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Efficiency makes people use more
The coal question
In 1865, a British writer named Jevons published a book called The Coal Question. James Watt's new steam engine had just made work far more efficient, and others reasoned that a fixed amount of work would now burn less coal. Jevons expected the opposite: everyone would want a steam engine, so Britain would use far more coal and could run short of its cheap supply. He was right.
The cotton gin
Consider the cotton gin. Before it, separating seed from cotton took hours, and one person could produce about a pound of usable cotton a day. Eli Whitney, a Yale graduate who went south hoping to make his fortune, built a small hand-cranked device that brought that to 50 pounds, making the work 50 times more efficient.
Some hoped this would slow the growth of slavery. The opposite happened over the next 30 to 50 years. Cotton got so cheap and demand rose so far that Mississippi called it King Cotton, and the South imported eight to ten times more enslaved people than it had held before the gin, to keep up.
The printing press
The printing press follows the same pattern. People might have expected five times more books. It led to something far beyond that, and anyone trying to estimate how many people would write and read text could not have predicted Twitter.
Why did a better steam engine mean more coal burned?
James Watt's separate condenser let steam engines produce the same work from far less coal than earlier Newcomen engines. That made steam power affordable for many uses that had been too costly before, from factories to railways. Economists now call the pattern Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect. Britain's coal output climbed steadily through the nineteenth century as steam spread.
How did the cotton gin separate seed from fiber?
A rotating cylinder studded with wire teeth pulled cotton fibers through slots too narrow for the seeds to pass. A brush then cleared the lint from the teeth. Eli Whitney received his patent in 1794. Copies were built across the South, and Whitney collected little money from the invention.
How many more books did the printing press create?
Before Johannes Gutenberg's press of about 1450, every European book was copied by hand. Historians estimate that printers had produced around twenty million volumes by 1500. Printed pamphlets then fueled the spread of the Reformation in the 1500s. Literacy rates in Europe rose over the following centuries.
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