Yet all of that changed over the next 150 years. Increasingly eficient engines powered by fossil fuels untied economic production from organic labour and unreliable forms of renewable energy. The general-purpose technology on which this was based was steam power, the first commercial application of which was Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 atmospheric engine. And yet it wasn’t until the closing decades of the century that capturing the power of steam proved transformational. While the steam engine was not a new creation, an improved version designed by James Watt turned it from a tool of marginal use to the focal point of what became the Industrial Revolution. Just as with agriculture twelve thousand years earlier, this was a shift so big that there was no reverse gear.
The consequences of all of this were extraordinary. The combination of steam power and fossil fuels re-oriented production around the factory system, and allowed the creation of national and global infrastructures through railway networks and ocean-going steamships. In 1830, less than two decades after the railway locomotive had been designed, the world’s first intercity route opened between Liverpool and Manchester. Another twenty years after that, Great Britain was home to over 7,000 miles of railway lines used by more than 48 million people annually.
Although Britain was at the forefront of such change, such trends rapidly went global. Thus while it was conceivable in 1873 that Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, could circumnavigate the world in under three months, the same journey took more than a year only a generation earlier. This unprecedented contraction of space and time would have particularly profound implications for the world’s rising economic superpower, the United States. In 1847, the journey from New York to Chicago took at least three weeks by stagecoach. A decade later, the same trip by rail took three days.
The Three Disruptions
33