World Industrialization

41760–1850 or the Industrial Revolution and its Competitive Innovations

4.1. The transition from the emergence of machinism and its shared inventions to the Industrial Revolution and its competitive innovations

The 1760s saw major changes including the decline in shared inventions that shaped the emergence and domination of machinism. These developments initially involved energy sources because steam engines were at the maximum of their potential and remained dependent on the production of high-performance steel at lower prices.

Half a century later, they were subject to competition from other energy sources such as hydraulic motors, a competition which Jean-Baptiste Say and Isaac-Louis Grivel encountered in 1807 when they modernized the Auchy-lès-Hesdin spinning mill, which they acquired in 1805. They then decided to replace the traditional waterwheels that drove the spinning machines with a “hydraulic motor” (or “turbine”), while high-pressure steam engines had become very reliable and produced in large quantities in France or England.

These hydraulic motors were born in antiquity (the “tub wheel” or “horizontal wheel”) and rediscovered and improved in 1790 under the name of their re-inventor as “Colladon wheel” or “Belidor’s wheel”. They were mainly used for grain mills (Dockès, 1986). Say’s successors replaced this engine with a steam engine in 1850, a sign of the limits of these energy sources which, certainly, greatly increased the capacities of hydraulics without really ...