which not only produced a stronger thread but was much faster. A worker spinning 100 lb of cotton at a hand-powered spinning wheel in the 18th century needed to work for more than 50,000 hours but, by the 1790s, this amount could be spun in 300 hours by a spinning mule, and with an automatic mule it could be spun by one worker in just 135 hours. This phenomenal increase in productivity made cloth more affordable for working people but at the cost of many unemployed hand spinners.

Simple handlooms, to make cloth, predate recorded history. These raised or lowered half of the fixed warp threads to provided the space for the shuttle (carrying the weft thread) to pass between the warp threads.

The vertical loom, where the warp threads were attached to an over head bar, used to make longer pieces of cloth, was invented before 6000 BCE in Greece. Edmund Cartwright built powered driven weaving machines between 1785 and 1792 but the process only became semi-automatic in 1842.

In 1823, Richard Guest noted the improved productivity. A very good 'Hand Weaver' could weave two pieces of shirting, twenty-four yards long, per week, while a steam engine powered loom weaver could weave seven similar pieces in the same time. This significantly reduced the price of fabric so that even poor people could afford to buy new cloth.

In 1844, after 50 years of incremental innovations by many inventors, John Fisher developed the modern sewing machine. Isaac Merritt Singer build a similar machine in 1851.Early in the 19th century many of Britain's 250,000 hand weavers lost work as the automatic looms became common. 

Many spinners and clothing makers also lost jobs because of these productivity improvements. However, most quickly found work in the rapidly expanding textile industry and everyone discovered they could then afford to buy new, cheaper clothes.