Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865 (review)

How did a ragtag band of rural colonies hugging a continental coastline an ocean away from the heart of the Industrial Revolution transform itself into a technological juggernaut in a mere three generations? For decades, historians have been exploring the sources of technological change in the Early Republic—the mechanical origins, if you will—of America's Industrial Revolution. Like many other historians, Ross Thomson looks far beyond the personal ambitions and individual qualities of specific inventors as presented in the "heroic inventor" mythology: "Innovators were more social products than the individualistic entrepreneurs Schumpeter envisioned" (p. 314). For instance, H. J. Habakkuk posited technological innovation as a response to acute labor shortages; Thomas Cochran focused on a uniquely American entrepreneurial culture that promoted risk-taking; George Basalla offered an evolutionary theory based on diversity rather than uniformity, choice not necessity, and selection rather than inevitability. Few historians of early industrialization have focused on technology as knowledge and examined the systems of transmitting and applying that knowledge.

Thomson draws our attention to the development of an institutional infrastructure for innovation: a set of highways, byways, bridges, and, importantly, intersections by which technological knowledge was both diffused and consolidated. Thomson's contribution to this discussion explores the development and functioning of this knowledge-sharing network that promoted technological creativity. His "innovation system" consisted of linked "centers," each a set of institutions and organizations that facilitated the exchange and application of technological knowledge. While certain elements predated the antebellum era, the centers—the patent system, the machine-tool industry, mechanics' associations and scientific societies, colleges, and the engineering profession—only became integrated in the mid1830s, a period of economic depression and intense labor unrest, after which the velocity of technological change increased rapidly.

A professor of economics at the University of Vermont, Thomson focuses on inventions in six major industries: textile machinery, steam engines, printing presses, woodworking machines, firearms, and clocks and watches. His portrayal of this information infrastructure is based on an analysis of 14,000 individual patents, census data for 1,800 companies, hundreds of business directories, and dozens of machinery-firm business records. Thus, he pays more attention to statistical indicators than individual stories, the flow of information more than the development of novel ideas, and patent trends rather than inventors' personal stories. The result is a text long on quantitative comparisons and social abstractions and short on narrative coherence.

How did technological innovation begin in a society with no developed technological centers? To this, Thomson answers that Americans in different trades responded to diverse, immediate incentives and opportunities. Thus, there was no central path of development; this proved to be one of the strengths of early America as innovative ideas and practices proliferated simultaneously in different industrial sectors. However, by the mid-1830s, the various centers integrated into functioning networks.

Which institutions, in fact, constituted these centers in the pre–Civil War era? Thomson finds three influential centers of practice that acted as collectors and transmitters of technological knowledge: the machine-tool industry, the "applied science nexus," and the patent system. The idea of centers of change is very close to the notion of "communities of practice" utilized by other scholars, but it includes a geographic as well as sociological dimension. Thus, Thomson finds the Northeast infrastructure dense and supportive of inventors, the West "an externalization of the East" (p. 321), and the South unfriendly toward the generation and transmission of new knowledge. Not surprisingly, Thomson draws heavily on geographer David Myer's Networked Machinists: High Technology Industries in Antebellum America (2006).

Much of this is familiar. The machine-tool industry, the patent system, and organizations like the Franklin Institute as sources of technical information and education have been identified as keys to American industrial development by many others. Thomson adds empirical evidence that strengthens the case for the importance of these factors and...