Engineering Invention: Frank J. Sprague and the U.S. Electrical Industry. By Frederick Dalzell. (Cambridge: mit Press, 2010. xiv, 288 pp. $21.60, ISBN 978-0-262-04256-7.)

Abstract

Biographies of great inventors have been a staple of the history of technology since the Scottish writer Samuel Smiles wrote his celebratory Lives of the Engineers in 1862. Acknowledging this tradition while subtly countering it, Frederick Dalzell gives us a readable, thoughtful life of Frank Julian Sprague, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur largely forgotten today. Dalzell shows the importance of Sprague to the development of electrical technology and of his innovations to twentieth-century American life. Sprague was a pioneer in the design of electric motors and mass transit systems, and for this reason alone he deserves a larger historical presence. Dalzell's book has an even higher value, however: it spurs reflection on critical conceptual issues in the history of technology. The majority of historians of technology hold that larger social, economic, and cultural processes shape the invention and diffusion of new technologies. In the main, Dalzell agrees with this view, yet he insists that we make analytical space for Sprague and other gifted individuals who created socially transformative technologies. Indeed, the main strength of this book is that it successfully embeds Sprague's life within the larger technological, social, and economic contexts that he inhabited. Dalzell concludes that “Sprague's career makes a case for the vital role that individual agency played” in the history of technology, but within circumscribed limits (p. 230). In an age when the locus of invention was shifting from the workshop to the corporate research-and-development laboratory, Sprague “catalyzed technological change,” but always within the constraints imposed by “larger social, economic, and cultural forces” (ibid.).