In this post, I will quote from ‘Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist’s Inquiry into Western Technology’ (1996) by Robert McCormick Adams. I think that I will make a post soon that will include my review of the TV shows The Boys (2019-2026) and Stranger Things (2016-2025). I watched the first two seasons of Stranger Things when they were released, but then lost interest in the series. I finished watching the series a few days ago. When it comes to The Boys, I watched the first three seasons when they were released, but then lost interest in the series. I finished watching this series a few months ago. Since I like to finish watching what I start, I had no doubt that I’d get around to finishing watching the two series someday. Cobra Kai (2018-2025) is another show that I have to finish watching. “The foregoing account of the increasing scale and productivity of industrial operations is important not only for the impressive duration and cumulative character it documents but for the systemic breakthrough to mass production that was a part of it. These features clearly were major contributors to America’s climb to unchallenged industrial ascendancy from the Civil War era to the Great Depression and the buildup to World War II. But they were not the only contributors. Of comparable importance, at least in the earlier part of the period, were an impressive series of major inventions that permanently displaced the image of the United States as largely an adopter rather than innovator, and that associated American technology instead with a special kind of creative luster. Emerging from obscurity to occupy positions of great social esteem in the late nineteenth-century was a substantial group of remarkably prolific, characteristically independent, inventors who were largely responsible for these breakthroughs. It was an era when scientific research was only beginning to become identified with universities, and when industrial research capabilities also were still rudimentary. The relative weakness of these other avenues of innovation no doubt helps to account for the public adulation that the group achieved. But as Thomas Hughes’s penetrating discussion of them illustrates, it cannot wholly explain either their many similarities in personality and approach or the extraordinary fecundity of their work. Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931), “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” was by all odds the dominant figure as well as prototype of the group. With virtually no formal schooling, already as a telegraph operator in his youth he began to display what became a lifelong penchant for study and, especially, experiment. (“No experiments are useless,” he once replied to a critical business associate.) A tirelessly committed, hunt-and-try pragmatist, he dismissed formal theory and was content to rely upon trusted subordinates for mathematical rigor as well as the construction of working models. But the record of his accomplishments, both before and after he established and led a team of co-workers in what became renowned as something close to a manufacturing production line for inventions, was by any measure extraordinary. The numbers are impressive enough he received over a thousand patents in sixty years. His expectation for the forthcoming schedule at Menlo Park, “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so,” was a realistic projection of the pace he had maintained during the early years of his inventive career. But no less impressive was the radical, rather than merely incremental, character of many of his and his staff’s contributions. Beginning with an electrical vote recorder, a stock ticker, and automatic telegraph systems, he went on to an electric pen that presently developed into the mimeograph; the carbon transmitter that was fundamental to the introduction of the telephone; the phonograph; an early variant of the incandescent lamp; the “Edison effect” covering his observation of a flow of electric current from filament to plate in incandescent lamp bulbs – the principle at the heart of the later development of radio tubes and hence of an entire industry that would presently follow; and many improvements in dynamos and electric propulsion and distribution systems. Later, in the 1890s and beyond, his attention would be directed still more widely, to magnetic ore extraction, storage batteries, a “kinetescopic camera,” and a variety of chemical processes. Almost mythical as this parade of interests and achievements seems, it is striking that there were others who were nearly as prolific. Elihu Thomson (1853-1937), concentrating on arc and incandescent lighting, alternating current transformers, motors, generators, and controls, electric meters, and high-frequency apparatus, also preferred to work with a small subordinate team isolated from other concerns, and held almost seven hundred patents. Francis H. Richards, Edward Weston, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikolai Tesla are among many who exemplify roughly into the same pattern. Lee de Forest, Edwin H. Armstrong, and Wilbur and Orville Wright are further, somewhat later exemplars. Not all shared Edison’s antagonism to formal science. Some had even received advanced European academic training and hence were familiar with James Clerk Maxwell’s and Heinrich Rudolph Hertz’s fundamental work on the propagation of radiomagnetic waves. Some, like Tesla, had a taste for overdramatic flamboyance that occasionally carried them outside the bounds of science. But they shared a burning concern to invent. Applying to the group as a whole is Thomas Hughes’s remark on the Wright brothers: “Enthusiasm and a vague longing for fame and fortune explain more about their choice of inventing an airplane than do rational economic considerations.” Elmer A. Sperry (1860-1930), holder of over 350 patents, is a variant from the pattern principally in that he became a successful manufacturer at the age of nineteen. Responsible for a succession of impressive achievements in the design and production of arc lights and search lights, he also introduced commercial electrolytic processes and designed and manufactured electric mining machinery and electric motors and transmissions for streetcars. Sperry’s most enduring interests and contributions, however, lay in the direction of high-precision gyroscopic control devices. These found application in his introduction of the marine gyrocompass, automatic gyro-pilots for steering ships and stabilizing airplanes, gyrostabilizers for ships, and during World War I (in connection with his membership on the Naval Consulting Board) gyrocontrols for the guidance of submarine and aerial torpedos. All in all, the half-century or so after the Civil War saw in the United States an era of unparalleled inventive achievement. With independent inventors in the leadership, there was a tendency to concentrate on radical inventions for reasons both obvious and obscure. As noted, they were not constrained in their problem choices by mission-oriented organizations with high inertia. They prudently avoided choosing problems that would also be chosen by teams of researchers and developers working in company engineering departments or industrial laboratories. Psychologically they had an outsider’s mentality; they also sought the thrill of a major technological transformation. Carried along with this transformative spirit, and with accompanying industrial growth, was a cultural outlook of sweeping technological optimism and even omnipotence; technology rather than science, for the role accorded to science and scientists was generally a subordinate one. Yet rising mainly from obscure origins and with access to rigorous scientific training only in a few cases, this highly unusual clustering of inventors made an extraordinary contribution to the amenities of modern civilization that we now take for granted. Technological advance in America changed in character as it approached the modern era. At least in some sectors, of which the manufacture of farm equipment is one, there is evidence of a transitional stage of organized product improvement before the full development of corporate research laboratories. An “inventive profession” was recruited into corporate ranks, composed not of academically trained scientists and engineers but of craftsmen with practical experience in farm-machine shops and a track record of some earlier success as small-scale entrepreneur-patentees. The trend may have begun slowly as early as the 1850s, but from 1870 onward most patents concerned with some of the technologically more complex machine requirements were received by hired professionals. From the mid-1870s onward, Rosenberg and Birdzell rightly speak of the most promising and active sector of the technological frontier turning away from exploitation of the long-familiar, visible world of mechanical objects and machine components. Beginning to receive attention instead was a hitherto invisible world of electromagnetic forces and microscopic or submicroscopic particles. This latter world offered few immediate attractions for the technological innovator. In order to enter it at all, new levels of organizational support needed to be assured not only for long-term investigative efforts but for expensive instrumentation and laboratory facilities. Specialization was also becoming more necessary as the knowledge base in science and technology advanced. To an increasing degree, new inventions and innovations came to depend on the collaborative efforts of specialists. Individual inventors played a smaller and progressively declining part; even Thomas Edison stood at the head of a substantial staff and laboratory devoted to the business of invention. Before long a fundamental division of labor would appear between “work done by basic scientists, functioning in what amounted to an autonomous sector of their own, pursuing knowledge for its own sake, and funded by grants and subsidies not directly linked to economic values, on the one hand, and work done by industrial scientists, functioning in the economic sector, and funded on the basis of the economic value of their work, on the other.” By 1890, the situation had begun to change more rapidly. For physicists, and more especially mathematicians, nonacademic employment opportunities still were not numerous. A number of universities, on the other hand, had succeeded in establishing relationships with local industries that as yet lacked research facilities of their own. Records probably do not exist from which to plot the pattern with any accuracy, but Nathan Rosenberg and Richard Nelson have recently offered their general impression that “a century ago a large share of American university research was very much ‘hands-on’ problem-solving.” Simultaneously, universities were evolving in the direction of offering some support for their faculties’ less immediately utilitarian, basic research, and being recognized as an advantageous setting for it. Moreover, a new situation had begun to present itself in the rapidly expanding electric power industry. Despite the continuing public adulation of Edison and his own tenacious efforts, he was demonstrably losing his battle to prevent the victory of alternating current generation over the direct current networks he had introduced. With this defeat went a loss of opportunities for many self-taught technicians or even empirically trained engineers to retain their former leadership against academically better-trained counterparts. The prodigously growing utilization of steel provides perhaps the earliest example of industry’s discovery of the need for growing numbers of trained scientists. Bessemer converters of the 1850s had opened the door to relatively cheap and plentiful steel production. “One part fuel in the Bessemer process equalled 6 or 7 parts in the old method of steelmaking, and comparison of labor and machinery requirements would yield similar results.” But while effective in removing carbon and silicon as impurities in molten iron, phosphorus in any concentration was left as an unresolved problem. Moreover, the process proceeded so quickly, with so little opportunity for intervention or control by the operators, that it was difficult to specify the properties of the resultant product within commercially acceptable limits. A need quickly appeared, therefore, for quantitative chemical analysis. Low-cost steel became a resource of enormous importance in practically every industrial field. Iron rails of Civil War vintage would support only eight-ton rolling stock before wearing out in a couple of years. The steel rails of 1905 carried seventy-ton cars and lasted ten years. In transportation in high-performance machinery of all kinds, in steel girders for bridges and the new multistory buildings, in agricultural equipment, and presently in the fabricating of automobiles and airplanes, reliable steel components were a critical constituent. The transition from the Bessemer process to open-hearth furnaces contributed to this end, permitting the use of a wider range of iron ores and facilitating the widening use of alloys that met increasingly demanding specifications. But the essential point is that already by the early years of this century chemical analysis, and hence trained chemists, became an essential part of the process. Before the turn of the century General Electric had already organized a semi-autonomous consulting-engineering department, essentially an R & D laboratory-under the renowned Charles P. Steinmetz. Here ways were found to prepare tungsten lamp filaments that were ductile rather than brittle, and to achieve important results in the design of radio tubes and other electronic equipment. The American Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T) similarly began to strengthen its engineering department during the 1890s, and soon afterward, faced with eroding patent protection of some of its key products, took steps leading to the founding of the great Bell Laboratories. From the limited available data, however, it appears that by the early years of the twentieth century the dominant area of industrial research activity lay in chemistry and its offshoots. Electrical machinery and instruments provided less than 10 percent of total industrial research employment in 1921, while by contrast slightly more than 40 percent and an almost equivalent proportion of all the new industrial laboratories opened during the entire 1899-1946 period was attached to the chemicals, glass, rubber, and petroleum industries. The industrial demand for organic chemists also swelled as new products and by-products proliferated. Drug, food-processing, and petroleum works identified a new need for organic chemists. The gross proportions are reported to have remained “remarkably stable,” modified only by an increasing research intensity on the part of the automobile industry, even while there was a tenfold growth in total employment at industrial laboratories between 1921 and 1940. Already by the turn of the century, the president of the American Chemical Society could claim that “many of the more important [industrial] works have corps of chemists numbering from 10 to 50, while very many more have smaller numbers.” Du Pont’s consistent policy of investing heavily in R & D laboratories, employing numbers of professional chemists that were a full order of magnitude higher than even the larger of those suggested earlier, followed by the time of World War I. Out of this complex presently came the firm’s entry into the production of tetraethyl lead, cellophane films, freon refrigerant, and rayon. Later still, Du Pont was responsible for the major commercial successes of neoprene and nylon, although the bulk of Du Pont’s other innovations during the interwar period were acquired rather than originating in its own research laboratories.”
