Chapter 289: Buried Sunlight

Three hundred million years ago, in the age this book has already sung, The great swamp forests of the Carboniferous grew, the giant clubmoss, The tree-ferns, the horsetails taller than houses, the young Earth breathing out oxygen, and when they fell, the loss Was not a loss: they did not rot, for nothing yet, some say, could eat the wood, And they sank, and were pressed, and became coal. The sunlight of that age, Caught in the leaves, kept in the dark, waiting. And the waiting was good For three hundred million years. And then, on this page, A Scottish instrument-maker in a workshop at the University of Glasgow, James Watt, born in Greenock in 1736, a sickly, careful man, Was asked in 1763 to repair a model of the steam engine, the slow And wasteful machine of Newcomen that pumped water from the mines. The plan Of the old engine heated and cooled the same cylinder every stroke, And wasted most of its fuel warming the iron again. And one Sunday in 1765, on a walk across Glasgow Green, the yoke Of the problem lifted: condense the steam in a separate vessel, and then The cylinder can stay hot. A separate condenser. He patented it in 1769. And it nearly came to nothing: no one could bore a cylinder true, The money ran out, his partner went bankrupt. Then the line Of luck: Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer of Birmingham, who knew What it was, took him into partnership in 1775, and an ironmaster, John Wilkinson, had invented a machine to bore cannon, And used it to bore Watt's cylinders, true to the thickness of a coin. The faster Engines of war made the engine of peace. In 1776 the first ones ran on At a colliery and at Wilkinson's furnaces, using a quarter of the coal. And that same year, in Philadelphia, a declaration of independence, And in London, Adam Smith, who had known Watt at Glasgow, set out the whole Of the market in *The Wealth of Nations*. The coincidence Of the year is the hinge of an age. Boulton said to a visitor at his works: *I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have: power.* Watt made the engine turn a wheel, and measured it against horses, the quirks Of his salesmanship giving us *horsepower*. And the flower Of it: the cotton mills, the ironworks, the mines, the locomotives, the ships, The cities. Within a hundred years the work of the world was done by fire. The buried sunlight of the swamp forests came up out of the pits And turned the wheels. And this book must hold it as it holds every desire: The gift. A human being could do the work of a hundred. Bread got cheaper. The poor, in the end, lived longer, and their children did, and the tide Of material life rose as it had never risen. The sleeper Of the old poverty began, slowly, to wake. And the other side: The children in the mills, six years old, fourteen hours a day. The black lungs of the miners. The cities of smoke. And the slow Thing no one saw: every engine breathed out what the swamps had put away, The carbon of three hundred million years, returned to the air. The glow Of the furnaces was the first rise of the curve that Ophiuchus will meet. The year 1776 was the year the planet's breath began to change. Watt could not know. Nobody knew. The heat Of the century to come was hidden in the coal's strange Black sleep, and the engine woke it. The Lunar Society of Birmingham, where Watt And Boulton met with friends on the night of the full moon, to ride home by its light: The potter Wedgwood, who would make the medallion of the slave in chains, the knot Of the words, *Am I not a man and a brother?*; the doctor Erasmus Darwin, whose bright Grandson would tell the story of descent; Priestley, who found the air we breathe. They believed the new power would free the world. It did, and it did not. Hold the engine as the Gaiad holds the fire it began with: the sheath Of a gift and a burning. The swamp forest's sunlight. Use it, but not Without knowing what it is: three hundred million years of the dead, Asleep in the earth, now in the air, now in the warming sea. Give thanks for the power. Count the cost. And go ahead As the Lunar men did, by the light of the moon: with friends, carefully. Stand.