Was John Mercer the epitome of the industrial revolution?
Caesar at 40 regretted that he had achieved nothing while Alexander, dead at 32, had conquered the world. However, at 18 Alexander had inherited the Macedonian Phalanx and at 40 Caesar’s career took off with command of Roman Legions. Given the numbers who died as a result neither could be regarded as a benefactor of mankind.
John Mercer (1791-1866) advised his sons to do the most good to all mankind and followed his own advice. That all men are brothers made in the image of God was not a platitude for many Christians of that time but an active principle of their everyday life.
He gave his name to Mercerisation – a process still used and which most of us have heard of but few understand. He is still known as the father of textile chemistry and, although illiterate in childhood and basically an autodidact, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, still the only textile chemist to be so. He was elected an honorary member of the Manchester Lit & Phil in 1849 having attended meetings for many years. He was an original Fellow of the Chemical Society 1842 and an honorary member of the Glasgow Philosophical Society elected in 1860.
Although his main interest was calico dyeing, he had many other achievements. These were based upon talent, hard work, rational thought, repeated experiments, and pure and applied science. However, he was born into the cotton industry, others produced the cloth he dyed for which there was an existing market. When he started in dyeing, he was able to ask a local chemical supplier what chemicals dyers bought and to buy a selection at threepenn’oth each (now £1.50) and obtain cloth to dye experimentally which may answer one question above.
The world’s first successful fully mechanised factory is generally held to be Lombe’s Mill (1718-21) in Derbyshire (the machinery was copied from Italian silk throwing machines in the first recorded incident of industrial espionage). The flying shuttle was patented in 1733 and increased the productivity of weavers. It already required several spinners to supply one weaver, but this ratio immediately rose and drove the inventions that gave rise in 1771 to the world’s first cotton spinning mill, Cromford Mill also in Derbyshire.
It has been said that the conditions for the industrial revolution existed elsewhere in Europe and it is not clear why it occurred in and around Northern and Midland England but this cannot be wholly correct or else it would have occurred elsewhere simultaneously and not by cultural appropriation (a habit of Mankind since the Palaeolithic) although some countries were better positioned than others to industrialise. There must therefore have been other factors even if it is not certain what these were.
A feature of the industrial revolution was that the power supply for the factories was inanimate not animate. Initially this was from Pennine rivers and streams but, as their number was limited, this soon became coal. The factories needed iron for structure and machinery and skilled workers. The industrial revolution also required banks, transport and markets. Other features were the sharing and rational application of scientific knowledge, not least through learned societies. It seems likely that the various causes interacted exponentially.
Although Oliver Cromwell is frequently felt to have been a sectarian, he was so only in regard to the Established Christian Sects. Many of his troopers were Non-conformists and while he was by no means a Leveller or a Digger, he believed in freedom of conscience for his troopers. This means that, from the Civil War onwards, Non-conformism became a matter of choice and it has been argued that the ability to think independently without the interposition of a priest between man and God, encouraged independent and critical thought.
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 by twelve natural philosophers including Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and William Petty and promoted pure science by experiment but all three were polymaths and also applied scientists. The men who drove the industrial revolution were more interested in experimental applied rather than pure science but did not neglect the latter and usually had multiple interests.
Many of those involved in the industrial revolution were Non-conformists. Mercer was originally a Wesleyan. Many Non-conformists believed in a practical form of Christianity and that salvation was not merely a matter of belief and privilege but, as preached by Christ himself, (Matthew 25:35 and onwards) earned by good deeds. Mercer was responsible for the building of Wesleyan Chapel at Oakenshaw in 1829 for which he was reimbursed in 1837 by Messrs. Fort who also provided funds for a burial ground, lending library and a public reading room and he was also responsible for the building of the Church of England, Church of All Saints Clayton-le-Moors consecrated 1840.
Mercer became a JP in 1861 and had such great sympathy for the offenders that he was lightly criticised “The claims of the justice to the community were not infrequently outweighed by the feeling of pity and compassion for the offender”.
Despite his early tribulations and self-education, he was keen to help with the education as well as the salvation of others e.g. building churches for his firm’s employees and recommending the establishment of technical schools to train skilled workers in Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow with a leading school in London. He recommended that the pupils be taught pure science as well as applied but not to the extent that they would not be of immediate use in industry. His recommendations on the training of industrial scientists were to some extent adopted but technical training along the lines he recommended developed better on the continent.
Dyeing is a very complicated process so Mercer’s science was often pragmatic, but also based upon the rational analysis of detailed experimentation in which smaller pieces of cloth would be dyed in various ways. Cotton in water is negatively charged. Many dyes are also negatively charged in solution so dyeing requires additives to overcome the repulsion between the two negative charges. Generally, once the dye has been taken into the cotton fibres, it must be fixed or rendered insoluble or else it will wash out. These agents, not always required with modern dyes, are known as mordants. The excess mordant must also be removed. Once the dye had been charged and fixed, the most common method of producing patterns was discharging or printing other chemicals onto the cloth to bleach the dye or alter its colour. One of the great advances made by Mercer would seem to be the use of phosphates and later arsenates to remove mordants rather than dunging or passing the cloth through a solution of cow dung.
Mercer was born in Great Harwood in 1791. He thought this the most beautiful place in the world his whole life. Unlike our recent Prime Minister, he referred to his father as a factory owner which means that he was a self-employed weaver as was his uncle. Relatives also farmed. The rise of larger factories compromised his father’s business and he became a farmer. He died when Mercer was 11 and his slightly younger brother and an uncle died around the same time. Times became hard and years later he still remembered collecting Patience Dock with which his mother made meals.
His mother remarried and moved away and had more children. The then illiterate Mercer became a bobbin winder aged nine. He later also worked as a warper. When winding bobbins, he was taught his letters and numbers by a draper called Blenkinsop who lived at the bobbin winders. Later a Mr Lightfoot, variously described as a surveyor or as an exciseman, at Oakenshaw Printworks helped him with mathematics. He taught himself to sing and play musical instruments and helped organise a choir and a band.
As a young man, he joined the local militia but was so awkward in drill that he was known as ‘Awkward John’ When their commander wished a certain tune played, only one man in the band could play it. He was advised to send for Mercer who listened to the tune and wrote down the music for all the band’s players. His drill continued so badly that he was brought to headquarters for reproof, but when he played his flute, he was transferred to the band. He remained fond of music all his life, attended the annual festivals at the Crystal Palace, and on one occasion his son observed him in tears and unable to speak after listening to the Hallelujah Chorus.
After his father’s death he lived with a series of relatives and friends – eight or nine in all. He had to leave one because the son (whom Mercer delicately refers to as having been born before his parents were married) objected to him and threatened to leave home if Mercer remained. At one time he lived with his sister Nancy, left and later returned to help with her distress after the death of two of her children.
His working life had lasted most of a decade before he became interested in dyeing. He visited his mother and a half-brother and found her wearing a dress she had dyed herself in a bright and pleasant orange with an annatto dye (which probably then faded quickly). He visited a chemical supplier in Blackburn some miles away, asked what chemicals dyers were interested in, bought a variety and practised dyeing himself. This was to some extent a matter of trial and error. He set up in premises owned then by a fellow choir member – Richard Sowerbutts – who became his partner in the business. On one occasion their blue dyes were not working well when the Richard found a piece of limestone that had fallen off a farm cart and put it in the vat which greatly improved their production. They dyed for local weavers and also redyed worn fustian clothes for workers.
As a result of his growing reputation, Mercer was offered an apprentice colour mixer in the dyeing shop of a mill owned by a Mr Hargreaves and this he accepted in September 1809. Unfortunately, the worker in charge of the shop took against him and gave him only menial and unpleasant work to do with no real dyeing. Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of 1806 was by now causing a recession in the industry and he accepted an offer from his employer to surrender his indentures to him which he accepted. He had given up his dyeing business when he became an apprentice. He continued to work as a warper and weaver but also did some dyeing on the side which strictly he should not have done and so he left, worked as a weaver and soon began dyeing successfully for himself. His mother and stepfather died in April 1810
He courted Mary Wolstenholme, the younger daughter of the family he lodged with, and in 1814 married her. He was very happily married until his wife died in 1859. They had two sons and three daughters. To his extreme grief a daughter died young and none of his children married. When obtaining the marriage licence, he saw and bought a book (The Chemical Pocket-book; or, Memoranda Chemica by James Parkinson) which he read avidly and which led to the development in 1817 of an orange dye made with antimony called Stoops Orange (Stoops was the farm his father worked).
He showed the dye to Mr Hargreaves and a further meeting was arranged on the way to which he met a Mr Fort who offered him a job as an experimental chemist in the dye shop at Oakenshaw Print Works at 30 shillings a week guaranteed for five years which he promptly accepted. He then met Mr Hargreaves and discovered that a similar job was about to be offered to him. Hargreaves was initially upset but Mercer explained to him that he had no idea that a job offer was to be made, not least as the mill already employed a Mr Steiner and Mr Fort’s offer was too good to turn down. After thinking things over Hargreaves agreed and wished him all success. Mercer later commented that in 1818 the only other firms employing a man with basic chemical knowledge were Thompsons of Clitheroe and Hargreaves of Accrington. Mercer retained a friendship with Hargreaves and Mercerisation was jointly patented by them both.
Mercer continued his work as a colour chemist in the printworks and in 1825 was made a partner. The partnership continued until 1848 when the firm was wound up and Mercer became a relatively rich man. Some years later, when a young man wrote to him about the happiness wealth gave, Mercer told him that he had been just as happy poor as rich as wealth was not the source of happiness. In 1866 he composed his holographic memoir which reveals that his spelling was still not perfect.
A list of Mercer’s work as a whole would be much longer than this brief summary but of interest only to those concerned with a history of early 19th century chemistry.
One advance made by Mercer was to follow the doctrine of chemical equivalence. As molecules of different chemicals vary in size, the same weight of different chemicals must contain different numbers of molecules. Mercer adjusted the concentrations of his solutions so that the number of molecules were in whatever proportion was required (here he referred to the individual units as atoms and not molecules).
Mercer was also interested in chemicals which promoted a chemical reaction between two other chemicals without being used up themselves in the process (now known as catalysis). He read a paper on catalysis at the Manchester Meeting of The British Association in 1842. In this paper he used the words atom and molecule more accurately.
For a friend in the soap industry, he discovered a cheaper method of bleaching palm oil using steam and, as a source of oxygen, air. He also discovered that adding 5-6 pounds of bleached oil to the tonne of unbleached oil made the process much quicker.
He developed new mordants, mineral colours including chrome yellow, improved the extraction of carminic acid from cochineal and the oiling process in Turkey Red dyeing. In 1839 the factory began printing delaine, a fine woollen fabric. However, the uptake of Prussian Blue was poor. Suspecting the cause to be de-oxidant in the wool, Mercer successfully treated the fabric with a weak solution of chlorine (from bleaching powder and hydrochloric acid) and this was still used 150 years later.
Mercer experimented with filtrating hydrates and, applying sodium hydroxide to a layered cotton filter, discovered what he called fulled cotton. The process alters the secondary structure of the chain of glucose molecules which constitute cellulose which forms cotton. The Mercerisation process he described resulted in shrinkage and the process used today treats cotton under tension to avoid this. He experimented with the temperature and strength of the caustic soda. The effects include increased lustre, increase tensile strength, increased colour depth after dyeing and improved dyeability (in which he was chiefly interested) as well as some absorption of water. Applying the caustic soda in stripes produced a puckered effect with a differential uptake of dye which proved popular and was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 along with other Mercerised articles which attracted great attention. Mercer was a juror for the Great Exhibition (and also for the Exhibition of 1862) and so was not eligible for an award for the best exhibitors but his work was nevertheless recommended. Queen Victoria accepted only two gifts from the 1851 Exhibition, one being Mercerised handkerchiefs. Mercer applied the same technique to paper producing effect which he probably regarded as a curiosity but which led to the manufacture of parchment paper. He experimented with the effects of other chemicals for example, sulphuric acid on cotton.
Mercer correctly recognised that photosynthesis played a central role in increasing atmospheric oxygen, although modern science shows that the early atmosphere was more complex than a predominantly nitrogen/carbon-dioxide atmosphere. Mercer correctly believed that the primeval, or, as he termed it, preadamite, atmosphere had been largely nitrogen and carbon dioxide until the latter was changed to oxygen by photosynthesis. He was not entirely correct as he thought this was due to the plants of the Carboniferous era and not, as correct, cyanobacteria in the even more prehistoric oceans.
In 1843 mould was discovered growing on cloth the firm exported to South America. Mercer devised a method of prevention using low gluten starch and a little potassium dichromate. He experimented and decided that there were moulds of different types in the air. He extended this to disease and in 1847 during a local outbreak of cholera used magnetic oxide of iron and chloride of lime (calcium hypochlorite) to decontaminate drinking water and sprinkle the latter on the floor of the factory. He ensured that the dead, clothing and houses in the village were dusted with chloride of lime which probably played a part in limiting the outbreak to four cases. Calcium hypochlorite is still used as a disinfectant today. Germ theory was firmly established by the experiments of Pasteur only in the 1860s. The bacteria causing cholera was identified by Koch in the 1870s. It took Florence Nightingale until the 1880s to fully discard the Miasma (bad air) theory and adopt germ theory although much of her nursing and preferred hospital design, including the old Withington Hospital, prevented cross- infection. While he dismissed the theoretical basis of homoeopathy, Mercer felt that good nursing, a good diet, faith in the remedy and less actual medicine were generally of benefit. Mercer suffered from headaches which in retrospect were clearly migraine. He had three or four a month but found the following day the best day of the week for his work.
Mercer felt correctly that heat was a form of motion but also pointed out that we did not understand how the process by which the sun continually produced heat and light without diminution.
Mercer also interested in astronomy and made and exhibited some of the earliest recorded monochromatic colour photographs.
Politically Mercer was a liberal and a reformer and a great admirer of Richard Cobden who had worked briefly for Messrs. Fort in 1830.
He died on 30th November 1866 and is buried in St Bartholemew’s Church, Great Harwood.
Philip Jones, member of Manchester Lit & Phil