I’m part way through William Rosen’s [amazon_link id=”1845951352″ target=”_blank” ]The Most Powerful idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention[/amazon_link]. It’s an enjoyable read, although I’m not learning anything new, as someone who has already read plenty about the Industrial Revolution. The book covers the same terrain as classics of economic history such as Joel Mokyr’s [amazon_link id=”0691120137″ target=”_blank” ]The Gifts of Athena[/amazon_link] and more recent [amazon_link id=”0140278176″ target=”_blank” ]The Enlightened Economy[/amazon_link], and Greg Clark’s [amazon_link id=”0691141282″ target=”_blank” ]A Farewell to Alms[/amazon_link].

However, one novelty is the claim made in a footnote that “a number of international economists” use the production of sulphuric acid as a proxy for the level of development. I’m familiar with the use of electricity consumption as a measure of economic activity – Friedrich Schneider and Dominik Este use it as one approach in their estimates of the scale of the underground economy. A bit of searching this morning has found the claim about sulphuric acid made in one commodities market blog post endlessly copied around the internet, and the following New Scientist article from 1988 attributing the claim to a classic chemicals textbook (Industrial Chemicals by Faith, Keyes and Clark) but noting that the relationship between economic output and sulphuric acid production had broken around 1983 in Britain. Intriguingly, this is the time when UK GDP decoupled from the material weight of the economy in general, as noted in my 1996 book, [amazon_link id=”0262032597″ target=”_blank” ]The Weightless World[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”1845951352″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention[/amazon_image]