THE MAN WHO MARKETED THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

 

 

If you want to learn about marketing, study James Watt.

He marketed the Industrial Revolution.

But how did one man market an idea that would change the world?

It began in 1712, Thomas Newcomen invented the steam-driven beam engine.

The piston would use steam to push one end of the beam up, then the piston had to be sprayed with cold water to bring it down.

It had to be reheated and cooled at every stroke, so it was a long inefficient process.

In 1764, Watt invented the condensing cylinder, removing the need for cooling and making the process much faster.

Then Watt added the flywheel, turning up-and-down motion into rotary motion so his engine worked non-stop, and used 75% less coal.

Obviously, Watt’s engine was an improvement on existing engines, but the problem was very few people had steam engines.

For a thousand years horses had supplied all the power for the entire country.

No one knew there was any alternative to horses.

So Watt’s problem wasn’t selling people a better steam engine.

It was moving England from a thousand years of horses to mechanical engines.

THIS is where Watt marketed what became known as the Industrial Revolution.

His marketing brilliance was talking to people in their own language.

All everyone knew was horses, so Watt didn’t talk about his machines in terms of engineering brilliance, he talked about them in terms of horses.

James Watt invented the unit of horsepower.

He started with the amount of work a horse could do in a single day.

Everyone agreed that one horse could raise 33,000 lbs of water from the bottom of a well 1,000 feet deep during a working day.

Watt divided those numbers into a single usable unit:

One horsepower = the power to raise 550lbs 1 foot in 1 second.

By converting a horse’s usable energy into a number, he could compare it against his steam engines.

Now he had something any farmer or pit-owner (who’d never even seen or heard of a steam engine) could understand.

Now, instead of some new-fangled gimmick his engines could be compared directly against horses in work-units.

Watt could explain, to people who had never known a machine, how many horses his engine could replace.

For instance a 6 horsepower engine could do the work of six horses; a 12 horsepower engine could do the work of 12 horses, and so on.

Before Watt, all England knew was the muscle-power of horses, Watt’s equation took the fear and mystery out of converting from horses to machinery.

The brilliance of Watt was to speak the language of the people he wanted to convince.

THAT was how James Watt marketed the Industrial Revolution.

So powerful was his unit of horsepower that it’s still the measurement for engines all over the world, even though no one has used horses for a hundred years.

A small family car is rated at around 100 horsepower.

Formula One racing cars are rated at 1,000 horsepower.

A Boeing 737 is rated at 60,000 horsepower.

A nuclear aircraft carrier is rated at 350,000 horsepower.

The Apollo 11 rocket, which took man to the moon, is rated at 32 million horsepower.

When Watt translated his technology into something anyone could understand he made it a language the entire world, present and future, could own.

Similarly, 250 years later, when Steve Jobs launched the Apple iPod in 2001, he didn’t announce it had an impressive 5GB of storage capacity.

He put it into language his target market could understand.

He simply said: “It’s like having 1,000 songs in your pocket.”