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Summary
Mining, machine building, shipbuilding
Chapter 1. Mining.
Mining was only a minor activity in the Netherlands before 1900, coal-mining being the most important. Coal seams existed in the extreme south of the country. Minig was relatively deep and, as in the nearby coalfields of Aachen and Liège, steam engines were introduced early. During the first half of the 19th century the State Bureau of Mines and its Mining Engineers tried hard to enforce modernization. However, innovation turned out to be rather unmanageable, as the example of Davy's safety lamp demonstrates. It shows the technical incompatibilities, institutional and social forces that shaped the acceptability of a modest device, which became the very symbol of mining. Developments in mining technology and productivity were path dependent processes requiring adaptation to local circumstances. Although there was an overall technological drift, mining regions were locked in to a specific level of productivity. The old Dutch mines improved their competitiveness by sudden leaps, which is characteristic for innovation strategies in the entire sector.
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Chapter 2. Machine building.
Due to a limited demand for machinery and a lack of iron and coal, Dutch machine building had a slow start in the early 19th century. The Belgian Secession of 1830 turned out to be a stimulus to the construction of steam engines for ships and industry in the country, which until then had relied on machinery from the Belgian provinces. In textile machinery British competition frustrated several Dutch attempts to enter the market. After 1850 home demand for machinery grew rapidly. Industry, pumping stations and ships used Dutch boilers and engines. In some fields, like dredging equipment and brickmaking machinery, Dutch manufacturers obtained a very firm position, whilst foreign competitors continued to dominate in agricultural machinery and industrial plant. The import of machines had never been hindered by tariff barriers, and industrial development in the Netherlands took place with a relatively small home machine building industry.
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Chapter 3. Shipbuilding.
Two major changes occurred in 19th century shipbuilding: the development of steam propulsion and transition from wooden to iron and steel shipbuilding. In cooperation with two large engineering firms (Fijenoord in Rotterdam en Van Vlissingen in Amsterdam) the Dutch Navy was a pioneer in employing steamships between 1830 and 1865. For the merchant navy sailing vessels continued to be more profitable than steamships until well after 1850.
The Navy and the engineering industry also took the lead in the use of iron and steel in shipbuilding. Only in the 1880s Dutch shipyards began to launch iron packets.
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Steam
Chapter 4. Steam as a symbol.
‘Steam is the symbol of the Industrial Revolution’. This notion has long thwarted an adequate analysis of the use of steam technology in the Netherlands. Compared to other countries, Holland was rather late in adopting steam engines, which led to the harsh verdict of ‘backwardness’ without further research into the technical aspects of this peculiar development. Various chapters in Vols. iv, v
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and vi of this series will analyse steam power in comparison with the ‘classical’ sources of energy, water, wind, and muscle power.
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Chapter 5. Steam in development.
This chapter deals with the history of 18th century steam technology in Britain and the international development in the 19th century. Changes in general technological characteristics, like pressure, piston speed and rotational speed are combined with data concerning efficiency and costs per hp as they appear from Dutch sources. Attention is also paid to the operation, nuisance and safety of steam technology.
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Chapter 6. Steam and drainage.
The transition from windmills to steam driven pumping stations demonstrates the complexity of steam technology, both in a technical and in a social sense. For the drainage of the Haarlemmermeer in the 1840s a very large scale use of steam was preferred above a vast number of windmills. For smaller polders the advantages of steam were less obvious, due to the ambiguity of various cost-benefit analyses. It appears that personal convictions within polder boards for or against modernisation often decided the issue. A fundamental change in attitudes towards watermanagement and seasonal flooding helped steam technology in the end to gradually replace that characteristic of Dutch landscape, the windmill.
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Chemistry
Chapter 7. Chemical industry in the 19th century.
At first glance the 19th century was for the Dutch chemical industry a difficult and unspectacular era, clenched between two relatively prosperous and dynamic periods in the 18th and 20th centuries. A closer look reveals a ‘paleotechnic transition’ (Mumford, Clow) that revolutionized the chemical industries of all European nations between 1800 and 1890. Specific for the Dutch chemical industry were the so-called ‘trafieken’, industries processing foreign or colonial raw materials and working mainly for exports. They were based on the trading networks of the early-modern period. These industries went through the process of change that will be the subject of the next chapters.
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Chapter 8. Industry, chemistry, and the environment (1750-1815).
This chapter outlines the world of chemistry in de Dutch Republic in the decades around 1800. Small companies dominated the chemical industry, but they covered an exceptionally wide range of activities. The largest sections were the madder, candle, white lead, soap, and pigments industries. Technologically and commercially the most advanced industries were cinnabar, borax, campher, nitre, litmus, aqua fortis, smalt, mercury compounds, and white lead. During the second half of the 18th century the second group, show-pieces of the Dutch chemical ‘trafieken’, fell slowly into decline, and their situation deteriorated rapidly during the years of French occupation (1795-1813). In 1795 chemical courses were organized in the ten largest Dutch towns. Partly from this intensified interest in chemical science, resulted the short period of recovery of the Dutch chemical industry during the years 1795-1805, when several new factories and production processes were installed. In the concluding sections of this chapter an overview is presented of the ways in which local and _ during the French period _ central government reacted to air and water pollution caused by the early-modern chemical factories.
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Chapter 9. Sulphuric acid.
In several applications sulphuric acid was the successor of aqua fortis. Probably because of the fact that the Dutch factories of aqua fortis were in the hands of wealthy merchants without any chemical knowledge, and because of the decline of Dutch bleaching, dyeing and calico printing at the end of the 18th century (where acids were used), factories of sulphuric acid were founded only after Belgian Secession (1830), which is late, compared to other countries. In the 1850s the industry prospered because of the spectacular growth of the garancin and the stearic candles industries. Ten years later the cotton crisis caused a sharp decline of the garancin industry, which affected also the sulphuric acid market. The Dutch acid manufacturers reacted by building their own soda factories (1863/64). These were the first soda factories in the Netherlands, ranking among the largest chemical factories of the country. Strong competition by British firms, and protectionist government policies in Germany, caused a complete collapse of the Dutch soda industry by 1874.
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Chapter 10. White lead.
During the early modern period the Dutch white lead industry dominated world markets. This was due partly to the Dutch dominance in overseas trade in general, and partly to innovations in production technology that had taken place sometime in the 16th century, giving rise to what was called ‘the Dutch process’. From the late 18th century onwards the old production technology was challenged times and again by new production me- | |
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thods, rooted in a new understanding of the chemical composition of white lead. Some of the manufacturers continued to bring the old Dutch process to perfection, while others tried to introduce new British technology into their factories. The competition between the old and the new technologies shows how in the long run all attempts failed to put white lead production on the newly discovered scientific basis, both in the Netherlands and abroad. The old ‘empirical’ process produced a white lead with superior qualities in painting. Several Dutch firms that had innovated only recently, returned to the old methods. It was only after 1850 that a third type of process, which was a semi-scientific, large scale variety of the Dutch process (the German ‘chamber process’) became the most successful production technology for white lead. After 1880, the few Dutch companies that had managed to survive, took up the chamber process, without abandoning their established methods entirely.
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Chapter 11. Madder and garancin.
Contrary to the case of white lead, the case of the madder industry shows that chemical discovery sometimes does overthrow a branch of industry. In the early 19th century a sophisticated symbiosis between agricultural production, industry, the merchant sector, and government regulation had put Dutch madder industry into an internationally leading position. This position was challenged by the rise of the French madder industry after 1830. French chemists had discovered a madder preparation, called garancin, made with sulphuric acid. After 1845 the Dutch madder industry went through a rapid process of change. Government regulation was abandoned, garancin factories were set up, and large madder factories partly took over the role of the traditional madder stoves. The spectacular rise of the garancin industry caused very serious water pollution with sulphuric acid. When the technical causes of that pollution were eventually solved, it was too late. The discovery in 1868 of the synthesis of the colouring matter of the madder root, alizarin, and after 1874 of the new synthetic alizarin ruined the garancin industry within a few years. In 1880, the last Dutch garancin factory closed down. One of the largest companies managed to survive, because it was converted to a superphosphate factory which made use of sulphuric acid like its predecessor.
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Chapter 12. Stearic candles.
The stearic candle factories were the other large consumers of sulphuric acid in the country. Between 1833 and 1837, only some ten years after the first factory of stearic candles was founded in France, a few entrepreneurs started the production of these candles in the Netherlands. At first the colonies were an important niche market for the new product, which could stand higher outside temperatures than the common tallow candles. In the 1850s a new production process was introduced in which sulphuric acid replaced milk of lime as the saponification agent. Parallel to that, palm oil was introduced as a raw material instead of tallow. Dutch entrepreneurs began to import palm oil from Africa and other tropical regions, thereby making the Dutch stearic candle industry practically independent from the expensive European supply of tallow. Between 1850 and 1870 the stearic candle industry grew dramatically. It developed into a new type of large scale, and science dependent ‘trafiek’ that imported its raw materials and exported the candles to foreign countries. Large investments were made to install new saponification and destillation technology.
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Chapter 13. A changing industry.
On the basis of the preceding chapters, the transformation of the Dutch chemical industry in the 19th century is analysed, by taking into account (1) the supply of raw materials, (2) the relation between the chemical industry and the environment, and (3) the role of chemical knowledge. The main periods of strong innovative activity were the 1830s (white lead, sulphuric acid and stearic candles), and the 1850s and early 1860s (garancin, stearic candles and soda). After 1870 many small scale innovations in many different industries resulted in a strong consumer orientation of the chemical industry, with a large share of luxury products (perfumes, soaps, pharmaceuticals, tooth powder, and the like). Being a country without abundant natural resources, import of raw materials remained of vital importance during the entire period. With the growth of the chemical industry in the 1850s, water and air pollution grew considerably. Together with a greater public health awareness this led to a more active government policy concerning the terms on which permits were granted. Several town councils appointed expert committees - with medical doctors, chemists, and architects - to investigate the pollution caused by industry. More than before chemical knowledge played a role in formulating the problems of, and the remedy for environmental problems. After 1850 a new type of entrepreneur, trained in chemistry or engineering, started to determine the course
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of the Dutch chemical industry. This group has also strongly dominated the industry's historiography, in which the situation before 1850 was depicted as obsolete and uninteresting. The research in this Volume shows the one-sidedness of that picture.
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Telegraphy and telephony
Chapter 14. Telegraphy and telephony.
In 1845 the first telegraph line was opened along the Amsterdam-Haarlem railway track, soon followed by a number of lines operated by private companies. Telegraphy developed into a large scale technical system after the State took over all lines in 1852 and set up a network which linked all towns. From 1877 onwards the telephone first played a role as an extension of telegraphy into rural areas. Due to technical, juridical and organisational integration of telephony, it greatly added to the economical viability of the telegraph network. Only after a number of years telephony developed into a system of its own, independent of telegraphy. |
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