A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

sack. He died a pauper, the first victim of the ‘restrictive practices’ that have continued into the late
twentieth century.
Mining was becoming an increasingly important industry; but mines tended to flood with water. In
the 1650s, Otto von Guericke had invented a vacuum pump. By the end of the century, a
Frenchman named Denis Papin had discovered that a pump could be worked with steam power.
The pump was attached to one end of the see-saw, and at the other there was a piston in a cylinder;
the piston would be driven up by steam from a boiler and then would descend - driven by a heavy
weight - as the steam condensed. Naturally, this was a slow business. Around 1700, an ironmonger
named Thomas Newcomen was experimenting with a pump when there was an accident; melting
solder allowed cold water to leak into the cylinder, and the piston descended with such a bang that
it wrecked the pump. But Newcomen realised that he had discovered a better method of making the
piston descend; a little cold water was sprayed into the cylinder at the end of every upward-stroke,
and the new engine worked at twice the speed. Newcomen engines were soon in use all over
Europe.
In 1763, a young Scott named James Watt was repairing a model of the Newcomen engine at
Glasgow university when he saw how it could be improved. By cooling the cylinder down and
heating it up again, three-quarters of the energy was being wasted. What was needed, he saw, was a
pump with two separate chambers - a cooling chamber, and a permanently hot piston chamber. He
found a rich partner named Boulton, and in 1769 was able to patent his new engine. And the world
entered the industrial age.
It so happened that large numbers of people were available to work in the new factories.
Landowners had perfected better methods of farming - fertilisers, the drill-seeder, the horse-drawn
hoe. What now stood in the way of efficiency was the enormous amount of ‘common land’ that
surrounded most villages. This was usually poor land on which everyone had a right to pasture their
animals or grow low-yield crops; moreover, it was often interspersed with the land on which the
farmers wanted to carry out their new experiments. Landowners petitioned parliament, and
parliament responded by passing ‘Acts of Enclosure’, which required common land to be divided
up between various owners, every one of whom had to fence off his portion. The small owners
usually preferred to sell out. And the poor who had lived on the commons in wooden huts found
themselves homeless. This is why increasing numbers of country folk found their way into the
towns and the new factories.
Here conditions were often appalling. Children from five upwards were taken from workhouses and
orphanages to labour in the cotton mills for twelve hours a day. The smallest could pick up cotton
from the floor. No one was forced to go - they were lured by promises of good food and pleasant
working conditions; once in the mills, they were underfed, beaten and even tortured. Those who
tried to escape were chained up. Some children even committed suicide. Adult workers laboured
for fourteen hours a day, and lived in damp cellars provided by the employers. A labourer from the
country might find himself assigned to a straw mattress on which a man had just died of fever.
Workers had to watch their wives and children drawn into these conditions and working beside
them in the mills and factories. Most of the children died young, or grew up permanently stunted.
Worse still, the new inventions began to make many workers unnecessary, so they were turned out
to starve. When new power looms threw Yorkshire workers out of their jobs in the early nineteenth
century, their reaction was to form secret societies whose aim was to blackmail the employers into
getting rid of the machinery. They called themselves Luddites, after a man called Ned Ludd, who