To prevent getting lost, the elevator goes directly to the safety islandNewspaper man Liu YaEast A
Intellectuals
Author:Liu Yu
Source: BBC
Coal and iron
The abundant reserves of coal and iron provided the material basis for the Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the mid-18th century, the former replacing traditional plant fuels with powerful new energy sources, and the latter preparing the most important raw materials for the production of large machines, which were linked by the invention and large-scale application of the steam engine.
Figure 1 is a work by the French-born British painter Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) entitled "Night in the Coal Valley". The term "coalbrookdale" is a literal and precise translation of the word "coalbrookdale" and is located in a hilly area where the Severn River, the longest river in the UK, flows, about 40 kilometres northwest of Birmingham. This area is rich in coal and iron reserves, and it also occupies the convenience of inland river transportation, and has become one of the earliest birthplaces of the British Industrial Revolution. The picture shows the iron being produced at night in the furnace of a local company called Coal Creek Valley: the molten iron in the center is splashed, the molten iron reflects the night sky red, and the farmhouse and horse-drawn carts carrying products and raw materials can be seen in the distance.
Fig.1 Rutherburg, Night in the Coal Valley (1801).
Now in the collection of the Science Museum in London.
Today, the smoke and fire over the Coal Creek Valley have disappeared, and the Great Iron Bridge, built in 1779, still stands between the banks of the River Severn, a symbol of the birthplace of Britain's Industrial Revolution. A few years ago, I visited the valley and found that there are many remains of mines, factories, and warehouses along the valley, most of which are now museums, and there are small railways nearby, and old-fashioned steam trains that carry visitors to the beautiful scenery of the valley.
Fig.2 The Great Iron Bridge built in 1779 (photo by the author).
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was one of the most prominent British landscape painters of the first half of the 19th century, particularly good at capturing the changes of light and color, and liked to depict the magnificent scenery of the atmosphere and the sea, and some of his masterpieces also contain a strong message of the Industrial Revolution, such as "The Battleship Intrepid Dragged to Disintegration" (1838) and "Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway" (1844). Fig. 3 is a night view of Turner's coal wharf, and the Keelmen in the title Keelmen He**ing in Coals by Moonlight originally refers to the boatmen who specialize in transporting coal in flat-bottomed boats on the River Tyne. At the top of the picture, a clear moon hangs high, and the moonlight passes through the clouds to form a huge vault across the banks of the river, and the layering of light creates a huge whirlpool of clouds in the night sky, and the cool, white moonlight contrasts with the warm, yellow and orange firelight, and the reflected light enlivens the sparkling water. On the right, black flat-bottomed coal carriers from Northumberland and Durham show workers at night with orange and white flames showing workers at night, factory chimneys faintly visible in the distance, and black smoke rising above the coal carriers indicating that air pollution is a problem.
Fig.3 Turner, Coal Port in the Moonlight (1835).
It is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Newcastle upon Tyne is a historic town in the north of England, developed into an important industrial center in the 19th century, where the world's first underground freight tunnel appeared, the world's first incandescent lit block, the ship cannons produced by the Armstrong Arsenal became the pets of the late Qing Dynasty foreign ministers, and the docks on the Tyne River worked day and night to transport raw materials and products to Britain and the world.
Figure 4 is Iron and Coal by the Scottish poet and painter William Scott (1811-1890). The painter was working as Headmaster of Newcastle City School of Art at the time. At the end of the frame, the protagonists are four strong men working in front of the wrought iron furnace, three of whom take turns wielding sledgehammers to forge the iron, and the other is supposed to be the foreman who is responsible for moving the iron and controlling the rhythm. Only those who have witnessed the blacksmith's workshop can depict this dynamic scene of labor in such detail. The vision is one of a thriving industrial and transport boom: viaducts that can drive trains and soaring factory chimneys, with the River Tyne and the busy wharves beneath it, from traditional sailing ships to smoky steamships.
Fig.4 Scott, Coal and Iron (1860).
It is now in Wallington Hall, Northumberland
Some of the details of the picture are quite intriguing, in front of and behind the four laborers, there are two characters who have nothing to do with production and the flow of goods: a little girl sitting on a log (or iron pillar) seems to be from the countryside; Another boy with a spring scale resembles a street vendor. Through these two figures, the painter shows the impact of the Industrial Revolution on British social life. It is worth noting that there are four parallel lines over the pier, and four white insulated porcelain pieces can be seen near the erected straight poles. The author guesses that this is a device used to transmit wired telegraphs, and the laying of ordinary ** lines and power transmission lines should be after the 70-80s of the 19th century. There is some symbolism in this detail: it is believed that the steam-powered Industrial Revolution in Britain began around the middle of the 18th century and was completed by the middle of the 19th century, and electricity was about to emerge as the protagonist of the second industrial revolution.
Fig.5 Detail of Scott's Coal and Iron.
Small workshops and big factories
The prototype of modern large-scale industry was the production of small workshops in the early days, and the ancestors of modern workers were craftsmen in ancient and medieval times. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, this sign was still evident. Fig. 6 is a depiction by the English painter Joseph Wright (1734-1797) of the daily life of a family blacksmith's workshop, with its old huts and rudimentary equipment, in stark contrast to the steel mills of the later era of big machine production. The blacksmith, the old man, the apprentice, the blacksmith's wife and daughter, and the family's pets are among them, and the focus of the picture is the wrought iron that has just been clamped out of the furnace, from which all the light comes from. Wright lived and worked in Derby, one of the centres of the early Industrial Revolution in Britain, and many of his works deal with the Industrial Revolution, with several paintings of blacksmiths and wrought iron alone, differing only in the color of wrought iron, showing the artist's careful observation of the relationship between metal temperature and spectrum.
Fig.6 Wright, The Blacksmith's Workshop (1772).
Now in the collection of the Tate Modern Art Museum, London
Fig.7 Another of Wright's Blacksmith's Workshops is now in the collection of the Derby City Art Gallery, England.
Fig. 8 is the Blacksmith of Hohenbeck by the Danish painter Peder Kr Yer (1851-1909). Hornbaek, a small town across the sea from Sweden at the eastern tip of Denmark, is now a well-known seaside resort.
Fig.8 Chloe, The Blacksmith at Hohenbach (1875).
It is now in the collection of the Hirschsprung Museum of Art in Copenhagen.
Led by Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and other Western European countries also completed the first industrial revolution in the first half of the 19th century, while Germany and the United States began to catch up in the 60s of the 19th century, and at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Tsar ** and Japan began the process of industrialization.
The Swedish painter Pehr Hillestr M (1732-1816) depicts blacksmiths at work in a different state than the people in Wright and Chloeer's paintings, set in a late 18th-century anchor smithing workshop in S Derfors, Upland province, where many of the products were exported to England. In the center of the picture, the workers present a collective work scene of division of labor, and several richly dressed figures in the right are supposed to be the factory owner leading his guests or customers to visit.
Fig.9 Hiloström, "The Workers of Soderforth Forge Iron Anchors" (1782).
It is now in the collection of the Swedish National Gallery in Stockholm.
Adolph Friedrich Menzel (1815-1905) was a 19th-century German realist painter who often depicted ordinary laborers and machine production. Fig. 10 is one of his famous gouache paintings, painting himself in a corner, depicting a blacksmith working intensely in front of a steam hammer.
Fig.10 Menzel, The Worker and Me before the Steam Hammer (1872).
It is now in the collection of the Kunsthalle Leipzig, Germany.
Figure 11, more famous, is painted in 1875, when the steam-powered First Industrial Revolution spread from the British Empire to continental Europe and North America. The painting depicts a scene of labor in full swing, with several workers working together in front of the furnace to send the burnt white steel ingots to the rolling mill with iron tongs. At the right end of the screen, a worker drinking water and eating is displayed, showing the actual operation of continuous production shifts. At the far end of the screen, a giant flywheel shows that the steam engine is powering the entire workshop.
Fig.11 Menzel, The Iron Rolling Workshop (1875).
It is now in the collection of the Old Museum of Fine Arts in Berlin.
Steam engines and industrial air.
Figure 12 is a fictional story by the Scottish painter James Lauder (1811-1869), in which the Scottish craftsman James Watt (1736-1819) was drawing under an oil lamp on a cold winter night, when suddenly the water in the pot on the stove boiled, the steam burst open the lid, and the inspired craftsman invented the steam engine. Like Newton's enlightenment under the apple tree, this is just a story made up by posterity, which may not be true but is also instructive, so it is talked about. In fact, as early as the 1st century AD, the Hero of Alexandria invented a steam-powered device; In 1678, the Flemish Jesuit priest Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) also built a steam turbine locomotive in the Qing court in Beijing. However, the steam engine for large-scale machine production did originate in 18th-century England, Thomas S**ery, C1650-1715), Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729), John Smeaton (1724-1792) and others all contributed, with Watt taking the greatest credit.
Fig.12 Lauder, Watt and the Dawn of the 19th Century (1855).
It is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Watt's biggest improvement to the steam engine was to separate the cylinder from the condenser, and to introduce devices such as jet condensation connecting rods, and more importantly, to realize the commercialization of steam engine production, making it the real driving force of large-scale machine production and the industrial revolution, and it is also reasonable to say that it is "the dawn of the 19th century". Figure 13 is a gilded bronze statue by British sculptor William Bloye (1890-1975) and others, which now stands on Centennial Square outside Birmingham** Hall, nicknamed the "Little Golden Man of Birmingham" by locals, and has become an important landmark in this industrial city. The three figures in the group are Watt and his two business partners, Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) and William Murdoch (1754-1839), whose company is headquartered in Birmingham.
Fig.13 Gilded statue of Bolton Watt Murdoch in Birmingham Central Square.
The steam engine soon became widely used in steel, textiles, mining, and land and water transportation, greatly contributing to economic development and improving people's lives. For industrialized countries, the most immediate result for ordinary people is the steam locomotive, which facilitates daily travel and the transportation of goods. On 27 September 1825, the railway line connecting Stockton and Darlington in the north-east of England was completed and opened to traffic, becoming the world's first public transport line with inter-town steam locomotives. However, at first it was only a steam locomotive pulling coal wagons, and passenger trains still used horses, and it was only in September 1833 that steam locomotives began to be used to carry passengers. Fig. 14 is a 20th-century British painter Terence Cuneo (1907-1996) based on reports and imagination of the year on the opening day: train drivers and stokers working behind the nose of the locomotive like coachmen, passengers standing happily or sitting in open-top carriages cheering, people chasing trains in horse-drawn carriages and donkeys, children waving national flags and dogs desperately racing against trains.
Fig.14 Cuneo, Opening of the Stockton-Darlington Railway (1949).
Source: BBC
Figure 15 is a 1925 commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton-Darlington line. Figure 16 shows a view of a culvert bridge on the line today.
Fig.15 The scene of the centenary ceremony of the opening of the Stockton-Darlington Railway.
Source: BBC
Figure 16 Trains running on the Stockton-Darlington line today.
Source: The large-scale use of the BBC steam engine requires coal, and one negative consequence is the deterioration of air quality and environmental problems. Some of Britain's largest cities in the 19th century were shrouded in smog all year round, and London earned the nickname "Fog Capital". Zhang Deyi (1847-1918), a diplomat from Tongwenguan in the late Qing Dynasty, wrote several times in his diary about air pollution in Britain, such as April 25, 18666.7) Take the train from Oxford to Birmingham, but see "the ironworks along the road, as far as the eye can see." The chimneys stand in clusters, the height is several zhang, the black smoke is dark, straight to the sky, and the clouds are connected"; August 26, 186810.11) In London, "the black fog was so thick that no one could be seen at hand, and wherever there were winding paths and forks in the road, and where there were dangers, there were patrols to stop the carriages and horses, and to escort pedestrians, so as not to be injured"; September 10 (1868.)10.25) Recall "It rains at the end, the black fog is filled, there is no one on the opposite side of the street, and candles are burned in the house".
For the early Impressionist painters who emerged in the 40s of the 19th century, the fog of England provided them with the opportunity to capture the changes in light and shadow in an atmospheric environment that had never been seen before, an unexpected gift that industrialization brought to the artists. The French painter Oscar-Claude Monet (1840-1926) traveled to London many times to paint foggy scenes at different times and under different lights, according to statistics, he painted 41 scenes of Waterloo Bridge alone, 34 paintings of Charing Cross Bridge, and 19 paintings of the Capitol, which are the impressions of the industrial revolution left by the painter to posterity.
Fig.17 Monet, Waterloo Bridge, The Fog Effect (1903).
It is now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Fig.18 Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, Fog on the River Thames (1903).
It is now in the Harvard University Museum.
Of course, the smoky scene is not unique to London, and the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris is also a favorite spot for Monet, and there are many paintings on this theme. Fig. 19 is his work from 1877: a steam train from Normandy has just entered the station, the nose is still spewing steam, the pyramid-shaped steel beam structure glass roof is shrouded in blue-purple fog, in contrast to the white steam emitted by the locomotive outside the platform, through the fog formed by the steam, the city's high-rise buildings are faintly visible, the whistle of the train and the braking of the wheels overwhelm the noisy human voice, this is a symphony of industrial civilization composed by Monet.
Fig.19 Monet, The Arrival of the Normandy Train in Saint-Lazare (1877).
Now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago
Big Machine Production and the Industrial Revolution
Marx's sojourn in England coincided with the glorious triumph of the First Industrial Revolution, marked by steam power. Commenting on the significance of the steam engine, Marx wrote: "Watt's great genius is manifested in the specification of the patent he obtained in April 1784, in which he did not speak of his steam engine as an invention for a special purpose, but as an engine for the general application of large industry." (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 13). Many people who quote this passage think that Marx declared here that the steam engine was the beginning of the industrial revolution, and only by carefully studying the complete description of "machines and big industry" in Capital can they understand what Marx meant by "the universal application of big industry". In his eyes, all sufficiently advanced machines should consist of three parts: the engine, the transmission and the machine tool (or working machine): the engine provides the power, the transmission regulates and transmits the movement, and the machine tool grasps the object of labor and changes it for a certain purpose. Therefore, Marx said: "The machine tool is the starting point of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century." ”
It is the advent of the machine tool that has fundamentally changed the relationship between the laborer and the object of labor, since the Middle Ages, the kind of family workshop has been dilapidated and withered in the era of large machine production, and the handicraftsmen with specialized skills are useless, and man only plays a simple and secondary role in the production process, so Marx said: "From the very beginning, the machine has increased the degree of exploitation while increasing the material of human exploitation, that is, expanding the field of exploitation inherent in capital." On the other hand, "to the extent that machines make muscular force superfluous, machines become a means of using workers who have no muscular strength or are physically immature and whose limbs are more flexible." The first slogan of capitalism in the use of machines is women's labor and children's labor! (Ibid.).
Fig. 20 is the third in the series "New Inventions" by the Flemish printmaker Jan van der Straet (1523-1605): the interior of a 16th-century cannon casting workshop, hot copper pouring down from the outlet of the furnace, workers reloading fuel, observing the solution, adjusting molds, and processing the cast barrels. Outside the window is the scene of the artillery bombardment of the castle. Figure 21 shows the situation of the cannon casting workshop in the era of large machine production, and it can be seen that the workers are engaged in simple manual labor without special skills.
Fig.20 Strett, New Invention: Bronze Artillery (c1600）
Source: Courtesy of Fan Jingzhong.
Fig.21 Cannon casting workshop at the Armstrong Arsenal, England, 1883.
Source: "Illustrated London News" (1883) Coal and iron were necessary conditions for the birth of the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine enabled human beings to obtain powerful power from nature, and the production of organized large machines was a sign of the maturity of the Industrial Revolution. Finally, we will present several 19th-century engravings of large machine production and transportation in England, all from the illustrated London News, a well-known pictorial magazine.
Fig.22 Iron works near Barrow-in-Furness (1867) in Furness
Fig.23 Stephenson's steam locomotive factory (1864).
Fig.24 A new loom (1862) on display during the London Expo
Fig.25 Production process at the soap factory in Warrington (1886).
Fig.26 The Prince and Princess of Wales visit Bessemer Steel (1875).
Fig.27 Busy railway transport (1868).