Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th-Century America

The first digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was over 100 feet long, with 18,000 simultaneously functioning vacuum tubes. Now virtually every business and home in America has its own compact PC. In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane, held together with baling wire and glue, traveled a couple hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people per day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering and improvements and adaptations. This is the world that David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, an engaging tour of the intersecting routes of technological change and economic growth in twentieth-century America. The authors focus on three areas of innovation that have dominated American technology in this century: the internal combustion engine, electricity, and chemistry. Extremely pervasive in their use, these three clusters of innovation are also highly research-intensive, allowing Mowery and Rosenberg to explore the importance of both "science" and technological innovation and improvement in realizing the economic consequences of technological advances. The cases of chemicals and the internal combustion engine also offer a lesson in the influence of geography and available resources on technological development. Here we see how the vast distances that goods and travelers must cover within the U.S. economy encouraged the rapid development and adoption of technologies to shorten travel times, reduce transportation costs, and increase reliability. But the U.S. resource endowment, with its abundant supplies of raw materials--particularly petroleum--exerted its influence, too, setting the internal combustion engine on a resource-intensive path. Throughout their book, Mowery and Rosenberg demonstrate that the simultaneous emergence of new engineering and applied science disciplines in the universities, in tandem with growth in the R&D industry and scientific research, has been a primary factor in the rapid rate of technological change. Innovation and incentives to develop new, viable processes have led to the creation of new economic resources--which will, in turn, determine the future of American technological innovation and economic growth.

"Rosenberg and Mowery are among the nation's premier historians of technical change. They relate the sagas of four technologies--the internal combustion engine, the chemical industry, electric power, and the electronics revolution that followed the invention of the transistor in 1947--and look for patterns that repeat among the details that do not." Boston Globe

The first digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was over 100 feet long, with 18,000 simultaneously functioning vacuum tubes. Now virtually every business and home in America has its own compact PC. In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane, held together with baling wire and glue, traveled a couple hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people per day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering and improvements and adaptations. This is the world David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, a tour of the intersecting routes of the technological.

In 1903 the Wright brothers' airplane, held together with baling wire and glue, travelled a couple of hundred yards. Today fleets of streamlined jets transport millions of people each day to cities worldwide. Between discovery and application, between invention and widespread use, there is a world of innovation, of tinkering, improvements and adaptation. This is the world David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg map out in Paths of Innovation, a tour of the intersecting routes of technological change.

1. Introduction; 2. The organization and institutionalization of innovation, 1900-1940; 3. The internal combustion engine; 4. Chemicals; 5. Electric power; 6 The electronics revolution, 1947-1990; 8. Concluding observations.