(^284) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
uses for waste products (thus coal gas for illumination), sometimes in
response to laws penalizing pollution. (Better to use the waste than be
sued or fined.) But the revolutionary advances came in the new field
of organic chemistry and derived directly from studies of carbon-based
molecules. These opened the door to a multitude of applications, first
in the field of dyestuffs (crucial to textile manufacture), then in phar-
maceuticals and photography, and finally, toward the end of the cen-
tury, in artificial matter—what we loosely call plastics.
Electricity was known, but not understood, by the ancients, and cu-
rious savants played with it, almost as with a toy, from the eighteenth
century on. Such experiments could have practical consequences;
hence Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightning rod. But the sys-
tematic use of electricity as a form of energy and its application to in-
dustrial processes had to wait for the nineteenth century, after research
by such people as Volta, Ampère, and Faraday, whose names have been
immortalized in scientific terminology. The first industrial applications
were small though impressive: batteries (Voltaic piles), which could
drive telegraphs and clocks; and electrolytic techniques, used especially
to plate metals and cutiery. Both of these were pre-1850. But electric-
ity's flowering came with the invention of generators and dynamos to
produce current in quantity and the building of a system of distribu-
tion. The biggest stimuli were Thomas Edison's incandescent lighting
(1879) and electric motors, which justified the outiay for overhead
capital.
In both chemicals and electricals, learning and competence de-
pended on formal instruction. These phenomena are not apprehensi-
ble by sensory perception; it takes diagrams and schémas to explain
them, and the underlying principles are best learned in the classroom
and laboratory. Here Continental reliance on schooling paid off, gen-
erating and imparting new technologies. Catching up turned into a
leap ahead, while Britain, caught in the net of habit, fell behind.
In British electricity, moreover, local autonomies exacerbated the
difficulty. In some places, municipal gas networks successfully opposed
electrification; elsewhere Britain built a multiplicity of power networks,
each with its own voltage arrangements and hardware. Later improve-
ments only added to the menu. To this day, British buyers of electrical
appliances must deal with a diversity of plugs and outlets, and cus-
tomers pay shopkeepers to ready equipment for use. The British econ-
omy grew in these new branches as it had in the old—like Topsy.
This marriage of science and technique opened an era that Simon
Kuznets called "modern economic growth."^14 It was not only the ex-
nora
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