------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (January 2009)

Christine MacLeod, _Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and
British Identity, 1750-1914_.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007.  xv + 458 pp.  $105 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-521-87370-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by B. Zorina Khan, Department of Economics, Bowdoin
College.


Let me avoid any suspense and immediately ask (and answer) the question:
to what extent will this book be a useful addition to the library of a
reader of EH.Net?  I was once chastised (and rightly so!) by a journal
referee for not including in my bibliography Christine MacLeod’s last
book, _Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System,
1660-1800_ (Cambridge University Press, 1988).  Any economic historian
investigating the genesis of British patent institutions is indeed
indebted to this meticulous and impressive monograph.  Fans of that
prior work should note that _Heroes of Invention_ is not a sequel, it
does not offer a systematic study of invention nor of inventors.
Instead, MacLeod (Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at
the University of Bristol, UK) parses the question of the role of
technological heroes in British cultural evolution.   The author
restricts herself to traditional exegesis, and makes no attempt to
formulate testable hypotheses or indulge in data analysis.  She makes
more frequent reference to _Punch_ (17) and _Mechanics’ Magazine_ (22)
than to the _Journal of Economic History_ (2).  Thus, although the
current work is included in the Cambridge “Studies in Economic History”
series, this billing is somewhat misleading, for the latest book
contributes to cultural history rather than to economic history.  It
will likely not appeal to the narrow economist, but presents numerous
insights that will fascinate and enlighten those with more encompassing
interests in social attitudes, perceptions, and representations of
technology and culture, during the period of industrialization in Britain.

The author never invokes the caption, “Heroes of Invention,” without a
sardonic smile accompanied by a skeptical lift of one (or both)
eyebrows.  The very first sentence informs us that “the inventor was an
improbable hero.” Nevertheless, during the British industrial revolution
a “bourgeois culture” dedicated to manufacturing and technical progress
prevailed over the former “aristocratic cultural hegemony” (p. 13) that
revered military prowess.  Christine MacLeod shows that the evolution of
ideas and projections about British inventors has to be understood
within this context of changing socioeconomic circumstances during early
industrialization.  Their social standing increased during the early
nineteenth century, and peaked in the third quarter of this period, but
by the First World War inventors had fallen back into obscurity or were
only noticed to be derided for their peculiarities.

The book is organized in chronological fashion.  The introduction and
first two chapters discuss the eighteenth century, when inventors were
typically viewed as charlatans, invidious monopolists or unstable
visionaries (or all of these simultaneously).  The fourth chapter
focuses on James Watt’s “shocking leap into the national pantheon” (p.
25) and the subsequent two chapters (“Watt, Inventor of the Industrial
Revolution” and “‘What’s Watt?’ The Radical Critique”) trace the
ramifications of Watt’s “patent on glory” (p. 181).  The following
section elaborates on the celebrity of other inventive entrepreneurs,
such as Isambard K. Brunel, Sir Humphry Davy and George Stephenson.  The
1851 Crystal Palace exhibition revealed the ambivalence of the era, when
controversies about the abolition of patents occurred simultaneously
with exhilaration about the achievements of the inventive era.
According to MacLeod, the ascendancy of nineteenth-century technologists
to the pantheon of heroes owed to a coalition of pacifists, dissenters,
radical political factions, and representatives of the upper working
class whose celebration of inventive geniuses provided the fulcrum to
leverage their own schemes.  The homage to inventors was not enduring:
by the turn of the century the statue of the physicist Lord Kelvin,
modeled as an academic scientist rather than as inventor, was more
emblematic of the age.  The final two chapters trace the regression that
occurred after World War I, when the class of inventors once again
lapsed into obscurity.  Today, “our pantheon of inventors is essentially
that bequeathed us by the Victorians” (p. 395).

How to obtain a proxy or gauge for popular attitudes toward the creators
of contributions at the frontier of Victorian technology, from the
distance of more than a hundred years?  The author’s solution is
original and encompassing in reach.  She appeals to a cultural
cornucopia of poems, public monuments such as grand statues and street
names, cartoons and more flattering portraits, grandiloquent speeches
and fund-raising subscriptions, metaphorical phrases, newspaper
obituaries, biographies and novels.  The book includes fifty-two line
illustrations and photographs (some of them expertly taken by the
author) that enhance and further the narrative.   MacLeod offers
particularly interesting and innovative interpretations of commemorative
statues.  Stone and marble effigies honoring James Watt, she argues,
signified “the epitome of a new philistine Britain dedicated to the
ethos of utility and the pursuit of meritocratic success” (p. 121).
(The economists among us will wonder what to make of the fact that the
world’s first public monument to Adam Smith -- financed with private
subscriptions -- was unveiled on July 4, 2008 in Edinburgh.)[1].

MacLeod is a careful and authoritative scholar who makes exhaustive use
of archives and sources, as the astonishing forty-three-page
bibliography attests.  So it is tempting for the reader to traverse the
shoreless Sargasso of supportive anecdotes and passively trust to the
seaworthiness of this well-crafted and persuasive thesis.  At the same
time, those unheroic few who wish to adopt a more scientific approach to
the study of science and technology will wonder how one might progress
beyond the confident commentary to attempt to prove or disprove the
assertions that comprise this convincing narration. This sort of
skepticism is reinforced by the book’s own ambivalence about such issues
as timing.  There is an unsettling exactitude about statements such as
“the year 1824 witnessed a turning point in the status of inventors” (p.
91).  Whereas, at various points the peak in the inventors’ heroic
reputation is identified as occurring during the second half of the
nineteenth century, at others in the third quarter and, even more
precisely, in 1883.  Improvements in the status of inventors are alleged
to have “stimulated demands for a more efficient patent system” (p. 125)
despite the calls for patent reform decades earlier.

Another obvious question arises regarding the crucial issue of
causality.  It is evident that the rise and decline of the glorification
of British inventors coincided with the rise and decline of British
competitiveness in technological innovations.  A plausible hypothesis is
that the status of British inventors deteriorated because the glory and
the credit for important innovations soon belonged to inventors in other
countries.  The author instead categorically proclaims that cultural
programming, and not changes in the domain of technology itself, caused
the changes in attitudes towards inventors.  If so, one wonders, why was
the code for cultural programming in France or the United States so
different?  But perhaps a sequel is in the offing...

Note:
1. “Enlightening Sight as Adam Smith Statue Finally Arrives,” _The
Scotsman_, July 5, 2008:
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Enlightening-sight-as-Adam-Smith.4259895.jp.


B. Zorina Khan is Associate Professor of Economics at Bowdoin College
and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  She
is the author of _The Democratization of Invention: Patents and
Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790-1920_ (Cambridge
University Press, 2005), which was awarded the Alice Hanson Jones
Biennial Prize for an outstanding book in American economic history.
Current projects include an extensive investigation into prizes and
patenting among “great inventors” and ordinary patentees in Britain,
France and the United States.

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