
Josiah Wedgwood - occamschainsaw
https://thehustle.co/josiahwedgwood
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georgecmu
Interesting they didn't mention that Charles Darwin was his grandson. The
pottery business funded Darwin's voyage on the Beagle.

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mannykannot
Josiah Wedgwood and Charles Darwin's paternal grandfather Erasmus Darwin were
both members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which also included the
chemist and liberal theologian Joseph Priestly, James Watt of steam-engine
fame, and Watt's patron and partner Matthew Bolton, who was as much a
technological entrepreneur as Wedgwood.

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claudiawerner
To add yet another connection, Watt is thought to have inspired Smith's
physicalist theory of value at the university in Glasgow.

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ddoran
"he's been largely forgotten by time"

Perhaps he himself is not well known, but the eponymous company he started in
1759 was the watchword for high-end ceramics for more than two centuries and
is still sold to this day.

Towards the end of the 20th century, consumer tastes changed and the company
faced stiff competition from cheaper imports. Wedgwood merged with another
luxury goods company Waterford Crystal in 1987, to become Waterford Wedgwood.
The combined companies fared no better as a unit and went into administration
in 2009 though the Wedgwood brand survives after being purchased by a private
equity company and now a Finnish consumer goods company.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterford_Wedgwood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterford_Wedgwood)

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anigbrowl
Really I think this is just standard America-centric writing - Josiah
Wedgewood isn't well-known in the US, so the writer assumes his prior
ignorance to be universal. Kinda the same way that many Americans think the
telephone and television were invented here.

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empath75
I don’t even think that’s accurate. If you watch antiques roadshow, wedgewood
pottery comes up all the time. Anybody that’s into antiques knows about them.

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dpau
Nice article, but I find it strange that not once was the gorilla in the room
mentioned- China. Wedgwood was working in a world that had been re-shaped by
Chinese export porcelain, one of the first examples of a truly global product
and marketing "brand". Chinese porcelain was of extremely high quality (some
of it unrivaled even today), technologically advanced, culturally complex, and
cherished by the European nobility. European potters like Wedgwood were
desperately trying to re-create the purity and beauty of the Chinese product.
I would argue that what Wedgwood came up with was not only technologically
inferior but also a strange cultural mishmash of influences with less cultural
value than Chinese porcelain.

I highly recommend Joseph Needham's "Science and Civilisation in China" Volume
5, Part 12, covers Ceramic Technology:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=mabcHwmAD5oC](https://books.google.com/books?id=mabcHwmAD5oC)

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kerbalspacepro
>European potters like Wedgwood were desperately trying to re-create the
purity and beauty of the Chinese product.

Oh, how the pottery turntable turns.

>Chinese manufacturers like Huawei were desperately trying to re-create the
purity and beauty of the American product.

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laumars
I think that’s grossly unfair given the American products you refer to are
also manufactured in China. So they clearly have the knowhow to produce high
quality products - even if they often prefer to target the non-premium market
(which probably makes better financial sense when it comes to selling hardware
domestically)

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kerbalspacepro
Manufacturing things is a commodity, creating things is where the value is.

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arbuge
> By the time Josiah died in 1795, he’d amassed a fortune of £600k pounds
> (more than US $100m today), and was the 4th richest man in all of England.

I found this to be an interesting point about how much the wealth of society
has increased since those times. $100m today would not put you anywhere even
remotely close to the top of that list.

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mxwsn
Converting historical currency to modern values becomes increasingly
meaningless the longer the time span, and 1795 is a sufficiently different
world to today with a different basket of goods that I don't think that's a
valuable comparison.

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maxxxxx
By the same formula 100k in todays' money would be $600. Is that realistic?

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xchaotic
That formula is for old British Pounds which are not even decimal. If go back
earlier than that, there's records of whole villages being bought for a pound
or two.

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amayne
Jacob Fugger might disagree...

Still, a very interesting read.

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softwaredoug
This article reads a bit too triumphal for my tastes. Factory towns and
globalized industrialization have a dark side. Certainly this story can’t all
be roses?

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BethGagaShaggy
Do you hold tea in your mouth until it tastes bad, too? Things have good and
bad sides. Be mindful of each on its own time.

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rasengan0
i am a potter and i approve of this article :-)

