The beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution
When things change it makes then good sense to refer to old times as OLD and to new times as NEW. It catches the spirit of the change. An example is the Old Kingdom of Egypt turning into the New Kingdom after a while, or another example is the Old Testament followed by the New Testament. Or take the bridges in Paris. There is a Pont Neuf, although I cannot remember a Pont Vieux. A more refined measure of the passage of time is to attach increasing numbers to events when major changes occur. Dynasties and Kings seem to qualify. Egypt had lots of dynasties starting with the First and ending up with the Thirty second. France had lots of Kings. Considering only the Louis variety that would already add up to XVIII. On the cultural and religious front an obscure Russian monk in the sixteenth century numbered their centres as “the first Rome was Rome, the Second Rome was Constantinople, the third Rome is Moscow, and there will not be a fourth Rome.”
I would not like to guess whether there will be a Fourth Rome (Beijing?) or a fifth one (Delhi?) but otherwise I regard number five as quite popular. I have come across the Fifth Column, the Fifth Republic, the Fifth Avenue and the Fifth Amendment. French revolutions are not numbered although they had five of them between 1789 and 1871. Russian revolutions are not numbered either. They could have called the 1905 Revolution the first one, the February Revolution the second one, and the October Revolution the third one. Instead they decided to drop the third one altogether. According to the last thing I heard, it is called nowadays the October turning-point (perevarot).
A careful investigation would show that many things that could be numbered remain unnumbered. It is then odd to notice that Industrial Revolutions are numbered. There is a First Industrial Revolution upon which there is good agreement among experts, and there is a Second one, a Third one, a Fourth one and not long ago I discovered a Fifth Industrial Revolution on the Internet. Needless to say there is no longer any consensus when these revolutions started, when they ended and why the changes were so revolutionary that a new number had to be attached.
I want to talk in any detail only about the Second Industrial Revolution, but perhaps I should mention the First one first, not its effect on society, a controversial subject, but just the technological innovations about which a consensus does exist. A brief summary is as follows: The productivity of the textile industry leapt forward by the invention of the power loom and the spinning mule, output of coalmining rapidly increased, transport was revolutionised by the railways, power to run machinery was provided by the steam engine. In one sentence: much of muscle power was replaced by machine power.
Many people define the Second Industrial Revolution by the development of new industries, oil, steel and electricity being the more important ones. I very much disagree with this numbering scheme. Why to attach a higher number when essentially the same trend continues. The rate of technological advance might have accelerated but nonetheless they were just further developments of the same kind. It was evolution not revolution. To my mind the Second Industrial Revolution started with the submarine cable between England and the US, and I claim that we are still in the midst of that revolution. To support this thesis I shall have to immerse myself in the history of that cable.
The first telegraph line in England was opened in 1839. A telegraph cable under the Channel connecting France to Britain was successful at the second attempt in 1850, a mere 11 years later. The next step was to establish telegraph communications with the United Sates. It was a time when people were willing to take risks. “Well, if the cable under the Channel works then surely it would work under the Atlantic as well. After all the only difference is that the US is a little further away.” The first attempt was made in 1857. It failed because the cable broke. The second attempt a year later was successful. It worked. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged greetings. Unfortunately, after 732 messages the line stopped working. The third attempt in 1865 failed again. (The delay of seven years between the second and third attempt was caused partly by an investigation trying to find out what went wrong and why, but mainly because between 1861 and 1865 the Americans were otherwise engaged. They fought their Civil War.
There were lots of problems with the Atlantic telegraph. Many of them were traditional engineering problems, e.g. the paying-out apparatus that released the cable had to be flexible enough so that the extra stress resulting from the movement of the ship did not break the cable. And even problems like the safe storage of that length of cable in a ship were far from trivial. However there was considerable optimism that all these problems could be solved. Charles Bright, the engineer-in-charge of the whole enterprise was enthusiastic and highly optimistic. The mechanical problems were daunting but familiar. The electrical problems were entirely new and their seriousness was hardly appreciated at the beginning. It turned out that the current at the receiving end differed drastically from the current at the transmitting end. It spread out. A nice, well defined pulse at the transmitting end turned into an ill-defined long-drawn-out current at the receiving end. It was difficult to see where that distorted pulse started and where it ended. The unfortunate fact was that the pulse that arrived was much longer than the pulse sent. It slowed down communications. If the rate of transmission was below six words per minute, the Atlantic cable was no longer an economic proposition. Problems abounded: mechanical, electrical, financial.
The traditional view was to build the cable, wind it on lots of big coils, put the transmitting apparatus at one end, the receiving apparatus at the other end and send signals along the whole length of the cable. If the rate of transmission of the signals is fast enough, the cable is OK, if the rate of transmission is not high enough then the cable must be modified. Surely, by experimentation alone one would eventually arrive at the correct design. This is how it used to be but in that specific case this was not a possibility. The cable had to be built before it could be measured. Each experiment would have cost close to hundred thousand pounds.
E. O. W. Whitehouse, the man in charge of the electrical problems had an ingenious idea. There were many cables in existence. He connected them together achieving a very long cable although still far from the length required for the Atlantic cable. He was happy that on the basis of these experiments he would be able to design the transatlantic cable. And that’s when William Thomson (elevated to the peerage later as Lord Kelvin) came into the picture. He was one of the Directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. One might be permitted to think that he was elected on the grounds of his superior knowledge of things electrical. After all he was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. However, this assumption would not be borne out by the facts. He was elected by the Scottish shareholders as an eminent man who would be able to represent their interests on the Board.
Did the Board of Directors want to involve Thomson in the electrical problems of the cable? Sometimes they grudgingly agreed to consult him but on the whole they did not think that Thomson’s science was relevant to the working of the cable. As it happened Thomson followed the progress of both attempts in 1857 and 1858, sailing with the Agamemnon, but not in an official capacity. In the words of S. M. Thomson, his early biographer “The work which he undertook for it was enormous; the sacrifices he made for it were great, the pecuniary reward was ridiculously small.”
So what did Thomson do next? He took ink to paper and filled the paper with equations. It was high mathematics. Apart from half-a-dozen kindred souls nobody would have understood them in Britain. He set up what we would nowadays call a mathematical model. A model is a simplified version of the real thing. You need some skill to realise what matters and what does not. Thomson needed to take into account the diameters of the wires, the kind of insulation used, the thickness of the insulation, the distance between the two wires in the cable. Then he sat down and solved the problem of pulse propagation, how it deteriorates as it moves along the cable, how the retardation (the time needed to wait before the next pulse could be sent) depends on the properties of the cable. He could not entertain any hope that his calculations will be understood, so he just offered them a law that came out of the calculations and was simple enough for the layman to understand. It became known as the law of squares. It meant that the retardation increased with the square of the length of the cable. If a certain cable with a given length would cause a retardation of one hundredth of a second then a cable ten times as long would give a retardation hundred times as large, i.e. one second.
Whitehouse had little faith in the calculations of an academic. He gave actually a lecture for the British Association Meeting at Cheltenham entitled “The law of the squares-is it applicable or not to the transmission of signals in submarine circuits?” He concluded:
“I believe nature knows no such application of that law and I can only regard it as a fiction of the schools, a forced and violent adaptation of a principle in Physics, good and true under other circumstances, but misapplied here.”
Whitehouse felt that he should not go too far in his criticism. The Professor’s calculations were no doubt correct-somewhere where the principles of Physics played a role- but not in this practical problem. The expression, a fiction of the schools, gave away what he thought of Thomson’s theory.
With some reluctance, Thomson’s arguments were eventually accepted. He approved the final design. The cable was built and laid. It worked. The fourth attempt succeeded. It was a momentous time in history although most history books keep silent about the event. For the first time ever, sophisticated mathematics entered the realm of industrial design. Victory was not immediate. Two decades later when the same problem arose with telephone lines, the initial reaction of experts was once more that higher mathematics was irrelevant in solving the problem. Not until Pupin’s patent (based on his calculations without any experimental support) had to be bought by American Telephone and Telegraph (still exists as AT&T) for the sum of $185,000. After that, the scribbling of mathematicians became respectable. All major projects, industrial or otherwise, needed the assistance or possibly the lead of mathematicians. An example when a mathematician was in charge of a major project, was the breaking of Enigma, the secret German code, in the second world war.
I have said that we are still in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution. Mathematicians are Kings. Technological advance is faster than ever. The Third Industrial Revolution is coming. When? Couple of decades? Three decades? Its hallmark will be that all production, all maintenance work, all administration, all transport will be done by robots, and in the unlikely case of a robot malfunctioning, other robots will hurry to help him/her/it to regain his/her/its former health. That will be a new age signifying the end of work. It will enable mankind to devote more time to realising their innermost desire: to kill their fellow human beings.
