> One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it
> began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been
> offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It
> had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor
> costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In
> an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf
> Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role
> of Britain=92s human-capital advantage=97in particular, on a group
they
> call =93tweakers.=94 They believe that Britain dominated the
industrial
> revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled
> engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and
> creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age
> and tweaked them=97refined and perfected them, and made them work.
> In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire,
> invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of
> cotton manufacture. Yet England=92s real advantage was that it had
> Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and
> James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the
> acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William
> Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw
> stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to
> turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of
> Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling=97and the tweaker=92s
> tweaker. He created the =93automatic=94 spinning mule: an exacting,
high-
> speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton=92s original creation. Such
> men, the economists argue, provided the =93micro inventions necessary
> to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.=94 Then
> there was Ivan Shaw...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
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