What do you think?
Rate this book
American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm
This riveting story of America's love affair with technology provides remarkable portraits of the lives and times of the early inventors--Edison, Bell, the Wright brothers, and charts the changing modes of invention from the age of independent innovation to today's corporate research labs and vast technological systems. This is the powerful and dramatic tale of our nation's incessant impulse to invent and discover, and of our complex relationship with the fruits of this impulse--a relationship that finds us liberated, dependent, enthusiastic, and skeptical all at once.
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
14 people are currently reading
333 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 21, 2019
"American Genesis" is a cultural history of the grand century of American technology, from 1870 to 1970. Thomas Hughes published his book in 1989, when Americans believed that the grandeur of American technological achievement had matured into something less flashy, yet more durable and equally pregnant with accomplishment. Hughes linked a valedictory history of early inventors with a narrative of those inventions becoming embedded in vastly greater systems, which appeared to offer continued technological progress. But 1989 was a long time ago, and as it has turned out, we have been left with the worst of both worlds. We lack new and beneficial world-changing technologies, and the massive systems, supercharged by the internet, dominate and dehumanize our lives in ways previously unimaginable. It may not be American Terminus, yet, but finding a new path is necessary to recapture the now-cobwebbed spirit of enthusiastic achievement this book chronicles.
Americans, we can all agree, don’t look forward to the future like we used to. This is encapsulated, I think, in Peter Thiel’s famous lament, “We wanted flying cars, and we got 140 characters.” To what future technological advances can the average American look forward? A slightly higher resolution television? A bigger mobile phone? I doubt if the average American could quickly name a single dramatic invention that he actually anticipates will ever happen. Perhaps if given a little time to think, he might name fusion energy or life extension, but that proves my point, since neither of those things is actually going to happen. Nor will artificial intelligence, as I have argued repeatedly. All gamechanging technologies we are told are imminent never arrive, from superconductivity to stem cells. Not to mention that a great many common basic technologies, such as washing machines, automobiles, and dishwashers, have actually gotten worse due to insane government mandates that cripple their use. The future is here, and it’s both stupid and stagnant. We don’t like to say that out loud, but it’s true. Reading this book is like reading any book about the vanished worlds of the past, just with more grim sense of loss, because it was not so long ago the future seemed so different.
Hughes divides the century of American technological genesis into two periods. The first, from roughly 1870 to 1920, was “the golden era of the independent inventors.” The second, to 1970, was the age of industrial systems, in which inventors mostly became cogs in systems of unprecedented size and complexity. In the first half of his book, Hughes studies twelve independent inventors (though others make guest appearances), comparing and contrasting their accomplishments and approaches, while situating them all in their era. Most of these men are famous: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers. A few are more obscure, but in Hughes’s telling, at least as important, especially Elmer Sperry, whose focus on feedback control systems enabled the ultimate switch to individual inventors becoming less relevant than the systems created as a result of their efforts.
The author does an excellent job of sketching the actual process of invention, which varied among industries and inventors, but had many core similarities. “[W]e need to recall that invention is rarely if ever an act, but usually a process involving the conceptualization, probably visualization, of various means to an end or of solutions to a problem; the embodiment of those in models; and subsequent experimentation with the models to discover how well the means fulfill the end in mind.” Hughes objects to the hagiographical myth of the solitary inventor creating by endless trial-and-error. All successful independent inventors had assistants and combined empirical approaches with those derived from scientific theory, and empirical did not mean just throwing random ideas at the wall, but rather to “hypothesize and experiment in the absence of theory.” Most relied on outside funding, with the friction and hassle that involved, though some were professional inventors and others invented while holding a day job. Among many examples, Hughes narrates how Sperry developed the gyrostabilizer for ships. Given that he had no money or connections to test using actual ships, with the assistance of model builders he built a stylized model, the core of which was a pendulum simulating ship movement. Then he experimented on rowboats, and eventually was able, with the data he had, to interest the Navy, who funded further experimentation and implementation.
It is not hagiography to recognize that these twelve men made much of the modern world. That others offered support of various kinds does not change this basic fact. As with almost any task to which a team is set, in any context, one person is the person who matters; the others are fungible. This is a truth unpalatable to some, and unfashionable. Even more unpalatable and unfashionable is another truth—every important new invention in this book was made by a straight white man under the age of forty, the only exceptions being that a few of the inventors were somewhat productive until they reached age fifty. It is not a coincidence that they were men and young. It may be a coincidence that they were straight (though maybe not), and certainly, given the strictures of the time, it is not reasonable to draw any conclusions about race.
Why young men should have accomplished essentially every important dramatic advance, both technological and cultural, in human history is not entirely clear to me. Some chalk it up to evolutionary pressures; young men are driven to achieve in order to obtain the best mates. Maybe, though that seems a bit too pat, but it gets at a truth, which is that young men have the drive, or drives, that old men, and women, simply don’t, and that is certainly largely biological. Some point out that the statistical spread in talents among men, in intelligence and other brilliance, is higher than among women, which necessarily means that the extremes, high and low, are dominated by men. That’s probably part of it, as well, and there may be other causes too.
Oh, sure, you can find occasional exceptions, in that a few older men and a few women have contributed spectacular human creative advances. Though, offhand, I can’t think of any. Can you? Real advances, I mean, not modest accomplishments recast as spectacular because of who made them. (If you say “Marie Curie,” you may be right, though you may also be wrong, but you are showing my basic claim is correct. It is like saying “Meryl Streep” when asked to name an accomplished actress. The inevitability of the name to show the claim belies both the claim’s accuracy and the purposes for which it is made.) Those who claim that the facts are a mere mirage, resulting from supposed discrimination against the old and women, have the burden of proof, which I suspect is insurmountable, as shown by that nobody bothers to try. Whatever the reason for their success, the only way to change that young men are the key to societal advancement is to persecute young men so that zero accomplishments are made, a task the Left has eagerly undertaken—one reason why the future is stupid and stagnant.
As to age specifically, Hughes makes clear, with Edison being the best example but all his inventors showing the same traits to some degree, as radically successful inventors age they no longer come up with brilliant ideas. Instead, they believe their own press, and they either run down blind alleys in a vain attempt to duplicate their youthful achievements or turn their focus to larger applications of their inventions, what in Hughes’s terms is “system building.” They exhibit closed-mindedness combined with overconfidence, not a winning combination. This is merely one empirical example of why laws forbidding discrimination against the old are stupid, because nearly all discrimination against the old is wholly rational, and laws forbidding such rational discrimination are pure rent-seeking by old people trying to take for themselves the fruits of the productivity of the young.
Anyway, from his long discussion of individual inventors, though he returns to them again and again, Hughes turns to thoughts on how inventions led to systems. Hughes’s thesis is that “Large systems—energy, production, communication, and transportation—compose the essence of modern technology.” Radical inventions result in the creation of new systems, he says, while modest, if still significant, inventions improve existing systems. The incentives that mold behavior vary depending on the position of each person with respect to systems; an existing system, for example, is unlikely to fund an inventor promising radical inventions. And such an inventor will have little interest in working on mere improvements within a system; Sperry, for example, was explicit that improving “a machine six or seven percent” was not his focus, which was instead improving something “four or five hundred percent.” Thus, as systems grow and become dominant, as they did after 1920, radical inventions by individuals tend to decline.
After World War I, organizations like Bell Labs (ably covered by Jon Gertner in The Idea Factory) come to the fore, both organizing the process of invention and slotting those inventions into new systems. Key to the American development of systems were Fordism and Taylorism—the former a system of economies of scale embodied in vertically integrated manufacturing schemes; the latter a scientific method to turn workers into fungible units that made a system run ever more efficiently. Hughes discusses both Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor at length, including the Ford system of manufacturing in all its manifestations (with interesting side departures into work on improving the refining of petroleum, since the predictions were that the world’s petroleum would disappear by 1935, yet another example of settled science being wrong). Both Fordism and Taylorism fit with the Progressive mania for rule by supposed experts, a disease that affected all sectors of society, and which was coupled with calls for “economic democracy,” which as Hughes points out, meant mass consumption, nothing more, and nothing less, the ultimate result of which we see today. Fordism and Taylorism were the birth of neoliberalism, mass consumerism, and the loss of worker autonomy.
Hughes spends a great deal of time on the international craze, including in postwar Germany and Russia under the Bolsheviks, for Fordism and Taylorism. The Germans thought it would help them rebuild; Lenin thought it would help Russia become modern (ignoring that Russia, until the war and Bolshevism, was already modernizing at a huge pace) and, more importantly, that it fitted with the supposedly scientific nature of Marxism. Hughes covers Magnitogorsk, for example, at some length, although he here and elsewhere is somewhat credulous about claimed Soviet accomplishments, not surprising since he wrote before the fall of the Soviet Union. Fordism and Taylorism were also influential in the rise of odious modernist architecture, which under those such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier had unbelievably destructive effects, made possible in part by falsely tying ugly architecture to a supposed technological imperative. This is a topic Hughes discusses in interesting detail, although it feels like a departure from the rest of the book. As it happens, by coincidence I also just finished James Stevens Curl’s new book, "Making Dystopia," which is on exactly this topic, so I will shortly have much more to say on modernist architecture, none of its positive.
It is interesting that this book was written at the height of American fears of Japanese dominance, and there are several references to that fear. China, by contrast, appears only twice. Once, in a reference to the United States Navy receiving international scorn for not developing its own innovations, but rather following “a Chinese plan of copying,” from Britain, France, and Germany. That shows that some things have not changed. Others have—the second reference is that “an American engineer visiting China about [1925] thought the principle difference between the two countries were that in the United States everything and everyone was in motion.” I visited Shanghai a few years ago, and I can confirm this difference, except that it has inverted completely in the past hundred years. Visit an American town and you can see lots of people doing nothing; not in China.
Hughes also talks of many systems, including the electric generation and distribution system of Samuel Insull, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Manhattan Project. Most of the drama is provided by conflicts among bureaucrats running the projects, many revolving around which massive system to build to achieve the ultimate, politically chosen, objective. Interwoven with the history of systems are discussions of cultural critiques of technology. These begin with mostly positive portrayals that, as the century passed, turned largely against the dehumanizing and atomizing effects of technology, in particular of the new systems. Men such as Thorstein Veblen and Lewis Mumford started with a positive view and ended with a negative view. Finally, Hughes tries to tie the so-called counterculture to a reaction against the weight of technological systems, which put man behind and beneath the system itself. Mumford shows up again, reversing his earlier views, along with Jacques Ellul, and Alvin Toffler, for his then-current prediction in The Third Wave that a holistic, more fragmented approach to implementing technology was just around the corner, which, as Hughes points out, is very similar to predictions made by Henry Ford in the 1920s.
Hughes is generally an even writer, but at this end, he gets preachy, which is a little annoying. He calls Jonathan Schell’s agitprop book The Fate of the Earth “profound”; a more accurate judgment was Michael Kinsley’s: “The silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people.” More problematic is his unreasoned and emotional aversion to nuclear power; he refers, for example, to the accident at Three-Mile Island as a “catastrophe” and to “the horrendous destructiveness of nuclear energy.” What he can mean by that, given that nobody has ever died in the United States due to nuclear power, I have no idea, but I do know (although this is something Hughes does not address, given the era of his book) that anyone who demands instant action against climate change and does not simultaneously demand massive immediate investment in nuclear power is not a serious person, or, more likely, is the combination of liar and grifter that most global warming alarmists are.
[Review completes as first comment.]
Americans, we can all agree, don’t look forward to the future like we used to. This is encapsulated, I think, in Peter Thiel’s famous lament, “We wanted flying cars, and we got 140 characters.” To what future technological advances can the average American look forward? A slightly higher resolution television? A bigger mobile phone? I doubt if the average American could quickly name a single dramatic invention that he actually anticipates will ever happen. Perhaps if given a little time to think, he might name fusion energy or life extension, but that proves my point, since neither of those things is actually going to happen. Nor will artificial intelligence, as I have argued repeatedly. All gamechanging technologies we are told are imminent never arrive, from superconductivity to stem cells. Not to mention that a great many common basic technologies, such as washing machines, automobiles, and dishwashers, have actually gotten worse due to insane government mandates that cripple their use. The future is here, and it’s both stupid and stagnant. We don’t like to say that out loud, but it’s true. Reading this book is like reading any book about the vanished worlds of the past, just with more grim sense of loss, because it was not so long ago the future seemed so different.
Hughes divides the century of American technological genesis into two periods. The first, from roughly 1870 to 1920, was “the golden era of the independent inventors.” The second, to 1970, was the age of industrial systems, in which inventors mostly became cogs in systems of unprecedented size and complexity. In the first half of his book, Hughes studies twelve independent inventors (though others make guest appearances), comparing and contrasting their accomplishments and approaches, while situating them all in their era. Most of these men are famous: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers. A few are more obscure, but in Hughes’s telling, at least as important, especially Elmer Sperry, whose focus on feedback control systems enabled the ultimate switch to individual inventors becoming less relevant than the systems created as a result of their efforts.
The author does an excellent job of sketching the actual process of invention, which varied among industries and inventors, but had many core similarities. “[W]e need to recall that invention is rarely if ever an act, but usually a process involving the conceptualization, probably visualization, of various means to an end or of solutions to a problem; the embodiment of those in models; and subsequent experimentation with the models to discover how well the means fulfill the end in mind.” Hughes objects to the hagiographical myth of the solitary inventor creating by endless trial-and-error. All successful independent inventors had assistants and combined empirical approaches with those derived from scientific theory, and empirical did not mean just throwing random ideas at the wall, but rather to “hypothesize and experiment in the absence of theory.” Most relied on outside funding, with the friction and hassle that involved, though some were professional inventors and others invented while holding a day job. Among many examples, Hughes narrates how Sperry developed the gyrostabilizer for ships. Given that he had no money or connections to test using actual ships, with the assistance of model builders he built a stylized model, the core of which was a pendulum simulating ship movement. Then he experimented on rowboats, and eventually was able, with the data he had, to interest the Navy, who funded further experimentation and implementation.
It is not hagiography to recognize that these twelve men made much of the modern world. That others offered support of various kinds does not change this basic fact. As with almost any task to which a team is set, in any context, one person is the person who matters; the others are fungible. This is a truth unpalatable to some, and unfashionable. Even more unpalatable and unfashionable is another truth—every important new invention in this book was made by a straight white man under the age of forty, the only exceptions being that a few of the inventors were somewhat productive until they reached age fifty. It is not a coincidence that they were men and young. It may be a coincidence that they were straight (though maybe not), and certainly, given the strictures of the time, it is not reasonable to draw any conclusions about race.
Why young men should have accomplished essentially every important dramatic advance, both technological and cultural, in human history is not entirely clear to me. Some chalk it up to evolutionary pressures; young men are driven to achieve in order to obtain the best mates. Maybe, though that seems a bit too pat, but it gets at a truth, which is that young men have the drive, or drives, that old men, and women, simply don’t, and that is certainly largely biological. Some point out that the statistical spread in talents among men, in intelligence and other brilliance, is higher than among women, which necessarily means that the extremes, high and low, are dominated by men. That’s probably part of it, as well, and there may be other causes too.
Oh, sure, you can find occasional exceptions, in that a few older men and a few women have contributed spectacular human creative advances. Though, offhand, I can’t think of any. Can you? Real advances, I mean, not modest accomplishments recast as spectacular because of who made them. (If you say “Marie Curie,” you may be right, though you may also be wrong, but you are showing my basic claim is correct. It is like saying “Meryl Streep” when asked to name an accomplished actress. The inevitability of the name to show the claim belies both the claim’s accuracy and the purposes for which it is made.) Those who claim that the facts are a mere mirage, resulting from supposed discrimination against the old and women, have the burden of proof, which I suspect is insurmountable, as shown by that nobody bothers to try. Whatever the reason for their success, the only way to change that young men are the key to societal advancement is to persecute young men so that zero accomplishments are made, a task the Left has eagerly undertaken—one reason why the future is stupid and stagnant.
As to age specifically, Hughes makes clear, with Edison being the best example but all his inventors showing the same traits to some degree, as radically successful inventors age they no longer come up with brilliant ideas. Instead, they believe their own press, and they either run down blind alleys in a vain attempt to duplicate their youthful achievements or turn their focus to larger applications of their inventions, what in Hughes’s terms is “system building.” They exhibit closed-mindedness combined with overconfidence, not a winning combination. This is merely one empirical example of why laws forbidding discrimination against the old are stupid, because nearly all discrimination against the old is wholly rational, and laws forbidding such rational discrimination are pure rent-seeking by old people trying to take for themselves the fruits of the productivity of the young.
Anyway, from his long discussion of individual inventors, though he returns to them again and again, Hughes turns to thoughts on how inventions led to systems. Hughes’s thesis is that “Large systems—energy, production, communication, and transportation—compose the essence of modern technology.” Radical inventions result in the creation of new systems, he says, while modest, if still significant, inventions improve existing systems. The incentives that mold behavior vary depending on the position of each person with respect to systems; an existing system, for example, is unlikely to fund an inventor promising radical inventions. And such an inventor will have little interest in working on mere improvements within a system; Sperry, for example, was explicit that improving “a machine six or seven percent” was not his focus, which was instead improving something “four or five hundred percent.” Thus, as systems grow and become dominant, as they did after 1920, radical inventions by individuals tend to decline.
After World War I, organizations like Bell Labs (ably covered by Jon Gertner in The Idea Factory) come to the fore, both organizing the process of invention and slotting those inventions into new systems. Key to the American development of systems were Fordism and Taylorism—the former a system of economies of scale embodied in vertically integrated manufacturing schemes; the latter a scientific method to turn workers into fungible units that made a system run ever more efficiently. Hughes discusses both Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor at length, including the Ford system of manufacturing in all its manifestations (with interesting side departures into work on improving the refining of petroleum, since the predictions were that the world’s petroleum would disappear by 1935, yet another example of settled science being wrong). Both Fordism and Taylorism fit with the Progressive mania for rule by supposed experts, a disease that affected all sectors of society, and which was coupled with calls for “economic democracy,” which as Hughes points out, meant mass consumption, nothing more, and nothing less, the ultimate result of which we see today. Fordism and Taylorism were the birth of neoliberalism, mass consumerism, and the loss of worker autonomy.
Hughes spends a great deal of time on the international craze, including in postwar Germany and Russia under the Bolsheviks, for Fordism and Taylorism. The Germans thought it would help them rebuild; Lenin thought it would help Russia become modern (ignoring that Russia, until the war and Bolshevism, was already modernizing at a huge pace) and, more importantly, that it fitted with the supposedly scientific nature of Marxism. Hughes covers Magnitogorsk, for example, at some length, although he here and elsewhere is somewhat credulous about claimed Soviet accomplishments, not surprising since he wrote before the fall of the Soviet Union. Fordism and Taylorism were also influential in the rise of odious modernist architecture, which under those such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier had unbelievably destructive effects, made possible in part by falsely tying ugly architecture to a supposed technological imperative. This is a topic Hughes discusses in interesting detail, although it feels like a departure from the rest of the book. As it happens, by coincidence I also just finished James Stevens Curl’s new book, "Making Dystopia," which is on exactly this topic, so I will shortly have much more to say on modernist architecture, none of its positive.
It is interesting that this book was written at the height of American fears of Japanese dominance, and there are several references to that fear. China, by contrast, appears only twice. Once, in a reference to the United States Navy receiving international scorn for not developing its own innovations, but rather following “a Chinese plan of copying,” from Britain, France, and Germany. That shows that some things have not changed. Others have—the second reference is that “an American engineer visiting China about [1925] thought the principle difference between the two countries were that in the United States everything and everyone was in motion.” I visited Shanghai a few years ago, and I can confirm this difference, except that it has inverted completely in the past hundred years. Visit an American town and you can see lots of people doing nothing; not in China.
Hughes also talks of many systems, including the electric generation and distribution system of Samuel Insull, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Manhattan Project. Most of the drama is provided by conflicts among bureaucrats running the projects, many revolving around which massive system to build to achieve the ultimate, politically chosen, objective. Interwoven with the history of systems are discussions of cultural critiques of technology. These begin with mostly positive portrayals that, as the century passed, turned largely against the dehumanizing and atomizing effects of technology, in particular of the new systems. Men such as Thorstein Veblen and Lewis Mumford started with a positive view and ended with a negative view. Finally, Hughes tries to tie the so-called counterculture to a reaction against the weight of technological systems, which put man behind and beneath the system itself. Mumford shows up again, reversing his earlier views, along with Jacques Ellul, and Alvin Toffler, for his then-current prediction in The Third Wave that a holistic, more fragmented approach to implementing technology was just around the corner, which, as Hughes points out, is very similar to predictions made by Henry Ford in the 1920s.
Hughes is generally an even writer, but at this end, he gets preachy, which is a little annoying. He calls Jonathan Schell’s agitprop book The Fate of the Earth “profound”; a more accurate judgment was Michael Kinsley’s: “The silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people.” More problematic is his unreasoned and emotional aversion to nuclear power; he refers, for example, to the accident at Three-Mile Island as a “catastrophe” and to “the horrendous destructiveness of nuclear energy.” What he can mean by that, given that nobody has ever died in the United States due to nuclear power, I have no idea, but I do know (although this is something Hughes does not address, given the era of his book) that anyone who demands instant action against climate change and does not simultaneously demand massive immediate investment in nuclear power is not a serious person, or, more likely, is the combination of liar and grifter that most global warming alarmists are.
[Review completes as first comment.]
January 12, 2012
America Genesis claims to cover a century of innovation, but the core of the book is much more tightly focused on the Second Industrial Revolution, electrification, motor transport, and mass production, and the rise of the immense technological systems which characterize modern life. Biographical sketches of major inventors like Edison, Telsa, the Wright brothers, along with system builders like Henry Ford, Samuel Insull, and the architects of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
However, American Genesis makes some 'interesting' choices about content, which combined with the length of the book can be rather frustrating. Land grant colleges and the influence of the German scientific style on American universities are not mentioned. DARPA, NASA, the NSF, NIH, and most of the post-war Federal scientific system are similarly glossed over. The Atomic Energy Commission and the nuclear Navy get a lot of space, but they're not particularly characteristic of American science. Soviet technical development (the USSR basically imported an entire industrial plant from America in the 1920s) is interesting, but not really relevant to the book. And while I enjoyed the section on Modernism as an artistic and architectural movement as a European reflection of the American technological style, it felt totally extraneous.
As a whole, I found America Genesis discursive and unfocused. The individual anecdotes of inventors and events are interesting, but the theoretical development surrounding the rise of 'system builders' isn't as rigorous as it could be. Hughes basically did not examine what I thought to be the most interesting historical question of the period: How scientific and technical knowledge became a core input of industry in the same way that coal or steel was, and how that reconfigured society.
However, American Genesis makes some 'interesting' choices about content, which combined with the length of the book can be rather frustrating. Land grant colleges and the influence of the German scientific style on American universities are not mentioned. DARPA, NASA, the NSF, NIH, and most of the post-war Federal scientific system are similarly glossed over. The Atomic Energy Commission and the nuclear Navy get a lot of space, but they're not particularly characteristic of American science. Soviet technical development (the USSR basically imported an entire industrial plant from America in the 1920s) is interesting, but not really relevant to the book. And while I enjoyed the section on Modernism as an artistic and architectural movement as a European reflection of the American technological style, it felt totally extraneous.
As a whole, I found America Genesis discursive and unfocused. The individual anecdotes of inventors and events are interesting, but the theoretical development surrounding the rise of 'system builders' isn't as rigorous as it could be. Hughes basically did not examine what I thought to be the most interesting historical question of the period: How scientific and technical knowledge became a core input of industry in the same way that coal or steel was, and how that reconfigured society.
May 7, 2018
Having just finished The Last Days of Night, most of the history in Hughes' opus was familiar to me. This was clearly a work meant to stand the test of time, but unfortunately, its breath failed to communicate a clear thesis and the book dragged on as the days of early electrification (well-documented by Hughes in Networks of Power) receded into the rear view mirror. Ambitious in scope, the book started out strong but failed to deliver on its ambitions. That said, there were redeeming qualities:
- The existence of a reverse salient as a common conceptual framework for finding topics where innovation is likely by identifying areas in the topology of technology that are falling behind the frontier and thus holding it back.
- The distinction between invention, the creation of new technology, and innovation, the process of bringing that technology to market.
- An effective description of the factors that favor systematic industrial research versus generative lone-wolf disruption.
- Clear articulation of the value of patents in early 20th century innovation and business in a way that feels very foreign; most of the book circles around various patent disputes and the value that patents provided was extraordinary.
- The character of Samuel Insull, someone I've never heard much about, and his battles between monopoly and regulation. Overall, I was hit hard by this quote: "The technical intricacies and organizational complexities of Insull's creation were too abstract for the public and press to comprehend or to visualize, as they could Henry Ford's Automobile empire...l.Not only did Insull and his lieutenants create a system for mass-producing energy, but they also articulated the concepts of mass production more subtly, more extensively."
- Key insight from Insull (obvious today) that with electricity, production and consumption needed to be coordinated, and that rebates should be offered to customers in order to consume during the periods of weakest demand.
- Generally interesting tension between the power of technology to drive monopolies, and the power of regulators to spread the wealth.
- The way technologists used both world wars to intertwine with the government, and descriptions of various technical projects that succeeded and failed based on the relationship with government PMs.
- How obsessed Lenin was with Taylorism - Stalin even proclaimed American Efficiency as a cardinal Leninist doctrine in 1924: "The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism."
- How closely American engineers worked with the Soviets in the 1920s to build infrastructure across the Soviet Union.
- The section on the manhattan project was interesting, but because of the substantial prior art felt rushed and forced. However, one interesting focus was on the non-Los Alamos research centers; I had no idea how important many of the discoveries at the other national labs really were!
Overall, I suspect that the book should have ended with Insull and stayed focused on the transition from independent inventors to industrialized systems of innovation. The scope was too wide and the ambition was too great, and in this way, the book was substantially weakened.
- The existence of a reverse salient as a common conceptual framework for finding topics where innovation is likely by identifying areas in the topology of technology that are falling behind the frontier and thus holding it back.
- The distinction between invention, the creation of new technology, and innovation, the process of bringing that technology to market.
- An effective description of the factors that favor systematic industrial research versus generative lone-wolf disruption.
- Clear articulation of the value of patents in early 20th century innovation and business in a way that feels very foreign; most of the book circles around various patent disputes and the value that patents provided was extraordinary.
- The character of Samuel Insull, someone I've never heard much about, and his battles between monopoly and regulation. Overall, I was hit hard by this quote: "The technical intricacies and organizational complexities of Insull's creation were too abstract for the public and press to comprehend or to visualize, as they could Henry Ford's Automobile empire...l.Not only did Insull and his lieutenants create a system for mass-producing energy, but they also articulated the concepts of mass production more subtly, more extensively."
- Key insight from Insull (obvious today) that with electricity, production and consumption needed to be coordinated, and that rebates should be offered to customers in order to consume during the periods of weakest demand.
- Generally interesting tension between the power of technology to drive monopolies, and the power of regulators to spread the wealth.
- The way technologists used both world wars to intertwine with the government, and descriptions of various technical projects that succeeded and failed based on the relationship with government PMs.
- How obsessed Lenin was with Taylorism - Stalin even proclaimed American Efficiency as a cardinal Leninist doctrine in 1924: "The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism."
- How closely American engineers worked with the Soviets in the 1920s to build infrastructure across the Soviet Union.
- The section on the manhattan project was interesting, but because of the substantial prior art felt rushed and forced. However, one interesting focus was on the non-Los Alamos research centers; I had no idea how important many of the discoveries at the other national labs really were!
Overall, I suspect that the book should have ended with Insull and stayed focused on the transition from independent inventors to industrialized systems of innovation. The scope was too wide and the ambition was too great, and in this way, the book was substantially weakened.
February 4, 2012
Thomas Hughes provides a critical look at how technology developed throughout the 20th century. The book begins in the 1870's with the inventors workshop and people like Edison gathering machinists around to develop new technologies for profit. This type of work space was based upon proprietary knowledge and combing the skills of those present. It was not a business driven venture on a product but it focused on the business of innovation. From the centers of innovation corporations began to develop their own think tanks and research and development labs. Although the book leaves out the early efforts of Du Pont it does pick up with AT&T and Bell Labs as the forebears' of corporate research. The military became the other area for innovation as World War I and eventually 2 brought together science and research in a whole new way from the TVA to the Manhattan project. Also included in this new venture was mass production and the scientific management of Frederick Taylor that was employed at companies such as Bethlehem Steel and beyond. The book trails off in the 1970's with the countercultures efforts at rejecting Taylorism and starting into the PC revolution. This book provides an excellent synopsis of these doctrinal shifts in technological production and how they shaped America.
August 31, 2014
A. Summary: During the 1870s heroic inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Bell ushered in an era of invention that was to be taken over by the industrial research laboratories after the turn of the 20th century. By the 1920s, Ford (mass production), Taylor (scientific management), and Insull (electric utilties) built “networks of power” by combining technologies into large systems. The revolutionary nature of this new technological civilization was most clearly seen by European intellectuals and artists who sought a new basis for social meaning. In the Depression (TVA) and World War II (Manhattan Project) political support was given to the building of massive systems. Social critics after the war (led by Lewis Mumford) lost their enthusiasm for technological systems (the “megamachine”) but they had taken on an unstoppable momentum.
B. The argument is to place technology at the center of American history. His approach is much like feminist scholars who argue that sprinkling a few women into traditional history is not enough. History looks different from a gendered perspective as well as a technological perspective. This book does not argue technological determinism, technology was socially constructed. Definition of technology: Technology is the effort to organize the world for problem solving so that goods and services can be invented developed produced and used.
C. Hughes 4 stage model of systems development: Invention and development, technology transfer, systems growth, systems momentum
II. Independent invetors (1870-WWI)
A. The main independents
1. Bell and the Wrights (amateur inventors): Free of commercial constraint because they had other jobs
2. De Forest and Fessenden (full-time-single minded inventors): Pioneers in wireless communication, chose problems that when solved would form the nucleus of a new system
3. Tesla: Was unconcerned with commercial advantage and like a pure scientist followed his imagination
4. Edison, Maxim and Sperry (the professionals): Their style of choice was wide-ranging
B. The independents supporting cast
1. Machine shops: The independent inventor wanted their own place to work (Menlo Park). Edison used skilled mechanics and craftsmen to transform his ideas into models “muckers”
2. Scientists: The inventors also needed men trained in science and chemistry. While on the cutting edge of scientific theory, the inventors relied on experimentation. The scientists and laboratories allowed the experimentation (the lifeblood of invention)
C. What problems did the independents choose to solve (radicle)
1. Salient (conspicuous) characteristics
a) Independents invented a disproportionate amount of radical inventions. This is their main distinguishable characteristic
b) Organizations did not support radical inventions because they upset the status quo
c) The independents preferred to create systems rather than to improve upon the systems of others
2. Reverse Salients (bottle-necks)
a) An example of this is a telephone relay that distorts the message after a certain distance
b) Economic reverse salient: the cost of copper wire
3. Military problems
a) After 1900 the independent began to increasingly invent for the military (the beginning of the military industrial complex)
b) Examples of military uses of the inventors
(1) The Wright Brothers: the military was one of the first users of the airplane
(2) Maxim’s machine gun
(3) Sperry’s gyros: His gyrostabilizer helped to remove the pitch and roll from navy ships. This improved firing accuracy
c) Naval consulting board
(1) Edison helped establish and headed the NCB
(2) His antiquated views mirrored the ineffectiveness and decline of the independent inventor and the rise of the industrial research lab
d) Aerial Torpedo
(1) This is an example of the industrial research company
(2) The Sperry Gyroscope company developed the aerial torpedo or flying bomb
(3) This company was the main manifestation of the military-industrial complex
(4) IT was called the “Sperry brain mill” and was a harbinger of the future
III. The death of the independent; Industrial research laboratories (WWI-WWII)
A. After WWI American invention was shifting from a revolutionary to an evolutionary mode. Research and development replaced the word “invention.” Professional inventors continued on in the 20th, but with less prestige and power. The heads of American research labs were becoming the organizers of American invention.
1. Edwin Armstrong: the independent beleaguered
a) Industries ability to draw on patent lawyers helped to establish the independents demise
b) Armstrong’s fight with AT&T and RCA illustrate this
c) He had invented a way to transmit radio waves
d) Because he did not document his inventions a Supreme Court awarded patent rights of De Forrest
2. Industrial research laboratories: See Reich.
B. The main system builders (Taylor, Ford, Insull). We mistakenly associate modern technology with objects (phone, light, radio), not systems (energy production, communication, transportation).
1. Taylorism
a) Developed scientific management
b) Attempted to design a system of men and machines that would be as efficient and well designed as a machine
c) Time studies to promote efficiency, better designed tools, decreased the foreman’s responsibility
d) Many workers were unwilling to subject themselves to the loss of autonomy
2. Fordism
a) The moving assembly line was the best known component of his mass production system
b) Highland Park and River Rouge were designed with the system in mind
c) Ford was a good systems builder but not a good manager
d) The companies demise was also due to the rise of General Motors: innovations like consumer credit, used car trade ins, yearly models
e) Automobile production system. Fords company was a component of a greater system which included roads, service stations, petroleum refiners, etc.
3. Insull the system builder
a) Insull presided over one of the largest and most complex power systems
b) He created a system for mass producing energy
c) Because electricity could not be effectively store, Insull had to maintain the flow of production and consumption
d) He did this through the load curve, and load management
e) By charging various prices for times of electrical use, Insull manipulated his customers
C. Tennessee Valley and Manhattan Project
1. Tennessee Valley: Ford envisioned a regional planning district in the Tennessee valley. This was not primarily a power generating organization. It also was interested in flood control, prevention of soil erosion, afforestation, and the distribution of industry
2. Manhattan Project: The path breaking involvement of government in planning and development of large scale technological systems was eclipsed during WWII by the governments Manhattan project.
IV. The European second discovery of America (the American technological system)
A. The Soviet Union
1. Soviet planners believed that the wave of the future was large scale systems
2. Lenin believed that scientific management could provide the transition between capitalism and socialism
3. Lenin brought American engineers to the Soviet Union to help install the Taylor system
4. This brought countless problems. Peasants could not get to work on time because they did not have alarm-clocks. This suggests the magnitude of technology transfer. There were monumental reverse salients
5. The Societs built hydroelectric plant (the Dneiper River), Ford plant, steel complex. These projects schooled countless Soviet engineers in Western technology
B. Germany
1. During the interwar years the Germans made a second discovery of America
2. Systems: Ford would show Weimar the war towards mass production and social harmony
3. Art: In interwar Germany one important branch of modern architecture came to be known as the international style.They defined a style that was modern. The house came to be mass-produced. Paradox: It was the German architect Gropious & not American architects who pioneered this modern style
4. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933 the leaders ended the American influence
C. Second Industrial Revolution or Neotechnic Age?
1. Lewis Mumford was among the most articulate and influential of those envisioning a new industrial era based on new forms of electrical and political power
a) Neotecnic era: primary energy is electricity, material is aluminum & synthetics
b) Eotechnic: wind, & waterpower, wood
c) Paleotechnic: steam & iron
V. Counterculture and Momentum (Post WWII)
A. Generally the attitude of Americans was of enthusiasm towards technology until WWII. The Atom bomb constituted a counterreaction to technology
B. Mumford and the Megamachine
1. Mumford in the 1960s and 1970s also expressed disillusionment with technology
2. He saw megamachines as shaping the course of human history
3. The megamachine was a huge technological system
4. The Manhattan Project was a megamachine
C. Appropriate technology
1. Many of those in the counterculture sought appropriate technology to counter large-scale technology
2. They wanted industrial nations to take the soft path: phase out large electrical supply systems with small decentralized sources of renewable energy from wind and sun
D. Momentum
1. A serious flaw in those who sought radical technology was that they forgot to take into account how deeply the American institutions were embedded in technological systems
2. The only way to slow down this momentum is through;
a) Contingencies: Ex. The 1973 oil embargo caused the auto to be redesigned
b) Catastrophe: Three-mile-island, Challenger crash
c) Conversion: This would be akin to religious change in belief
3. The most likely way to change momentum is through a confluence of these three ways
B. The argument is to place technology at the center of American history. His approach is much like feminist scholars who argue that sprinkling a few women into traditional history is not enough. History looks different from a gendered perspective as well as a technological perspective. This book does not argue technological determinism, technology was socially constructed. Definition of technology: Technology is the effort to organize the world for problem solving so that goods and services can be invented developed produced and used.
C. Hughes 4 stage model of systems development: Invention and development, technology transfer, systems growth, systems momentum
II. Independent invetors (1870-WWI)
A. The main independents
1. Bell and the Wrights (amateur inventors): Free of commercial constraint because they had other jobs
2. De Forest and Fessenden (full-time-single minded inventors): Pioneers in wireless communication, chose problems that when solved would form the nucleus of a new system
3. Tesla: Was unconcerned with commercial advantage and like a pure scientist followed his imagination
4. Edison, Maxim and Sperry (the professionals): Their style of choice was wide-ranging
B. The independents supporting cast
1. Machine shops: The independent inventor wanted their own place to work (Menlo Park). Edison used skilled mechanics and craftsmen to transform his ideas into models “muckers”
2. Scientists: The inventors also needed men trained in science and chemistry. While on the cutting edge of scientific theory, the inventors relied on experimentation. The scientists and laboratories allowed the experimentation (the lifeblood of invention)
C. What problems did the independents choose to solve (radicle)
1. Salient (conspicuous) characteristics
a) Independents invented a disproportionate amount of radical inventions. This is their main distinguishable characteristic
b) Organizations did not support radical inventions because they upset the status quo
c) The independents preferred to create systems rather than to improve upon the systems of others
2. Reverse Salients (bottle-necks)
a) An example of this is a telephone relay that distorts the message after a certain distance
b) Economic reverse salient: the cost of copper wire
3. Military problems
a) After 1900 the independent began to increasingly invent for the military (the beginning of the military industrial complex)
b) Examples of military uses of the inventors
(1) The Wright Brothers: the military was one of the first users of the airplane
(2) Maxim’s machine gun
(3) Sperry’s gyros: His gyrostabilizer helped to remove the pitch and roll from navy ships. This improved firing accuracy
c) Naval consulting board
(1) Edison helped establish and headed the NCB
(2) His antiquated views mirrored the ineffectiveness and decline of the independent inventor and the rise of the industrial research lab
d) Aerial Torpedo
(1) This is an example of the industrial research company
(2) The Sperry Gyroscope company developed the aerial torpedo or flying bomb
(3) This company was the main manifestation of the military-industrial complex
(4) IT was called the “Sperry brain mill” and was a harbinger of the future
III. The death of the independent; Industrial research laboratories (WWI-WWII)
A. After WWI American invention was shifting from a revolutionary to an evolutionary mode. Research and development replaced the word “invention.” Professional inventors continued on in the 20th, but with less prestige and power. The heads of American research labs were becoming the organizers of American invention.
1. Edwin Armstrong: the independent beleaguered
a) Industries ability to draw on patent lawyers helped to establish the independents demise
b) Armstrong’s fight with AT&T and RCA illustrate this
c) He had invented a way to transmit radio waves
d) Because he did not document his inventions a Supreme Court awarded patent rights of De Forrest
2. Industrial research laboratories: See Reich.
B. The main system builders (Taylor, Ford, Insull). We mistakenly associate modern technology with objects (phone, light, radio), not systems (energy production, communication, transportation).
1. Taylorism
a) Developed scientific management
b) Attempted to design a system of men and machines that would be as efficient and well designed as a machine
c) Time studies to promote efficiency, better designed tools, decreased the foreman’s responsibility
d) Many workers were unwilling to subject themselves to the loss of autonomy
2. Fordism
a) The moving assembly line was the best known component of his mass production system
b) Highland Park and River Rouge were designed with the system in mind
c) Ford was a good systems builder but not a good manager
d) The companies demise was also due to the rise of General Motors: innovations like consumer credit, used car trade ins, yearly models
e) Automobile production system. Fords company was a component of a greater system which included roads, service stations, petroleum refiners, etc.
3. Insull the system builder
a) Insull presided over one of the largest and most complex power systems
b) He created a system for mass producing energy
c) Because electricity could not be effectively store, Insull had to maintain the flow of production and consumption
d) He did this through the load curve, and load management
e) By charging various prices for times of electrical use, Insull manipulated his customers
C. Tennessee Valley and Manhattan Project
1. Tennessee Valley: Ford envisioned a regional planning district in the Tennessee valley. This was not primarily a power generating organization. It also was interested in flood control, prevention of soil erosion, afforestation, and the distribution of industry
2. Manhattan Project: The path breaking involvement of government in planning and development of large scale technological systems was eclipsed during WWII by the governments Manhattan project.
IV. The European second discovery of America (the American technological system)
A. The Soviet Union
1. Soviet planners believed that the wave of the future was large scale systems
2. Lenin believed that scientific management could provide the transition between capitalism and socialism
3. Lenin brought American engineers to the Soviet Union to help install the Taylor system
4. This brought countless problems. Peasants could not get to work on time because they did not have alarm-clocks. This suggests the magnitude of technology transfer. There were monumental reverse salients
5. The Societs built hydroelectric plant (the Dneiper River), Ford plant, steel complex. These projects schooled countless Soviet engineers in Western technology
B. Germany
1. During the interwar years the Germans made a second discovery of America
2. Systems: Ford would show Weimar the war towards mass production and social harmony
3. Art: In interwar Germany one important branch of modern architecture came to be known as the international style.They defined a style that was modern. The house came to be mass-produced. Paradox: It was the German architect Gropious & not American architects who pioneered this modern style
4. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933 the leaders ended the American influence
C. Second Industrial Revolution or Neotechnic Age?
1. Lewis Mumford was among the most articulate and influential of those envisioning a new industrial era based on new forms of electrical and political power
a) Neotecnic era: primary energy is electricity, material is aluminum & synthetics
b) Eotechnic: wind, & waterpower, wood
c) Paleotechnic: steam & iron
V. Counterculture and Momentum (Post WWII)
A. Generally the attitude of Americans was of enthusiasm towards technology until WWII. The Atom bomb constituted a counterreaction to technology
B. Mumford and the Megamachine
1. Mumford in the 1960s and 1970s also expressed disillusionment with technology
2. He saw megamachines as shaping the course of human history
3. The megamachine was a huge technological system
4. The Manhattan Project was a megamachine
C. Appropriate technology
1. Many of those in the counterculture sought appropriate technology to counter large-scale technology
2. They wanted industrial nations to take the soft path: phase out large electrical supply systems with small decentralized sources of renewable energy from wind and sun
D. Momentum
1. A serious flaw in those who sought radical technology was that they forgot to take into account how deeply the American institutions were embedded in technological systems
2. The only way to slow down this momentum is through;
a) Contingencies: Ex. The 1973 oil embargo caused the auto to be redesigned
b) Catastrophe: Three-mile-island, Challenger crash
c) Conversion: This would be akin to religious change in belief
3. The most likely way to change momentum is through a confluence of these three ways
June 23, 2018
The best book I know on history of technology. Very readable, its chapters include an excellent summary of the development of the atomic bomb and a real eye-opener on the way in which the soviet economic system was built on F W Taylor's "Scientific Management" and with the assistance of American engineers and contractors.
January 7, 2023
Good history of technology in US since 1870 with a look at Edison, Ford, and others. Took me a couple of months since it wasn’t as easy. Nice end discussion about the type of society we have or should have. Good overview of nuclear inventions too.
March 7, 2017
I spent all night reading, annotating and reviewing this book. I submitted it to my adviser this morning. He said I still have to do a report on Das Kapital.
I hate my life.
I hate my life.
Read
April 19, 2021DNF
October 31, 2021
Recommended highly for anyone interested in history of science
July 4, 2013
Great read for history student or fan
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews