7 - Innovating

Summary

The power of inventing mechanical contrivances, and of combining machinery, does not appear, if we may judge from the frequency of its occurrence, to be a difficult or a rare gift.

Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1833)

In his own time, Babbage's reasoning is understandable. The best machinemaking shops were by then highly organized and equipped, and manifestly innovative. Even so, Babbage qualified his view: extremely rare were ‘the more beautiful combinations … found only amongst the happiest productions of genius’. And, he noted, while inventions amounted to ‘a vast multitude’, many failed ‘from the imperfect nature of the first trials’. A larger number, while mechanically successful, proved non-viable in practice, for ‘the economy of their operations was not sufficiently attended to’.

A long road had been travelled towards institutionalizing mechanical innovation. Whether that made the process more efficient, how effectively creativity was managed, how sparks of brilliance and initiative channelled into something workable and economical, are questions to consider. The history of inventions, thought Mantoux, ‘is not only that of inventors but that of collective experience, which gradually solves the problems set by collective needs’. Finding a solution involves producing a design that can be executed into a working mechanism. Equally important is that a machine is functional and cost-effective in local circumstances. Mantoux, his focus the eighteenth-century high point of ‘productive association’, offers a non-specific definition, tied to neither time nor place. But what became of the innovation process after engineering was largely absorbed into factories, and apparently separated from its surrounding community?

The spurs to innovate remained broadly the same – speed, quantity, quality, efficiency. Each advance tended to knock-on, requiring change to other processes. Invention indeed bred invention. Engineers’ customers had little choice but to keep up. Hence Benjamin Gott persisted in trying to make Joseph Bramah's press work for him in 1802:

Those who have tried any machines and found a realized advantage from the use of them will speedily consult their own interest by generally applying such productive power & the rivalship of their neighbours will bring them into general use.