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c h a p t e r ฀ o n e Structure and Change In the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 U.S. technology came in for high praise. Americans received grand prizes and gold medals for reaping and mowing machines , sewing machines, firearms, machine tools, steam engines, telegraphs, locomotives , and woodworking machines. Locks, scales, looms, machine-sewed shoes, and petroleum garnered silver medals.Such awards were unanticipated in London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition sixteen years earlier,when reapers and revolvers surprised the public. By the time of the Paris Exposition Europeans expected Americans to invent widely and effectively. They were right; over the next half-century annual patenting almost quadrupled, after having expanded 13-fold since the Crystal Palace Exhibition, mechanization penetrated virtually every industry, electrification transformed workplaces and homes, labor productivity more than doubled, and the United States became the world’s economic leader.1 The rapidly mechanizing United States of 1865 contrasted starkly with the preindustrial country at independence, when productivity grew slowly, if at all; machines were few and rudimentary; a machinery industry did not exist; and large industrial firms were rare. The contrast points to the classic problem of how industrialization began and became ongoing. How could the United States succeed in innovating so widely and deeply? Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked, “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”2 That method generated sustained technological change through the operation of key institutions. The antebellum United States developed such a method, but it was not the organized, science-based research Whitehead had in mind. In the earlier method quite different institutions structured learning in ways that developed new techniques and new capabilities to deepen and widen invention. Understanding the institutions will prove essential for an account of antebellum industrialization. Reflecting on a postbellum innovation will help identify their character and operation. 2 Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age An Outcome: The Wizard of Menlo Park Perhaps the most famous American innovation was Thomas Edison’s incandescent light. It succeeded as part of an electrical light and power system that included generating plants and distribution facilities.Success required sufficiently large markets, competitive advantages over gas lighting,and large investments.Edison’s brilliance, leading the press to dub him the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” surely mattered. But more was required. Edison’s prowess rested on his knowledge and his access to the knowledge of others. Edison had learned how to learn and how to form a team of coworkers who did the same. The team originated in Edison’s earlier inventions. Trained as a telegraph operator ,Edison adapted telegraph technologyinhisfirstinventions,anelectric vote recorder and a stock and gold ticker. With revenue from ticker sales, in 1870 he built a Newark plant to manufacture tickers and to develop technology. Here he formed his first inventive team,including a group of machinists,designers,model makers,and experimenters who remained with Edison in Menlo Park.Its remarkable successes, expressed in Edison’s 98 electrical patents through 1876, included telegraphs that sped communication and that transmitted four messages simultaneously . Sale of the team’s products—both equipment and patents—financed Menlo Park in 1876.3 Menlo Park was an “invention factory” and was designed accordingly. It consisted of a lab with electrical devices and chemicals, a machine shop to build prototypes and electrical machinery, buildings for lamps and other inputs, and an office with a drafting room and a library of patent materials and scientific and technical publications in several languages. Edison’s team broadened invention fromtelegraphstoelectricalinventionsandbeyond,includingbasiccarbontransmitter telephone patents and the phonograph. When, after talking to scientists, Edison shifted attention to the electric light, he found he had to hire scientists and specialized craftsmen. Employment grew from 15 in August 1878 to 25 in mid-1879 and 35 by year’s end. He experimented simultaneously with electric lighting and with power generation and distribution. The experiments led to a series of critical conclusions, such as the necessity of a vacuum (and a bulb to preserve it) and high electrical resistance in lamps.Although not frontier science, the experiments were purposive, informed by the technical literature, and solved a sequence of key problems. In about a year Edison developed his basic lighting invention and key elements of the power generation and distribution system, manifested in 16 patents in 1879 and 1880. Edison developed and commercialized his invention in companies in which he [3.12.41.106] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12:10 GMT...

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