Khan on MacLeod, _Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

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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