Few today would think of pottery making as a revolutionary enterprise. Tables piled with ornate dishware usually remind one of old money and power, not the collapse of the ancient regime. However, like those famous engines of English industrialization — textiles, coal and iron — the pottery trade was being transformed in the late 1700s from a loosely organized and lightly mechanized activity into a modern business. New forces were changing how ceramics were made and sold. As they did, Staffordshire, the Midlands and England itself learned to play their parts in a growing industrial empire.

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Most potters merely scrambled to keep up, but a few moved with and sometimes ahead of the times. Josiah Spode, Thomas Minton and, most important, Josiah Wedgwood were among them. His many artistic and business successes showed younger potters and nascent industrialists how to exploit the new markets, means of production and sources of power that would characterize the coming age.

Wedgwood was born in 1730 into a family of struggling potters living in Burslem, the center of pottery making in North Staffordshire. In the early 20th century, Burslem merged with five nearby towns to become Stoke-on-Trent, a substantial city. During the mid-1700s, however, it was a hamlet of small potteries producing wares for English tables.

The West Midlands was uniquely suited for the task. It contained long-flame coal, necessary to fire ovens, and fireclays, from which pottery-making equipment and facilities could be constructed. Nearby counties provided lead, salt and fine sand. More important, however, Staffordshire had clay, in variety and large quantities.

Most potteries in the early 1700s were small, family-based enterprises. Boys with parents of some means were apprenticed to learn the craft, with the hope that they would eventually become master potters who would specialize in one aspect of their art, usually throwing or firing. Youths who could not afford to become apprentices joined the larger ranks of unskilled or semi-skilled pottery workers performing a broad range of simpler duties.

The products of this system were serviceable but undistinguished. In the mid-1700s, English ceramics were little known on the Continent because they were eclipsed by superior works from such factories as Meissen in Dresden and Svres in France. Leading Continental potteries operated with the financial support of monarchs and aristocrats who wanted elegant tableware for their own use.

Enjoying no such patronage, English potters personally financed their experiments to create new or improved ceramic bodies and glazes, competing fiercely to gain an advantage in the domestic market. Although men like Wedgwood did not receive outside investments to underwrite their experiments or to pay fine artists to help with their designs, they did enjoy an advantage that would eventually help some of them compete against Continental producers: They had to focus intensely on the needs of an international marketplace, not those of a few patrons.

One characteristic of the international marketplace was a love of novelty. A new teapot design or colored glaze could earn a potter a handsome profit — until competing makers learned to copy it. Ceramics manufacturers were always looking for a competitive edge.

Wedgwood worked constantly to improve and diversify his wares. He experimented with clay bodies and glazes, keeping detailed notes of the kinds and quantities of substances he tried and their results. This scientific approach to pottery making eventually led him to develop the pyrometer to measure extremely high kiln temperatures. For this he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Wedgwood’s first great improvement to English pottery making was his perfection of ‘creamware.’ For some time, English potters had striven to produce a thin, hard-firing, light-colored earthenware that could be covered with a clear glaze. It would look almost as elegant as porcelain and would display transfer printing to great advantage. (This method of quickly and cheaply decorating ceramics had recently been invented by John Sadler of Sadler & Green.)

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