I seem to be on a roll recently highlighting neglected industries during the Industrial Revolution. I think this is extremely important, and here’s why. 

The popular perception of the IR is that it was all about cotton, steam, coal and iron. There’s some truth to this of course - an absolutely huge proportion of British economic growth in the period came from cotton manufacturing alone. But focusing on these industries can lead to explanations of Britain’s economic ascendancy that do not adequately account for the sheer scale of the change (see my earlier post on why coal didn’t cause the IR). 

The IR was instead an acceleration of innovation that has lasted to this day, and it affected all industries, even if some of them were initially quite small as a proportion of output. By recognising this fact, we can focus on explanations of the IR that actually work. In other words, if you’re to explain the IR, you need to find an explanation that accounts for the pervasiveness of innovation across most of society, and most industries. This is why I find cultural or ideological explanations of the IR so much more convincing.

So having highlighted some innovators in watch-making (who had recently unfairly been labelled “anonymous tinkerers”!), I’d like to celebrate the individuals who transformed another much-neglected industry: food processing and products. There are 33 individuals in my database who contributed to this industry (and more in my running list of individuals to add), but here are 10 of my favourites, in broadly chronological order, to whet your appetite.

1. Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753)

Sir Hans Sloane is famous for a lot of things. It was the bequest to the nation of his huge collection of largely botanical specimens that was one of the three collections giving rise to the British Museum (and presumably its spin-off, the Natural History Museum). The marriage of a daughter to the 2nd Baron Cadogan also means that his name is preserved in London’s street names on their former estate, for example in Sloane Square. 

He is also famous as a medical pioneer, being an early promoter of inoculation after it was introduced from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, popularising the use of quinine to treat malaria (more on that in a later post perhaps), and above all contributing to the establishment of scientific medical diagnoses from observation.

However, the reason he’s mentioned here is because he pioneered milk chocolate (from which he profited substantially), as an alternative drink to alcohol. This he brought back from an early trip to Jamaica in 1687 (along with the beginnings of his plant collection too). There’s far more I could mention about his prolific career, but for that alone, I think we have a lot to thank him for.

2. Humphrey Gainsborough (1718-1776)

Yes, brother of that Gainsborough, the famous landscape artist. Humphrey was a dissenting minister who had been taught by a friend of Newton’s, John Eames, and which seemingly inspiring him to a life of amateur invention. Interestingly, he appears to have, independently of James Watt, invented the separate condenser for steam engines in the 1770s. 

However, he gets a mention here because of a self-ventilating fish carriage that he designed in 1762 in response to the Society of Arts’ efforts to aid Britain’s fishing industry. It was meant to keep fish fresh en route from the docks to inland markets. Unfortunately, this was one of the only designs of his to survive - his extensive archive of papers was lost after his death due to a distinct lack of offspring and a wife who pre-deceased him.

3. Friedrich Christian Accum (1769-1838)

Perhaps best known as the person who first lit the streets of Westminster by coal gas, and for describing the production of iodine in 1814, Accum was initially a pioneer in food safety, applying his knowledge of chemistry to analysing drugs and foods to figure out if they were adulterated with other substances. 

 An immigrant from Westphalia, whose father was a Jewish convert to Christianity, and whose mother was of Huguenot descent, he was also responsible for introducing beet sugar to Britain in 1799. However, a lot of this useful work was marred when he was caught tearing pages from texts in the Royal Institution library in 1820 (it’s not clear why). Disgraced, and charged first with theft and then with the “mutilation” of books, he fled the country to become a professor in Germany.

4. Robert Bill (1754-1827)

A little-known figure, Bill was from a gentlemanly Staffordshire family, and originally intended for the army, but used his fortune to conduct experiments that he hoped would benefit society. Among his many improvements as an amateur-inventor (including clothes washing machines, springs to keep pianos in tune, and improvements to house heating systems), he also proposed iron tanks to keep and preserve water on ships in 1795 (somewhat bizarrely in a treatise on the dangers of paper currency), and a steam cooking apparatus in 1813, which he submitted to the Navy Board.

5. Bryan Donkin (1768-1855)

Survivors of any impending zombie apocalypse will have a lot to thank Donkin for. He was the person to make food canning safe and commercially possible. The idea was originally French, patented on behalf of Phillippe de Girard in 1810 by a Peter Durand. 

Recognising its potential, Donkin purchased the patent with some of his long-time partners in other ventures for £1,000. He then established the first cannery, at Bermondsey, and developed a sterilisation process (which involved heating the meat in tin cans in calcium hypochlorite - now used as a commercial bleach). He then went about creating a market for the process by having the Prince Regent test it. Armed with royal approval, he was soon taking orders from the Navy and helped feed various Arctic expeditions.

It’s worth noting that Donkin, a devout Methodist, was remarkably prolific in other areas too, improving papermaking machines, instruments, various tools, and advising on civil engineering projects.

6. William Leftwich (1770-1843)

You’ve definitely never heard of Leftwich, but his commercial daring probably led to significant improvements in diet and hygiene. A confectioner, he hated that his dairy products were quickly going off during the summer months. So in 1822, he chartered a ship and imported an enormous 300 tons of Norwegian ice to London, with the purpose of using it to preserve food.

This marked the first use of ice on an industrial scale. Combined with concurrent transport improvements, this undoubtedly led to fresher food finding its way to cities and further inland, as well as presumably reducing incidences of food poisoning.

My favourite part of the story, however, is that London’s customs officials had absolutely no idea how to tax this unprecedented import, and took their time deciding. You can just imagine him anxiously hoping it wouldn’t all melt before he could get it to market. Fortunately for the health and diet of many of our Victorian forebears, it was extremely popular and profitable from the outset.

7. Sir Thomas Tassell Grant (1795-1859)

Grant was responsible for some of the major innovations that quite literally fed the expansion of the British Empire. A technical civil servant in the Admiralty, he designed machinery in 1829 that could mass-produce ships’ biscuits. This invention alone apparently saved the British government around £30,000 per year - an enormous amount of money in those days (for which he was awarded £2,000 by Parliament). 

In 1834, he then devised a machine to desalinate water for drinking while at sea, which came in handy during the Crimean War when it was used on 11 ships in the Black Sea to produce almost 5,000 tons of fresh drinking water over a period of just 3 months. He also designed a steam kitchen and other ships’ cooking apparatus. He was quite deservedly awarded a Knighthood upon retirement.

8. John Cadbury (1801-1889)

I think it’s pretty obvious that Cadbury was a pioneer of chocolate, as his name lives on in supermarkets and corner shops across the country. A Quaker son of a draper, he was initially in the retail tea trade, before setting up on his own as a tea dealer and coffee roaster in Birmingham in 1824. However, his great innovation was to imagine a mass market for chocolate.

He set up a cocoa factory in 1831, and the product experimentation then began. By 1842, he was advertising 16 varieties of drinking chocolate, and 11 cocoas, and in 1853 was appointed cocoa manufacturer to the Queen. Perhaps this is typical of Quaker entrepreneurs of the time, but he was a social activist well ahead of his time, spending money on campaigns by the Animal Friends Society, and against the use of chimney sweeping boys.

9. Jonathan Dodgson Carr (1806-1884)

Another name that lives on to this day, in Carr’s water table biscuits. Carr innovated both processes and products. In the 1830s, he introduced steam-powered ingredient-mixing machines, but by 1860 had also developed 72 varieties of fancy biscuit. Like Cadbury, Carr was also a Quaker, although he was censured by the Society of Friends for bringing the Bible to meetings (this reliance on books apparently meant he wouldn’t be as attuned to the promptings of the Holy Spirit), and eventually resigned from it.

 His story also involves a good old Victorian narrative of self-help: in 1831 he tramped 50 miles from Stockton to Carlisle to set up a bakery and mealman’s shop. He then proceeded to build an industrial empire based on bread, expanding into corn merchanting, flour milling, baking, biscuit manufacture and retailing, and even owning his own fleet of ships to import the wheat. 

Carr was also a political activist. He was secretary of his local Anti-Cornlaw Association, and came up with one of my favourite political PR stunts of all time. In his shop window he placed a taxed and a larger, “untaxed” loaf of bread, side by side, to demonstrate the costs of protectionism to consumers. And when the laws were eventually repealed in 1846, he provided every inmate in Carlisle gaol with a fruit loaf in celebration.

10. Henry Bessemer (1813-1898)

Bessemer was a serial inventor. In fact, he’s unusual in the list for explicitly choosing “inventor” as a career when he first set out on his own. He’s famous for the Bessemer steel converter (which is really, really cool: here’s a video of it), which made the mass production of steel possible for the first time. However, among his whopping 119 patents, in all sorts of industries, he also took out 13 for improvements to the manufacture of sugar between 1849 and 1853.