In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 45.1 (2004) 159-161



[Access article in PDF]

Demythologizing Innovation
Steven Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation

John Lauritz Larson


In the United States, economic and business history and a great deal of the history of technology have been dogged by claims that market forces automatically yield efficiency, rationality, utility, and innovation: "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Such claims posit straight-line linkages between good ideas and their realization; whenever that does not happen, look for the weasel (or should I say rat?) who upset the natural order. The resulting literature is often adversarial, more interested in scoring points than explaining complex phenomena. It serves badly as a platform on which to explore the extraordinary interconnections that occur when creative minds produce tools, technologies, systems of technologies, businesses, industries, commercial-social complexes, political economies—in short, the history of technology in context over time.

Steven Usselman's Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, $65) calls historians back to what we do best: empirical study of what happened and how people tried to deal with it in their own times. Such is the historian's unique contribution to scholarly inquiry, and in this case it repays any reader's investment many, many times over. Those of you who have taken the "literary turn" bear with me for a moment. I know we construct these cultural realities and impose hegemonic narratives on hopelessly imperfect documents; but when confronting flat-footed positivists left over from the nineteenth century we cannot afford to join you yet on the other side of the postmodern looking glass.

Usselman's prosaic title exactly describes the content of this book but vastly understates its importance. Railroads were among the first technologies [End Page 159] in the modern age to exhibit attributes of "very complex systems," and in the United States railroad managers historically were businessmen trying to perfect an immature system while turning a profit in a marketplace that was itself just emerging from premodern cultural embeddedness. Add in for fun a political culture temporarily drunk on the notion that competition always eliminates the potential for corruption. During the railroad's formative decades, dozens of entrepreneurs gleefully sifted through hundreds of innovations (some generated by explicit demand, others by implicit promises of wealth from the next "big thing") looking for the better mousetrap. By the eve of the Civil War the rough outlines of the system were in place, but innovation and improvement continued apace as the war itself strained improvised networks to the max.

In the twenty years after the Civil War, railroad managers (those who survived the chaos of cutthroat competition among too many independent firms) began to damp down the chaos with huge investments in coal-burning steam locomotives, steel rails, larger and larger cars, telegraphic communications, and a host of operating procedures that constituted the "software" of the industry—standard specifications, car interchange, through billing, pooling, low-speed freight trains, high-speed passenger trains. Seen in context, as Usselman is able to portray them here, railroad decision makers faced a bewildering windstorm of things that needed to be fixed or controlled if their companies were going to make a nickel. Desperately they sought solutions in business collusion, political manipulation, lawsuits, engineering, technological innovation, and efforts to control or suppress innovation when the scale of investment threatened to suck all the profits out of the traffic that must, in the end, pay for it all.

Usselman's treatment of technical problems associated with steel rails, couplers, air brakes, and signal systems, both before and after the rise of system-wide regulations, gives this book its extraordinary empirical weight. Here we have hundreds of pages of detailed evidence of "what happened." It's unpredictable—and intensely fascinating. One narrative arc depicts with tragic irony the effort of railroads to enshrine engineering methods as a way of silencing clamorous demands from shippers, workingmen, inventors, lawmakers, and would-be regulators, only to have Louis Brandeis turn it on them like a...

pdf

Share