Rivers of Civilization
The Industrial Revolution
Young Hamish McRae jauntily whistled an old ditty from his homeland of Scotland as he strode off the dirt street and onto the property of the Premier Electric Light Company. He considered himself lucky. He and his wife had settled down in this growing and bustling young town of Wallaceburg, Ontario a month before he found himself work as a labourer at the new plant. He grinned and nodded – the year of our Lord, 1892, was going to be a great one! He waved at his foreman, as he jauntily jumped a few muddy puddles up to the door of the plant, and stored his belongings inside before going to the waters edge to start his shift. Already, a barge was waiting for him, the sides of its old wooden structure barely above the waterline. It seemed the waters of the Sydenham, just now glinting with the rising sun, could slip in at the slightest movement. But Hamish knew this particular old barge well. It was safe. It was seaworthy. He’d offloaded it only two weeks early, and a monthe before that, and even a month before that. As was then, it was weighed heavy with Appalachian coal from Pennsylvania. Other men were waiting and they waved and greeted Hamish as he joined them.
It was not long after when a steam whistle blew and the foreman barked his orders – same ones as yesterday, and the day before and every day the weeks before that. The men grabbed shovels and wheelbarrows and well used carts from the tool cribs and got to work, the heavy labour required to move the coal off the barge, on to cartds, then off the dock, one of many docks on the banks of the river, each busy with activity of other businesses and industry along the Sydenham River, and to the ever growing pile of coal next to the boiler house.
Hamish still looked at wonder at the boilers, whenever he got a chance to sneak a peak at the machines inside the power plant. And he did just that. Who would have thought, he mused, coal being used to make light and steam for the homes and businesses in Wallaceburg. He still didn’t quite understand how it all worked, only that it had to do with steam, turning some contraptions to make the electricity that made lights work. He was hoping soon he and the missus could save enough money to afford the wires and small glass lamps that made light. It would be nice to get rid of those smelly kerosene lamps they had now. Just a few of the rich folks had the new ones now. They disn’t have to worry about the smell of he old ones, or the risk of fire if one fell and broke. But someday….someday…wow…just imagine…
“McRae! McRae! Quit yur damned daydreamin’ and get back to work!” With a start at his foreman’s abrasive bellows, Hamish sheepishly turned his gaze from the boilers and turbines visible from the open door of the plant, and readied himself for another trip back to the barge, for another cart of coal so the great beast inside the Premier Electric Light Company could keep burning and making power.
The discovery of boiling water to make steam, and then using the pressure of that steam as it built up in a chamber or mechanism to make power – kinetic or electrical – was a game changer in society. Using wood, coal or other fuel, large amounts of water would be boiled to create steam, which was fed through pipes to spin turbines. The turbines could spin gears, and move machinery such as in sawmills, textile factories or other industry where moving parts – previously moved by people or animals – did the work. The turbines could also be used to spin magnets that rapidly spun around rapidly rotating coils of metal, like copper, thus creating electricity.
Water was not just the working fluid, such as seen in our scene with father Edmund and his grain mill, but ended up being a bridge between fire and light. Electricity would power the lights in homes, machines in factories, and with the kinetic power of water amplified by the energy of steam, would propel society into an unmatched era of industrialization and wealth.
Waterways were also a critical way to move the fuel sources for these generating plants from the source, be that coal from a mine, or timber from a forest, to the point of generation. The coal that our young Hamish would have shovelled off the barge would have most likely come from the Appalachian coal fields in Pennsylvania. It would have been loaded into larger boats, either sail powered or steam, on Lake Erie, and transited past Windsor and into Lake St. Clair, from the Detroit River. Because these ships could not navigate the Sydenham, the coal would be transferred onto barges, or smaller riverboats, perhaps at Port Lambton, then towed to Wallaceburg.
Similar scenes would be recreated in the waterways and growing towns and cities across the world. Waterways were the highways of that era, and the fusion of water and fire to make steam, was the catalyst that magnified the power of water to perform work that was not imaginable to the average person even a century before.
Understanding better the properties of water, then using human ingenuity to turn that into the practical, propelled us forward an order of magnitude.
Resources
2.) SCIplanet – Steam Power And The Industrial Revolution (1760-1840)
