Invention historian. I write *Age of Invention*, an email newsletter on the history of invention and economic history.
Edinburgh, Scotland
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Why did Scotland punch so far above its weight in the age of industrialisation and enlightenment?
The usual answer is education.
But I argue that this puts the cart before the horse, and that it was almost entirely down to capital:
ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-…
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Just thinking about how much this shelf would have been worth in England in the year 1600. Presumably at least tens of millions in today’s money.
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Strongly disagree. This is FPTP at its *best*, allowing the electorate to mete out proper punishment and let another team have a proper go of it without having to bend to fringe parties that hardly anybody at all wants.
I just can’t get past Labour winning 65% of seats off 34% of the vote.
Absolutely wild mismatch between the headline result and, well, everything else.
Britain is now a multi-party system, and first-past-the-post can’t cope.
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Why is an intelligent economist unable to understand opportunity cost? If I value a day at home with my family at over £400, and don’t desperately need the cash, I might not want to take on an extra £1,000 task for just £400.
Why are intelligent high earning people so bad at arithmetic? If I am asked to write something for £1000 and I pay tax of 60% on that fee I am £400 better off than if I say ‘no thanks there’s no incentive to do it’ bit.ly/4p84RhN just do the job work harder and pay the tax!
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Frenchman visiting London in 1698 and simply cannot believe the size of the steaks
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This is HUGE! For the first time since the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD 79, the words on un-openable carbonised papyrus scrolls can now be read.
Looks like someone will soon win the $700,000 prize for reading four passages by the end of the year!
scrollprize.org/firstletters
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Love the idea that the ultra-wealthy keep massive warehouses full of cash, hoarding it like dragons do gold
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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.
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Mad fact I just learned: the room temperature of a coal-heated London house in the 1740s in winter was usually as low as 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit). During the night-time often below freezing.
And this is remarked on as very cold, for room temperature, by a Swede!
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Yet again, one to add to the list of low-hanging fruit when it comes to innovation. Immense productivity increases reported here, with reduced wait times and earlier diagnosis likely saving a great many lives: thetimes.co.uk/article/londo…
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If you’ve ever wondered why your council can’t ever seem to fix potholes and no longer picks up your bins every week, it’s because central government has created and then foisted on them hefty social care obligations without the means to pay for them.
Hampshire County Council is spending 83% of its budget on social care.
An official from this same council told the FT a few days ago that they are paying up to £30,000 *per week* – per child – to for-profit children's homes to look after some children.
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Hypothesis: the knowledge of making telescopes may be older than "the invention of the telescope", but it was a closely guarded secret and rarely - if ever - applied.
One example: the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in his 1551 book on geometry describes how Roger Bacon in the 13thC had "a glass that he made in Oxford, in which men might see things that were done in other places, and that was judged to be done by power of evil spirits. But I know the reason of it to be good and natural, and to be wrought by geometry (since perspective is a part of it) and to stand as well with reason as to see your face in common glass."
Recorde refuses to openly print how it works however, since "this conclusion and other diverse of like sort are more meet for princes, for sundry causes, than for other men, and ought not to be taught commonly".
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Guyana is fascinating. A mainland South American country that had over 40% GDP growth in 2020, is 40% of Indian descent, is 25% Hindu, has English as its official language, and currently has its first Muslim president.
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This is such a typical Tory policy from the last few years. A near-worthless handout that only adds complexity to the tax system and makes the problem it seeks to solve slightly worse, all just to show they’re on some demographic’s “side”. At least try to change!
Exclusive:
Young people would be given a £5,000 national insurance rebate towards the cost of their first home when they get their first full-time job under Conservative plans to ‘reward work’
Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, will announce proposals for a ‘first-job bonus’ that would divert national insurance payments into a long-term savings account. For a working couple the bonus would be worth £10,000
The plans would benefit 600,000 people a year, and the Conservatives say the £2.8 billion cost would be funded by cutting government spending, including ending sickness benefits for milder mental health conditions and banning half a million foreigners from accessing the welfare state
The policy represents the Conservative Party’s first major offer to young people as Kemi Badenoch attempts to revive her political fortunes. At the last election people in work deserted the party, and the age at which the average voter switched to the Conservatives rose to 63, up from 39 in 2019
thetimes.com/article/441070e…
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A very similar thing happened with the working classes too - before the 1850s they would sit the *entrance* examinations, and if they passed they’d use that to get a job as a clerk, etc instead of going to university at all!
One odd thing you see in older British books is that, for their upper classes, college wasn't *that* important.
You were kind of supposed to go up to Oxford or Cambridge, but it wasn't very important if you actually graduated.
It was common/fine to leave after a few terms.
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Sorry, but why is the BBC just happily regurgitating some charity's press release? I thought the whole point of a public broadcaster was to be better than this. Not to mention that the idea is unbelievably silly and not remotely newsworthy. "Charity calls for X" is not news.
Call for young to have legal right to live where they grew up bbc.in/4eVEVAH
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Actually no. The value of land pre-1800 was also largely about the agriculture vs energy tradeoff. Marshes were maintained for turf, heaths for gorse and furze, and woods for.. well, wood.
It was coal, then oil, that shifted land to become so exclusively devoted to agriculture
For millennia, the value of land was largely tied to its underlying agricultural productivity.
The clean energy transition is completely flipping this longstanding paradigm.
We can see this in the real-time energy economics of solar projects vs. farming (corn).
🧵
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Best proposal I’ve heard: rebrand all councils as “Social Care Boards”, and most of council tax as a “Social Care Tax”, and hive off all other responsibilities that we think of councils performing - waste collection, road repairs, etc - to a completely new kind of local authority
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Nice illustration of how canals and river navigations opened up Britain's economy, forging it into a single domestic market. Shaded bits show the land more than 15 miles from sea or navigable river, and thus reliant on more expensive overland transport. Huge change 1600 to 1760.
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It may be ugly and excessive, but this is what the peak performance of a “regulatory superpower” looks like.
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The UK today: a major announcement on nuclear energy is actually just "we'll be doing lots of consultations".
We're a Consultation Nation. So we never actually get anything built. The Lower Thames Crossing had FIVE consultations 2017-22, still doesn't have planning permission.
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Adding to my overflowing “there is absolutely loads of low-hanging fruit innovation still” file
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Many won't appreciate this. But Mokyr getting the Economics Nobel is a huge, huge win for History!
BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” with one half to Mokyr “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” and the other half jointly to Aghion and Howitt “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”
#NobelPrize
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So much of what goes wrong in government is because one branch can impose costs on another branch without any consequences.
Once you see it that way, you see it EVERYWHERE. If there’s a “joined-up thinking” to attain in government, it’s to internalise these externalities.
Here’s an idea: give Natural England £x mn which THEY then use to spend on measures to protect bats. You want a tunnel on East-West Rail because of the barbastelle bats? You pay for it. You want a bat shed? Cough up. Put your money where your mouth is.
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Incidentally, if this works it will kill independence stone dead - for reasons that are so utterly obvious, I’m surprised a nationalist party is the one doing it.
Scotland given same credit rating as UK ahead of first bonds issue bbc.in/4p7pYk8
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What was the most *underrated* ever exogenous shock to the world economy?
I’ll go first: the invention in the 15thC of the “saigerprozess” for separating silver from argentiferous copper ores
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Back when I worked at KCL in 2017-19 this was already a problem. Not among undergrads, but for *loads* of MA students, and in political economy and public policy - essay subjects!
Often had half a seminar *completely* silent due to lack of English.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mz…
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Forgive me for saying something that many will find heretical, but I think this work is really just a few powerpoint slides written in academese for activists, and most certainly didn't deserve to be published in the world's top scientific journal nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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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:
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Please, I'm begging you, can we stop adding to the list of things for the beleagured British taxpayer to fund? At least until we get a fully-functioning health service, police, or even just weekly bin collections?
Nesta (Britain's state-funded 'innovation agency for social good') has endorsed the creation of state-run restaurants to provide subsided healthy food.
Do you think this would be a good use of public money?
nesta.org.uk/feature/future-…
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When you think of environmentalist royals, you probably think of Prince Charles.
But he really gets it all from his father, Prince Philip, who was at the forefront of the very emergence of British environmentalism.
A thread:
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So this is cool. Since ancient times, clay from Lemnos was exported all over the world as a cure against disease & poison. The Ottoman sultans later even totally monopolised its production.
In the 19thC it turned out just to be clay, when tested using the latest science.
BUT..
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Most striking thing in this, to me, is how France can afford to have constant strikes and lots of labour regulations because it has lots of cheap nuclear energy and transport infrastructure.
Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated.
A new essay by @bswud, @SCP_Hughes & me.
Why the UK's ban on investment in housing, infrastructure and energy is not just a problem. It is *the* problem.
And how fixing it is the defining task of our generation.
ukfoundations.co/
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Pity London demolished all its old gates. Just came across drawings of them in a 1681 guide to the city:
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I’m very uneasy with how this map is being shared. It is NOT estimated GDP/capita, but a proxy measure derived from the number of biographies on Wikipedia, the accuracy of which is 🤷
How rich was pre-revolutionary Europe?
Despite major political divides, Northern Italy was still ahead on the continent!
England with its proto industrial revolution was just behind.
France was very poor in contrast.
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Surely this is a parody. England has become such a consultation-obsessed nation that even the princes of the established church are subject to consultation?!
More than 11,000 people have participated in the consultations for the next Archbishop of Canterbury – carried out online, by post and in person earlier this year.
Read more at cofe.io/ArchbishopConsultati….
ALT An infographic displaying the following statistics: More than 11,000 people have taken part in the consultations for the next Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop’s Secretary for Appointments and the Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretary met over 350 individuals during the consultation period. Over 1,200 children and youing people participated in consultations conducted by the National Society for Education and the Appointments Secretaries. The online consultation form received more than 9,600 responses. Over 160 pieces of written correspondence were also received.
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Historians!
Does anyone have access to Vatican records that show who had an audience with the Pope on 12 April 1771 ???
My grandmother has fully translated a Grand Tour manuscript diary written in French by an English aristocrat - it’s the only way to identify the author!
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We have GOT to have a better system for out-of-print works. The number of times I've emailed a publisher and they've said "sorry don't have a copy", but nearest library with the book is 200 miles away, the Gbooks version is snippet view only, and no print versions to be bought...
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Via an old friend still in UK academia: they've now seen at least a dozen masters dissertations that they're 99% sure are AI-generated, but the current rules mean they can't penalise them
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The hardback is here! And it’s much heftier than I had imagined when writing it. A nice, solid weight. Coming out on May 12th.
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My short reaction for @WorksInProgMag on why Joel Mokyr’s economics Nobel win today is such a fantastic, fantastic day for history. worksinprogress.news/p/what-…
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Why did coal, having been used in Britain for centuries, very suddenly take off in London in 1580-1600?
I dove deep into the archives, unearthing a story *never* told before. It was thanks to German inventors, and through brewing, that coal really won.
ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-…
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I don’t usually like revisionist renaming of historical events, but “War of the Three Kingdoms” is both more accurate and sounds so much cooler than the English Civil War.
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I use Internet Archive daily, often to read books that are out of print, sometimes for so long that they cannot even be purchased. It is an *essential* service for scholars.
📚 Attention Readers & Researchers 📚
More than 500,000 books have been removed from our lending library due to the publishers' lawsuit. Have you been affected? Share your story with us and help us fight to restore access. #LetReadersRead
👉 forms.gle/G2GXK6xwMZ3t8oHh9
ALT Internet Archive logo in white on a black background.
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Somehow, despite the system of licensing, driving has come to be seen as a human right - something that it would be unfair to deprive people of. There are so, so many cases where a lifetime driving ban would be appropriate. But instead they keep getting just a few years banned.
Sam Hughes, 32:
- Decided to “go for a drive in the countryside” after consuming a bottle of vodka, MDMA, cocaine and cannabis
- Drove through a red light and KILLED cyclist Lee Raynor
- Fled the scene and then attempted to deceive officers by claiming to be someone else
- Was described by a witness as driving at “high speed”
- Showed no remorse in police custody and answered no comment throughout
He:
- Has been sentenced to 6 years and 9 months for causing death by careless driving
- Will serve just a two year driving ban upon release
Tell me, why should he ever be able to drive again?
ALT Sam Hughes
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Britain, they say, was running out of trees, so in the sixteenth century switched to using coal.
But this story is not only wrong, it’s completely back-to-front.
ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-…
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Why did the Industrial Revolution occur in Britain?
In 1600, it wasn't the only place in the world that seemed a candidate for an acceleration of innovation.
Here's a thread on two of the other promising locations, one of which might surprise you...
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Ban noisy motorbikes from cities. Easily the majority of road noise at this point, and totally unnecessary. Well beyond safety levels.
I’ve lived near busy roads most of my life, so don’t mind some noise. But the deep roar of a passing souped-up motorbike makes my blood boil.
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Shocking graph. Why the UK has such high productivity despite such a small capital stock suggests some remarkable intangible strengths. Now imagine if we maintained that while increasing the capital stock...
Indeed. UK's capital stock per hour worked is roughly HALF of that of peer countries! £5 trillion of (net new) capital (relative to others) would be required to close the gap. #dataisbeautiful
linkedin.com/posts/teraallas…
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I've started a newsletter to stay updated on my research into the history of innovation. So that you don't miss a single fun fact about an inventor of the British Industrial Revolution: antonhowes.substack.com/
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Quite serious for the head of TFL to be so brazenly dishonest, and in an attempt to smear concerned citizens. If that’s not a resigning matter, what is?
LFG cleaned graffiti off the tube.
TfL smeared us as criminals.
They claimed they had evidence. But we discovered the secret emails that prove they never had evidence.
Lying is bad. Say sorry, Andy.
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Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain first, and not elsewhere?
It's because the inventors there were great at PR.
Take the case of Bryan Donkin: mechaniser of papermaking, canned food magnate, phrenology enthusiast.
And saviour of the steamboat.
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Corn Laws were introduced by an authoritarian landed elite to shore up food prices and their rents! The repeal was hugely popular with pretty much everyone else - there’s a reason early Labour movement was pro-free trade!
Don't believe vanilla revisionism. Britain's shift to a market economy was a conscious political shift driven by the elite. From transporting Luddites to the Peterloo Massacre, creating the Workhouse & repealing the Corn Laws, this 'inevitability' was a political project >
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My latest post! Writing history for the public comes with risks and responsibilities.
ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-…
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Funny, but also dead wrong. The Shire’s economy was *already* much like that of 18thC England, clearly the most prosperous part of Middle Earth. Fat yeomen with rich and varied diets are a clear sign of extraordinary wealth.
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Why did London grow so extraordinarily? Were people pushed out of the countryside, dispossessed by enclosure, or were they pulled to the metropolis?
What it was like to migrate to Shakespeare's London.
antonhowes.substack.com/p/ag…
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My latest post! On England's centuries of maximum wages (yes, you read that right), and how they led to a Lost Century of stagnant growth and a dwindling population, while the rest of Europe forged ahead. ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-…
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Patents have problems. They give 20-year monopolies on inventions, which can sometimes be used to block further innovation.
But they also provide important incentives to make the details of inventions public.
So how might we get the benefits without the costs? A thread:
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Can’t see reference there, but I assume it’s the small rotary device using just the expansive force of steam (but, crucially, not atmospheric pressure) described by Taqi ad-Din c.1551, and v similar to other aeolipile devices known throughout the Middle Ages. In which case, yes!
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British policymakers could have landlords falling over themselves to lower people’s rents, but instead they engage in populism
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In the mid-18thC, one of the major worrying diseases was typhus. Nowadays, we know it's spread by lice or fleas. But at the time, like so many other diseases, it was thought to be caused by noxious air. e.g. malaria literally means "bad air".
Sounds silly? It wasn't. A thread:
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Wow! I'm over the moon at Joel Mokyr getting the Economics Nobel. It's not only recognition of the primacy of innovation to the history of economic growth, but also a recognition of the old-school methods.
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If you’re a PhD student in economic history, the smart bet is to start reading your Mesopotamian history yesterday
New AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets instantly bigthink.com/the-future/ai-t…
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Depressing to read so many replies saying “akshually there’s no crisis, the UK only imports 4% of our gas from Russia”.
If the rest of Europe suddenly has to buy gas from Norway instead of Russia, that means we have to outbid them. Same for gas we import via Netherlands/Belgium.
If I were advising the UK Prime Minister, I would tell them to make a televised statement to the nation tonight (or very soon) along the following lines:
1. We are in an energy crisis. This crisis is having a dreadful effect on everyone’s finances. And it is going to get worse.
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I’m not a philosopher, but one line struck me: that academics are pressured to write for publication, not to be *read*.
Since leaving an academic post last year, I’ve done nothing but write to be read. Journal publication no longer a big stress. And it’s wonderful. Liberating.
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It’s taken almost 3 months of research and discovery, but I’ve finally given my answer to Why wasn’t the Steam Engine Invented Earlier?
antonhowes.substack.com/p/ag…
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Today's the day!
My first book, *Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts changed a Nation*, is officially out!
I don't get a physical launch event just yet. So here's what's going to happen instead.
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“Do the job, work harder and pay more tax” says journalist who loves their job so much they’d happily do it for free to doctors who’d rather spend time with their families than take on an extra shift for less pay than the last.
Yes it is an interesting point. As I like my work there probably isn’t a point for me but then I love what I do. And indeed I do a lot of work for nothing. Like Twitter!!
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Two years on, there's now a peer-reviewed paper in Annals of Science responding in detail to Jenny Bulstrode's still-unretracted claims about Henry Cort and Jamaican metallurgists, showing even more egregious problems with them than originally found. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
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Before the 1850s, an average household had to spend over 30% of its income on bread alone.
What would that get you today?
In the UK, the median household income is now about £35k. And a loaf of *sliced* white bread from Aldi is a little under £1 per kg.
So in today’s terms I make that about 12,000kg per year, or almost 33kg of bread per *day*.
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I very, very highly recommend Steven Gunn's "The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII" - a simply fantastic book.
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New post, on the spread of the Gutenberg press, and why it took so long for an Arabic-character press to be founded in the Ottoman Empire.
It's a story of changing alphabets, arsonist clergymen, Cossack hordes.
And above all, of apathetic Sultans.
antonhowes.substack.com/p/ag…
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Fantastic blogpost by @jasoncrawford on why the bicycle wasn’t invented earlier. We can ask similar questions of many other technologies. My favourite is the flying shuttle on looms. Another is mechanical telegraphing systems like semaphore. rootsofprogress.org/why-did-…
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Gosh, who could ever have predicted this? (Except the hundreds of people who predicted exactly this and were completely ignored because legislators are happy to just burden businesses and civil society with compliance costs without a second thought)
Hard to think of a single worse law to have been brought in than the “cancel every nice thing to make me feel ‘safe’” law
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I reckon about 90% of tv documentaries would be significantly better if they communicated information more densely. Find it unbearable when you spend 15 minutes learning perhaps one new fact or insight into something.
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FFS. The exact opposite of what’s needed for tax simplification and growth. They need to *eliminate* the VAT exemptions, not add more!
🚨 NEW: Rachel Reeves is considering scrapping VAT on energy bills
[@thetimes]
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A very exciting milestone just now. After a little bit of persistent emailing, I finally persuaded a publisher to make an out-of-print book, which they no longer sold or even stocked, available for everyone to read on Google Books!
I've tried this many, many times before, but kudos to Leuven University Press for actually listening and doing so many scholars a service.
Now no longer tantalisingly guarded by snippet view, you can read the book in full here: books.google.be/books?id=M2_…
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Been a wait, but finally published my investigations into the origins of the steam engine.
I was in for a surprise: science might not have been as central as I thought.
antonhowes.substack.com/p/ag…
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"Our ancestors were harder than us", 1576 edition:
"when our houses were built of willow then we had oaken men, but now that our houses are come to be made of oak, our men are not only become willow, but a great many altogether of straw"
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What caused the Dutch Golden Age?
In short: plentiful peat with which to refine imported salt
ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-…
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Been informed of a new article just published in *History of Science* by Candice Goucher, the historian & archaeologist who excavated Reeder's Pen in Jamaica. I remember some people asking what she thought, to settle the whole controversy. And she's unequivocal:
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The government wants an iconic design for British EV charge points, to compare with post boxes and telephone booths. Good.
But hiring a consultancy design team is the wrong approach. Should be a public competition, like the Victorians would have done.
gov.uk/government/news/elect…
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I've seen plenty of economic historians use access to rivers in their regressions. But I don't think I've seen them use river rapidity. According to a 16thC source I'm reading right now, this was extremely important for trade - there was a sweet spot, neither too slow nor rapid.
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I simply cannot accept that the people with such superb sense of form also simultaneously had a terrible sense of colour. I can only imagine that this is a complete guess as to the correct colouring, including tint and shade.
The gothic West Front of Wells Cathedral - with c.300 carved figures - in medieval times was painted vibrant colours. Also I learned today of the “Singing Galleries” behind the sculptures: so that trumpets & choirs could play thru apertures, amazing the citizens below. Incredible
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Apparently, English in 1800 had different days based on class:
Upper classes seldom finished breakfast before 1-2pm, and never in bed before 1-2am.
Middle class finishing breakfast by 10-11, business until 5. Bed at 11pm.
Lower classes earliest to rise, and earliest to bed.
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Meanwhile, Germany also doing Saruman levels of environmental destruction at the Garzweiler surface coal mine - so large it's visible from space - for lignite, which produces about 1/3 more carbon dioxide than more common kinds of coal.
And they say the Germans do it better...
Tomorrow, DE are pulling the plug on Grohnde nuclear plant. This plant has set world records 8x for annual power gen, with an availability of ~92%. Over it's lifetime it has averted the emission of 400 million tonnes of CO2 that wld have otherwise been produced by coal/gas plants
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We really have no idea how good we have it. From 1515 in England there was a legally-mandated 66-hour *minimum* work week during the spring and summer months for urban workers, which fell in the autumn and winter along with pay.
(Sneak peek from my book draft):
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Well, now it’s official. My history of @theRSAorg, “Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation” has got the official go-head from @PrincetonUPress. My first book!
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Did a double-take here. Some of these planning application documents are 90-THOUSAND pages long.
Not 90 (a tract), not 900 (a very weighty tome), not 9,000 (is that a long shelf of books?), but 90,000. And that's just for a single application.
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Really fun constitutional reform idea, via a friend:
The directly-elected mayors in Britain should be ex officio members of the House of Lords, much like the bishops. We already have Lords Spiritual, so we'd also have the Lords Metropolitan.
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You see blue plaques dotted all over Britain, commemorating such-and-such a famous person who lived in a building. They seem, at first glance, just a nice reminder of history.
But that was not their original purpose. And nor were they always blue. A thread.
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My latest post! How control of one commodity - salt - supported the rise of the Dutch Republic and its Golden Age
ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-…
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I present to you the birth locations of 1,229 innovators of the British Industrial Revolution:
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New substack post - and it’s a big one, weeks in the making.
Did the Ottomans ban print?
The answer’s more complicated than you’d think.
antonhowes.substack.com/p/ag…
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