Iron, Steam & Money: The Making Of The Industrial Revolution, by Roger Osborne, Bodley Head, £25

The Industrial Revolution had a bad press from 19th century aesthetes such as John Ruskin, who shuddered at the sight of Titus Salt’s “palace of industry” on the banks of the Aire.

William Morris and his Pre-Raphaelite painting compadres looked upon steam trains with horror, preferring to hark back to a supposed golden age of shire horses, homely rustics and self-sufficient artisans.

Roger Osborne wastes no time getting to the point in his new book, which charts the transition from canals to railways from 1770 to 1830, and the central part played in this technological earthquake by coal.

“Before the Industrial Revolution humanity, for all its ingenuity, lived in a precarious balance with the natural world. The overwhelming majority of people were vulnerable to starvation, disease and debilitation, and were rarely able to rise above mere subsistence.

“All work was done by human and animal muscle, and life for most was a continual struggle against exhaustion and the spectre of death. There were great civilisations, of course, but none ever freed its people from the threat of imminent famine or disease.”

Scarborough-born Osborne studied geology at Manchester University and used to make a living transcribing computer manuals into readable English and editing books for Faber & Faber.

His back catalogue includes the best-selling The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology, and Civilisation: A New History of the Western World. It discloses at first glance an eager ambition to embrace disparate ideas the way a deep-sea trawler fishes for shoals.

In 2006 a national newspaper review of Civilisation summed up his style thus: “At his best Osborne is a refreshingly unacademic synthesiser and his is an anthropological, philosophical, technological and social history of the west and its collision with other cultures.”

The drift of his latest book can be seen in the eight chapter headings – Invention, Coal, Power, Cotton, Iron, Transport, Money and Work.

“In a world concerned about climate change, pollution and environmental degradation, industrialisation can seem like the villain of the piece. But everyone reading this book leads a life of well-being beyond the imagining of those who lived before 1770: it is the great watershed and there is no going back.”

And this life of well-being flowed directly from manufacturing and trade and the spirit of Non-Conformist empirical inquiry that prompted industrial revolutionaries such as Thomas Newcomen, James Watt and Matthew Boulton, George Stephenson, Richard Arkwright and Abraham Darby.

Osborne gets inside the life and times of these pioneering engineers to explain how their machines evolved, were improved upon and then applied world-wide. For once the adjective “rivetting” is appropriate.

You won’t find local wool textile magnates Samuel Cunliffe Lister and Titus Salt, though Bradford is listed four times in the index. The fourth, in the chapter about work and factory conditions, refers to the 1838 Silkstone colliery accident in which rainwater flooded a shaft and 26 children drowned.

“The resulting Royal Commission into child labour in mines heard from Patience Kershaw: ‘I hurry in the clothes I have got on, trousers and ragged jacket. The bald place on my head is made by thrusting the corves.

‘I hurry the corves a mile or more underground and back; they weight 3 cwt (hundredweight). I hurry eleven hours a day. I wear a belt and chain at the workings to get the corves out. The getter that I work for sometimes beat me if I not quick enough’.”

We don’t need to go back 235 years. The death of hundreds of clothes-makers in the building collapse in Bangladesh this year reminds us of the price that some still pay for the life-enhancement of many.

  • Roger Osborne will be talking about his book at Bradford Industrial Museum on Saturday, June 29, from 1.30pm. Admission is free but places must be booked by ringing (01274) 435900.