Paul Israel

Inventing industrial research: Thomas Edison and the Menlo Park Laboratory

In the 1870s, American inventor Thomas Edison forged the first industrial research. At his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison merged the machine shop with sophisticated electrical and chemical laboratories and employed teams of researchers who could experiment on all aspects of his inventions and move them rapidly from research to development and commercialization.

Underrated entrepreneur: Thomas Edison's overlooked business story

This paper attributes the success of Thomas A. Edison as an inventor primarily to his ability to marshal the forces and institutions of business. While scholars and historians may condemn Edison to business ignominy for the act of creating vast amounts of wealth and letting much of it slip through his fingers, it would be shortsighted to continue this trend as it focuses entirely on what he failed to do and almost completely ignores his many business successes.

Recording Bridges: HAER in California

THE HISTomIc AMERICAN ENGINEERING RECORD (HAER) is a federal program designed to identify and record the countrys historic engineering sites. In 1978 HAER began a three-year inventory of California engineering sites under the direction of Professor Carroll Pursell of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Pursell employed another graduate student, Jeffrey Stine, and me in the summer of 1978 as part of the HAER summer field team. Normally, these field teams, which are paid from HAER funds, conduct their inventory work through site visitations in order to photograph and investigate the physical condition of the site. Because of the massive scale of the California inventory, it was decided that this first summers work would be better spent in a literature search.

Ideal, Illusion, and Invention

N ikola Tesla has nearly eclipsed Thomas Edison in the popular mind as the inventor of the electrical age. In part this is because his most significant contribution, the polyphase alternating current system, not only superseded Edison’s direct current system but still provides light and power all over the world. He is also credited with some of the earliest contributions to other electrical technologies, such as radio and radar. Yet even as Tesla’s fame has grown, his life and accomplishments have become encrusted by a set of myths that treat him as superhuman. Combining the insights of a skilled historian of science and technology with those of a thoughtful and penetrating biographer, W. Bernard Carlson provides us with a very different account of Tesla’s life and career. Instead of treating Tesla as an idiosyncratic and superhuman genius whose career was sui generis, Carlson has produced a study that treats Tesla as a creative inventor whose career can provide general insights into the nature of inventive activity. He does so by very creatively mining the sometimes scant documentary evidence and Tesla’s own writings to provide readers with an in-depth study of Tesla’s worldview and his methods. In the process he humanizes Tesla, showing us how this complex and flawed man achieved tremendous success and endured debilitating failure. The result is what should become the standard biography of one of the most important inventors of the electrical age. In his introduction and in a concluding chapter, Carlson provides us with some key concepts for thinking about the act of invention and for understanding Tesla’s style as an inventor. Drawing on Thomas Hughes’s work, he argues that an inventor’s style emerges through creative engagement with nature to determine what works and with society to convince others of the value of the invention. In the process, inventors “develop their own worldview and creative method, reflecting their personality, education, experience, and context” (p. 8). In Tesla’s case, his style was highly idealist. By this Carlson means that Tesla focused on finding the fundamental principle on which to base an invention and then manifesting this ideal in a working device. The drawback was that Tesla was less suited to the task of transforming his ideal device into a technology suitable for daily use.

The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 by Chris Otter

Chris Otter intends his book The Victorian Eye to be a political history of visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. But he is little interested in politics or even political economy. It would be more accurate to say that that he has produced (drawing on a word he uses but does not develop) a politico-cultural history of the multitude of ways in which the material culture of light and vision was shaped by the political ideology of British liberalism. By using liberalism as his framework, Otter makes a significant contribution to our understanding of visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular he reconstructs a range of visual practices based on the liberal subjectivity that permeated the culture and shows how these helped to reshape the built environment. Otter’s self-governed liberal subjects (usually upperor middle-class individuals) were ‘expected to possess many different visual capacities: attention, observation, recognition, introspection, discernment, literacy’ (p.46). These capacities gave them the ability to observe themselves as well as others objectively in order to read character and to move autonomously about the city. Nonetheless, because the built environment of the industrial city ‘was perceived as blocked, gloomy, filthy, and demoralizing’ it became for his liberal subjects a ‘politicovisual problem’ (p.53). Their solutions to this problem emerged through what Otter calls ‘numberless little acts of municipal engineering’ (p.61) that reconfigured the built environment. Otter begins his book by tracing the development of ophthalmological science and the emergence of new practices designed to produce better visual habits, including efforts to protect against the myopia brought on by the visual rigours of modern civilization and liberal subjectivity. He then discusses how these visual practices were embodied in oligoptic spaces in which mutual oversight between liberal subjects could take place while individuals were also enabled to withdraw from view. Such spaces were produced by a range of municipal engineering and architectural projects that included street widening and soundproofing, smoke abatement and the growing use of glass in buildings. Especially important, according to Otter, who devotes a chapter to the subject, was the creation of new regimes of inspection. He does a terrific job of detailing the many forms of inspection undertaken by municipal governments, paying special attention to new portable tools used by inspectors as well as the ways that street signs, house numbers and traffic lights enabled inspection and made it more efficient. These new inspection regimes were also aided by the creation of new spaces designed to enable inspection while also keeping certain things, such as death and animal suffering, out of public view. Among these new spaces were the modern hospital, the abattoir and the access pipe for technological systems. At the same time, domestic spaces were also being reconfigured to increase

Understanding technological innovation: a socio-technical approach

influential group of workers, bureaucrats and politicians, some of whom are members of the elites who have delayed the whole process (p. 194; see also p. 118 for Africa). In the case of infrastructure industries, and especially in the grid networks where deregulation and competition cannot be easily introduced, efficiency gains are not necessarily reflected in profitability and it is necessary to use measures like total factor productivity. Remarkably, it seems there are few positive outcomes to report here. The evidence has either not been assembled (Latin America, India) or, where it has, the performance has been mixed as in Britain (p. 59), Africa (pp. 125/6) and in Eastern Europe (p. 94 of the chapter by Jan Hanousek, Evžen Ko cenda and Jan Svejnar). In infrastructure industries like transport, telecoms, water supply and energy, two further issues emerge. One is that the services in question are often a central element of many poor people’s consumption. If then we see the price of water rocketing in parts of Africa and Asia, it is no consolation that quality and reliability have improved and that the situation would likely have been no better under continued state ownership. Indeed the key dilemma in these regions lies in the lack of indigenous entrepreneurs and administrative failings and they seem to be present whether the industry is privatised or not. Build–own–operate projects by foreign multinationals do not touch these matters. The other important dimension with respect to infrastructure industries is their strategic value. It would seem that the resort to only part-privatisation, golden shares and outright reluctance to privatise some sectors is a common phenomenon throughout the world and recent worries about energy supplies will hardly change matters.

Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The use of cybernetic metaphors drawn from communications networks may seem to be a recent phenomenon, growing out of the increasing importance of computers in contemporary life. But Laura Otis demonstrates that such metaphors have had a long and powerful influence ever since telegraph networks first separated communication from transportation. Networking is a sophisticated but jargon-free analysis of the ways in which scientific and technological ideas created novel explanatory metaphors that also became powerful tools for understanding social and natural systems. Otis is most explicit about this in the conclusion to her first chapter, which explores the connections between electricity and the electric telegraph and scientific concepts of the nervous system: “metaphors do not ‘express’ scientists’ ideas; they are the ideas. Metaphors suggest new visions, images, and models; they inspire scientists to approach problems in new ways” (p. 48). One of the more interesting aspects of Otis’s study concerns the attention paid by scientists to the metaphorical nature of knowledge, including its unstable relationship to physical reality. For example, Hermann von Helmholtz drew upon electrical science and telegraph technology to design instruments to measure the velocity of nerve impulses. But he also recognized that nerve impulses, like telegraph signals, had to be interpreted once they were received. Turning from early researches on the functions of nerves to later research on their structure, Otis notes that scientists using similar techniques arrived at very different conclusions depending on how receptive they were to the use of network or web metaphors. Indeed, she argues that as telegraph networks matured they may no longer have provided an apt metaphor for a dynamic, growing system. Organic webs and technological networks provided competing but not exclusive visions of social and natural systems. British physiologist George T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

Technological Innovation and the Great Depression.

Part 1 The Great Depression revisited: questions unanswered building a new theoretical approach - consumption and investment the new theory - technological change the labour market. Part 2 Industry-level analysis chemicals electronics internal combustion selected other industries non-manufacturing sectors summary of industry studies international and regional comparisons.

American Business And Technology In Edison's Time

At the end of his life Edison seemed a figure from a by-gone era, an untutored genius whose cut-and-try method of invention had given way to organized scientific research. This view of the inventor was certainly evident in the appraisals of his career by some of the country’s leading directors of industrial research, which appeared in an issue of Science shortly after his death. By the time Edison died in October 1931, as historian Thomas Hughes has noted, “the words ‘invention’ and inventor’ had fallen into disuse, and ‘research,’ ‘development,’ and ‘industrial scientist”’ had taken their place. In his own appraisal of Edison’s work, Hughes suggests that these directors of industrial research should not have “compared him to the industrial scientist of the 1920s; they should have compared him to themselves.” I will show how Edison was a pivotal figure in the transition from the individual inventor of the nineteenth century to the industrial research scientist of the twentieth.