Crossover Inventors and Technological Linkages: American Shoemaking and the Broader Economy, 1848–1901

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Crossover Inventors and Technological Linkages: American Shoemaking and the Broader Economy, 1848—1901 ROSS THOMSON Many technologies are linked across industries. Such interindustry linkages can influence technological change; as a result, advances in one industry may depend on progress in a second and set conditions for the evolution of a third. Technological change then takes on an interindustry cumulativeness that helps explain why economically advanced countries lead in many industries, not just one. This article will try to show that technological linkages across industries directed invention along certain paths in the case of U.S. shoe manufacturing in the second half of the 19th century. It will then argue that linkages could only have had this effect because socioeco­ nomic institutions, including firms, occupations, and communities of inventors, immersed inventors in communication networks that helped them identify and make use of technological linkages. Thus, linkages and social structure both affected invention. Issues To clarify the thesis, consider how linkages are analyzed by two historians of technological change, Nathan Rosenberg and Thomas Hughes. Technological linkages refer to connections among technical problems or among their solutions. Linkages are of two types. On the one hand, problems concerning the adequacy of a production process or product are interdependent; solving one problem may have little impact without solving others and may even generate new problems requiring attention. Hence, technological change may be driven by a sequence of such problems. The dependence of James Watt’s steam Dr. Thomson, formerly with the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research, is the chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Vermont. This article benefited from the comments of John Berry, Carolyn Cooper, Robert Heilbroner, David Weiman, and the Technology and Culture referees. John Berry, David DeRamus, Salim Khan, and William O’Callaghan provided research assistance.© 1991 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/91/3204-0005$01.00 1018 Crossover Inventors and Technological Linkages 1019 engine on John Wilkinson’s cannon-boring machine is a classic example. Rosenberg calls the problematic feature of a production process or product a technological imbalance; for Hughes, it is a reverse salient.1 Such problems arise in relation to the purposes of specific agents. Rosenberg focuses on one kind of agent, the firm (or group of firms), for which imbalances limit profitability. For Hughes, techno­ logical systems are agents; for example, the electrical light and power system must overcome reverse salients in order to generate and distribute electrical power. This system includes not only utility companies, but also suppliers, designers, and even financiers and regulatory agencies.2 On the other hand, a solution may be applied to technological problems quite different from the problem originally addressed, such as when the stationary steam engine was adapted to water and land transportation. Rosenberg calls this wider applicability technological convergence and illustrates it with the remarkable series of machinetool innovations that connected the production of firearms, sewing machines, bicycles, and automobiles in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hughes’s idea of a salient can support a similar argument. In part, salients are just the techniques limited by—and thus defining—reverse salients. But salients can lead to the solution of ‘That both Nathan Rosenberg, an economic historian, and Thomas Hughes, a historian of technology, employ these categories suggests a place where the two kinds of history can fruitfully learn from one another. Rosenberg discusses imbalances in many of his writings, including “Technological Change in the Machine Tool Industry,” pp. 9—31, and “The Direction of Technological Change: Inducement Mechanisms and Focusing Devices,” pp. 108-25, both in his Perspectives on Technology (New York, 1976) (hereafter Perspectives). The latter article expands imbalances to include nontechnological limits of the supply of labor and other inputs. Hughes analyzes reverse salients widely (Networks ofPower: Electrification in Western Society, 1880—1930 [Baltimore, 1983], American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870—1970 [New York, 1989]). He develops the idea of a system in these works and in “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas...