Episode 05 — The Steam Engine Replaces Human Muscle

In 1765, a workshop in Glasgow, Scotland.

James Watt was studying a model of a steam engine. Copper pipes and piston fragments lay scattered across the table, and the air was a mix of oil and metal. It was raining outside, but inside the workshop the heat was intense. Watt was thinking. Why does this machine waste so much steam? Newcomen's engine worked, but its efficiency was far too low. It devoured too much coal.

In that moment, an idea flashed through Watt's mind like lightning. What if the steam were cooled in a separate condenser? If the main cylinder stayed hot at all times and only the steam was drawn off and cooled separately, the energy loss could be dramatically reduced. With trembling hands, he began to sketch in his notebook. He had no idea that those shapes and lines would become more than a simple machine drawing — a blueprint that would change the fate of humanity.

A few decades later, the landscape of Manchester, England, had completely changed.

Tall chimneys soared as if to pierce the sky, and from their tips black smoke rose without end. The sky was blanketed in gray, and the buildings turned black with soot. Trains ran through the streets instead of carriages, and steamships drifted on the rivers. Inside the factories, thousands of spinning machines moved in unison, producing an ear-splitting din. Whirr, whirr, whirr. Bang, bang, bang. It was the heartbeat of the machine.

The faces of the workers here were smudged with soot. Children were no exception. Six-year-olds had to crawl beneath the machines to pick up fallen threads. Adults worked sixteen hours a day. Their muscles were worked to the bone, but it was a fatigue of a different texture than tilling the soil in the countryside of the past. Farm work followed the rhythm of the seasons, but factory work followed the rhythm of the machine. As long as the machine did not stop, neither could the human.

But paradoxically, this was also the era in which humans began to be liberated from physical labor.

For thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, human power was the power of muscle. Farming, building, hauling — every task depended on the muscular strength of humans and livestock. The strong did much work; the weak did little. A society's total productive power was proportional to its population and average muscle power. Even in war, the side that mobilized more soldiers won. The sum total of strength was national power itself.

But with the arrival of the steam engine, the equation changed.

A single machine began to do the work of hundreds of people. Heat obtained by burning coal, a fossil energy, boiled water; the pressure of the steam pushed the piston; and that force turned the wheels. Humans no longer did the work directly with their own muscles. Humans watched over the machine, fed it fuel, and operated the switches. The human role shifted from exerting force to managing force.

This was the externalization of human bodily function. If the printing press externalized memory into books, the steam engine externalized muscle into machines. Humans gained a giant muscle that moved outside their own bodies. That muscle felt no fatigue, never slept, and lifted things far heavier than any human could.

Imagine it. The shock a farmer who had spent his whole life touching the soil must have felt when he first witnessed a steam engine. He would have realized how powerless his own hands were. At the same time, perhaps he also felt the relief that his hands no longer had to lift heavier things. But that relief soon turned to anxiety. If the machine does my work for me, what do I exist for?

The Luddite movement broke out. Workers began smashing the spinning machines, claiming that the machines were stealing their jobs. They regarded the machines as the devil's invention. But the tide could not be stopped. The machines produced faster, more precisely, more cheaply. Even those who resisted eventually had no choice but to enter the factories. Work with the machine, or starve. The choice was clear.

This was another stage of evolution.

Humans extended beyond their biological bodies into mechanical ones. The train extended the human leg, the crane extended the human arm, and the steam engine extended the human chest muscles. Humans were no longer confined to the biological species called Homo sapiens. An early form of the cyborg, a fusion of human and machine, had appeared. Though that connection was made not of wireless chips but of coal and gears, the essence was the same.

Human limits had begun to be supplemented by technology.

But here is one interesting point. As machines replaced human muscle, humans came face to face with a new problem. It was the problem of time and space.

In the farming days, people worked when the sun rose and rested when it set. Time flowed according to the rhythm of nature. But for the factory to run, standardized time was needed. To work in shifts, to catch the train on time, to receive a supply of raw materials, everyone had to look at the same clock. It was the moment when natural time turned into social time.

Space changed too. Goods had to be moved quickly from the source to the place of production, and from the place of production to the place of consumption. Roads were paved, and railways ran through continents. The earth began to shrink. The liberation of force the steam engine brought led directly to the compression of space and time.

Humans were freed from the shackles of muscle. But this time, the shackles of time and space lay waiting. The machine gave humans freedom, but at the same time imposed a new discipline. Within this discipline, we come to ask once again. If the machine replaces the body, what will be replaced next?

While the body was being extended by machines, human thought was still analog. The factories were running, but the speed of transmitting information was no faster than the speed of a horse. Letters took days to arrive, and news reached another city only after a week had passed. It was a civilization with a giant mechanical body, yet its nervous system was still slow.

A mismatch: the body had already arrived in the future, but the nervous system remained in the past.

The next revolution to resolve this mismatch would soon arrive. Before the smoke of the steam engine had even cleared, a new set of blood vessels called wires began to cover the earth. After the liberation of force had ended, what came next was the liberation of connection.

Next episode: Chapter 2, The Extension of the Body: The Industrial Revolution | Standardized Time and Space, and Mass Production