In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention, he takes us back to what he calls the “transformative 20s” of the seventeenth century:
St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden (built 1631-8) by Inigo Jones.
Photo by Steve Cadman via Wikimedia Commons.
The 1620s saw an upsurge in major projects to transform Britain’s landscape. Engineers from the Dutch Republic like Cornelius Vermuyden came to straighten its rivers, build canals, and even drain its marshes, converting them into pasturage and farmland — in the decades that followed, they would even begin to drain the Great Fens. The cityscapes changed too. The former theatre designer and architect Inigo Jones — by 1615 the Surveyor-General of the King’s Works — introduced classical architecture from the continent, drawing upon the rules of beauty and proportion that had been set down by Vitruvius in the first century BCE and resuscitated in Renaissance Italy by Andrea Palladio. Jones’s influence transformed England’s palaces, churches, cathedrals, and even Covent Garden square, to reflect his ancient Roman ideal.
But the environment, built or natural, would be most transformed by the experiments of a few individuals with fossil fuels. Dud Dudley, an illegitimate child of the 5th Baron Dudley, in the 1620s experimented with smelting iron with peat and coal. Dudley was not the first to do so — the patent on using coal instead of charcoal to work iron had been sold on from person to person since at least 1589 — but his experiments were among the most influential. The famous Abraham Darby, who achieved commercial success in applying coal to smelting metals in the early eighteenth century, was Dud Dudley’s great-great-nephew.
Sir Robert Mansell (1570/71–1652), by an unknown artist.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.The decade also saw major new attempts to use coal as a fuel in other processes, such as glass-making. Although the patent on using coal to make glass had been around since at least 1610, by the 1620s Sir Robert Mansell had bought out the partners who owned it and was pouring a fortune into setting up glassworks at Newcastle. In this case, the transformation was institutional. Mansell’s political connections allowed him to widen the terms of his patent, such that he even tried to ban all other kinds of glass in England, regardless of whether they were made using other fuels, or even imported. Usually, patents of invention were for things entirely new, and were not supposed to interfere with existing English industries. But over the course of the 1610s, various abuses like Mansell’s came to light. King James I, eager for cash, had sold monopolies on ancient trades, as well as the new — one crony was even awarded a patent for inns and alehouses. Mansell’s patent, along with the others, was attacked in Parliament in the 1620s, and even revoked. The outcry ultimately led to the Statute of Monopolies of 1624 — the earliest patent legislation in England, which sought to regulate the royal practice of granting them. (Ironically, Mansell was so well-connected that he managed to get his controversial glass-making patent renewed and then exempted from the new Act.) The Statute of Monopolies was the only English patent legislation in force during the Industrial Revolution — there was no more patent legislation until 1852.
Finally, the ’20s saw a transformation of science. It was the decade in which Francis Bacon published some of his most significant works, on how to collect, refine, and systematise human knowledge for the good of humankind. He set out a comprehensive programme for the organisation of science and invention, with his utopian work New Atlantis setting out his ideal R&D lab – “Salomon’s House”. (Despite these high-minded aims, Bacon was also Mansell’s brother-in-law, and as attorney-general had helped draft the controversial glass-making patent. In 1621 he was convicted, fined, and even briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London for his role in the corrupt early patent system, though he appears to have been a scapegoat.)
