If the Industrial Revolution has a birthplace, Glasgow can claim the birth-thought: James Watt’s Sunday walk on Glasgow Green in 1765, when the separate condenser occurred to him and the steam engine became an economic proposition — a story told on his own page and the Green’s. What Glasgow did with the century that followed was apply that thought to everything at once.
Steam drove the cotton mills of the previous page off the rivers and into the city; steam pumped the coalfield and, from the Comet of 1812, drove ships; and around steam grew the industries of transformation. Charles Tennant’s St Rollox works, founded on his 1799 bleaching-powder patent, became the largest chemical works in the world, supplying the globe’s textile trades and announcing itself with ‘Tennant’s Stalk’, a chimney over 450 feet tall that ruled the northern skyline for a century — along with a pollution the East End breathed for as long.
Iron completed the trinity. The blackband ironstone of the Monklands, identified by David Mushet in 1801, met its catalyst in 1828 when the Glasgow engineer James Beaumont Neilson — manager of the town’s gasworks — patented the hot blast, cutting the fuel needed to smelt iron by two-thirds at a stroke. Scottish pig iron went from marginal to world-beating within a decade, and the furnace districts east of Glasgow — the subject of the next pages — caught fire in every sense.
The human transformation was the steepest in Britain. Glasgow held around eighty thousand people in 1801; a century later, boundary to boundary, more than three-quarters of a million — drawn from the Highlands, Ireland and the Lowland countryside into the tenements, mills and works, making the city’s wealth and enduring the sanitary catastrophe the Health & Medicine pages describe. The Industrial Revolution in Glasgow was cholera and Chartism as much as chemistry.
By the 1830s the pattern was set that the Victorian pages of this section inherit: coal and iron below, engines and chemicals above, ships on the river and the world for a market — the machine, assembled in one lifetime, that would run flat out for a hundred years.