Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T10:32:45.684Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Post-Heroic Generation: American Independent Inventors, 1900–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Eric S. Hintz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

By World War I, the public (and later, many historians) had come to believe that teams of anonymous scientists in corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories had displaced “heroic” individual inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as the wellspring of innovation. However, the first half of the twentieth century was actually a long transitional period when lesser known independents like Chester Carlson (Xerox copier), Earl Tupper (Tupperware), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Edwin Land (Polaroid camera) continued to make notable contributions to the overall context of innovation. Accordingly, my dissertation considers the changing fortunes of American independent inventors from approximately 1900 to 1950, a period of expanding corporate R&D, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Contrary to most interpretations of this period, I argue that individual, “post-heroic” inventors remained an important, though less visible, source of inventions in the early twentieth century.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 732 - 748
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Books

Carlson, W. Bernard. Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Chesbrough, Henry W. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.Google Scholar
De Forest, Lee. Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee de Forest. Chicago: Wilcox and Follett, 1950.Google Scholar
Eisler, Charles. The Million Dollar Bend: The Autobiography of the Benefactor of the Radio Tube and Lamp Industry. New York: William-Frederick Press, 1960.Google Scholar
Gieryn, Thomas F. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Godfrey, Donald G. Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Graham, Margaret B. W. The Business of Research: RCA and the Video Disc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Hounshell, David A., and Smith, John K.. Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R & D, 1902–1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Hughes, Thomas P. Elmer Sperry: Inventor and Engineer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Israel, Paul. Edison: A Life of Invention. New York: John Wiley, 1998.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Adam B., and Trajtenberg, Manuel eds. Patents, Citations, and Innovations: A Window on the Knowledge Economy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Reese. Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839 to 1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Jewkes, John, David, Sawers, and Stillerman, Richard. The Sources of Invention, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1969.Google Scholar
Kevles, Daniel J. The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. New York: Knopf, 1977.Google Scholar
Lewis, Tom. Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York: E. Burlingame Books, 1991.Google Scholar
Miller, John A. Men and Volts at War: The Story of General Electric in World War II. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947.Google Scholar
Ndiaye, Pap. Nylon and Bombs: Du Pont and the March of Modern America, trans. Forster, Elborg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Owen, David. Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough since Gutenberg: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.Google Scholar
Reich, Leonard. The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.Google Scholar
Ruben, Samuel. Necessity’s Children: Memoirs of an Independent Inventor. Portland, OR: Breitenbush Books, 1990.Google Scholar
Temporary National Economic Committee. Investigation of Concentration of Economic Power: Hearings before the Temporary National Economic Committee, 31 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939–1941.Google Scholar
Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956.Google Scholar
Wise, George. Willis R. Whitney, General Electric, and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.Google Scholar

Articles and Essays

Carlson, W. Bernard. “Innovation and the Modern Corporation: From Heroic Invention to Industrial Science.” In Science in the Twentieth Century, edited by Krige, John and Pestre, Dominique. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic, 1997: 203–26.Google Scholar
Galambos, Louis. “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History.” Business History Review 44 (1970): 279–90.Google Scholar
Hintz, Eric S. “‘A Swindling Concern’: The National Institute of Inventors, 1914–1925.” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Conference on the History of Technical Societies, Philadelphia, August 2009. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5337835.Google Scholar
Hintz, Eric S. “Portable Power: Inventor Samuel Ruben and the Birth of Duracell.” Technology and Culture 50 (2009): 24–57.Google Scholar
Hodges, Laurent. “Color It Kodachrome.” American Heritage of Invention and Technology 3 (1987): 46–53.Google Scholar
Hounshell, David A. “The Evolution of Industrial Research in the United States.” In Engines of Innovation: U.S. Industrial Research at the End of an Era, edited by Rosenbloom, Richard S. and Spencer, William J.. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996: 13–85.Google Scholar
Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Daniel, M.G. Raff, and Temin, Peter. “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History.” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 404–33.Google Scholar
Lamoreaux, Naomi R., and Sokoloff, Kenneth L.. “Inventors, Firms, and the Market for Technology in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries.” In Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries, edited by Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel M.G., and Temin, Peter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 19–57.Google Scholar
Nicholas, Tom. “The Role of Independent Invention in U.S. Technological Development, 1880–1930.” Journal of Economic History 70 (2010): 57–82.Google Scholar
“Patent applications filed and patents issued, by type of patent and patentee: 1790–2000.” Table Cg27–37 in Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial ed., ed. Carter, Susan, et al., vol. 3, 425–9. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Recommendations Relative to the Strengthening and Enforcement of Antitrust Laws,” delivered April 29, 1938. Exhibit No. 1. In Economic Prologue, Vol. 1 of Investigation of Concentration of conomic Power: Hearings before the Temporary National Economic Committee, 31 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939–1941.Google Scholar
Schmookler, Jacob. “Inventors Past and Present.” Review of Economics and Statistics 39 (1957): 321–33.Google Scholar
Whalley, Peter. “The Social Practice of Independent Inventing.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 16 (1991): 208–32.Google Scholar

Magazines and Newspapers

“A Fortune for a Simple Invention.” Scientific American, August 8, 1914.Google Scholar
“Asserts Inventors Have Good Chance.” New York Times, December 18, 1927.Google Scholar
Eastman, Kodak. “The Autographic Kodak” (advertisement). Scientific American, September 5, 1914.Google Scholar
Gaisman, Henry J. “How I Came to Invent the Autographic Kodak.” Scientific American, August 8, 1914.Google Scholar
“Says Garret Genius Has Disappeared.” New York Times, December 11, 1927.Google Scholar

Unpublished Work

Brannock Device Company Records. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Carlson, W. Bernard. “At Arm’s Length or Close to the Vest?: A Historical Look at How Companies Locate Technological Innovation.” Paper Presented at the International Economic History Association Congress, Helsinki, August 2006.Google Scholar
Eberstadt, Rudolph to Wadsworth, W. Mount, 3 October 1955. Folder 5, Box 2, Wadsworth W. Mount Papers. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Joseph B. Friedman Papers. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
National Inventors Council, Administrative History of the National Inventors Council. Washington DC: Department of Commerce, 1946. Administrative Records of the National Inventors Council, Record Group 167, Records of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.Google Scholar