You can never read too many books about the Industrial Revolution, in my view. This is partly because I grew up in a Lancashire mill town, with family members working in the cotton industry – until the mills closed in the late 1970s, their machines taken straight to the museums. But of course, it’s everybody’s heritage. The decisive shift to the modern world started in those decades of industrial invention from the late 18th century. The answer to the question, What did the Victorians ever do for us? is almost everything.

Luckily, there have been lots of excellent new books about the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, the intellectual context for practical innovation. These include the academic – such as Joel Mokyr’s [amazon_link id=”0691120137″ target=”_blank” ]Gifts of Athena[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”0140278176″ target=”_blank” ]The Enlightened Economy[/amazon_link] – and the more accessible – such as Jenny Uglow’s [amazon_link id=”0571216102″ target=”_blank” ]The Lunar Men[/amazon_link] and Richard Holmes’s [amazon_link id=”0007149530″ target=”_blank” ]The Age of Wonder[/amazon_link].

I’ve just finished reading William Rosen’s [amazon_link id=”1845951352″ target=”_blank” ]The Most Powerful idea in the World: A story of steam, industry and innovation[/amazon_link]. It doesn’t make this first rank, although its ambition is commendable. The idea is to set the conventional history of inventions of this and that – Watt’s condenser, Stevenson’s Rocket – in the context of social and legislative innovations, such as the enabling patent laws and the emergence of a class of self-improving practical artisans in Britain. This is obviously a fruitful approach, and one that has become much more widespread in recent years. The Lunar Men is a brilliant example of bringing the social and political context to life. In the academic literature, Paul David is an economic historian who, along with Mokyr, did much to reattach innovation to the specifics of its time.

Unfortunately, Rosen doesn’t manage to make his account sparkle, and I think it’s because he can’t resist including technical detail, at the expense of the story. For example, there are too many paragraphs like this one: “And so the challenge of converting the reciprocating motion of the early atmospheric engines into rotary power occupied a fair chunk of the 18th century. The fundamental problem of direct conversion was not ignorance; the crank and the cam were well known to Newcomen and his successors. In fact they were known to his predecessors…” and on for another half page before we get a diversion into biomechanics and kinetic energy for the next couple of pages. If the kinetic energy is actually important to the story, I need the beginner’s guide; if not, these pages should have been edited out. I also got the sense, whenever Rosen heads into economic territory, that headstrong concepts such as ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ are in danger of bolting, with the author hanging terrified onto the reins.

Having said this, this is a mostly very readable book which is obviously based on a vast amount of research. It will introduce people to some of the key technologies of the Industrial Revolution, and above all to the important idea that their impact would have been far less if the innovators had lived in a different time and place. Its emphasis on the importance of patent protection is timely, too. Innovation, in other words, is a social system as well as a technological one – as today’s debates over intellectual property in the digital world demonstrate all too clearly. Rosen does not make the link explicit – he is certainly not making a foolishly simplistic argument that because patents were essential for Boulton and Watt to build and sell their improved steam engines, strong enforcement of DRM is essential for innovation now. However, the book does do us the service of underlining the need for careful thought about the legal framework for an innovative economy – and in fact, for thinking there’s every reason to believe a patent framework established about a quarter of a millennium ago is unlikely to be suitable in the modern, intangible economy.

[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]