14 - Twentieth-Century Technological Change

Summary

INTRODUCTION

An examination of technological innovation in the twentieth-century U.S. economy must naturally begin in the nineteenth century. An appropriate starting point is Alfred North Whitehead’s observation, in Science and the Modern World, that “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention” (98). The sentence just quoted is well known, but equally important is the less famous observation that immediately followed it:

It is a great mistake to think that the bare scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has only to be picked up and used. An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.

Whitehead’s statement serves as a valuable prolegomenon in at least two respects to much of this chapter’s discussion of technology in the twentieth century. First, a distinctive feature of the twentieth century was that the inventive process became powerfully institutionalized and far more systematic than it had been in the nineteenth century. This institutionalization of inventive activity meant that innovation proceeded in increasingly close proximity to organized research in the twentieth century. Of course, this research was not confined, as Whitehead appreciated, to the realm of science, much less to scientific research of a fundamental nature. But Whitehead’s observation is apposite in another respect as well. For all its reorganization and institutionalization, the realization of the economic impact of twentieth-century scientific and technological advances has required significant improvement and refinement of the products in which they are embodied.