• Jane Goodall has shown that chimpanzees use tools in the same sense humans do, as do orangutans
• new evidence that birds use fire
  
• paleontologists find that early species of humans, as much as 3 million years ago, used fire and produced simple tools.  But in primitive societies there is little division of labor so the work process tends to stay very simple.
• hunting and gathering seems to be an easy life--12 to 19 hours of work a week--so why develop agriculture?
• less than 10 thousand years ago agriculture was invented in northern Iraq, and within a few thousand years independently in other parts of the world--China, India, central America.
• slash and burn agriculture did not make much difference, because it cannot support large populations.
• Irrigation is the key to the development of cities because it supports 14 times the population on the same area of land.  It takes twice the labor as dry farming.
• Mesopotamian writing:

• labor demands increased as a result of technological advance, but it also allowed specialization--the invention of government, writing, and in general of civilization.  This second revolution happened in Egypt and Mesopotamia about 3000 BCE.

• This meant the opportunities of a market, but at first opportunities to do new things were very limited by people's beliefs
• belief that the physical world was controlled by Gods who behaved irrationally (example: Mesopotamia)
• slavery--you don't need labor-saving devices if you have slaves to do the hard work
• the attitude that practical life was beneath the dignity of educated men (example: Hellenistic Alexandria)
• Plutarch said of Archimedes: "Although his inventions had won for him a name and fame for superhuman sagacity, he would not consent to leave behind him any treatise on this subject, but regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest efforts only to those studies the subtlety and charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity." (a source) Archimedes

 the four season, from bnf.fr

• The mouldboard plow (8th century, also known as the heavy or wheeled plow) turned the soil--needed on wet soils in northern Europe
  
• required 6 to 8 oxen to pull so led to cooperative farming

PEM photo: Mouldboard Plow, National Museum of American History
• Three field crop rotation (9th century)
• winter wheat or rye
• spring oats, beans, or barley
• fallow
• 2/3 of the fields produced food each year instead of the old system where half the fields were left fallow
• signifcant land was reserved as common land for pasturing animals and gathering firewood.
• Horsepower replaces oxen (widespread by 12th century)--horse could work for more hours a day and moved 50% faster
• oats (oxen can work on grass alone)
• the horse-collar (8th-9th century)--allows a horse to pull 4 or 5 times more weight.
 

 Horse-collar
• iron horseshoes (common by 11th century) allowed horses to work on wet ground
• the stirrup made possible the mounted knight, creating a demand for more and better horses

• --Manorial System : the serfs (not a slave, but bound to the land--cannot move away) lived in a village and farmed the land communally, giving a share of their labor and the crop to the knight
• --the knight and his family lived in the castle and had responsibility to protect the serfs and to fight when called up by the king
• --theoretically the king owned all the land and gave the lords the right to use it in return for military service, the lords then divided it up among knights on the same deal
  
• --such government as there was was provided by the knights and lords
• --the farmers had some opportunity to better themselves by improving farming practices

• invented in Roman times but used only rarely through the 5th century
• Spread of the water wheel in the 8th and 9th centuries
• In 1086 the Domesday Book lists 5624 mills in 3000 English communities--an average of one mill for every 50 households
• first mills were floating mills or mills attached to bridges.  They first had undershoot wheels (20-30% efficient), then overshoot (50-60% efficient, 13th century) with the water directed by a canal or a wooden millrace
• the invention of the cam allows the conversion of rotary motion into reciprocating motion
• new uses for water power:
• around 1000: fulling wool cloth, beating hemp, water driven trip hammers to break up iron ore
• around 1100 water powered bellows, edge runner wheels to crush olives for oil
• around 1200 saw mills that used water power both to power a rotary saw and to feed in the log
• around 1300 water powered grindstones, pumps to remove water from mines
• damming a river for water power--1177 Toulouse had 3 dams with 43 mills.  The largest dam was 1300 feet long
• windmills (12th century) used in areas where land was flat or streams froze in the winter

    23. Life and Miracles of Saint Louis

Christianity and attitudes towards technology in the Middle Ages

• motivation to go out and spread Christianity
• God no longer inhabits nature
• Man's dominion over the earth--new attitude
  
• monasteries developed and spread technology because they needed it to be self-supporting on marginal land and because they believed work was virtuous
  
• monks work with their hands--the first intellectuals who got their hands dirty   ( The Cistercians )
• Christianity prohibited the owning of Christians as slaves so slavery became much less common
• Cathedrals were a technological achievement with a religious purpose--competition to build taller both for civic pride and because people saw it as getting closer to God (a medieval mason, images of medieval art and architecture)
• the invention of the clock in the late 13th century--at a monastery 

• medieval books cost $2000-10,000 in today's money
• the first universities developed in the middle ages, and the demand for books was so high that some workshops had a kind of mass production with one person reading and a number writing
• paper was already mass produced, the screw press and oil-based inks used for wooden block prints
• Gutenberg's key innovation (in 1452) was moveable type (more history )
• by 1483 the same amount of money would produce 3 hand copies of 1025 printed copies
• the cost of a book dropped to a few hundred dollars in today's money
• by 1500 8 million books published--equal to total previous world output

• students didn't have to spend all their time memorizing the books
• more books available meant it was easier to compare books and notice contradictions
• more accurate and faster transmission of knowledge
• people read the Bible for themselves, leading to the reformation
• Luther takes his stand in 1517--argues that we are saved by God's grace not by good works and that everyone has the right to interpret the Bible for themselves
• in 1531 Henry VIII breaks England away from the Catholic church

• Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbis Celestium in 1543.  He was a priest motivated by the need for calendar reform, but his argument that the earth goes around the sun (instead of vice versa) started the downfall of Aristotelian science
• Kepler published the theory that the planets move in elliptical orbits in 1609.
• Galileo published his defense of the Copernican system in 1632 and his new physics in 1638.  Galileo is most important because he put into place a new scientific method in which scientists argued from experiment and from his observations with the telescope, not from logic alone.
• Newton published the law of universal gravitation in 1687.  He was slowed down a bit because he had to invent calculus in order to show that his theory worked.

• the problem of navigation was not solved during the age of exploration
  
• magnetic compass introduced in 13th century, but knowing which way you are going doesn't help much if you don't know where you are
• more careful map-making was the main improvement of the 14th and 15th centuries, particularly knowledge of the winds
  
• minor improvements in methods for measuring latitude in 15th century
• the problem of measuring longitude was not solved until the mid to late 1700s ( story)
• in 1340 the Muslims cut off overland trade to Asia and Europeans start exploring outside the Mediterranean
• slow exploration down the coast of Africa until Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487
• Columbus underestimated the circumference of the earth and reached America in 1492
• in 1519 Magellan set out on a 3 year voyage around the world

• multiple masts and more than one sail on each mast
• rudder permanently attached to a stern post instead of a steering oar
• rounded shape
• military technology was also critical, because of the fighting to control sea routes
• primitive cannon about 1325 used carved stone balls and exploded a lot
• iron cannonballs introduced 1350, corned gunpowder for more even explosion about 1420
• cannon became safe enough to use on a ship about 1500
• very quickly warships began carrying large numbers of cannon--England rose to power partly because they were more successful in making iron cannon (because they happened to have high-phosphorous ore)

Improvements in agriculture helped start the industrial revolution and were crucial to its success
notice also what life was like for farm laborers, to provide a comparison with the lives of factory workers

• key to agriculture becoming more efficient
  
• land ownership:
• the owners of the land were rich upper class families
• they leased the land to villages whose residents cooperated to farm communally but different families has the right to the produce of different amounts of land
  
• during enclosure the landowners wrote new leases to individual families--often 19 year leases
  
• every family in that village had the right to get a lease for an amount of land equivalent to the rights they had before
• the replacement of communal farms with family farms was well underway before the industrial revolution--started on the basis of agreement of villagers but was increasingly forced after 1760
• communally farmed land and common land were divided up into family farms, each family getting an equivalent share to what they had before
• people who got very small farms couldn't survive on their own without the right to use the common (because it has been divided up too) and had to sell out, so farms got larger (several hundred acres)
• family farms (on leased land) worked by the family and some hired agricultural laborers (at first fairly often hired on an annual basis)
  
• this was key because it gave opportunities to those farmers who were interested in improving--they could invest in improving their land or new crops
  
• End result of this process of enclosure & farms getting larger was a pattern of large family farms on land leased from an upper class landowner:
  • Farms of 200-500 acres
    
  • One family held the lease and makes decisions
  • That family could invest in improvements and get profits
  
  

• 15-20% of the land was owned by the farmers themselves, 75% by large landlords, usually the old aristocracy whose families had owned the land for many generations
• farmers did often have 19 year leases--farm size refers to the size of the farm a family leased and managed, not the land owned by a landlord
• the small farmers who sold their land rights mostly become agricultural laborers but some moved to cities
  
• the overall labor surplus kept wages down
  
• in a few areas people were moved off the land to increase pastureland for sheep
• it is somewhat oversimplified to say that poor people moved from rural areas to the cities and provided the labor force for the industrial revolution
• but agriculture certainly made a difference because it allowed population increases and fed an increasing population of city-dwellers
  

• even before the industrial revolution there were leaseholders who controlled land and laborers who had no land rights and worked for money (or food)
• enclosure benefits the remaining leaseholders, but more people become laborers
  
• before the industrial revolution, farm workers had been hired annually and fed by the farmer, as the industrial revolution developed the system changed, farm laborers were hired when needed and paid weekly wages
• why?  disappearance of feudalism, more emphasis on profit
• the system of relief for the poor--poor laws--was based on the idea you could only get help in the place where you were born
• population began to grow more rapidly, more food
  
• the poor had large families because more children meant more wages and with the early poor law reform called the Speenhamland System, actual cash benefits
  
• Hobsbawm writes about the Speenhamland system, which made the situation worse by encouraging people to have more children and providing benefits only if they stayed in the parish where they were born (discouraging them from moving to find work)
  

a turnip slicer because horses can't manage whole turnips

• the amount of land in cultivation increased because of the enclosure of common land
  
• four field crop rotation--wheat, turnips, barley or oats, clover or alfalfa
• consider a 500 acre farm
• after enclosure the common land becomes cropland instead of permanent pasture so cultivated land increased from 360 acres to 480 acres
• the number of animals kept doubled, to 25 horses, 80 cattle and 350 sheep, who eat clover or alfalfa 9 months of the year and turnips in the winter
  
• these provided enough manure to fully fertilize the land, increasing grain yields by at least 10%
• labor needed increased from 15 to 21 year-round laborers, increasing the incentive to mechanize, but the new farm did not need any more labor during harvest than the old
  
• the earnings of the farm increased because of higher grain yields and because there were more animals, so the total revenue increase was 24%
  
• turnips and hay crops make it possible to keep more livestock over the winter and therefore to have more manure for fertilizer
• new willingness to try new things in agriculture--
  
• new scientific approaches to farming. willingness to experiment
  
• one of the pioneer scientific investigators of agriculture was an Englishman named Jethro Tull, who introduced an improved seed drill in 1701 and did systematic experiments to see what worked
  
• these technologies at first spread very slowly--they were widespread by 1800
  
• importing of fertilizer (guano from South America)
  
• breeding of improved livestock (eg. Herefords)
  
• fencing and drainage, including laying clay pipes under the fields after 1843
• mass production reduced the cost of tile pipes
• 
  
• average agricultural surplus per worker doubled from about 25% to about 50%

Labor involved in growing 100 bushels of wheat

•    1830  250-300 hours by hand
•    1890  40-50 hours by horse-drawn machine
•    1930  15-20 hours with a tractor
•    1975  3-4 hours with large tractors & combines

1837 John Deere produced a wrought iron plow with steel cutting edge for sticky prairie soil--his factory produced about 1000 in 1846, about 10,000 in 1857.  Harrows, grain drills, cultivators, and mechanical threshers (John and Hiram Pitts, 1837) come into use in 1840s

 McCormick Reaper

• McCormick didn't have the most uniform or satisfactory product but he moved his factory from Virginia to Chicago to be nearer the demand while Hussey stayed in Baltimore.
• McCormick succeeded by advertising and demonstrations, and by developing exclusive dealerships and selling machines on credit.
• Manufactured by regional franchises until 1851, at which point his production was 1000 per year.  Even his steam-powered plan in Chicago in 1850 depended on skilled workers, not special-purpose machines.
• Annual new model made manufacturing innovations difficult and meant replacement parts were an incredible headache--this wasn't a conscious marketing strategy but a combination of improvements and meeting the expectations of farmers.
• Even in the 1870s, factory manager Leander McCormick did not want to expand production and was notably unknowledgeable about machine tools--ordered things that did not exist and asked for parts that were not normally supplied (Chicago too far from New England, for one thing).
• Only introduced mass production techniques in 1880, when Cyrus kicked out Leander and hired Lewis Wilkinson, who had worked at both the Colt Armory and the Wilson Sewing Machine company.  Production increased fivefold by 1902.

•  labor shortage and high prices resulting from the civil war--farmers had cash to buy machines.
• When prices went down after the war farmers had to expand and mechanize to keep up.  Farm workers 64% of labor force in 1850, 49% in 1880.
• Machine farming developed on a large scale with settling of western Great Plains, 1870-1890.
• Rainfall of less than 15 in/yr and required wells 50-500 feet deep (windmills scarce until 1900).  Open range pretty much gone by 1890s; ranching took advantage of barbed wire (invented in 1874) to fence grazing land.

 Glidden's 1874 barbed wire design

• 1870s brought first attempts at large-scale, technology-intensive farming.
  • Took advantage of new varieties of wheat (particularly Russian) that could grow as winter wheat in cold climates.
  • Dry farming techniques--planting in deep furrows (dust mulch).
  • Experiments by people such as Oliver Dalrymple in mid to late 1870s--Grandin Bonanza, a farm of 61,000 acres worked by 200 pairs of harrows, 155 binders, 16 threshers, combines pulled by teams of 30-50 horses and mules or by steam tractors.  But many large farms went bankrupt in the droughts of 1885-1890.

PEM Photo, Steam Tractor, Dacusville Farm Days

• By 1900 5000 steam tractors made per year.
• Required many men to operate and much carrying of supplies, not to mention danger of setting fields on fire with sparks from the engine.

• it wasn't easy to build a machine to replace horses in a muddy field
  
• steam tractors were a success for logging and for farms in the western great plains in the 1890s
  
• tractors with internal combustion engines were on the market as early as 1904
• D.M. Hartsough built a multicylinder tractor that evolved into a successful model called "the big four"

• period of many different companies trying different approaches

• produced his first experimental tractor, which he called an automobile plow , in 1907
• Fordson model F production started in 1917

 Fordson Model F

• this was good timing, just when World War I was causing a desperate manpower shortage for farmers and higher prices so they could afford to buy equipment
• Like the Model T, Ford made a smaller, less expensive, easier to maintain tractor

• tractors were most useful on larger farms in relatively flat terrain with hard soil
• in the south they weren't necessarily more economical than mules for small farms even in the 1930s
• the more farmers have to spend on equipment the more dependent they are on crop prices