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Chapter 2. Rebooting Reality:Labor

Overview

Food is the number one factor shaping ourswarm. Labor is a close second. It shapes how we, wittingly or not,organize to get what we want. That determines our labor lives, whichshape many other things. In the 1800s we started into a big wave oflabor change, and that happened partly because of ‘reaction networks’and ‘synergy.’ The first describes how we sometimes work together tobuild things, even when we don’t mean to. The second describes howsuch networking can sometimes grow so strong that it overthrows evenour age-old divisions of labor. Those two swarm-physics behaviors helpsuggest how our labor lives might change, perhaps even in the nearfuture.

Network Reactions

It’s 1774, in Scotland,and Jamie’s fire engine is still “a shadow, as regarded its practicalutility and value.” For nine years, scrimping and saving, he had triedeverything he could think of, yet still it doesn’t work. Now he’s broke,and out of time. His investor—who has poured a fortune into themachine—has lost everything, and creditors are taking it all. Theydon’t care a farthing for Jamie’s unfinished device. To them, it’s anunproven, high-tech rat-trap, and they need money now. Many privateScottish banks had just crashed, driven out of business by bad harvestsand bad investments. Plus, everyone is running for financial cover becausethe previous December, a bunch of colonists in British America, angryabout taxes, had turned Boston harbor into a teapot. War with the colonyseems nearly certain. Further, Jamie’s wife has just died, as has hisinfant child, and two of his other children had already died. In despair,and in debt, he’s ready to give up. At first, he plans to flee Scotlandfor Russia, which has been after him for a while, and which would soonoffer to quintuple his wages. But then he decides to try his worthlessengine down south, in England, with a new investor. That decision helpedtrigger a big labor change, for today we remember Jamie as James Watt,and we call his fire engine the reciprocating steam engine.

Mention the term ‘steam engine’ today and eyes glaze over. It bringsback memories of tedious schooldays filled with dry stories of grimymachinery and oppressed wage-slaves. But mention it two centuries ago andmany eyes would light up. Back then, it was the last word in high tech,much as the computer is today—and learning what happened to it thenmight help when trying to figure out what might happen to the computertoday. It played a big part in the start of our ongoing phase change fromfarming to industry, which would lead to major changes in our labor lives,much as our phase change from foraging to farming had millennia ago.

How and why did such a momentous thing happen, and what did Watt haveto do with it? Take the next Russian offer that would so tempt him,in 1775. That might seem like a mere footnote in his life, but why didSaint Petersburg reach across 1,300 miles to offer a failed Glaswegianmachinist £1,000 a year when he scraped by on a mere £200a year as a lowly surveyor? To answer that question, step back a littlefurther in time, to Russia.

It’s 1758, and Ivan Polzunov, a young mining officer, is escorting a muletrain carrying 8,000 pounds of silver, plus some gold, 2,600 miles fromSiberia to Saint Petersburg. There he sees the old tsar’s fountains, whichare powered by the first steam engine that Britain had ever exported. Thatengine excites him because back in Siberia, he has a problem. He’s stuckin a small feudal town in the middle of nowhere—miles and miles awayfrom nothing but miles and miles of more nothing. That town exists solelybecause it mines about 90 percent of Russia’s silver. But, lately, themines have been drying up. So he wants to build a machine to increasethe smelter’s bellows pumps, and perhaps even run other mine equipment,rather than rely on manual labor. Maybe this strange engine could dothe trick, if only he could adapt it to work there. After he returns toSiberia, he spends three years designing the world’s first two-cylindersteam engine. Russia’s empress, desperate for silver, promotes him andpromises him a prize if he can build his machine. He then spends the nextfew years doing so. Then, exhausted, he dies in poverty, of tuberculosis.

A week later, on May 23rd, 1766, his orphaned engine started drivingfour pairs of bellows in the smelting furnaces. But it was crude—inRussia, we would say it was ‘built by the axe.’ Polzunov, in a townso isolated—and with winters so harsh—that bread had to come fromhundreds of miles away (and when it didn’t arrive in time, some of usthere starved to death), had lacked even the tools he needed to buildthe tools he needed. So he had brought in gangs of laborers and organizedthem to help him build many things from scratch, and by hand. His machineworked for three months, then sprang a leak and stopped working. Withhim dead, his apprentices couldn’t fix it. Asking them to do so musthave been like asking one of us today to repair a spacecraft with a canopener and some duct tape. It never worked again and the mine returned towaterwheels and forced labor. Polzunov was a failure. History forgot him.

Three years after he died, Watt patented a similar idea, anothertwo-cylinder engine. That’s why Russia was after him. In Scotland,though, even after years of trying, he failed to get it going. But byMarch 11th, 1776, his engine was huffing away down south, in England,in a Birmingham coal mine. Within a year, mine owners were after it likea pack of rats after a plate of sausages. They all wanted to buy whathe had to sell—power. Watt was a success. History idolized him.

Watt succeeded where Polzunov failed. So was he smarter? Or perhaps heworked harder? Well, maybe. But he built on an engine common in England,not Russia. That engine was common because of work done by ThomasNewcomen, John Smeaton, Thomas Savery, and others. To increase its power,he needed to understand the physics of heat, and he got some of thatinsight from Joseph Black, a Glasgow professor. To build it, he neededcylinders that could withstand high pressure (which he got from AbrahamDarby and John Thomas). To make it cheaply enough, he needed cheap ironinstead of costly brass for his cylinders (Abraham Darby II and ThomasGoldney III). To run it cheaply enough, he needed cheap fuel, which he gotfrom coke—that is, coal cooked to remove impurities—instead of woodor charcoal (Abraham Darby). To machine its cylinders precisely enough,he needed high-grade iron (John Wilkinson). To cut its precision-groundcylinders and pistons, he needed crucible steel (Benjamin Huntsman). Andso on.

Without all those boring people doing all those boring things, Jamie mighthave been as lost in Britain as Vanya had been in Siberia. So creditingWatt alone for the steam engine makes about as much sense as creditingWilkinson alone for it, since Watt’s steam engine didn’t begin to take offuntil after Wilkinson’s precision cylinders. Huntsman would also do. Sowould Black—or Darby (father or son). Many others also mattered. Thus,Watt didn’t ‘invent the steam engine.’ The group that he was part of did.

An idea can matter, but where it falls can matter, too—as someonenoted about farming millennia ago: “[S]ome seeds fell by the way side,and the fowls came and devoured them.... But other[s] fell into goodground, and brought forth fruit.”

Watt wasn’t even the only steam-engine designer in Britain. In 1782, whatgot him steamed was that “Nature had taken an aversion to monopolies,and put the same thing into several people’s heads at once, to preventthem.” By then, he was battling other inventors for patents. Had hedied young, as Polzunov had, others in Britain would, almost surely,have gone on to do what he did.

After all, Newcomen’s engines had been pumping out mines in England since1712—24 years before Watt was born. Savery had patented the firstprototype steam engine in London in 1698—the year Watt’s father wasborn. So the group Watt belonged to didn’t ‘invent the steam engine,’either. That group inherited a steam engine, which it further refined.

Why stop even there? Newcomen seems to have gotten the idea of using acopper boiler—which could withstand high heat and pressure—from localbrewers. Darby surely got some part of the idea of using coke instead ofcoal from local beer makers, since that’s where he had apprenticed. Black,too, was just as dependent on others. He was a chemistry professor whohad worked out latent and specific heat. But why? Well, he was trying toreduce the fuel needs of local whiskey distillers. So all three got atleast part of their skill from our thirst for alcohol. Huntsman, too,inherited part of his skill. He figured out how to melt steel by usinga special clay to reflect furnace heat. And how? He got the idea fromlocal glassmakers, who had come across that idea while trying to meltold glass. Who knows how many generations it took our species to workout, then accumulate in one place and time, just those particular bitsof knowledge.

Nor does the chain of dependencies stop even there, either in time orin space. For instance, Black could teach physics to Watt only becausehundreds of us, stretching back centuries, and spread over severalcountries, had worked out lots of stuff. To do so, we had to drop thingsfrom heights, measure things down mines, and carry things up mountains. Wehad to figure out that even air could have weight. We had to invent waysto measure temperature and pressure. We had to discover how liquids,gases, and energy flow. Above all, we had to learn that a vacuum couldexist—despite what all of us had thought for over two millennia. Thus,behind every idea, tool, or resource that aided Watt’s group in the1770s lay human pyramids of work and thought stretching back millennia.

Millennia ago, and anywhere on the planet, we probably couldn’t havebuilt a precision steam engine. For one thing, we probably wouldn’t haveeven bothered to try. Nor is that a simple matter of saying that slavelabor outmatched it. Slave labor might be free labor, but it isn’t laborfor free—slaves cost something to capture, feed, house, clothe, andsuppress. So had we a machine alternative, we would have tried it out.But we had no such machine. To build one, we first would have had to seethat we could. That couldn’t happen until we worked out that we couldmake a vacuum, and nowhere on the planet did we know that—until themid 1600s.

Nor was that all. To go from a dream to something real, we then neededhigh-grade iron for vacuum cylinders. We needed crucible steel forprecision cutters and precision bearings. We needed steam-proof solders,sealants, and gaskets. We needed enough hands who could reliably buildall those materials. And we needed those hands to be near each other,and to be cheap enough to be worth hiring. Also, the overall effort hadto be cheap enough for us to bear the cost. Plus, our need for the devicehad to be large enough to make it worth that cost.

All that didn’t come together in one time and place until the late1700s and in England—not in Siberia, and not even in Scotland. Thesame frictions that defeated Polzunov’s engine, and that defeated Watt’sfirst engine, would likely have defeated anyone’s engine—unless theyhad the kind of support structure that Watt ended up in by 1776.

That kind of support structure, of many parts working together, even whenthey don’t, or can’t, plan to do so, isn’t unique to us. Biochemists mightcall it areaction network. Such networks are widespreadin all known life-forms. Our body, for instance, is a walking chemicalfactory. Thus, when we eat an apple, many reactions break it down intostuff that our body can use. Take fructose, one of the sugars in thatapple. Some reactions in our stomach first make it safe so that it won’treact with just anything. Others then move it to our liver—our body’sfactory floor for sugar conversion. There, other reactions break it downinto glyceraldehyde or dihydroxyacetone. Yet others break those downinto glycerol or pyruvate. Still others turn those into even smallerbits. Others shift those into our cells, where yet others burn themfor fuel or use them as spare parts. Thousands of such reactions mustwork together, or we couldn’t digest an apple—we might even die fromeating one.

Similarly, like molecules in a cell, or cells in a body, when Watt,Wilkinson, Huntsman, Black, or whoever, built a new tool, had a new idea,supplied a new fuel, or whatever, someone else in their network couldreact to that change by building something with it, or having a new ideabecause of it. In that way, one thing and one thing might make not twothings but three or more things. So 1+1=3. But that needn’t happen. Forit to work, such parts must be in touch, somehow, yet they needn’t beaware that they’re in touch—or even be aware at all. Whether awareor not, once in touch they can still be parts of something larger thanthemselves. They can each go about their business, yet still they togethercan form a reaction network. Such a network was strong enough to giveour species our first precision steam engine in 1776. Watt’s group,not Watt alone, did that.

Birth of a Notion

Watt’s reaction network could do what it did in 1776 because bythen Britain had many scientific and technical tools. But that mighthardly have mattered had Britain not also had many other tools as well,especially financial and legal ones, because for steam engines to cometo exist they also needed banking credit (and therefore banks), legalprotection (like patents), and so on. Together, all such tools helpedseveral networks of us in Britain interact to work out, build, refine,and maintain the world’s first precision steam engines. But that costa lot of money and took a lot of effort. Why did we bother? And why inthe 1700s? Why not long before? Or long after? Just because we could tryto do something needn’t mean that we will. Supply needs demand, just asdemand needs supply. So why did Britain want a steam engine so badly,and why then? Well, by the 1700s it had several pressing military andcommercial needs, one strand of which began with trees.

In England in the 1500s, centuries before any steam engine, we had startedchopping down our easiest to reach trees. With cheap wood vanishing,and plenty of coal below the soil, we then reached for our spades andstarted digging. As early as 1550, in some parts of the island, wood costabout twice as much as coal. Between 1500 and 1700, the price of wood inLondon rose almost fourfold. But while coal was cheaper, it was smellierand smokier. When we burned it for heat, it smelled bad. When we burned itto brew beer, the beer smelled bad. When we burned it to smelt iron, theiron was brittle. So we looked for ways to make it less polluting. Thatthen led to coke, which started to replace wood and charcoal.

But while we did that on one small island—and in China half a millenniumbefore—we didn’t do it everywhere, like, for example, Russia. Why? Well,in Russia we didn’t have to bother. We still had huge forests to chopdown. Russia was still sparsely settled and densely forested. So as earlyas 1700, it was tiny Britain, not huge Russia, that produced five timesas much coal as the entire rest of the world.

All that spadework led to deeper mines, and deep mines flood. Pressurethen grew for some means to get the water out. Thus, in England from 1561to 1642, about one in seven patents were for the raising of water. By1700, some mines were already 360 feet deep.

But that in itself wasn’t new. Millennia before, anything sufficientlyexciting—gold, silver, iron, salt, whatever—had driven us as deepas that in Egypt, China, Greece, Rome. However, besides our usual miningtools, we now had new tricks to try, including gunpowder, and we had justfigured out that we could try vacuums. They’re great at sucking. By 1698,early steam engines were the result. Those engines lying about the placethen had catalytic effects. So instead of one lone inventor in Siberia(much later on), dozens of inventors in Britain got all fired up aboutthem.

So in England some of our early experience with coal and iron grew outof our long history of tree-chopping and mine-digging. But why did wechop down so many trees? And while beer may have made life bearable,what made iron so, er, ironic?

Well, our numbers were rising fast. From 1500 to 1700 they roughlydoubled, which was twice as fast as the rest of Europe. As houses wentup, forests went down. But also, ships at the time needed wood—lots ofwood. A warship might take over 2,000 century-old oaks. To arm such shipsmeant cannons, which meant iron (or bronze, which meant copper and tin),which meant even more wood to smelt those metals from their ores.

We needed lots of ships and lots of guns going back at least as faras the 1540s. That’s when our king, who was busy running through sixqueens searching for a son, looked at his threats across the channel,looked at his measly ten navy ships, panicked, and started importingFrench and German experts to build his navy and coastal weapons againstthe power of the time—Spain.

So in England we chopped down our trees and dug up our coal and smeltedour iron partly because we were scared. We also envied the wealth thatSpain and Portugal were then sucking out of the Americas, plus theirnew spice trade with India. So both fear and greed drove ship buildingand arms dealing, which meant lots of timber and fuel. And by the 1570s,our growing numbers also meant growing brass, glass, brick, tile, and beerindustries, which meant even more fuel, which meant even more coal mining.

By the 1670s, our ship building, and our many wars, meant that our navywas sucking in three-quarters of our national budget. So we were desperatefor more money. But, being mostly poor and rural, to get that money weneeded more trade. To protect that trade, we had to beef up our navy. Sothat meant borrowing oodles of money. (And chopping down oodles of trees.)

However, borrowing that much money from hostile foreigners provedimpossible. Also, we were (unwittingly) shifting from an agrarian worldto an urban world. So instead of the age-old mass of farmers—whereonly about one in 20 of us were townsfolk—now about one in eight of uswere. So getting money the usual way—taxing it into existence—wouldn’twork anymore. The peasants would revolt. The last king who lost his headand tried that, triggered a civil war—and lost his head. So where wasthe new navy money going to come from? We needed a different kind ofmining—financial mining.

Further, while we needed lots of cash, we also didn’t have enough preciousmetal to make that cash. Geology had made us rich in coal and iron, but ithad made us poor in gold and silver. So making more cash meant importing afinancial tool new to us—paper currency. But nobody in England trustedpaper. So giving value to that currency meant stapling it to hard assets(like land, houses, ships). That meant importing other financial toolsfrom foreign city slickers—mortgages, limited liability companies,bills of exchange, credit, insurance, and such like. A mortgage, forexample, divides up land into chunks small enough for many of us to payfor. Similarly, a limited liability company divides up large risks intochunks small enough for many of us to bet on.

Such financial tools weren’t new. In China we had paper money since1111—and other such tools went back at least as far as 3,800 yearsago in what we today call Iraq. But they were new to us in England;we only tried them because we were under pressure.

We began adopting such tools in stages, especially after 1688, when apolitical scuffle led to the ouster of our then king. The new tools,like the new king, came mostly from the nearby Netherlands, which, topay for its 80 years of war with Spain, had adopted several such debtinstruments from Italy, which had developed some of them to pay for itscenturies of wars there.

Our attention got really focused in 1690, after losing a big seabattle—to France—then even more in 1693, when we lost a flotilla ofmerchant ships, and a whole year’s worth of trade goods—to France. Atthe time, France, not Spain, had the largest land army in Europe, andthe strongest navy in the world. Thrashing around like gaffed fish,we were suddenly certain that without an even bigger one, we were doomed.

So we tried all sorts of financial mining experiments: lotteries,annuities, tontines, land banks, and such—and one worked. Today wewould call it government bonds, which are state-backed promises to payback borrowed money, with interest to cover the risk of lending.

In 1694 a gang of merchants and financiers sold shares in that bondmarket idea, which became the Bank of England.

Did they (or anyone) predict what would happen? Nope. In just 12 days weshowered them with £1.2 million. Did we do so because we thoughtof its direct effect on the navy? Nope. Perhaps we were thinking of itsfuture effect on steam engines? Nope. Maybe it was because we wantedto spit in France’s eye? Nope. The new bank promised eight percentinterest a year! It then lent money to the state. The state used overhalf that pile of cash to build up our navy, which protected our trade,which made our merchants richer, which gave it more tax income, whichit used to pay down its debt to the bank—then borrow yet more. Ourshipping thus grew autocatalytically.

That wasn’t all. That autocatalytic cycle also spurred industry. A singlewooden ship might need over five tons of iron nails and bolts. So suckingin a pile of cash in London only meant that gobs of money had to thengush out to the north, south, and west to pay for more iron mines, morecoal mines, more coke to smelt iron, experiments looking for faster andcheaper ways to make more iron nails, a slow merging from the age-oldcottage system to more of a manufactory system for iron nails, and soon. That’s not to mention the same ship’s three-ton cannons, guns,miles of ropes, acres of sails, anchors, timbers, barrels, pulleys,winches, knees, treenails.... Within a decade, tiny Britain had a huge,well-armed fleet. In a sense, it had become one body—Navy, Inc.

The result was war with France and Spain (and the Netherlands and others),with conquests around the globe, as well as lucrative trade in slaves,rum, and sugar in a triangle between Africa, the Caribbean, and NorthAmerica.

That a dinky island, which not that long before had been known mostlyonly for its lead and tin and sheep, could do all that, began to awe,then scare, all Europe, and soon, the world.

As Britain’s fleet grew, so did its go-anywhere, do-anything empire. Asits empire grew, so did its trade. As its trade grew, so did itsindustry—to satisfy foreign demand and so pay for yet more trade. Theurge to move from countryside to city rose. The drive to industryrose. The need to read rose. The acceptance of paper money and otherunfamiliar tools rose. Then, by the 1770s, all that money sloshing aroundEngland meant that some of it could flow out of London to bet on othermoney-making schemes—one of which in 1776 was the funding up north,in Birmingham, of a newfangled steam engine.

Prime Movers

Before 1800, and across the planet, our labor lives hadn’t much changedin millennia. Even in Britain, and even counting early steam engines, wehad much the same labor sources as we had in Rome and China two millenniabefore, and as we had in Egypt and Iraq two millennia before that. Wehad invented many new tools across the millennia, but few of them hadchanged our labor lives much at all. Transport hadn’t much changed sincethe horse. Farming hadn’t much changed since the plow. Family size hadn’tmuch changed since farming began. That was our life. For millennia.

For all that time, nearly all of us were farmers. Our lives were drivenby the harvests, and thus the seasons (even in the tropics), and thus thesun. (Today they still are, just not quite as much.) So, baubles aside,our main real wealth was in land and labor. Only with them could wecapture energy—the sun’s energy—with plants. Only with that energycould we fuel our main ‘prime movers’—that is, ourselves and our draftanimals. So land meant food, which meant energy, which meant wealth.

Since the sun didn’t change much, and since there was only so much land,when our tools didn’t change much—which was most of the time—to gainwealth, a gang of us might try to snatch a bunch of bodies for labor. Butsince those bodies would need food, that was the same as trying to snatchland. And snatching land meant war.

That could never mean an overall gain for our species. No matter howmuch havoc we cried, and however many dogs of war we let slip, no gang’spower could grow beyond an amount proportional to the land just gained,if any. And feeding a horse twice as much can’t ever make it run twiceas fast, or pull twice as hard. So while a war might mean that flags andborders and such might change, in the long run our labor lives couldn’tever change. We lived in a zero-sum world.

However, a war might also lead to a new tool or trade. But we could alsodevise such things without a war. And after we made our first sickle inIraq, fired our first pot in Japan, harnessed our first ox in India,tamed our first horse in Mongolia, or whatever, more of us could eatoff the same amount of land.

But even that didn’t really change our food-to-labor ratio because wekept competing for wealth. So after each new tool we just pumped out morebabies to work that same land. (Trying to snatch slaves to work the landwould make no difference. It merely meant that someone else would pumpout more babies somewhere else.)

So while a new tool might mean that we could feed more bodies with lesswork for a while, there would soon be more of us to feed. So overallfood demand would rise. So food prices would rise. Thus, while our labordemand would ease up for a bit—just as it would for the winners of anywar, or just as it would if the weather had gotten a bit nicer—aftera while, each of us would be back to getting only about as much food asbefore. And to get that food, we would each have to do about the sameamount of work as before. So, again, in the long run, there would be noreal change in our labor lives.

So once we blundered into farming, we were trapped in a zero-sum laborworld—a world of roughly constant manual effort per kilocalorieof food. Thus, for instance, in the 1,700 or so years before 1800,we invented and traded lots of labor-saving things—the sail, thewheelbarrow, gunpowder, and such. Our numbers rose about fourfold—fromaround 160 million to perhaps 700 million. But all around the planet,while we had different gods, spoke different tongues, waved differentflags, wore different clothes, we still worked and traveled and livedand died much as before.

For all that time we lived in a bottle, and that bottle limited whatwe could do and build, which limited what we could think and be. Thattrapped us in a world of farms and slaves and manual labor. It told usthat enslaving hands made sense, and that women had to be baby-machinesto make more hands—because as farmers we always needed hands to workthe land. So we toted that barge, we lifted that bale, we got a littledrunk, we landed in jail.

That near-stasis depended on no new tool changing our land-labor equationmuch at all. However in Eurasia, Egypt, and north Africa (but not therest of Africa, the Americas, or anywhere else) a few new tools didjust that. First we tamed a few draft animals millennia ago, then camethe waterwheel, which some of us in Turkey first worked out about 2,300years ago. At first, as farmers we had to irrigate our fields and grindour grain or hull our rice by hand. Once we had the ox and the horse andsuch, we could build a capstan or treadmill and have them do it. But westill had to feed them, which meant land—which meant they competed withus for food. Build a waterwheel, though, and it could move our water,or move a stone to grind our grain. Like us and our tamed animals, itwas a mover—a prime mover. But unlike ourselves, or an ox or a horse,we didn’t have to feed it, house it, or keep it warm—so it neededno new land. That freed up labor, which we could use for other work,or for free time.

By around a millennium ago, waterwheels had sprouted all over Eurasia,from England to Japan, but far more in the west than the east. Forinstance, in England by 1086, we had about 5,624 of them—one for every50 or so families. By 1250, almost every village in England had one.

Yet while a 20-foot-high waterwheel can move about 700 pounds forever,it’s stuck in place. A windmill, which some of us in Greece first figuredout around 1,900 years ago, can do about the same amount of work (ifit’s big enough and in a windy enough place), but it, too, is stuck inplace. A horse can do about one-seventh of that for about a day. A mancan do about one-seventh of that for several hours. That was it.

The steam engine, though, which at first we called a ‘fire engine,’was different. Like a waterwheel (which we called a ‘water engine’),or a windmill (a ‘wind engine’), it could be a far stronger prime moverthan a horse or ox. And, like a waterwheel or windmill, it didn’t needland; so its fuel didn’t compete with our food. But, unlike a waterwheelor windmill, we could put it anywhere we could find cheap fuel for it.

That was new. Here was a relocatable prime mover, sort of like asuper-strong horse or ox, except it didn’t need land.

But there was a catch. Unlike a waterwheel or windmill, which wemade with wood, and which we by then understood very well, we hadto make it with metals—to make steam and hold a vacuum. It wasalso more intricate—since it had many more parts. And it was moredangerous—since it could blow up. So it was harder to build. Plus,it depended on physics that almost none of us understood. So, at first,only a few of us knew how to build and maintain one, and we lacked thetools to do so easily and cheaply. Further, like a waterwheel or windmill,at first it was just as stuck in place—namely, in coal mines.

So making the first one was a leap into darkness. Just as when we firststarted farming, we couldn’t possibly have foreseen its future. At first,we used it only in coal mines because it could only pump water, and itburned lots of coal to do so, so it had no other use. Had we lacked theskills to make one, we would have done what we had always done: we wouldhave abandoned the mine and dug somewhere else. We only bothered becauseof the depth of the mines, the seriousness of the flooding, and the moneyto be made because now we could keep digging. It was a niche product only.

Unlike the horse or waterwheel or windmill, though, its usefulnessdepended not on land or rivers or wind, but on our cleverness. Andthe longer it was useful, the more we were driven to keep making it,because it could only exist where we had cheap coal, and we used it toburn cheap coal to keep coal cheap. So it catalyzed itself.

Then, the more we kept making it, the better we got at making it. Sosmall skilled clumps of us began to form in Britain. New reactionnetworks, based on skilled labor and precision tools, sprang up here andthere. After a while, we could churn out precision-made steam engines,and we could do so more cheaply and quickly.

Those next-generation engines only needed half as much coal as before. Sothey no longer had to infest only coal mines. They then jumped to copperand tin mines, too. Only then did we begin to see that since they couldpump up and down, they could also push back and forth. If they can push,they can saw; if they can saw, they can pound; if they can pound, theycan knit, and so on.

That was another leap. The steam engine, like the horse, but unlike thewaterwheel and the windmill, wasn’t tied to a place, but a fuel. So if itsfuel costs fell, its number of niches rose. So applying our clevernesscould bear direct fruit. New production centers then sprung up whereverthey were best suited to grow—first, a coal mine (for its fuel), butthen a town (for its labor), a market (for its sales), a port (for itstransport). Thus, this leap was like making the planet spout new ragingrivers and mighty winds.

As the engine spread into new niches, demand for it grew, as did demandfor the specialists who made it—and their new precision tools. So ournewest prime mover didn’t merely lead to increases in power; it also ledto increases in tools and skills. As new engines, new engine makers, newengine-making tools, and new toolmakers who made those new engine-makingtools spread, engine-building went autocatalytic.

By 1800, a Manchester cotton mill might buy a 100-horsepower steamengine. It would thus get 100 horses it didn’t have to feed. Thosehorses weren’t cheap, but they also never tired—nor slept. With them,plus the machines they ran, the mill could start running around theclock. Suddenly, 750 of us could make as much cotton as 200,000 of uscould have made before. By then, 84 cotton mills in Britain alreadyhad the next-generation engine. So did 31 coal mines, 12 waterworks,and many mills for salt, flour, wood, wool, iron, and steel. Britainalready had about 2,000 steam engines of all sorts. Of course, water stillpowered almost all mills, but wherever coal was cheap enough, steam wascoming. As it did, a few of us got more wealth, but also many more of usgot more goods. As our newly cheap goods spread, and the profits rose,we cheapened our engines still further. As we did, our engine-buildingtools and engine-building skills grew faster still. As the horse began toturn into the engine, the cottage began to turn into the slum tenement,and the farm day began to turn into the work day. We didn’t know it yet,but we were beginning to lurch into a new gear, because after a whilesomething even bigger than autocatalysis started driving us.

A Synergetic Machine

In 1800, although the steam engine was a potentially large tool change,our labor lives, even in Britain, hadn’t yet changed much at all. Breakingout of our farming bottle required massive changes. And while thatphase change may have started with the steam engine, it didn’t endthere. Nor did it happen all at once. It came in at least four waves,with steam power triggering the first one. Its three later waves startedwith railroads, then mass production, then mastery of hydrocarbons,electricity, and magnetism. Together, those four waves gave us newvehicles, new production schemes, new prime movers. Those new toolschanged how much food we had, how far and how fast we traveled, how wetraded, how we lived, and far above all others in consequence: how manykids we needed to work the land.

The steam engine alone didn’t cause all that. No single new tool or dealneed necessarily lead to many other changes. For instance, we first workedout how to make coke, then used that to smelt iron, not in Britain butin China—and over a thousand years ago. By 1078 China made twice asmuch iron as England would go on to make in 1778. But by itself thatdidn’t trigger a huge labor change.

So although the steam engine by 1800 was a useful new tool in severalniches, had it been all that we ever got, after a while we might havesettled down again in our usual zero-sum way. That didn’t happen—orhasn’t yet, anyway—because it wasn’t just any important new tool,like the wheel, the compass, or paper. It was a rootless prime mover,a riverless waterwheel, a tireless giant. Once it escaped the mines, italit on many new niches. That led to many new pressures, which led to manynew tools, which led to more new pressures, which led to more new tools.

Here’s how: In Britain, as we made more and more steam engines, we beganto see how to make them less and less coal-hungry. Thus, in 1727 theyhad needed about 44 pounds of coal to produce a horse’s strength for anhour. By 1860, though, they could produce the same power with only abouttwo pounds of coal. So over time we could use them even where coal costa lot.

What we were doing was pouring our brain into the new machine. Withthat, we figured out how to make the planet spout even more new ragingrivers and mighty winds wherever there was coal, not just where it wascheap. And that started to break our age-old link between land and wealth.

After a point, the cost of the amount of coal that a steam engine neededto do a fixed amount of work fell below the cost of the amount of foodthat we—or our horses or oxen—needed to do the same work. That waslike finding a horse that we could feed half as much for it to go twice asfast. At first the trick only worked in a few of our industries—mining,cloth, pottery—but in them our surplus labor started rising fasterthan our food costs did.

So, in them, our labor returns from pumping out more babies started tofall behind. We started to produce faster than we needed to reproduce. Andthat started to break our age-old link between babies and wealth.

As those two age-old links started to crack, we began to spurt throughthe first fissures in our agrarian bottle.

For instance, in 1783, Manchester had just one cotton mill powered bysteam. By 1800, it had 42. By 1816, it had 86. Over the same period,its headcount shot up from around 25,000 to about 150,000—not withreproduction, but mostly from migration.

Suddenly, to make massive amounts of new stuff we no longer needed togo conquer many acres of new land, or produce (or steal) huge numbersof new babies. (Although we were still making lots of babies; in Britainas a whole, our numbers nearly tripled between 1750 and 1850.)

But that sharp rise in production only brought us up harder against thenext problem—transport.

Take pottery. To make pots, we needed clay for the pots, potter’s wheelsand lathes to shape the pots, flint and salt to glaze the pots, coal tofire the pots, power to grind the flint and run the wheels and lathes,and, of course, potters. Where, though, do we site the pottery itself?Where the clay is? Where the coal is? How about where the power is?What about the flint, or salt—or potters? Wherever we site it,something may be missing. To fetch that, we might need ships, carts,packhorses, and people. Transport adds time, or cost, or both. Plus,power is a special case. Waterwheels and windmills are stuck in place. Soare early steam engines, since they needed so much coal.

Every manufacturing industry is the same (even today). To make anything,whether its pots, or cotton, or flour, or whatever, we need materials,power, and hands, but rarely are all three in the same place at thesame time. Wherever we had lots of power, we usually didn’t have enoughfood for lots of hands, or we didn’t have much materials. Wherever wehad lots of hands, we either didn’t have much materials, or not muchpower. Wherever we had lots of materials, we either had too little power,or too few hands.

So, for millennia, most of our industry had to be either small or slow,or both—and, usually, hands had to make do for missing power, and mosteverything was handmade. Of course, we could build large things—webuilt pyramids, for instance—but not quickly. Or if quickly, then notcheaply. Fast, cheap, or large—pick any two. It was as if three kidswere trapped in a burning building, but we could only ever carry two,so we always had to decide which one had to die.

In Britain, as we ramped up production, turnpike roads, then canals,helped. But even our widest and newest canals, which could carry up to400 times what a packhorse could, weren’t enough to bleed off the headof steam building in our industrial pressure cooker.

So we poured our brain into the new machine yet again and by 1825, wemanaged to make high-precision steam engines so small and safe that wecould plop them on rails. A new vehicle, the locomotive, was born.

The first railroad, just 25 miles long, then halved the cost of a tonof coal. And steam could pull 50 times what even a horse drawing on acanal could. Many of us began to smell money. Railroad mania then tookover and the stock market went mad.

So we poured even more of our brain into the new machine. That then ledto further engine changes—for instance, to use even higher pressuresteam—which then pushed the train faster and faster. The trainthen led to our second wave of industry by creating entire networks ofcatalyzing cycles. As it linked different places into new networks, theystarted working together, making things that weren’t makeable before,then things that weren’t even thinkable before. That’s when Britain,then later a few other of our nations, started to get seriously rich.

Here’s why: We want coal, but deep coal mines flood. We get more coalwith steam engines, but to pump water they need coal. So steam pumpsburn coal to help us reach more coal to burn. That’s an autocatalyticcycle. It could give us piles of pumps and tons of coal. But to makethose pumps, we need iron, and deep iron mines also flood. If we sticksteam pumps in iron mines, we get another autocatalytic cycle. It couldgive us piles of pumps plus tons of iron. But while those pumps wouldgive us lots of iron they won’t work without lots of coal. Each set ofpumps needs something that the other set makes. Both cycles could feedeach other—if only we had some cheap and fast way to haul coal to ironmines, and iron to coal mines. A railroad makes that happen.

But a railroad can’t exist without iron for its rails and coal for itsengines. So, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, coal mines, iron mines,and railroads fit together. They all need steam engines, which needcoal and iron. So if we link the mines with a railroad, all three could‘trade’ materials with each other. The three reactions together areco-catalytic—they all catalyze each other.

That’s already a larger network process than mere autocatalysis. But nowadd factories. They catalyze railroads, because they could make railsand engines—if they have iron—and coal to smelt it—and railroadsto fetch both. But railroads also catalyze factories, as they do mines,because they can fetch things that factories need, and carry things thatfactories make. Similarly, mines catalyze factories, just as factoriesdo mines.

So once we link everything up: we can dig coal to carry coal to makeiron to build trains that burn coal to carry coal to make iron to buildpumps that burn coal to dig coal to feed factories that burn coal to....

Trains HelpMines Help Factories Help Trains

That second wave of industrial change started in Britain. As railtravel blossomed there, the new engines, skills, and tools spreadwildly. Production rocketed up. In 1800, thanks to Britain’s treeshortage, Russia and Sweden exported iron to Britain. (Smelting iron takeslots of fuel, and Russia and Sweden had lots of trees.) But Britain wassoon exporting over five times as much iron as it imported. In 1800, itmade about 280,000 tons of pig iron. By 1850, it made about 3.4 milliontons—more iron than all the rest of our nations combined. By 1872,it made about 7.25 million tons.

The new cycles didn’t merely result in more coal and iron. We can’teat coal. We don’t wear iron. Since factories were linked into the samecycle, we also sprouted factories that made other things. But even whenwe could make some industry large-scale, why bother if its large-scaleproducts couldn’t then cheaply reach large-scale markets? That’s whytowns have always had an edge over the countryside. In a town we can’tfeed ourselves, but enough of us live in one place to make it worthdividing our labor so that we can pay for our food, and more. Thusas industry ratcheted up, so did cities, sucking in labor from thecountryside. Further, even where there weren’t any cities, new citiessimply grew up around new factories, which grew up around new sources ofpower, sucking more and more of us out of the countryside, like blackholes popping up out of nowhere. Supply fed demand, which fed supply,which fed demand.

Thus from 1830 to 1900, several other of Britain’s industries started togrow just as insanely fast as coal and iron. The new cycles thus pushedBritain’s production straight off the financial charts and into unknownterritory. Compared to our previous millennia of near-stasis, it was asif aliens had landed in Britain and started handing our jetpacks.

But then, the rest of the world began to, er, cotton on to how the trickworked. As steam engines got less and less coal-hungry, and spread andspread and spread, and the skills and tools to build them kept spreadingand spreading and spreading, those same aliens landed elsewhere. Inthe United States after 1830 our miles of railroad track doubled everydecade—for 60 years straight. By 1850 we already had more rail therethan the rest of our nations combined—Britain included. By 1916 we hada quarter million miles of track. Similarly, in Germany we produced 30million tons of coal in 1871. By 1890, we produced 70 million, and by1913, 190 million. By 1893 we were making more steel than even Britaindid. By 1913 we doubled Britain’s steel production. France, Belgium,and the Netherlands took off, too. So did Japan. But the aliens didn’ttouch down everywhere. In an eyeblink, what was once one planet, becametwo—a superrich one and a poor one.

Nor was the railroad our only new network enabler. Over the next twocenturies, steamships, telegraphs, phones, trucks, planes, shippingcontainers, fiberoptic cables, satellites, computers—and before andduring the railroad age, turnpike roads and canals—each welded togethersimilar sorts of networks. They all linked parts that previously weren’tlinked, or weren’t quickly linked, or weren’t cheaply linked, lettingthem feed each other.

Make beer here and bread there and, if transport is fast enough and cheapenough, trading them can pay. Each site can then specialize, doing whatit does best. Both beer and bread get cheaper. Cost goes down. Volumegoes up. Quality goes up. Production explodes. Trade explodes. Divisionof labor explodes. Cities explode.

Thus while the steam engine triggered the first wave of our industrialphase change, the railroad triggered the second. It locked itself, themines, and the factories together so that each part catalyzed all theothers. Such a network effect is more than one autocatalytic reaction;that’s just a special case. It’s many co-catalytic reactions linkedtogether. All happen together, with each aiding the others, which togetheraid it. Thus, all the parts meld together into one giant self-helpingreaction network.

That kind of network isn’t unique to us. Biochemists might call itsynergetic (‘jointly self-helping’). Similar networkspower nearly all life-forms on the planet. Our bodies, like those ofall other animals, break down food, then feed the spare parts to ourmitochondria, which are like little cells inside our cells—they’re ourcells’ power plants. In them, molecules work synergetically with eachother to break down those spare parts and so both remake each other, andthus their network, and also make essentially all our body’s energy. Asimilar network does much the same in plants.

Such self-helping networks are like spinning flywheels (like ingyroscopes). Getting one to spin is hard. Changing its angle of spin ishard. But stopping it from spinning is also hard because once it startsspinning it makes everything that it needs to keep on spinning.

In sum, by about 1830, in a few of our countries, a metronome began tobeat that we had never heard before. It was the first thready pulse ofan industrial age. That synergy is the heart that still thumps today atthe base of all our currently rich nations. It’s why well over a billionof us are now so rich that we can throw away billions of pounds of fooda year. It’s also why billions more of us get far more food today thaneven a few decades ago. All that started because new synergies droveus to abandon our age-old zero-sum path to wealth, which was to pumpout as many babies as the land and our tools could support. Over time,we found that we needed fewer and fewer hands on the farm to feed moreand more hands in the cities; then, later, we found that we needed fewerand fewer hands even in the cities. But for all that to happen we firsthad to change our largest, and oldest, division of labor—that betweenmale and female. Had that not happened, in the long run nothing elsewould have changed.

Rebirth

By about 1840 in some of our countries new synergies started leadingto many changes in our labor lives, for both men and women. One ofthe many reasons for that begins this way: “It is well known howdifficult it is for poor inventors to obtain money to aid them in makingexperiments. People, generally, would much rather invest in lotterytickets.” So said the main investor in Isaac Singer’s invention,the first practical sewing machine. Then he handed over the sum inquestion—$40.

That money, given to Singer in Boston in 1850, was to make him amulti-millionaire in a time when laborers there earned $1 a day. But thatsame $40 also went on to trigger changes in the labor lives of millionsof women, first in the United States, then Europe, then elsewhere aroundthe globe. Singer’s machine, and many other new tools, restitched thefabric of many women’s lives. However, not all of us would have wishedthat, least of all Singer. A brash, semi-literate, wife-beating bigamist,he was once sued for alimony by seven women at once. His attitude, andthat of many men at the time, whether in the United States, Britain,or anywhere else, was that women were best when supine and silent.

To see something of the changes in women’s labor lives, strap yourselfinto the corset of a woman in 1800 in the United States. Your man mightbe the bread-winner, but you’re the bread-maker. You’re also the chiefchild-rearer, food-maker, and clothing-maker. You make the bread andcornmeal, butter and cheese, cakes and pastries. You salt the pork andmake the preserves. You make the clothes and linens, and the soaps andcandles. You also do the laundry and housework, and you look after thekids or younger siblings. For none of that are you paid a wage. You alsorarely travel, and almost never alone—it’s unsafe. It’s also costlyand slow. For instance, a stagecoach trip from Philadelphia to Baltimore(about 100 miles) takes three days and costs $11. So, mostly, you stayhome, often spending three months at a time without seeing a new face.

If you live in one the few towns, you might have a wider circle. If you’vehad more schooling than normal, you might become a governess. If you’rea widow and well-to-do, you might keep a shop or a boarding house. Ifyou’re a spinster, you might live with kin, or take in washing, or bea seamstress, cook, or maid. If you live in a port city or border town,you might rent out your body. If you’re a native, you’re either fleeingthe invaders, or trying to survive with them. If you’re a slave, you dowhat your owners tell you to do, which might include hiring yourself outas a laundress or caterer. If your family is rich, your menfolk couldafford slaves or servants. Also, you would be taught to read, draw,and sing—but mainly to make yourself more of a catch in the marriagemarket. You avoid too much schooling as that would scare off suitors.

Wherever you live—whether on the farm or in a town (calling them‘cities’ stretches today’s meaning of the term)—you live under much thesame rules. You can’t vote. If single, you’re a ward of your menfolk—inessence, a reproductive asset to be sold at some point to some man. Ifmarried, you’re nearly property. If enslaved, you’re actual property. Andblack or white, slave or free, young or old, rural or urban, poor orrich, you might get married at 15 or so, then get pregnant every two orso years before you die, exhausted, often before 40.

It’s 1800 not 800, but you mostly live the same rural, home-bound,illiterate, nonsalaried, high-birthrate life that almost all otheragrarian women all over the planet have lived since we stumbled intofarming. In an agrarian world, land means nothing without labor, whichmeans nothing without babies. Your real job is baby-maker.

It’s now 1820 and your labor life hasn’t changed. But the countryas a whole is now changing fast. Europe’s recent hijinks mean thatit has ceased supplying guns to the natives, who are now nearlydefenseless. The usual farmer and herder expansion—and hunter-gatherernear-extinction—is following. But it’s now happening far fasterthan in millennia past because, besides cows and numbers, the invadershave guns and smallpox while the natives have bows and arrows and nochance. Settlers are crowding west, killing natives and gobbling land. Injust the last nine years, the number of states have jumped by over a thirdand the cost of virgin land has fallen to $1.25 an acre. With so muchcheap land, food is cheap, so settler numbers are surging by an unheardof 33 to 35 percent every decade. Also, as early as 1830, seven factoriesin Pittsburgh alone are churning out 100 steam engines a year—in aland that just 20 years before had no working steam engines at all.

In the rapidly expanding country, our new attitudes to change astoundvisitors from Europe. In 1825 a German visitor noted that “Anything newis quickly introduced here, and all the latest inventions. There is noclinging to old ways; the moment an American hears the word ‘invention’he pricks up his ears.” In 1831 an English visitor wrote that “Thewhole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour,are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable todomestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper mills,or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they wouldreceive in service.” In Europe, such attitudes to novelty, machines,labor, and servitude are crazy. There, we’re used to a world teeming withpeons who live on a fixed amount of land owned by hereditary aristos. Wecan’t remember what the (far slower) farmer invasion of Europe must havebeen like millennia before. We also find it puzzling given that the newcountry still holds two million slaves—and native blood is still weton its hands.

But for many of us in the new land, anything old is now suspect. Anythingnew is now, if not embraced, at least not always smothered in its crib,as it usually was before. Also, if you’re a free-born white, whether richor poor, male or female, you feel yourself the equal of anybody. So yousee being a servant as degrading. Of course, if you’re black, you’relikely still a slave, so your opinion mostly doesn’t count. If you’rea native, your thoughts don’t seem to matter, either.

It’s now 1840 and the growing country’s vast new land surplus plus its newmachines have finally led to new labor options for you—if you’re white,single, and urban, that is. Now you can take wage-paying jobs—mostlyin sweatshops. In New England, for example, you can work in one of thecloth mills. Women like you make up nine-tenths of their labor pool. Andthey want you. You aren’t as violent as men are. You won’t complain asmen would. You can’t leave town as men could. You also take less—$1.25 aweek plus bed and board is normal. (Outside the mill, as a lone seamstressyou might expect to earn around 90 cents a week.) Your working day is 12to 14 hours long, six days a week. Sometimes the job gets so hard thateven you go on strike—but you have no leverage. Owners simply replaceyou from a rising tide of immigrant females from Europe, washed in bythe new transatlantic steamship.

As settlers in the rapidly ballooning country, we’ve by now killed,exiled, or absorbed enough natives to discover the vast coal and irondeposits of Pennsylvania. We’ve also discovered the vast wheat-growingcapacity of the ‘northwest.’ One day that would come to be known as the‘midwest,’ but right now it’s the frontier. As natives, we’re still tryingto fight, but as we die, and as the steam engines multiply to 5,000, andas the Conestoga wagons rumble farther west, many towns stop botheringto be self-sufficient and start to specialize. For instance, a swampyfort smelling of garlic starts calling itself Chicago. It quickly growsinto a transport hub—first by water, then by rail. Whole states, too,begin to specialize. Farming makes off for Ohio. Heavy industry fleesto Pennsylvania. Light industry remains in New England—but with cheapfood rolling in by rail from the plains, its farms no longer need asmuch female labor at home, so women and girls there stream to the mills.

It’s now 1860 and cities are inflating like popcorn on a hot griddle. Asthe railroad puffs them up, its ability to move bulk goods cheaply alsomeans that eastern factories can now supply the entire country’s demandfor goods—especially clothes, shoes, and tinware. Singer’s sewingmachine is now ten years old and theNew York Times booms thatthis “iron needle-woman” is the “best boon to woman in the nineteenthcentury.” Wow. But while that might be true for some rich urban women,you probably don’t buy one. Why would you? Suppose you’re a seamstressin New York. There are about 40,000 other seamstresses there justlike you. But the previous winter, at most 3,000 had found work. Allof you stitch by hand. None of you want sewing machines. Even if youwant one, you can’t afford it. Even if you could, you still wouldn’tuse it. It’s a machine, so that’s “men’s work.” In any case, even ifyou want to use it and could afford it, you still have to wheedle yourhusband or father to buy it; he controls the money. Besides, you knowthat men would only offer you low-paying work that no machine could yetdo. Nor are you wrong to think so. For example, that year in Bridgeport,Connecticut, only 1,131 females work for money. Of them, a thousandsew shirts. Twenty-nine make boots. Nine make lace. Seven help makecarriages. Six make hoop-skirts. Three make saddle parts. Not one usesthe latest machines.

Singer’s company helps change all that, but not with anything physical.It comes up with a new tool—the installment plan, a piece of financialengineering whose importance most of us today don’t even notice. It canmake a sewing machine for $10, yet it sells one for $25. You can’t affordthat, but you only need $5 to bring it home—and end up paying $50 for itby the time you’re done. In 1860, the company sells 13,000 machines—andby 1880, it would go on to sell half a million. Other companies takeup the idea. As cities explode, and steam-powered factories spread,you start buying other things on credit. In the burgeoning cities, othernew ideas whose importance most of us today don’t notice—like the shopwindow and the mail-order catalog—multiply. Singer, and others like him,make millions. It’s the biggest boom market in the history of the world.

Meanwhile, over 73,000 factory-made mechanical reapers are already cutting70 percent of the corn in midwestern fields—and factories are pumpingout around 20,000 more a year. Also, as the railroad keeps puffing west,bison slaughter steps up. Soon, as plains natives we would have nothingto eat, wear, or live in. So even when we aren’t being killed or exiled,we starve. As the railroads cobweb the continent, dragging the telegraphand a skein of raw new towns behind them, credit markets explode. Also,as harvesting machines spread, grain shipments explode. For example,in 1838 Chicago had shipped 78 bushels of corn. By 1860 it’s shipping31 million bushels of grain. You no longer need to make as much foodand clothing (or soap and candles) by hand. If you can afford it, youcan just buy them in the new stores or from the new mail-order catalogs.

As the genocide and the land rush continues, and the new machinesspread, massive reproduction plus massive immigration plus cheapertransport mean more cities plus bigger cities. Like you, many womencan now leave home to earn money. That helps push more of you to learnto read. In the newly big cities, the new gaslight makes the streetssafer at night, which makes evening classes possible. Once many womencan read, the telegraph, the newly cheap steam-printed newspapers,and the newly cheap railroad-carried postal system help you organizemeetings and protests. The railroad also gives you new, fast, cheap—andsafe—transport. It also feeds the cities still more as it makes leavingthe farm both easier and cheaper. As the costs and dangers of travel fall,instead of never seeing a strange face for months at a time, you now meetmany new women daily. Now that you can read, you also share their livesthrough the newly cheap books and magazines. You can also share yourgrievances through the newspapers and pamphlets. You still can’t vote,but your collective female voice now matters more than before.

It’s now 1880 and your labor life has changed a lot. Slavery is nowover—well, legally, anyway—and the farm is no longer the center ofyour world. Half of us are now working off it, earning a wage. Labor-lifechange is now constant. For instance, the New York branch of the YoungWomen’s Christian Association is just about to buy six of the newtype-writers. It plans to teach eight women to type. Uproar follows.Many males and females alike say that type-writing means both workingwith a machine and being surrounded by males, so it’s men’s work. Also,females, by keeping out of money matters, are more virtuous thanmales. Plus, female bodies are too frail to withstand the strain ofoffice work. Besides, letting females into offices would lower malewages. Surely, too, it would lead to lewdness. Anyway, it would displacemen—who have families to feed. That would then destroy the family, allof which would obviously mean the end of the world. As a female, you thusbelong at home. If you’re a black, you may well already work for wages,but only you seem to notice. Legal slavery is dead, but state-enforcedprejudice is still the norm. You can’t get the schooling you need forclerical work, anyway. Even if you do, you likely wouldn’t get hired. Ifyou’re a native, you’re in the same fix.

However, within six years, 60,000 women would become type-writers. TheType-Writer Girl then becomes an icon for white, urban, literatewomen in the United States (also in Britain, then some of the rest ofEurope). The newspapers and magazines use her in ads aimed at daringwomen—who might also want to smoke, live on their own, and perhapseven—shock, horror—ride a bicycle in a skirt. Then the same thinghappens with shorthand schools—then the latest thing, telephoneoperators. Office work becomes the new thing among the young aspiringwomen you know. However, aside from a handful of successful writers,singers, and actors, most working white women are still young, single,urban immigrants. Most still see their low-paying jobs merely as waysto mark time until they can get married, stop getting paid, and becomebaby-makers.

But the new synergetic pressures continue to drive change. Kids arebeing forced off the farms and into the factories, then even out ofthe factories. Like their mothers, they need to prepare for the newindustrial demands. No longer would sons always do what their fathersdid, nor daughters what their mothers did. To gain new skills theynow have to learn to read, so they get stuffed into schools. The newcities mean that a flock of kids can sit in one room, tended by just oneadult—often female. That then frees many women from daycare and alsocreates demand for teachers. So white, urban, literate women can nowearn money other than through harlotry, domestic service, factory work,and office work—they can become teachers, librarians, nurses.

It’s now 1900 and many women’s labor lives differ a lot from yourlabor life in 1800. To someone who lived through it: “the old universewas thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created.” The railroad iseverywhere. Big cities, too, are everywhere. (For instance, Chicago isnow the fifth largest city on the planet.) Whereas in 1800 only about onein 16 of us there lived in cities, now two in five of us do. Further, asnew sewers spread in the new cities, death rates fall. From 1890 to 1930,average life expectancy would shoot up by about 16 years, and averageheights would shoot up by about 2.4 inches. Also, as urban densitiesrise, schooling rises with them. With few natives left to kill, and thuslittle land left to steal, land starts getting dear again. But with laborstill unreliable and low-skilled, machines are everywhere. For example,harvesters help the country produce over half a billion bushels of wheat,which is about a quarter of all the wheat we produce in the entire world.

All those machines mean that food there is still cheap, even though landis getting expensive again and our numbers exploded over the century. Butas machines cheapen even further, and child deaths fall, and schoolingcosts rise, the cost of rearing kids rises, while their farm-labor valuefalls. With many big cities and many machines, unskilled labor now hasless value. Skilled labor has more value, but it costs more to create. Somaking lots of kids stops making sense.

New ways to prevent pregnancy, or to abort, also cheapen andspread—against strong resistance, both male and female. Over thecentury, white urban women have halved their average number of babies,from about seven to about three. The rates for black and native womenalso fall, but not as much. In the new country, as in all industrializingcountries, our age-old link between land and bodies to work it breaks.

By 2000, the country’s labor phase change continued to bring aboutan urban, mobile, literate, low-birthrate, wage-earning woman. It hadshifted from 94 percent rural in 1800 to 79 percent urban. However, itslabor market remained largely dual, with many paid jobs still mainlymale and some mainly female. Thus, many doctors were now female, butmore surgeons were male, and more pediatricians were female. Women stillhad to balance baby-making against wage-earning jobs, and most high-pay,high-status fields were still mainly male.

By 2007 our species was still phase changing out of the agrarian world.In the United States, women made up 28 percent of White House senioraides. Of the active federal judiciary, 24 percent were female. InCongress, 15 percent were female. In the Senate, it was 14 percent. Of theactive duty force in the uniformed services, 14 percent were female. Ofthe 39 active duty four-star officers, zero were female. Across theglobe in 2007, of our 758 Nobel Prize winners, 33 were female. Of our793 billionaires with publicly traded fortunes, 78 were female—and ofthose, six were self-made; all others married or inherited wealth. Ofour 500 largest companies, seven had female CEOs. Of our 100 richestnations, three had female elected heads of state. However in 1800, allthose numbers were zero. Had Singer, who died in 1875, lived to see howmany women’s lives would change, he would have been as surprised as ifa butterfly had pulled a knife on him.

In the Grip of a Metal Hand

Given how synergies have helped shape our labor lives over our past twocenturies, what might our near future labor lives be?

In 1850 in the United States, the average work week was around 70 hours;by 1900, the population had tripled, yet the work week had dropped toabout 60 hours. In 1900, a year’s worth of food cost an average a year’sworth of food cost an average family about 1,700 hours of labor. By2000, that effort had fallen by over sixfold. In 1945, a year’s worthof housework—preparing meals, doing laundry, cleaning the house, andsuch—might have cost an average family about 3,120 hours. By 1975,that time had dropped threefold. From 1900 to 2000, the country’sjob market switched from one-quarter to three-quarters professional,managerial, clerical, and sales and service. Thus, in 2006 it had aboutas many barbers and beauticians as farmers. Even its few remaining farmersweren’t really farmers. They lived on farms, but about 89 percent of theirincome came from outside farming. From 1900 to 2000, in our presently richcountries as a whole, our average amount of leisure time before retirementrose fourfold. Our average amount of time spent retired rose fivefold. Theproportion of us who lived long enough to retire rose sevenfold.

In general, over our past couple centuries, as new tools spread, andthe new synergies that they gave rise to locked together, millionsof us started shifting from land-as-wealth and bodies-as-wealth tocoal-as-wealth and trade-as-wealth.

Many of those changes followed from a tiny few of us trying to pump waterout of coal mines in Britain in 1700. Was all that change a one-timething, or is there anything that we’re doing today that might go on toshape our labor lives in our near future just as much? It’s impossibleto be sure, but maybe yes, because we may now be beginning to shift intoknowledge-as-wealth and brains-as-wealth.

When it comes to planetary-scale forces, like geology or climate,it’s easy for us to see that we’re in the grip of forces that we don’tcontrol. It may be harder for us to accept that we’re also in the gripof forces that we ourselves create—mostly by accident—but that westill don’t control.

That matters today because network forces didn’t only shape our past;they’re still shaping us today. Because of them, less than a centuryfrom now, we may look back and call much of the 1800s to early 1900s‘The Steam Age,’ and much of the mid 1900s to perhaps the mid 2000s‘The Computer Age.’

Today, just as with the steam engine centuries ago, one large set oflabor changes centers around the computer. One day it will be largelyforgotten, just as today the steam engine mostly is, but today’s globalnetwork is beginning to do what railroads and steamships began to do forsteam engines and mines back in the 1830s—it’s linking computers andbrains and thus catalyzing their effects. As a result, a new synergeticnetwork may now be seeding itself. As before, we’re the ones doing it,but, just as with the steam engine, we mostly don’t know what we’re doing,because we don’t know what the outcome of what we’re doing will be.

That similarity may not be coincidence. There’s little really new aboutcomputers compared to steam engines because what’s really driving themisn’t semiconductors (or vacuums), but our groups. How they act andreact doesn’t seem to change very much whether it’s 1810 or 2010.

Just as with the steam engine, for millennia the computer was anunthinkable thought. Then it abruptly left the dream world and becamereal. Just as with the steam engine, that happened, first, because itbecame just barely within our reach, and, second, because of a few localand practical needs—in one case: to aim big guns in a big war. Then,just as with the steam engine, after a while, we figured out a littlebit about it and so got better at it, so it began to spread into otherniches. In the case of the steam engine, those were what we today wouldcall factory jobs; in the case of the computer, those were what wetoday would call office jobs. Both kinds of jobs had existed before,but neither was anything like what today’s versions would become.

Again, just as with the steam engine, the computer was a new kind of primemover—but this time, a mental one. Before it, with one or two minorand recent exceptions, we had only ourselves and our aids. In the mentalworld we didn’t even have analogs of horses or waterwheels. And today,it’s locked into a development spiral, just as the steam engine once was.

Further, like steam engine performance, computer performance mustpeak. Thus, computer-powered change must one day taper off. But that’sunlikely to happen soon. Steam-powered change started around 1700 butdidn’t end when we perfected large ones around 1800. Nor when we made onessmall enough to run on rails and stick on ships around 1830. Nor whenwe made ones that were even less coal-hungry and even higher-pressurearound 1850. Even today, small changes continue in their descendants,steam turbines and Stirling engines. Further, whether those descendantsare in coal-fired power plants, nuclear power plants, or wherever, todaythey help generate around 80 percent of all our electrical power. Thelabor lives that most of us today lead, whether in our rich world orour poor world, would cease to exist without them.

Similarly, in the 1960s a computer chip factory cost around $14 millionU.S. By 2010, a new one could cost about $5 billion, or more. And justdesigning a chip in the first place could cost another couple billiondollars. Such costs can’t keep rising forever. But whenever they peakwon’t mean the end of computers. Likely, big ones will then switchto more exotic tech. Instead of using flat chips, maybe they’ll usethree-dimensional wafers. Or perhaps they’ll have optical or quantumparts. But whatever tech they use won’t much matter. They’ll still be bigand rare and costly. However, by then, small computers will be so tinyand cheap that we’ll weave them into our contact lenses, shoes, clothes,walls, roads, maybe even our food to act as body monitors. They’ll run offof tiny batteries, or solar power, or radio-frequency power, so they won’tneed a power plug. And they’ll be dirt cheap—literally. Many of themwill also talk to each other. So they could call on the effort of manyothers, big and small, all around the planet. Pieces of such distributedmachines will routinely go dead, but that won’t matter, because otherpieces will simply route around them, surviving as a whole as long asthey can patch links between themselves. That is almost surely our future.

By then, if not long before, we’ll make our next leap into darkness,just as the steam engine left the world of vacuums and pistons andentered the world of turbines when the electric motor displaced theirfirst prime-mover purpose.

Some of our rich countries already have more computers thanpeople. Billions more are headed our way, far faster than our numberscan grow, even in our fastest growing nations. So, just as with thesteam engine, we’re once again producing something far faster than weneed to reproduce to keep producing it.

This time, that something isn’t hands, but brains. Of course, we’refar better than our computers at a huge range of mental tasks. But theyvastly surpass us at others. And they’re a lot cheaper. And soon they’llvastly outnumber us.

However, today we still link them about as well as we linked our coal andiron mines back in 1800. Even with today’s orbital comsats and fiberopticsand the like, when pushing data around the planet today mostly we’restill plodding along on the analogs of muddy packhorse trails. We’restill missing two things vital for full synergy: railroads and factories.

By 2015, about three billion of us were linked in a global computernetwork. But over seven billion of us were alive, so over four billionof us were still out of the loop. However, by 2030, perhaps over eightbillion of us will be alive, probably six in ten of us will be urban,and likely all of those will be online—because our computers will bythen be vastly cheaper, smaller, far more linked, and they’ll vastlyoutnumber us. By then, if not before, billions of us will each have atleast rentable access to, perhaps, millions of them. By then, asking oneof us, even in our poorest countries, about ‘our computer’ would be asnonsensical as asking us about our paint or plastic or concrete. Likely,most of us may be linked. Computers would have multiplied and shrunk andlinked so much that they would be everywhere—and thus, nowhere. Probablylong before then our computers will finally have their ‘railroad.’

That alone seems likely to trigger a major reboot in our labor lives,just as the railroad triggered vast new synergies. However, even morechange may be ahead if we one day get ‘mental factories’ beyond oursingle selves. Might those arise?

When automation first came to manual labor starting around 1800, it facedhuge barriers, but one by one they fell away and huge changes followed,including major disruptions of our old ways of life. Now automation iscoming to mental labor, and it, too, faces huge barriers—starting withthe fact that we don’t know how to do it.

But we’ve been down that road before. Not that long ago we couldn’timagine a future where rootless prime movers outside of ourselves (andour draft animals) existed. Before the steam engine, we had to do mosteverything physical by hand. For most everything mental, that’s mostlystill the case today. We don’t yet have mental steam engines.

Maybe we’ll get our first one through machine intellects. Or maybe we’llget one through enhancing our own brain. But even if we don’t get oneeither way—or at least, not soon—it seems likely that long-distance,one-time, bespoke, problem-solving networking will come, and perhapssoon. Bits of that are already a little here as the world goes online.But it’s also already a little here in a few software development nicheswhere firms are no longer local entities but world-wide sets of contractsspecifying tasks that are then picked up by others around the planetwho are talented enough to do them.

Once upon a time, an average company was tiny, limited to one building,and most everyone in it was related, or was part of one small circle offriends—all, or almost all, male. That company might grow anything,make anything, or do almost any other sort of work, yet its people had tocover all the necessary functions. Thus, merely having an idea needn’tmean much. It’s rare to find someone who can be the brain (who thinkssomething up), the mouth (who sells it), the wallet (who pays for it),the hand (who builds it), the sword (who defends it), and so on, butstill the circle usually had to be small. All sorts of barriers forcedthose limits on us.

Nowadays, faster and longer-range matter- and data-flow (transport andcommunication), ever larger markets, and thus ever more money, and evermore competition, can splinter having an idea from testing it, findingthe money to build it, getting the money to build it, distributingthe money to build it, organizing the people and tools needed to buildit, building it, defending it, regulating it, managing it, and owningit. Thus giving rise to: inventor, scientist, mathematician, engineer,contractor, investor, banker, lawyer, shareholder, director, executive,manager, accountant, designer, marketer, and regulator.

Many such parts are integrated, but mostly only vertically, in the formof firms, institutions, or government agencies. But our still limitedmental tools may have forced that particular solution on us. Such toolsare widening, and smartening, and as they do they might erode some of ourage-old geographic, linguistic, credit, and legal barriers. Today we thinkof those barriers as fixed things, but they needn’t be. In the long run,they might crumble if new mental tools were to make them less important.

Today a company often means idea and money suppliers, energy andmaterials suppliers, tool suppliers, buildings containing those tools,labor suppliers working in those buildings, perhaps another set ofbuildings where product is sold, retail staff working in those buildings,and yet other buildings for office staff, designers, advertisers, andpossibly shippers. Most of those workers are still human. And even inlarge multinationals, while most such people may not be related they’reusually still ‘near’ each other, either in location, language, origin,or friendship circle. But if global linkage costs continue to fall, and ifthe number and power of mental tools continues to rise (although probablynot as fast), our need for those kinds of links may fade. It may no longermatter so much where we live, what language we speak, where we’re from,or even that we knew some other particular person before joining.

If so, no matter how small the company, or how esoteric its product orservice, its parts might start splintering as more and more company tasksspin off into world-spanning contracts. More of us around the world mightcompete to sign up for such a contract, then perhaps farm out some of it,which other contractors might compete for, then they might farm out someof that to yet other contractors, and so on. Many such contractors mightlive anywhere, speak any language, be any age, and be more female than inages past. If so, only contracts might then bind such a company together.

Of course, just as when the railroad started linking mines and factoriesand cities and ports and such, many of us will surely throw up all sortsof barriers—particularly those surrounding individual, corporate, andnational competition—but if such global contracts do become viable,then after a while, all that may be left of any such company may bethe network that glues producers—whether on farms, in factories,or in offices—to consumers.

Further, more and more of those producers, and even some of theirconsumers, may be robots—more and more of which may be of any size, fromcity blocks to gnats, so that some ‘factories’ might even fit in bedroomclosets. Why not? Establishing, branding, growing, and marketing suchnetworks across national boundaries would then become such a company’smain business, regardless of what it grows, makes, or serves—or to whom,or what, it serves that to. Increasingly, company reputation would becomeeverything. It would be all that defines the company.

If we allow such companies to come to exist, and if we reward them,they would grow in number and size. Then as they compete, they wouldskeletonize as other companies arise to help them. For instance, writing,insuring, and enforcing distributed contracts so that they can thrive invaried legal domains might grow so important that it might become a newkind of company’s business. Identifying, targeting, and tracking suitabletalent might becoming another kind of company’s business. Designingsets of contracts so that they mesh well, or are standardized, or areaccredited, might become yet another kind of company’s business, and soon. Then, several such helper companies could themselves skeletonize. Theresult could be a bouquet of such skeletonized global companies, drivingdown global wages but driving up global variety.

Another such kind of helper company might arise to solve problems forother such companies—or for any company at all—or for no company atall, for some of them might do some things for the sheer joy of doingit. In any such group, no one of us need necessarily be superfast orsupersmart, but with the right tools and links to others, the group mightwell be—if not compared to other such groups, certainly compared toa lone person, or any number of lone people. That group might have anedge in terms of facility, creativity, curiosity, or tenacity.

Were such groups to become routine, a new term might enter our languages:‘metaconcert.’ It might denote how we behave when we mass togetherto solve problems, for we would then have a new kind of power grid—amental one—because cleverness would then be on tap. Depending on demand,up to a third of us alive might be in constant touch with each other,and, enhanced with ever more powerful and ever cheaper thinking aids,we might attack our problems—at least technical ones in math, science,engineering, medicine, finance, and business—in ever larger, ever moreorganized metaconcerts across planetary distances.

Further, if the sheltering effects of location, language, origin,and friendship do indeed decline, any profit-motivated skeletonizedgroups that survive would have to become ever more nimble. With everfewer tethers to a physical existence, many such groups may then havethe lifespans of mayflies—winking into and out of existence in aneyeblink. Change would be constant, rapid, torrential. As with steamengine dispersal two centuries ago, new centers of ‘mental industry’would then spring up wherever they’re best suited to grow. So mentalproduction might explode, just as physical production once did whenrails synergetically linked coal and iron.

None of the above need happen. Maybe it won’t. But if, like the steamengine, we’re enticed to solve one problem after another between hereand there, then by around 2030 or so, if not before, we might be nearingthe same sort of cusp point that the steam engine took us to by about1830. If so, we may be headed for the next biggest boom market in thehistory of the world.

‘Computer Revolution?’ Feh. It probably hasn’t happened yet.