Invention in the Industrial Research Laboratory: Individual Act or Collective Process?

Abstract

Abstract The primary question this chapter explores is whether invention in the industrial research laboratory is an individual act or a collective process. The chapter also addresses the issue of whether the inventive act occurs in a discrete moment or in a more continuous process. These questions will be examined by focusing on the “inventions” of one particular industrial laboratory, the Pioneering Research Lab oratory of the Du Pont Company’s Textile Fibers Department in the period 1928 to 1968. Even in 1928 when this laboratory was established, the diversified, decentralized Du Pont Company had at least a dozen research laboratories; by 1968, the Textile Fibers Department alone had half a dozen laboratories, including four in the Wilmington, Delaware, area and others in Waynesboro, Virginia, and Kinston, North Carolina. The Pioneering Research Laboratory’s mission was to do just what its name implied-to conduct longer term and more basic research and to invent new products and processes within the Textile Fibers Department’s areas of business. This laboratory was extraordinarily productive during this period, especially after 1941, and therefore it provides an excellent vehicle through which to explore the inventing mind. Readers should compare and contrast this chapter’s analysis, which reflects the work of an historian of technology, with that of Dr. Paul Morgan (Chapter 10), who was one of the Pioneering Research Laboratory’s distinguished chemists during a good part of the period under consideration and who is rightfully to be considered an important inventor of the twentieth century.