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Technology and Culture 45.4 (2004) 778-794



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Tredegar, Newcastle, Baltimore

The Swivel Truck as Paradigm of Technology Transfer

Claims and counterclaims of precedence of invention were once the stock-in-trade of technical history. Not only were engineers' professional reputations and fortunes at stake but aggressive nationalism also stood to lose or gain. Even now, it is the nation-state, whether initiating or receiving, that focuses scholarly studies of technology transfer.1 These have concentrated on industries in which governments restrict the movement of labor and devices—and perhaps also actively support industrial espionage. In contrast, studies of individual technologies are more likely to emphasize how they were freely observed and diffused. Innovations in ship design, for instance, were adapted at the governmental level by navy yards and from creek to creek by shipwrights.2 The dynamics of transfer clearly varied considerably from one type of technology to another, and the scale might be local or regional as well as national. Local economic factors might ensure that diffusion was not uniform within the national group. Frederick Gamst [End Page 778] developed this point in his study of early British-American railroad technology transfer: "Diffusion is neither ensured, nor, when it occurs, slavishly imitative. Specific elements of the technology and operations of British railroads not useful for the particular conditions in America—such as the limited amount of investment funds and the sparse and dispersed population—were not fully adopted." Gamst categorizes railroad technology transfer from the "mother culture" under four types: first, the movement of graphics, including writing, drawings, and diagrams; second, the personal observation and experience of visiting engineers; third, migration of technicians; and fourth, diffusion of machines, including models.3

John White Jr. and others have also extensively researched railroad technology transfer from Britain in the early period, yet detailed accounts of particular aspects of this process can still add to our understanding both of railroad history and of the dynamics of transfer. Railroads were there for all to see, simple enough in conception but calling for significant levels of capital investment. Their development reflects the work of both artisans and college-educated engineers. Furthermore, we now know much more about the minutiae of development and about the important regional dimensions within British technical cultures. This article offers just such an account, concerning the transfer of the swivel truck or bogie—the separate wheeled subframes found on both locomotives and cars, attached to a main frame or platform by kingpins or the equivalent—during the period from 1797 to the mid-1830s.

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"It is generally believed that the railroad system was imported into this country from England full grown, but such is not the case." So wrote Horatio Allen to William Brown, who added his own explanation: "There was this difficulty in the way of introducing an English engine upon an American road: In England the roads were virtually straight or with very long curves; but in America they were full of curves."4 The American railroad system was, by this reckoning, only a very partial transfer of technology from England; the topography and natural resources of the United States, as well as the different amounts of capital available, called for different answers to both civil engineering and mechanical engineering problems. Among these answers, it has been claimed, was the swivel truck. [End Page 779]

Yet at least one American authority suggested that the swivel truck was not an American invention. Zerah Colburn wrote in 1871 that it had been recommended by Robert Stephenson to a deputation of American engineers in 1828.5 This might seem unlikely, in that the swivel truck did not form part of the Stephenson traction system.6 The Stephenson railroad had to that point only operated through comparatively undemanding territory—the low hills of northeast England, where it evolved from the wooden colliery wagon way, and the farmlands of Lancashire. There had been no need to negotiate mountain bluffs and deep valleys such as faced American railroad pioneers, and consequently little need to develop rolling stock adapted for...

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