Components of Industry
Industry uses technical and organizational skills, engineering knowledge, and energy to transform natural resources into useful products. (Our definition of industry excludes such late-twentieth-century coinages as “banking industry,” “leisure industry,” and “culture industry.”) When we carry on industry, we alter the landscape by using natural resources, by releasing wastes, and by building workplaces, industrial communities, and transportation systems. The components of industry include the skills and technical knowledge of the participants as well as the landscape and natural resources devoted to industrial activity. We cover the industrial landscape in Part II; in this chapter, we introduce the human and natural resources used by industry. The work skills of artisans, the organizational skills of managers and entrepreneurs, and the engineering skills of designers and innovators have always been as essential as natural resources to industrial success. Although scientific skills had relatively little place in most industrial enterprises until the late nineteenth century, they are now essential to the success of many industries. The skills in consideration here are the mental and physical capacities of individuals to do difficult tasks. These “genuine” skills are not necessarily the same as the “socially constructed” skills that are defined by job descriptions or established as barriers to control entry into a trade or profession. Among work skills, those of artisans are the most poorly re corded and are, consequently, the most difficult for historians to interpret; additionally, artisan’s skills are sometimes ignored, or even denigrated, by authors seeking to describe industrial work in terms of exploitation of workers or to inflate the accomplishments of inventors or entrepreneurs. Some skills that were essential in industrialization, sueh as those used in mining and burning coal, are hardly described in the historical record because they developed gradually and were difficult for observers to perceive. Firing a furnace with coal seems to be a simple, physically demanding task, but it requires judgment and experience to do well in a locomotive, a crucible steelworks, a glasshouse, or other heat-using industries. The stoker’s skill often went unrecognized until attempts were made to transfer technology dependent on burning coal elsewhere.