Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750–1914
Book Review by: Pat Hudson
For Citation: Business History Review 83 (Autumn 2009)
This book starts with two simple questions. Why are so few British inventors famous today? Why are those who are recognized, with one or two notable exceptions, all males born in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? James Watt, George Stephenson, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, Humphrey Davey, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel head the pantheon now, as they did in 1850. Since heroes are made rather than born, Christine Macleod favors a cultural explanation, albeit one with economic, social, and political underpinnings. Inventors in the seventeenth century were generally seen as potential fraudsters and treated accordingly. Invention was seen as “a divine attribute, which mortals emulated at their peril” (p. 25). Recognition of the inventor had to await the Enlightenment’s changing philosophical views of the role of man in creativity and the growing visibility of the successes of science in manufacturing productivity, smallpox vaccination, balloon flight, and other marvels.
The installation of a giant statue of Sir James Watt in Westminster Abbey in 1834, financed by a list of subscribers headed by the King, marked an important cultural turning point. Macleod explores this event in depth in a superbly researched chapter. The star of the inventor was at its zenith by the late nineteenth century, marked by greater accessibility of the patent system from 1852 and by more decisions favorable to applicants. At the Great Exhibition, in civic honors, popular celebration, and, above all, in the “statumania” and heroic painting of the late Victorian period, the inventor as hero was a ubiquitous and accepted figure. His position was bolstered by middle-class support, part of its challenge to aristocratic power, and supported by free traders keen to privilege the recognition of men of science rather than of war or empire. The inventor as hero was also taken up by radical artisans determined to celebrate the achievements of honest labor and skills, rather than militarism or nationalism, and to use the inventor as a model of the rise of the “ordinary man” that could be mobilized to serve the campaign for the extension of the franchise in the 1860s. Macleod’s chapter entitled “The Workers’ Heroes” is particularly engaging, but she is equally assured in detailing the lobbying, fights, and negotiations surrounding the nature and placement of public statuary in towns and cities, particularly in her account of “The Battle for Trafalgar Square.”
In the twentieth century, circumstances conspired to reduce the status of inventors once again, but this decline was not simply the result of the preemption by research laboratories of the role of individual inventors; nor was it a manifestation of the decline of the industrial spirit. Macleod is adamant that her analysis should put paid to a belief in British cultural or economic decline from the late nineteenth century onward. She sees such decline as a product of late twentieth-century historiography: the bourgeoisie did not fail to appreciate it own achievements at any point, especially in the late nineteenth century. In fact, the reality was quite the reverse.
Successful inventors proliferated after 1900, but few reached the pantheon of national recognition or state honors, partly because technological change was increasingly taken for granted, and partly because the “mere inventor” was superseded in popular estimation by successful and wealthy entrepreneurs with philanthropic, civic, and political achievements. At the same time, more deterministic and collaborative understandings of technological change emerged that left less scope for the heroic role of the individual. MacLeod’s research thus opens a window not just onto the way in which society sees inventors, but also onto the ways in which technology and technological progress are themselves understood and pursued.
One might suggest that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventors were lauded more than their predecessors and successors, not because of changing conceptions of the nature of technology or invention, but simply because they were the most obvious manifestation of progress (for many different groups in society) in an age that was, in any case, marked by hero worship, public and civic celebration, and the rise of biography as a literary form. A further criticism of this book might be leveled at the minimal level of its gender analysis, particularly as the author sets this up as a central issue in her introduction. Nevertheless, Heroes of Invention remains a vital resource for all readers interested in the culture and iconography of nineteenth-century Britain, for historians of technology and science, and for students of the business and economic history of the period. It is very well written. It is also highly assured in its treatment of a diversity of literature and ideas, areas not normally found together in a single volume, and in marshalling and interpreting the evidence harnessed to the book’s central thesis.