Thread by @antonhowes

When you think of the Industrial Revolution, you might think of soot-belching factories and squalid cities.

But just as some inventors pioneered the use of factories, other inventors sought solutions to industrialisation's social ills.

So why aren't they more famous? A thread:

The more famous inventors are Watt and his steam engines, or Arkwright and his cotton-spinning machines. But the Industrial Revolution was a much broader tide of accelerating innovation, from agriculture to watchmaking, and everything inbetween.

Including safety improvements.

There were plenty of inventions at the time that we might call more socially-oriented: the kinds of inventions that were rarely immediately profitable, but which aimed to save lives or alleviate suffering.

They were especially encouraged by the Society of Arts (now @theRSAorg).

The Society (more fully, "for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce"), for about a century from 1754 awarded cash prizes or honorary medals for un-patented inventions.

In other words, inventions that weren't all that profitable, but which were socially useful.

It advertised prizes for solutions to the problems that it identified - its premium system - and offered similar rewards, which they called bounties, for unsolicited inventions.

e.g. It awarded bounties to various inventors of lifeboats (pictured).

Or there was the bounty it gave to a clockmaker, Christopher Pinchbeck, for a safer crane - cranes at the time were like gigantic hamster wheels, but for humans (pictured).

When lines snapped, the results could be fatal, so Pinchbeck added a pneumatic braking mechanism.

In all, over the course of about a century, the Society of Arts awarded over 2,000 premiums and bounties for inventions.

But there is one invention that especially stands out, whose inventor deserves especial fame:

A replacement for using children to clean chimneys.

These children, sometimes as young as 4, were forced to climb up inside the chimneys to clean them. They were sometimes abducted by master chimney sweeps, and frequently perished in horrific accidents or of soot-induced cancers.

It was a national embarrassment.

Campaigners against called it "England's peculiar disgrace" - a social phenomenon thought to be unique to the country.

So the Society of Arts offered a premium to anyone who could find a technological replacement: a machine that could put the kids out of jobs.

The prize was won in 1805 by George Smart, a timber merchant and engineer. His tool, the scandiscope (pictured), could be operated from the fireplace, was cheap, effective, and weighed "no more than a musket".

But the master chimney sweeps opposed it.

To try to get Smart's invention adopted, the Society worked with the snappily titled "Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys, by Encouraging a New Method of Sweeping Chimnies, and for Improving the Condition of Children and Others Employed by Chimney Sweepers"

The SSNCB (I think that's the shortest acronym that makes sense?) at first tried to cooperate with the sweeps, offering their own prizes for the number of flues swept using the machine, as well as subsidising their purchase.

But this did not work.

Instead, the sweeps purposefully misused Smart's scandiscopes in an effort to turn customers against them.

So by 1809, the SSNCB had had enough. They changed their strategy from cooperation to outright disruption, encouraging brand new entrants to the market.

Gradually, the scandiscopes were brought into use. And crucially, the technology made laws banning the use of climbing boys possible. Parliament banned the employment of under-14s in 1834, extended in 1840 to 21.

But it wasn't until 1875 that the law had teeth for enforcement.

So thanks to Smart's machine, as well as later improvements, the lot of the climbing boys eventually improved.

And yet, Smart has been almost entirely forgotten.

He only just got a stub on Wikipedia (at my urging), and I wrote his entry in the @odnb.

Surely he deserves more!

Smart wasn't even a one-hit wonder. He pioneered the mass-production of barrels, made it safer for sailors to take down a ship's topmast, and improved civil engineering.

And what of the other Society of Arts premium winners who turned their inventive minds to the public good?

Hopefully they'll get the recognition they deserve, and join the pantheon of the Industrial Revolution's inventors alongside the likes of Watt and Arkwright.

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

And as for the Society of Arts - the remarkable institution that rewarded and encouraged them - I wrote a book about it, just out!

amazon.co.uk/Arts-Minds-Soc…