Josiah Wedgwood, the Wedgwood Pottery Company, and the Beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England



This is how one company actually began the Industrial Revolution.

The revolutionary generation that first adopted steam engines saw the following trends and changes:

Manufacturing was being modernized by a small group of entrepreneurs. Much of the new raw material processing and manufacturing was concentrated in a small area in the middle of England, away from London. These modernizing entrepreneurs formed a new economic, intellectual and social network.

Modernizing entrepreneurs like Wedgwood tended to be members of Dissenting sects (not members of the Church of England), Whig (liberals) in politics, and believers in “progress.” They were optimistic about the future, influenced by the ideas of Hume, Rousseau, Locke and Adam Smith. They believed their society could be reformed and they were active agents for improvement.

They believed in studying and understanding the material world through reason, data, experience, and experimentation. They had personal ties with scientists and intellectuals. 

Like Wedgwood, many came from poor backgrounds. Because of their backgrounds and dissenting religious beliefs (many were Quakers), they could not attend Oxford or Cambridge. They were cut off from the traditional avenues of social advancement - government official, army officer, and the Church of England. 

The Industrial Revolution gave them opportunities for economic success denied them under a pre-industrial society. Entrepreneurs could develop these opportunities because of a long political struggle in England to establish the rule of law, individual rights, property rights, patents and limits on governmental power.

The Industrial Revolution was a radical break in history. But in England, many of the preconditions were already in place, as can be seen by the history of the Wedgwood company.  

Josiah Wedgwood came from a family of potters. He founded the famous Wedgwood pottery company in 1759. 

Wedgwood and many his business associates and acquaintances were modernizing entrepreneurs. Wedgwood and others built large factories and understood division of labor. They were constantly looking to improve their businesses - new products, improved products, improved production, better machines, new materials and marketing.

A limiting factor was power to run the machinery. Waterwheels were inefficient, not enough power to drive the larger, faster, heavier machinery. English rivers were flat and sometimes dry because of droughts. The solution - Watt’s steam engine, which was manufactured starting in 1775.
James Watt invented a more efficient steam engine but it was Matthew Boulton, a friend and sometime business partner of Josiah Wedgwood, that produced it. Boulton heard about Watt's engine through a mutual acquaintance in his network of correspondents. Boulton, a successful manufacturer, established and ran a new company (Boulton and Watt) that dominate steam engine production and marketing for a generation. Like many later industrial companies, Boulton and Watt was the combination of a businessman and an inventor/tinkerer.

Innovation at Wedgwood was based on science and experimentation. Josiah Wedgwood carried out thousands of experiments in his lifetime analyzing all aspects of pottery manufacturing and decoration. He read chemistry books and corresponded with the foremost chemists of his day. He tried to reduce the traditional hit or miss methods of producing pottery to more scientific measurement and control. (This family and company tradition of careful observation and scientific understanding of the natural world was passed on to Josiah Wedgwood’s grandson, Charles Darwin.)

Josiah Wedgwood used power-driven machinery and early assembly line techniques to mass-produce pottery. He was the first manufacturer to install a Watt steam engine.

Wedgwood was always on the lookout for new styles, better machinery (lathes and kilns) and new production methods. He believed in retaining employees and training them to become increasingly productive. To keep employees, he provided housing and retirement benefits. Wedgwood cooperated with other manufacturers he knew to introduce new materials and new processes into the production of pottery.
Wedgwood expanded sales and profits by selling in foreign markets. He provided a large amount of specially designed pottery to the Russian royal family. In addition to European countries, Wedgwood made a special effort to sell to the American colonies. He designed different styles for different markets.  

His experiments with new materials and production methods led to the creation of new styles of pottery, which he believed was necessary to increase sales. Wedgwood changed styles every few years, backed by innovations in marketing such as showrooms and branding that were to become standard in the selling of consumer goods.

==============================================

See the related post, Adam Smith's Pin Factory.


For a list of all posts and pages (economics tutorials), see Guide to Pages and Posts.

Economics tutorials in Pages are the equivalent of a course in economics. No graphs or equations. But the content is different than that in a typical course or textbook.

Comments

  1. Thank you for pointing out this article. It is very interesting and useful to me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adam Smith's Pin Factory

The Structure of the Economy: Bilateral Oligopoly

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Beginning of the Great Depression

Guide to Pages and Posts

Explaining Derivatives - An Analogy