Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c24.6

c24.6

4. In projecting the establishment of a new manufacture, persons are but too prone to copy an old established process, without studying sufficiently the principles by which the result is produced, so as to be able to modify the mode of operation to suit the resources of the locality, and the capabilities of the workmen; and because the English mode of manufacturing iron has been found to be the most profitable in England, it has been supposed that a similar process could alone answer in India. This process has also been styled ‘scientific’, but the fact is, that the principles of the mode of operation are still totally unknown, and the manufactures are not only unable to produce at pleasure a certain result, but even the quantities of the results produced depend upon the weather, and other causes as yet not explained, or beyond the control of the workmen. We do not as yet even know what cast iron is; nor with any certainty what its component parts are; nor in what it differs from steel, or the varieties of what are generally called carburets of iron. On this point Barlow remarks: (Encyclopedia Metropolitana) ‘There is certainly much to be learned in the iron trade, before we can boast of any thing like a complete knowledge of its different processes. We observe many facts in this, as well as in other branches of the manufacture, of which, the most we can say is, that they are connected with, or caused by certain other accompanying facts, though we are ignorant how this connection exists; often, indeed, our knowledge does not extend so far.’ Again, ‘it is, however, so difficult to follow up chemical analysis, and to obtain results with minute accuracy, in a process requiring intense heat, that hitherto the phenomena attendant upon the refining of pig iron, and its conversion into bars, may be said rather to be guessed at, than perfectly explained.’ Upon the same point also Dr Ure remarks: (Dictionary of Manufacture) ‘but philosophers have been, and still are, too much estranged from the study of the useful arts, and content themselves too much with the minutiae of the laboratory and theoretic abstractions.’ Such being the state of our present knowledge of this subject, it may be doubted if a careful examination of the principles of the long established, cheap, and simple mode of manufacture of the native of India, might not lead to improvements and modifications, which would be found to answer better, than the operose methods of the English manufacture, which require much capital, costly building, and a considerable trade to make them profitable.