Thread by @antonhowes

It's sometimes said that people living through the Industrial Revolution didn't quite notice it. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Here's a thread on the decade of technological wonders that was the 1820s - the decade we always forget.

The mathematician Dr Olinthus Gregory put it especially well, in a speech to the Deptford Mechanics' Institution in 1826.

The Industrial Revolution, as it would come to be known, was already in full swing:

"Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, navigation, the arts, and sciences, useful and ornamental, in a copious and inexhaustible variety, enhance the conveniences and embellishments of this otherwise happy spot", Dr Gregory enthused.

He described "cities thronged with inhabitants, warehouses filled with stores, markets and fairs with busy rustics; fields, villages, roads, seaports, all contributing to the riches and glory of our land."

But, crucially, the work of improvement was far from done.

"Every natural and every artificial advantage is susceptible of gradual progression", he pointed out.

It's an attitude I call the improving mentality: seeing that there is always room for improvement, no matter how much has already been made.

He listed them:

"New machines to advance our arts and facilitate labour; waste lands enclosed, roads improved, bridges erected, canals cut, tunnels excavated, marshes drained and cultivated, docks formed, ports enlarged" (let alone passenger railways, which would appear at the end of the decade)

As Gregory put it, "these and a thousand kindred operations which present themselves spontaneously to the mind’s eye" - at least for those with the improving mentality.

And, most importantly, the way to get more people improving things was for them to improve themselves, too.

"Man", Gregory preached, "is in his nature an improveable being".

He was speaking to the Deptford Mechanics' Institution because in the 1820s such institutions were another new phenomenon of improvement: working men who pooled their savings to pay for lecturers & libraries.

The mechanics' institutions spearheaded Britain's bottom-up approach to adult education, with classes held in the evenings after work.

(There's a reason that @BirkbeckUoL University still holds evening classes: in the 1820s it was founded as the London Mechanics' Institute.)

Gregory recognised the importance of the Industrial Revolution's accelerators and catalysts - he called Britain's coal "more valuable to us than the gold mines ever were to Spain".

But it was the community of inventors and scientists who were improvement's primary cause.

He listed the Boultons and Watts and Trevethicks and Maudslays, who within living memory had brought about extraordinary changes.

And he exhorted his working audience to emulate them. Many of the "great" inventors of the 1820s, after all, had originally been of humble means.

Every extra person inspired to educate themselves, Gregory argued, led to the "augmentation of the national stock of happiness, prosperity, and peace, as well as to its stock of mechanical knowledge, of beneficial invention, and of practical skill."

We're still improveable beings, and have seen technological marvels within our lifetimes that would blow Dr Gregory's mind.
His message is just as relevant to the 2020s as it was to the 1820s. Go forth and improve!

You can read more here: antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-inven…