GUEST POST from John Bessant
How a ‘happy accident’ helped change the world…
When life doesn’t so much give you lemons as hurl them at you from a great height with the intent of inflicting significant damage on you it’s sometimes a moment for big change. It can force you to jump the tracks, find ways around the problem, reframe the world.
Innovation history is full of examples. Take the case of Django Reinhardt, a successful musician in the 1920s whose career was nearly brought to a sudden end in 1928 when his caravan caught fire leaving him with life-threatening burns over half of his body. Including damaging two fingers of his left hand with all that implied for his ever being able to play guitar again. His response was to evolve a completely new style using his remaining fingers and creating the distinctive approach which made his name as one of the founders of ‘gypsy jazz’.
The pianist Keith Jarrett had a similar challenge to his ability to play though fortunately less physically direct. Contracted to give a late night concert in Cologne’s opera house he arrived to find a mix-up meant that the piano on which he was to play was an out of tune and malfunctioning rehearsal machine. With some frantic and unfinished attempts by a tuner to bring it into line Jarrett embarked on a journey of improvisation, adapting to the limitations of the instrument to create what has become a legendary (and thankfully recorded) performance.
In the world of healthcare the website ‘Patient innovation’ reminds us of how powerful this effect can be; it lists thousands of innovations which patients and their carers develop as ways around their problems.
It’s not a new phenomenon. One of history’s great innovators was, arguably, pushed to reframe his world and think differently about it as the result of what he later termed ‘ a happy accident’. Not quite the description most of us might use to capture falling ill with smallpox and losing the use of a leg which eventually has to be amputated. But that’s where the huge innovation legacy of Josiah Wedgwood began.
Born in 1730 in Burslem, Staffordshire, clay — or at least traces of it — was in his blood. He and his relatives had been turning pots for four generations and he’d learned the trade the hard way. Whatever needed doing — putting his shoulder to the big wheel with the horses that drove the smaller potters wheel on which shapes were formed, stacking for firing and then unloading from the kiln, fetching, carrying, packing and shipping.
But his career as a master potter was sadly cut short by an attack of smallpox when he was eleven years old which weakened his knee to the point where he could not work the potter’s kick wheel on which the trade depended. Formally apprenticed to his older brother his bad leg meant that he was unable to perform such laborious tasks as throwing pottery clay. Instead he began to spend much of his enforced sitting time reading and experimenting, trying out new ideas and recipes and painstakingly recording the results in his notebooks. It forced him to look at the whole process from a different angle, and reframing it threw up powerful — and valuable — insights.
Because pottery was about to become big business. From a pretty early date we’ve made use of clay to make functional utensils like plates and cups; relics found in Xianren province in China are close to 20,000 years old. But ceramics have also been a long-standing part of history as a visual pleasure, formed and decorated in exquisite ways using complex materials and techniques. The trouble is that only the very wealthy could afford the workmanship and materials needed to create the fine porcelain that was so prized in the early 18th century.
But things were changing; in particular the rise of the middle classes and their growing wealth had begun opening up a huge potential market for beautiful but functional tableware. And England was well-placed to respond to this demand, as potteries like Minton and Spode had begun to demonstrate with their porcelain wares made from finest Cornish china clay.
The future would belong to the innovators. Of whom his brother was not one….
In 1749, his apprenticeship ended. The family fortunes had improved somewhat thanks to his ideas but his brother was not convinced of the value of innovation and refused to take Josiah in as a partner. So he left the family business and in 1752, he formed a partnership with John Harrison (of clockmaking fame) and Thomas Alders. This was a short-lived association, as Wedgwood and Harrison clashed over manufacturing ideas. From too little to too much innovation under one roof….
His next move, in 1754, was more productive, a meeting of minds since his new partner Thomas Whieldon, a successful potter who also “loved to experiment”. Whieldon was interested in Josiah’s approach, not least because there was an urgent need to improve the quality of his lead-glazed creamware while keeping costs competitive. As Wedgwood noted, “…these considerations induced me to try for some more solid improvement, as well in the Body, as the Glazes, the Colours, & the Forms, of the articles of our manufacture….”
He started keeping his ‘Experiment Book’ at this time, containing details of his work and carefully listing measurements and ingredients, using a coded system that only he could understand. Over the next years it swelled to contain the details of thousands of experiments, many of them failures but crucially providing a roadmap for future innovation directions.
In 1759, Josiah parted company from Whieldon and set up on his own, leasing the Ivy House pottery in Burslem, Staffordshire, from one of his uncles. Business grew and he opened a second works in the town. But in 1762 returning trouble with his leg forced him to spend several weeks in bed; as it turned out another candidate for ‘happy accident’ status. Because it was while he was bed-bound in the city of Liverpool that a friend introduced him to Thomas Bentley who eventually became his business partner.
Innovation is rarely a solo act; in most cases it is the convergence of different skills, experience and insight which can help build something new. Think Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wozniak, Gates and Allen. And it was certainly true of Wedgwood and Bentley; he brought a deep understanding of the trading side of the pottery business together with a classical education and a rich network of contacts to the party. He understood the ways in which ceramic fashions were changing and how the technical skills of Wedgwood could help play in such a market.
Over the next years they not only made a wide range of tableware but also speciality wares for retailers, dairies, sanitary suppliers (including tiles for indoor bathrooms and sewers all over England), and the home. But beyond the functional Bentley also saw a growing demand for artefacts inspired by the classical Greek, Roman and Etruscan styles and the company began making cameos, vases, jugs, and plaques decorated with such themes. Just like the Meissen company in Germany had begun to work with artists and designers so Wedgwood and Bentley began to draw on Bentley’s contacts to supply the artwork and give a distinctive style to their products.
Josiah Wedgwood didn’t like porcelain. Or rather he did, from an aesthetic point of view. Its white purity, translucent thin strength, the wonderful shapes it could be fashioned into, all of these triggered his potter’s admiration as the high point of the craft.
His objection to porcelain was entirely economic. This was a time when the big prize was not selling expensive ceramics to wealthy aristocrats but somehow giving the same experience of fine pottery plates, cups, saucers, pots and jugs to the growing middle class. The Industrial Revolution was changing the economic as well as the social structure of Britain; there was now a potential mass market and an appetite for new goods — all manufacturers like Wedgwood had to do was create good quality products to satisfy it. He understood this and worked hard to bring to simpler earthenware and stoneware the distinctive features, fine designs and tactile quality of porcelain.
This ceramic offered a cheaper alternative to porcelain production, which by this time was being made by a number of manufactories at Bow in London, Plymouth and Bristol who had mastered the art of porcelain production at huge financial cost to themselves and their customers.
His favourite motto was ‘Everything yields to experiment..’. And so he continued the laboratory work, aiming to move pottery from a “rude uncultivated craft” into a field of applied science. And it was through this process that he made his first major achievement, the “invention of a green glaze,” recorded after six months of unsuccessful trial and error as experiment number seven. It proved to be popular and helped establish a reputation for innovation, something which he followed up with in the development of a better form of ‘creamware’. Creamware — a cream-coloured earthenware — had become popular as an economic alternative to porcelain but it had significant limitations. Through his experimental approach Wedgwood transformed it into a high-quality ceramic that was very versatile in that it could be thrown on a wheel, turned on a lathe, or cast.
He began receiving orders from the highest-ranking people and in 1765, received an invitation from St James’s Palace, London, for a ‘complete set of tea things…. ‘with a gold ground & raised flowers upon it in green….’. The invitation came from Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III and it took the form of a competitive tender; fortunately Wedgwood’s hard work in the laboratory paid off. He won the competition and the contract; more importantly he’d been canny enough to include other samples of his wares in his delivery and they attracted further interest. The Queen was so pleased that in 1766 she gave him what must rank as one of the first ‘celebrity endorsements’, issuing a royal warrant with the wording: ‘To this manufacturer the Queen is pleased to give her name and patronage, commanding it to be called Queensware, and honouring the inventor by appointing him Her Majesty’s Potter’.
Wedgwood was nothing if not quick on the uptake and soon the title ‘Potter to Her Majesty’, was being added to invoices and orders while ‘Queensware’ featured prominently in newspaper advertisements for his products. As with the Meissen porcelain business in Germany the importance of a brand identity became apparent. It was not customary for Staffordshire potters to put their name or mark on their wares but Josiah began stamping the base of his products as a mark of authenticity and quality.
His marketing wasn’t confined to influencers and advertising; he pioneered many innovative approaches to reaching and serving his growing market including offering free delivery from his factory to London and free replacement of items broken in transit. He opened shops and showrooms in fashionable cities like Bath as well as in the capital. And he pioneered a ‘two-tiered’ approach, selling first to the aristocracy at premium prices and then using the cachet which their adoption gave to promote sales at lower prices to aspirational middle class buyers.
In 1764, he had received his first order from abroad and built on that success. By 1769 he declared his aim was to become “Vase Maker General to the Universe”. He might not have exported off planet but did a pretty good job in terrestrial terms — by 1784, he was exporting nearly 80% of his total produce. By 1790, he had sold his wares in every city in Europe.
Image: AI generated via Google Imagen
Perhaps the project which best underlines his grasp of the competitive edge which a combination of technical competence, great design and sophisticated marketing skills can offer is the famous ‘Frog service’ commission which came from Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in 1773. This called for a huge dinner and dessert service (944 pieces) for use at the Chesme Palace near St. Petersburg. It was located on marshy ground and had once been called ‘La Grenouillerie’ because of the large frog population. Catherine wanted to use this frog motif on every item of the service and for it to contain 1222 topographically correct hand painted views of British landscapes! Significantly she also wanted it to be made not of traditional porcelain, but in Wedgwood’s Queensware.
Wedgwood undertook this huge commission and delivered, even though it took over 30 artists and two years to complete. It was never a commercial success; the cost of final delivery was £2612 against a commission price of £2290 (£503,280 and £439,680 in today’s terms). But it more than made up the shortfall in reputation and marketing; the service was first displayed in London before delivery and attracted huge crowds, powerfully demonstrating that Wedgwood’s earthenware and stoneware could rival the best porcelain in the world.
When the service in its 22 crates finally arrived in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1774 it was displayed in the palace as a spectacle for visitors. The majority of it has survived and is now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
But Wedgwood wasn’t only working on the marketing side; from his early days as an apprentice he’d looked for ways to improve production operations, focusing not just on single problem areas but looking at the manufacturing system as a whole.
He was an early adopter of steam power, something which significantly reduced transportation costs since it mean that mills for grinding and preparing materials for manufacturing could now be located on the same site. It also mechanized the processes of throwing and turning pots, previously driven by foot or hand wheels. But it was less in his adoption of new machinery than in his approach to production organization that he had the biggest impact. He was fascinated by the ideas of Adam Smith around the concept of division of labour, focusing on specialisation rather than having a single person carry out all the tasks in a series of operations. Mixing clay, throwing, firing and decorating were all separated into distinct operations and staffed by people trained in those areas, supported by specialised equipment. The result was a massive improvement in productivity and the approach enabled the volume production needed to meet the demands of a growing mass market.
Significantly Wedgwood also recognised the need to manage the major changes this would bring to working lives — not least the elimination of the old apprentice and journeyman system. In 1769, he opened a new factory complex, named ‘Etruria’ in a nod to the ancient Etruscans whose civilization had inspired many of his best-selling designs. It was a planned community designed to house his workshops, showrooms, and his workers and their families — far cry from the ‘cottage industry’ in which he had grown up. It gave him practical advantages such as co-location of key activities reducing time and transportation costs but it also represented an early attempt to create a different working environment. He passed some of the benefits of the (significantly) higher productivity at the factory by paying higher wages and he experimented with ways of improving the working environment, providing clothing, washing facilities, and even an early form of air conditioning.
Etruria was strategically located next to the newly-constructed Trent and Mersey canal, a venture which he had campaigned hard for and which was to help significantly in managing the wider logistics and distribution challenges of the growing business. These weren’t small; in mid 1700s the pottery industry was sourcing its clays and other materials from the south west in Devon and Dorset which meant shipping them to ports like Liverpool or Chester and then transporting them slowly along an antiquated road system down to Staffordshire. Wedgwood’s efforts to promote better roads and particularly the cutting of a 94 mile canal linking Liverpool with the Potteries paid off; despite a long planning battle with Parliament the canal was opened in 1777 and with it the chance to reduce inbound logistics costs and open up better distribution to his increasingly global market.
Growing a business often carries with it the risk that cash flow gets out of balance but this wasn’t the case with Wedgwood. His early family history gave him an abiding sense of the need to control costs, once complaining that his sales were at an all-time high, yet profits were minimal. He studied cost structures and came to value economies of scale, trying to avoid producing one-off vases ‘at least till we are got into a more methodicall way of making the same sorts over again’.
And he brought a scientific approach to his work, carefully recording the results of his experiments to build a clearer understanding of how to move manufacturing from a haphazard trial and error process to one which allowed for reproduceable control. In 1783 he was awarded a patent for a pyrometer designed to measure the extreme temperatures within a kiln, helping tame the chaotic and unpredictable firing process. For this he was recognised by being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, joining his scientific friends and colleagues like Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton. Although named as a key achievement the award really testified to over thirty years of systematic research and development.
Wedgwood wasn’t one to rest on his laurels; in 1774 built on his success with creamware with another major innovation –Jasperware. This was a new material, laboriously developed to offer a new approach to pottery making and it led to a material that was unglazed and had a distinctive matte, or “biscuit,” finish. He experimented with many different colours including green, lilac, yellow, black, and white (the Victoria and Albert museum in London has several display trays showing the different samples). But the distinctive light blue colour which caught the imagination and which survives to this day in thousands of artist’s palettes and children’s colouring books was Wedgwood blue.
Jasperware’s development built on Bentley’s observation of the growing interest in ancient cultural artefacts from Greek, Roman and Etruscan civilizations. Wealthier people were beginning to undertake the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe and bringing back souvenirs such as Roman cameos; Jasperware provided the perfect medium for making such products available in England. Pieces would be ornamented with scenes and reliefs not simply painted on but applied as a separate layer of clay before firing; it gave Wedgwood products a distinctive trademark to further bolster their brand.
In keeping with Wedgwood’s philosophy the Jasperware product and process continuously evolved. For example early specimens used cobalt to colour the entire body by mixing it in with the clay; this was extremely expensive and so later development used a dipping process in which a thin layer of coloured slip — watery clay — was applied just before firing.
This continuous improvement of the Jasperware concept led to perhaps Wedgwood’s last and what he considered his ‘great work’ — the five year journey towards creating a replica of the ancient Roman Portland Vase. The original was a masterpiece of cameo glass from the 1st century BC and considered one of the greatest works of antiquity. No-one knew how it had been made; the secret of its creation had been lost for over 1700 years. It was less a commercial venture (though once again it had powerful reputational benefits) but instead was the ultimate challenge of his technical skills.
To achieve this, he conducted thousands of experiments over nearly five years to perfect the blue-black colour and the delicate, low-relief figures in his signature Jasperware. He relied on his pyrometer to control the firings and worked with renowned sculptor John Flaxman to create the intricate white reliefs. The project had many challenges, including blistering and cracking. But his persistence paid off. The first successful copies of the vase were released in 1790 and proved to be so accurate that when the original was accidentally shattered at the British Museum, Wedgwood’s Jasperware copy was used to help piece it back together.
Wedgwood’s health had never been great; he’d finally had his leg amputated in 1768 and by 1770 his sight was beginning to fail him. When Bentley died in 1780 he stepped back from the marketing side and focused his remaining attention on the factory and his laboratory. But in 1794 he fell ill again and died in 1795, aged 64.
Was it worth it? He’d started by inheriting £20 from his father, and when he died he left one of the finest industrial concerns in England with a personal worth of £500,000 (around £50 million today). When he began his business the big names in Staffordshire pottery were those of manufacturers like Josiah Spode and Thomas Minton; it didn’t take long before the name of Wedgwood and Bentley was up there with them, their company arguably the best-known pottery in the western world.
In doing so he helped create an industry which continues to produce beautiful artefacts for widespread use around the world. And one which has grown in value; the ceramic tableware market size was worth $12.4bn in 2024 and is forecast to reach $22bn in the next ten years.
He left the business to his sons and they continued through several generations to maintain the reputation for quality and innovation. The company remained independent until 1987, when it merged with Waterford Crystal, then with Royal Doulton. In July 2015, it was acquired by a Finnish consumer goods company who have retained the brand and still produce ‘prestige’ wares such as hand-painted and limited edition objects. Jasperware is still made by a small team of skilled workers at the Barlaston factory, while the rest of the company’s output is produced in Indonesia.
So in a sense Josiah is still vase making to the universe….
As with all my work I’m indebted to many other researchers and writers; in this case I’d particulartly like to mention the excellent chapter on Josiah Wedgwood in the book by Mark Dodgson and David Gann, ‘ A very short introduction to innovation’, Oxford University Press, 2018
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(All images author’s originals or generated via AI in Canva or Substack)
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