The Next Industrial Revolution

David Mindell is an eminent American academic and entrepreneur, and in The New Lunar Society he draws on the group of (mostly) men who forged the industrial revolution in 18th century Britain to try to write about the next industrial revolution in the 21st.

The Lunar Society, celebrated in Jenny Uglow’s fine book about them, included most of the leading industrialists in Britain at the time. They met on the full moon, because it was safer to get home when it was lighter.

The relationship between Matthew Boulton and James Watt is at the heart of the narrative, and you can see why. Watt gets most of the credit for the invention that transformed Trescothick’s engine, but he probably deserves less of it. Because Watt’s improvements were product innovation, but Boulton turned this into processinnovation. Boulton created a production system to scale up Watt’s invention.

Process innovation

Mindell argues that the US has focussed too much on product innovation (‘designed by Apple in California’) and not enough on process innovation. In practice, you need them both.

Economists get the blame for this—or specifically, an economist, in the person of Adam Smith, because his model of the division of labour and the pin-making factory seems largely to have been made up from his reading of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

Mindell points out that there were actual factories within reach of Smith, but he seems never to have felt the need to visit them to see show they worked in practice. This led to errors: pin factories that adopted the division of labour were more productive, but by a factor of two, not the factor of 240 that he claimed. And larger factories were not more productive than small ones.

This sounds like the arcana of economic history, but it matters because it illustrates a larger point that remains relevant today:

Smith’s distortion matches surprisingly well how today’s economists missed the social, political, and technological importance of manufacturing in favor of all-out globalization… Thanks to the misreadings of Smith’s descendants, economic policy in the United States enabled the decline of manufacturing, confident that the new information and service sectors would replace those jobs. [33, 34]

Multiplier effects

This matters because manufacturing has disproportionate multiplier effects—close to a factor of four, in both income and jobs, on the rest of the economy. Manufacturing also connects product innovation to process innovation: the benefits of designers working near manufacturers to solve problems create technical solutions that can often spread beyond the specific factory to the wider production ecosphere. Mindell quotes Bonvillian on China: that “produce there/innovate there” may have been more disruptive than Apple’s model of “innovate here/ produce there.”

I’m not sure that there is a definition of process innovation in the book, and this might be because the literature isn’t that definitive. But by deduction from the text, I’d say it has three main characteristics:

an ecology of manufacturing, in which innovations in one sector spill over into others;
a close and continuing relationship between design and production; and
a focus on the end to-end production system.

Innovating and inventing

This also reminded me of Peter Drucker’s distinction between invention and innovation. An innovator concerns themselves with all of the things needed to get an invention into use.

Given this, it’s not surprising that Mindel is a big fan of Matthew Boulton. Watt had the insight that by adding a condensing valve you could make the steam engine more efficient and smaller, while generating more power more consistently.

But it needed Boulton to amass the different forms of expertise to develop it first as a product and then as a category. He waited for the right time to buy the rights from Watt’s first investor to ensure he could sell at scale; he built a factory on the canal to enable delivery of raw materials and distribution of the products.

He had assembled (from Birmingham’s ‘toy’ industry, which made watches and gadgets, a workforce that could build large machines reliably to small tolerances. He and Watt developed a language that made plans precise enough for the workers to craft the machines. Boulton was also charming with customers and investors alike, as they started on the long haul of selling the product, whereas Watt was curmudgeonly.

Marketing and customers

Mindell also writes about Josiah Wedgwood admiringly, and with good reason. Wedgwood more or less created the British porcelain industry. He was a chemist, and his ‘creamware’ pottery—both affordable and of good quality—was the product of hundreds of carefully documented experiments. But he also seems curiously modern in his interest in his customers (women buying for the domestic sphere), the marketing potential of associating his products with royalty (Catherine the Great bought thousands of pieces), the way he stratified the market by price, design, and quality, in his relentless innovation, and in using china as a form of media.

As part of the campaign against slavery, for example,

he contributed in the way he knew how: by making ceramics. In 1787, he created a medallion in jasper that depicted an enslaved man, in chains, on his knees, looking upward, with the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” [xx]

He gave away thousands of these, sending them by the boxful to other abolitionist campaigners, and they became a symbol of the anti-slavery movement.

Wedgwood also has the best quote in the book. His goal, he said, was

to astonish the world all at once, for I hate piddling, you know.

Connectors

But the connectors in the Lunar Society were also important. Many of these entrepreneurs were religious dissenters, and therefore excluded from British universities. Many of them met through the ‘dissenters’ academies’. The leading one was in Warrington, where Joseph Priestley modernised the curriculum to teach through practice. William Small, who had taught Thomas Jefferson while in the United States, introduced Boulton to Watt and acted as a kind of informal secretary for the Lunar Society. There are others as well.

There are obvious lessons for Mindell to take from all of this for his dream of a modern industrial system. One is the experimentation that led to process innovation. Another is the concern for the whole industrial system, from end-to-end. Wedgwood campaigned for better roads and celebrated the coming of the canal by building a factory alongside it.

A third is the interest in areas of research and production outside of your own. Mindell also touches on the exclusion of dissenters from many forms of public life, which pushed them into manufacturing, although some of the obvious conclusions from this, which he doesn’t develop, are uncomfortable to modern sensibilities.

Industrial systems

Along the way, more or less woven through the text, he makes some notes on the nature of industry in modern society that are worth pulling together here.

It can take decades to transform a system, even when a technology “has been invented, deployed, and proven.” Some of this is down to safety and reliability issues. Mindell’s rule of thumb here is 30 years. Which means that the technologies we need to decarbonise already need to be working, somewhere. [161ff]
That industrial systems are really about material flows. He describes such systems as “large scale technological networks that provide for basic material human needs.” These are large and capital intensive. They also need stability, not disruption—precisely because they are supplying basic human needs. [47ff]
The continuing importance of repair and maintenance. Mindell draws on the work of the historian David Edgerton here, who writes in his terrific book The Shock of the Old that “maintenance and repair are the most widespread forms of technological expertise”, but are constantly overlooked. Similarly, Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russel argue that “maintenance mindset is crucial to any move towards technological sustainability.” [127ff]
There’s a ‘cult of the new’ around technologies that is harmful to innovation. This leads, he says, to a picture of technology that “is shallow, utopian, market-driven.” When technologies fail to be adopted, technological visionaries blame the rest of us. But adoption, Mindell suggests, ought to be challenging: “it is actually quite normal to reject most new technologies.” [135ff]
Silicon Valley doesn’t really understand innovation. If there’s an undertone in this book, it’s Mindell’s impatience with Californian technology ideologists. One of the findings of his MIT ‘Work of the Future’ project was that we would need more robots not less. His co-chair, David Autor, “pointed out that the demographics and other factors pointed to a shortage of workers for years to come.” [76]
Technologies always come with a politics attached to them—even when those politics are about not “interfering” with the market. But decarbonising our economies will require also reindustrialising them—and that is a political decision too. [77, 141]

Cross cutting

The last few chapters have a kind of manifesto embedded in them, which needs a broader discussion in another post, since it reads as both pragmatically mundane and wildly utopian all at once.

The New Lunar Society is a short book, and it is written in short chapters. It takes a while to tune into the rhythm of his cross-cutting between now and the 1700s, which made for a choppy start to the book, at least for this reader.

Some of his writing about the present, especially early on, has the style of a thinktank report,1 perhaps because he co-chaired the ‘Work of the Future’ project. It is worth persisting past these pages. But if you’re more interested in The Lunar Society, I’d recommend Jenny Uglow’s fabulous group biography instead.

—

A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

—

Previously Published on thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com with Creative Commons License

***