Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840-1920

by Steven W. Usselman

Efforts to create and mold new technologies have been a central, recurrent feature of the American experience since at least the time of the Revolution. Many of the most tumultuous events in the nation's history have involved disputes over the appropriateness and desirability of particular technologies. For nearly a century, railroad technology persistently posed novel challenges for Americans, prompting them to reexamine their most cherished institutions and beliefs. Covering a now neglected aspect of American history, Usselman traces their myriad struggles in rich detail.

Genres: History

416 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 1998

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book looks at an important and understudied topic, how railroads dealt with new technology, but the theories and the narratives rarely congeal and I left the book still wondering if there was a basic argument in it.

Much of the book deals with the seemingly simple but actually monumental issue of purchasing rails. As one economic historian showed, the switch from iron to steel rails (started by J. Edgar Thomson of the Pennsylvania RR with a trip to England in 1862 to look at the new Bessemer process), and the general changes in rail shape and increased weight (doubled to 100 pounds a yard by the end of the century), was the single greatest driver of productivity increases on the railroads. As the author shows, the powerful Bessemer Association, led by Alexander Lyman Holley, was crucial in organizing the new steel mills to negotiate with the railroads, but they tried to work to break the patent monopoly in turn. Later the Pennsylvania used its tight relationship with its former employee Andrew Carnegie, who also wanted to break out of the association, to negotiate good, long-term deals (with him assuring them that they needed to keep his appropriately named Edgar Thomson plant open even in the winter so they would get the freight fees from coal and other shipments to him.)

Originally anonymous inside railroad inventors tended to have a loose relationship with innovation and rarely patented it. But the rise of inventors like George Westinghouse (a former railroad employee who made a big and then anonymous innovation in junction technology) and his air brake in 1869 caused railroads to take the patent system more seriously. They fought together with strange bedfellows like the Grange to limit patent infringement suits, especially because of a series of rulings by Judge Drummond in Chicago that made patent infringers liable for all "savings" a patent had supposedly earned them, which could be millions a year. The railroads formed the Western and Eastern Railroad Associations whose main job was to coordinate patent fights and gather information about prior use of technologies on the railroads before a patent case (as well as assemble patents from the railroads themselves). They also tried to set industry standards (without references to particular patents) by using groups such as the Master Car-Builders Association, founded in the 1860s. In the Sayles Case of 1878 the Supreme Court pulled back on patent damages on a particular type of "double-acting" brake to the railroads satisfaction.

There's a lot here on the rise of the "block system" with automatic signaling (it became common in passenger trains in the 19th century but not for freight until much later) and the lead up to the Safety Appliance Act of 1893 (which forced some adoption of air brakes, although on an extended time scale that the railroads, and Senator Collum who wrote it, appreciated). But there really isn't a big story or takeaway here.