English Copper Barge Kettle Unique Design, 20th Century

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About the Item

English, copper barge kettle with removable lid and iron lug on back for hanging on an English, copper half kettle, dark color on back and bottom circa 1900-1910..9.5″H, 8.25″ base. The 18th century, Canal Mania. Manufacturing had already changed from local craftsmen meeting local needs to home-workers producing for regional merchants. Now it was moving from cottage industry to factories, where the workforce could be more easily supervised. Low quality goods could be mass produced in large quantities by untiring machines. The factory system imposed a working discipline on the workforce and overcame the labor shortages caused by better paid workers who decided that they wanted to work less! Good communications became vital to move raw materials to the factories and the products to consumers, including those in the expanding British Empire. More roads were being built and improved but they couldn’t easily handle heavy bulk materials like coal, or fragile materials like pottery. One horse could pull 50 tons in a boat, and there were over a thousand miles of navigable rivers, but their potential was becoming exhausted, they didn’t go to the right places anymore. Along came the wealthy young Francis Egerton, the third Duke of Bridgewater, fresh from his Grand Tour of Europe where he had seen the Canal Du Midi in France. He decided in 1759 to build a short canal to link his coal mines at Worsley with the River Irwell, a navigation which led to Manchester, to help fuel the increasing appetite for coal to power the mills and warm the workers. Astutely he didn't actually link his Bridgewater Canal to the river but by-passed it, taking his coal directly to Manchester and also to Liverpool, without paying tolls to the Irwell Navigation. Coal prices were halved, he became an even richer man and the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution roared even louder. Other gentry, merchants and common men looked on in envy, and counted their savings. In the scramble to follow the Duke’s lead over the next 50 years, fortunes were made, the watersheds of the Rivers Mersey, Trent, Severn and Thames were climbed and crossed by canals and the rivers linked, and two thousand miles of canals were built. Whole regions like the Staffordshire Potteries and the midlands Black Country were developed and became wealthy because of their canals. Building costs usually exceeded the optimistic estimates, but there was plenty of money and even more enthusiasm, so most were oversubscribed. Promotion meetings were even held in secret, or bogus meetings advertised, to keep profits in the right pockets. And many canals did make profits, a few for a hundred years or more, but some never made a penny for shareholders, and others like the Dorset and Somerset Canal were abandoned during construction. By the end of the 18th century the boom was over, most British canals were completed by 1815, and within ten years the smart money, and the not-so-smart, would be chasing railway schemes.

Dimensions:
Height: 9.5 in (24.13 cm)Diameter: 8.5 in (21.59 cm)
Style:
Late Victorian (Of the Period)
Place of Origin:
England
Period:
Early 20th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1900-1910
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use. a few minor dents to the body.
Seller Location:
Woodbridge, CT
Reference Number:
Seller: C-40811stDibs: LU185934673793