Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America by Carolyn C. Cooper

Abstract

164 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America. By Carolyn C. Cooper. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 326; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00. The punning title of Carolyn Cooper’s admirable study of Thomas Blanchard gives notice of both her approach and her subject. Just as Blanchard’s irregular turning lathe and blockmaking and woodbend­ ing machinery shaped timber into standardized gunstocks, plough handles, or shoe lasts, so “invention itself is a social construct” (p. 3) shaped by society. A principal lathe of invention was a patent system: through its operation the boundaries of particular inventions were drawn and the concept of invention in general defined. Successful inventors were those whose technical ingenuity was matched by their ability to manage their intellectual property. Blanchard was undoubt­ edly successful: at his death in 1864, his estate was worth $100,000, and his name is forever linked with at least one major invention. All this, Cooper argues, he largely owed to the patent system. This book has many strengths, and it will interest historians of technology on multiple levels. Cooper knows her subject thoroughly. She has pursued woodworking machinery through museums and ar­ chives on both sides of the Atlantic, and she describes both machines and production systems with great clarity, assisted by a wealth of drawings, diagrams, and photographs. From this stems a fascinating discussion of the points of originality in Blanchard’s inventions and of how contemporaries established criteria of similarity and dissimilarity in the course of patent litigation. One is forced to recognize the sub­ jective nature of such judgments: was it material that the rival lathes made the same product and did so by copying models, or was it significant that the cutters were of different forms and followed dif­ ferent paths on the workpiece? Cooper herselfendorses the emergent 19th-century consensus, emphasizing process above product and ki­ nematics above components. “Blanchard’s insight was to escape the incompatibility facing him in the lathe by separating the two tasks of cutting and positioning into separate motions ofthe machine. . . .That way the cutting could be fast enough and the positioning slow enough” (p. 80). It was a radical specialization of function comparable to Watt’s invention of the separate condenser. A major application of Blanchard’s lathe was in the manufacture of gunstocks at the Springfield Armory. As an inside contractor operating his lathe on piece rates, Blanchard had an incentive to minimize his costs. This prompted him to devise a series of specialized, labor-saving machines into which the lathe was integrated—the first example in the United States of a sequential production line. Cooper offers a reas­ sessment of this milestone in “the American system of manufactures” and moderates some of the more exaggerated claims for its immediate TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 165 significance. Because only half the gunstocking process was mecha­ nized and only the lathe (among the fourteen machines) was self-acting, Blanchard’s innovations neither increased labor produc­ tivity spectacularly nor replaced handicraft skills to a significant degree. On the other hand, the Ordnance Department almost certainly did not lose money on its investment, providing a counter to the thesis that the pursuit of interchangeability imposed a heavy financial burden. It is a curious feature of Cooper’s concluding chapter that she explicitly denies Blanchard the title of “entrepreneur” (by which she presumably intends “manufacturer”). For, by that stage, she has amply demonstrated his enterprising patent management, to the point where one might classify this book as a business history. Students of diffusion should take note of the positive promotional role that the patent system might play when a patentee adopted a liberal policy of licensing and assignment. Blanchard correctly judged that the market was much larger than he could supply and divided his patent rights by application as well as by geographical territory: the collection of royalties from both makers and users of his machinery gave him a vested interest in its diffusion. This did not make his patents uncontentious, since woodworking machinery was a lucrative field, and Cooper stresses the role of litigation as a regular...