The Roar of Steam — Coal That Turned the Industrial Revolution

Last time, we saw that pre-modern societies were bound by limited powers — firewood and muscle, water and wind. What broke through that invisible ceiling was the black stone sleeping underground: coal. Yet coal, merely burned, is no more than a replacement for firewood. The true revolution came when a mechanism was born that boiled water with its heat and turned the force of rising steam into the motion of a machine. With the roar of the steam engine, humankind at last gained a power that knew no fatigue and depended on neither riverside nor the whims of the wind. It was a power that would repaint the very landscape of the world.

The Black Stone Gave Heat

Coal is, in a sense, a solidified ‘past sun’ — ancient plants that transformed over long ages deep underground. Like firewood, it is a fuel that burns, but there was a decisive difference. Unlike wood, coal does not need to be waited on as it grows. Dig it out and there it is, and for the same weight it gives off far more heat than firewood. To regions that had cut down their forests and were troubled for fuel, the black stone underfoot looked like a spring of heat that would never run dry.

In Britain, coal had been used early on for heating and smithing. As the forests thinned and firewood grew hard to obtain, people came to rely on coal more and more. But the deeper the shafts were dug to mine that coal, the more a certain trouble stood in the way: groundwater. The shafts soon flooded, and unless the water was pumped out, mining could not continue. At the time, water was pumped up mainly by the strength of horses, but that could not keep up. It was precisely this pressing trouble that became the soil from which the invention of the steam engine grew.

Newcomen and Watt — Taming Steam

The pioneer known for turning the force of steam into a practical machine is Thomas Newcomen of Britain. The steam engine he is said to have built around 1712 was, indeed, a machine for draining coal mines. Burn coal to boil water, fill a cylinder with rising steam, then cool it to turn the steam back into water, and the pressure difference that arises moves a piston. That up-and-down motion drove a pump and lifted the water from the shafts. Using coal to power the very tool that dug coal — it was a reasonable mechanism, placed at the source of the fuel.

Newcomen’s engine, however, had a weakness. Each time the steam was cooled, the whole cylinder cooled with it and had to be reheated, devouring a great deal of fuel. The one who applied a hand of improvement here was the Scottish engineer James Watt. Watt assigned the task of cooling the steam to a separate vessel — a condenser — and contrived to keep the cylinder itself hot. This method, for which he obtained a patent in 1769, was credited with greatly curbing fuel consumption.

Watt and his colleagues went further, devising a mechanism that turned the piston’s reciprocating motion into rotary motion. With this double-acting engine, said to have been completed around 1782, the steam engine evolved from a tool that merely pumped water into an all-purpose power that turned the wheels of machinery round and round. This was decisive. Until then, spinning and weaving machines, relying on the force of waterwheels, could only be placed by riversides. But with a steam engine, as long as coal could be carried, a factory could be built anywhere. Power had been freed from the constraints of the land.

This liberation greatly changed the shape of society. Once there was no need to tie factories to riversides, people built them one after another near coalfields where coal could be mined, or beside ports and canals where goods could be easily carried. People gathered to where the work was; villages swelled into towns, and towns into great cities. People who had once lived scattered across the countryside were drawn into industrial cities lined with chimneys. A single machine, the steam engine, remade even people’s very way of living — where they worked and where they dwelled. The way energy is chosen decides the shape of society — this relationship would appear again and again in the later ages of oil and electricity.

The City of Smoke, and Its Shadowed Side

The steam engine did not stay within the walls of factories. The power that turned wheels was in time applied to vehicles running along rails. Richard Trevithick is reported to have run a steam locomotive in 1804, and in 1825 a railway linking Stockton and Darlington is said to have opened in Britain. People and goods came to be carried far faster and in far greater quantity than by horse or sailing ship. At sea, steamships supplemented sails left to the wind, and the world drew sharply closer. A single fuel, coal, remade both production and transport whole.

Later generations called this great transformation the Industrial Revolution. The ceiling on energy that nature had once set was broken, and humankind made, carried, and built wealth in quantities never seen before. By the power of iron and coal, civilization rushed up to a new stage. This was, without question, the side of light that energy brought.

Recall the story from last time. Pre-modern humankind managed within the range of an allowance — the power nature produced in that year: this year’s rain, this year’s wind, this year’s grown wood. Coal, however, was different. It was, so to speak, an immense savings stored in the earth over millions of years. The steam engine gave humankind the means to withdraw that savings, burn it, and turn it into power however much it liked, whenever it liked. Humankind, which had lived on an allowance, suddenly laid its hand on a vast hoard — if the essence of the Industrial Revolution were put in a single phrase, it might be expressed that way. It was because of these savings that the population grew, cities swelled, and production expanded explosively.

How to take this light and dark is no simple question even now. Without the Industrial Revolution, there would have been none of today’s abundant life, none of its medicine, none of its power to feed so many people. Yet at the same time, it is also a fact that this prosperity polluted the air and forced a heavy burden upon people and nature. To use energy in great quantity is, at the same time as gaining something, to pay something — the age of coal clearly teaches us this simple and weighty truth. Neither speaking only of the light nor blaming only the shadow, but fixing one’s gaze on both sides, should be an important attitude in tracing the history of energy.

Thus coal and the steam engine pushed humankind into the age of fossil fuels. From here, humankind began in earnest a way of life that dug up the ancient sun sleeping in the earth, burned it, and turned it into power. Yet beside the factories and railways swirling with the roar of steam, an entirely new power was quietly preparing to show itself. Soundless, giving off no smoke, and yet illuminating and transforming the world from its very foundations — the unseen power: electricity.