When Did the Age of Innovation Begin?

The distinctive feature of the modern world is that we are constantly coming up with new ways to do things. I always said, when teaching this to undergraduates, that the key was a shift in thinking: a modern engineer or manufacturer sees an old way of doing things and immediately wonders how to do it better and cheaper. When did that habit arise, or, maybe, become common?

I think it was common within certain circles by 1600. Certainly this was true in shipbuilding and sailing, which were seeing very rapid changes. I sometimes come across hints that this attitude had spread to other industries, like this:

Back in 1606, Sturtevant had had great success in applying a kind of mechanical crushing and compressing machine, which he dubbed his “lenicke instrument”, to the mass-manufacture of earthen water-pipes. The courtier tasked by the king with assessing it, Sir Thomas Chaloner, was an experienced backer of other innovators, and after two years reported that Sturtevant’s machine could “easily cast 700 or 8000 yards in one day [I’m not sure which is the typo] as just and even as a printer prints his letters”, compared to just 40 yards a day when made by hand. Sturtevant could apparently even make his pipes at just a tenth of the cost per yard compared to pipes of lead. Chaloner reported that the person responsible for the king’s buildings was very eager to buy them, and I suspect that he did, for a few years later Sturtevant made almost two thousand yards of earthen pipe for the Earl of Salisbury’s gardens at Hatfield Park, quoting him — for everything including the manufacture, trench-digging, pipe-laying, joint-soldering, trench re-filling, and 18-mile delivery overland from his factory at Highbury — even less than the shockingly low price of manufacture that Chaloner had reported.

I imagine this machine extruded the pipes through a mold, so all the workers had to do was load the hopper with clay, activate the press, slice the extruded pipes at the desired lengths, and set them aside for drying, which would indeed be much faster than pressing them by hand into wooden molds. The collars for fitting them together could be made in the same way with a small alternation to the machine, then attached to the pipes before firing.

It took 200 more years for all these little improvements to add up to an economic revolution, but the process was under way and it had measurable effects on productivity well before 1700.