Today, we meet a man who was left behind by a
revolution. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
In the late 18th century,
Europe and America went through revolutions. In
England that upheaval was bloodless. It was
industrial -- not political. One man who was
bypassed by those revolutions was a French
manufacturer named Delaunay Deslandes.
Deslandes joined the French Royal Glass Works in
1752, when he was 30. And he did well. In six years
he became its general manager. He held that job for
31 years, and when he died he left us a manuscript,
On the History of Glass Making. It was
as much a memoir as a history. It shows what was
happening in one French factory while the English
Industrial Revolution was growing. It's clear from
the book that Deslandes found a real vocation in
his work. He took great pride in it. It filled him
up.
French plate glass was the best flat glass in the
world when he was young -- far superior to the
so-called crown glass or broad glass made in other
countries. The French cast large plates in very hot
molten glass. Then they rolled them out and ground
them into high-quality panes for windows and
mirrors.
Deslandes tried to learn what the English already
knew about the chemistry of coal-burning. You need
very clean, intense heat to make plate glass. The
English knew a great deal about that from using
coal to produce iron and steel. But English
industrialists like Watt and Wedgwood created
seminars with the great scientists of their day,
while people like Deslandes were kept apart from
French intellectuals. They didn't have the same
means for keeping up, and by the end of the
Industrial Revolution, France had lost its
ascendancy, even in glass-making.
Deslandes's ideas about labor and management were
progressive. He instituted workers' benefits. He
knew that his product depended on his workers'
pride and independent craftsmanship. If you looked
carefully, you saw a kind of benevolent
paternalism. But he was always there in the thick
of things -- no managing from a distant estate.
Every time glass was poured, he arrived in full
formal dress to observe -- to make ceremony of the
act.
He retired to a house near the factory. When he was
82, a bitter cold front threatened a company
waterwheel with icing. He joined the workman fixing
it. And there he died of exposure. The company that
had been his life finally claimed his life.
If so good and honorable a man as Deslandes
represented France, then what did France lack that
England had! The answer is, Deslandes sustained an
old order, shaded from the new winds of science and
individualism. It took more than good masters to
survive 18th-century revolution. It took people and
institutions that could seize those changes and use
them to remake the world.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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