Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (6 page)

As more skyscrapers rose around the Flatiron, the sharp wedge shape lost its propensity to channel wind and the gusts died down. Cycling along Broadway in the 1970s, the Flatiron was no longer as imposing, overshadowed by the nearby Metropolitan Life Tower. But the building continues to attract people to the area and is a constant reminder of a period of unparalleled growth in the city.

Skyscrapers are built to accommodate more people in a city centre; building upwards is just a more efficient use of the land. Iron’s strength and abundance underpins this concentration of the human population into small pockets dotted about the world. These hives of activity foster innovation and so support human progress, raising humanity from simple rural communities to prosperous urban societies.

Skyscrapers were also built as symbols of economic and political power. Some of the first inhabitants of New York’s pioneering buildings were the executives of the corporate trusts, such as Standard Oil and US Steel (formed from the Carnegie Steel Corporation and several other major producers), which resulted from the industrial revolution. Prestige was vitally important to Rockefeller, Carnegie and the other American robber barons and so these buildings were beautiful as well as big.

The World Trade Center’s Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world when they were completed in 1971. For thirty years they stood as symbols of America’s economic eminence, and this is why they were chosen as targets in the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. The Twin Towers went down, and with them 200,000 tonnes of steel. On the day of the attacks, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani declared: ‘We will rebuild. We’re going to come out of this stronger than before, politically stronger, and economically stronger. The skyline will be made whole again.’ The Ground Zero site is being restored to its former standing as a centre for global economic activity; on
completion, One World Trade Center will be the tallest skyscraper in America.

At the beginning of 2012 there were, for the first time, more people living in cities than in rural areas. Nowhere is this dramatic shift more apparent than in Asia. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are the biggest twin towers ever built, while Dubai’s Burj Khalifa is the world’s tallest skyscraper, standing 830 metres high. Iron and steel have made this possible; China is now the world’s biggest consumer of iron ore.

Every time I visited China in the 1980s and 1990s, new ramshackle and purely functional apartment and office blocks would have sprung up with extraordinary speed. In this period of rapid economic growth, the pragmatic prevailed over the aesthetic; there was little time to consider how to create a sustainable and beautiful city environment. Today, many of these early buildings have been knocked down and replaced with piercing skyscrapers. China’s cities are getting taller and sprawling faster than anywhere in the world. The simple, elegantly curved Shanghai World Financial Centre and the oddly pleasing Beijing headquarters of China Central Television, colloquially known as ‘the big-shorts’, are Flatirons of the twenty-first century.

These are not the first iron colossi that China has built. In the small city of Cangzhou, 240 kilometres to the south of Beijing, stands the Iron Lion. It is over five metres tall and weighs around 50 tonnes. Originally, the Lion is thought to have lived inside a Buddhist temple, with a bronze statue of Bodhisattva Manjusri riding in the lotus flower on his back. Today it is battered and broken. The Lion’s tail went missing sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century, and in 1803 a storm toppled the statue, chipping the beast’s snout. It may have seen better days, but the hulking cast-iron mass persists as evidence of the phenomenal Imperial Chinese iron industry that existed over a thousand years ago. When it was cast in
AD
953, the production of iron in China was far greater than anywhere else in the world. Iron output increased sixfold between
AD
800 and 1078 to 115,000 tonnes, almost as much as the whole of Europe would produce in
1700. China’s growing iron industry was just one face of the great social, political and economic changes that were sweeping through the country during the late Tang and Song dynasties. Joseph Needham, the historian of Chinese technology, writes that ‘China in 1000 had more in common with China of 1900 than it had with the China of 750’.
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With this prodigious output of iron, China cast the tools and weapons that it used to become a dominant global power at the beginning of the second millennium
AD.
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Up until 1700, China had the world’s largest and most efficient iron industry, which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries declined. During this period, a Chinese poet, Ji Ruiqi lamented this change:
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Thinking of ancient flourishing glory

I sigh for the changes of our times

But the Iron Lion still stands
,

While halls and palaces have turned to thorns and brambles.

In Europe and the US the industrial revolutions were creating increased productivity and growth; scientific advances had led to an array of innovative low-cost iron- and steel-making techniques. China could now simply not compete. In the late 1950s, Mao Zedong was determined to reverse the decline of its iron and steel industry during the Great Leap Forward. He wanted China to produce more steel than Great Britain but the pots and pans he had collected and melted down produced useless pig iron.
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Under the rule of the British Raj, the economy in India was also stalled. Jamsetji Tata, a successful cotton and textile industry entrepreneur, wondered what could be done to reverse this position. With his already-made fortune Jamsetji decided to pursue his own vision: the development of India.

Jamsetji believed that four ingredients were necessary for industry to flourish in India. First, technical education and research were needed to reduce India’s reliance on foreign technology. Second, he saw that hydroelectricity
would utilise India’s huge supply of water to generate cheap electricity. Third, he made plans to build a grand hotel, to attract the wealthy international elite to India. Finally, and most crucially, Jamsetji wanted to produce steel, ‘the mother of heavy industry’, for the building of railways and cities.
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The notion that India could succeed in making steel to British standards was ridiculed. Sir Frederick Upcott, Chief Commissioner for the Indian Railways, offered to ‘eat every pound of steel rail they succeed in making’.
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Behind this arrogance, however, was the fear of competition, a fear which for a long time had caused the British Raj to hold back industrial development in India. It was not until the 1890s that the Raj began to support the development of the iron industry in India, when Great Britain saw itself slipping behind the booming iron industries in Germany and the US.

Jamsetji finally earned government support when he met Lord Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, in 1900. Now sixty and wealthy, Jamsetji explained to Hamilton that his efforts to develop a steel works were for the improvement of his home country rather than personal profit. Hamilton told him that he would have full government backing. At once, Jamsetji left for the US, where he sought the advice of Julian Kennedy, America’s foremost steel expert and manager at Carnegie’s well-known Edgar Thomson Steel Works. Then he hired a geologist to seek out suitable iron ore reserves, a task he had started almost two decades earlier.

In 1904 Jamsetji Tata died. Of his four great plans for India, only the Taj Mahal Hotel had been completed, built with ten pillars of spun iron that still hold up the ballroom ceiling today. The execution of his vision was continued with equal determination by his sons, Sir Dorabji and Sir Ratanji Tata. Three years later, Dorabji found the perfect site for the Tata steel plant at the small village of Sakchi, which had had a good supply of iron ore, water and sand. Sakchi was later renamed Jamshedpur in honour of Jamsetji. In 1912, the Tatas’ plant produced its first ingot of steel, marking the birth of India’s new iron industry. During the First World War, Tata Steel exported 2,500 kilometres of steel rails, leading Dorabji to comment that if Sir Frederick Upcott had fulfilled his promise to eat every quality steel rail produced he would have suffered ‘some slight indigestion’.
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The Tatas’ first steel mill might never have been built if it had not been
for their nationalist vision. Seeking investment for the Sakchi steel mill, the Tatas appealed to their fellow Indians to invest in a project that would help industrialise India. One observer recounts how ‘ … from early morning till late at night, the Tata offices in Bombay were besieged by an eager crowd of native investors. Old and young, rich and poor, men and women they came, offering their mites; and at the end of three weeks, the entire sum required for construction requirements … was secured, every penny contributed by some 8,000 native Indians.’
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At all Tata’s industrial enterprises, the wellbeing of the workers was a priority. Jamsetji introduced humidifiers, fire sprinklers, sanitation disposal and water filtration into his early cotton and textile mills. He was also a pioneer of pension funds, accident compensation and equal rights. Unlike Carnegie, the Tatas did not pursue profits at all other costs; they believed that a business that supports the development of a nation must also support the health and wellbeing of its people. A century before Western business had defined corporate social responsibility, enlightened self-interest and the triple bottom line, he had already got there.
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Tata knew that consideration for society must be integral to every aspect of operations. When shareholders complained of the great expense going into building workers’ accommodation on the site of the Tatas’ first steel mill, Sir Dorabji would tell them: We are not putting up a row of workmen’s huts in Jamshedpur, we are building a city.’
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In 1895 Sir Dorabji wrote: ‘We do not claim to be more unselfish, more generous or more philanthropic than other people. But we think we started on sound and straightforward business principles, considering the interests of the shareholders our own, and the health and welfare of the employees, the sure foundation of our success.’
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There are few more eloquent expressions of the proper relationship between business and society. Even today many businesses have failed to catch up with Tata. Some still follow American economist Milton Friedman’s mantra that ‘the only business of business is business’, and believe they can ignore the external world.
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In doing so, they risk their reputation, their licence to operate and their customers. Today, as the scrutiny of business becomes more intense than ever, and as governments call on business to do more and more beyond their core activity, we would
do well to refer to Tata’s example, and to observe the success it became, not only for his dynasty but for India as a whole.

In
The Argumentative Indian
, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen considers the role that our sense of identity and social motivation play in the determination of our economic behaviour. ‘Within the limits of feasibility and reasonable returns,’ he writes, ‘there are substantial choices to be made, and in these choices one’s visions and identities could matter.’
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For the Tatas, a nationalist vision of India’s industrial development led them to behave quite differently in their business practices from the American robber barons.

Like Carnegie, Jamsetji Tata also gave money to support the needs of his nation. With the large fortune that Ratanji and Dorabji inherited, they set up philanthropic organisations, with a focus on education, health and founding institutions of national importance. They continue to hold a large shareholding in Tata today. Jamsetji Tata is remembered in India in the same way as Carnegie is remembered in the US. They differ in how they acquired their wealth. Carnegie sought to amass as much wealth as possible, whatever the cost to his workers, so that he would have more to give back to society, while, for the Tatas, their personal wealth and that of India were one and the same. Both used iron to develop the industrial power of a nation, to form the foundations of a long-lasting business and, ultimately, to give back to society.

Their approaches were successful in their own time and place, but neither would be entirely successful today. In the lawless early days of the American industrial revolution, cronyism and corruption were the only ways for a business to survive and grow. Today such behaviour would provoke an immediate and powerful public backlash; a business would not grow or survive. Even the Tatas’ pioneering and enlightened approach to business is not wholly sustainable in today’s business environment. Dorabji’s decision to build ‘a city’, rather than ‘a row of workmen’s huts’, would run contrary to the fundamental business principle of maximising shareholder value.
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Dorabji’s shareholders were the people of India, whereas today shareholders are largely private individuals. In the current business environment, social investment remains a vital aspect of ensuring business sustainability, but there is a need for something more. In the
face of growing inequality, philanthropy remains a vital mechanism for redistributing the wealth that individuals acquire through their use of the elements. In Carnegie and the Tatas we find lessons for today.

E
VERY YEAR, ON THE
third Saturday in July, I watch the fireworks of Venice’s Festa del Redentore, the Festival of the Redeemer, illuminate the sky above the church of the same name. With friends I take a gondola into St Mark’s Basin and meander through the festively decorated boats, packed solid save for a narrow passage kept open for gondolas. Even today, the gondola still commands precedence and respect from all other vehicles in the city. We dock close to the old customs house, the Dogana, and admire the magnificent spectacle of lights as they reflect in the still lagoon waters around us.