The Spirit of Innovation in Ohio Cities

Abstract

The Spirit of Innovation in Ohio Cities John W. Kropf Kevin R. Cox, Boomtown Columbus: Ohio's Sunbelt City and How Developers Got Their Way. Columbus, OH: Trillium, 2020. 264 pp. $29.95 (paper). Adam Millsap, Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City. Columbus, OH: Trillium, 2019. 208 pp. $24.95 (paper). Shortly after the Civil War, Union veteran William D. Curtis returned home to Sandusky, Ohio, and started experimenting in the family kitchen with crude blocks of chalk and gypsum from nearby Sandusky Bay. His tinkering led to improved schoolhouse chalk and, later, crayons and paints, founding what would become the American Crayon Company. Curtis was not the only Ohioan to pursue entrepreneurial innovation. Akron's Harvey Firestone and Frank Seiberling experimented with rubber, and Thomas Edison was born in Milan, a dozen miles south of Sandusky. As one of the first tracts opened for settlement in the Northwest Territory, northeast Ohio attracted people with new ideas who "hastened to it as to a seedbed."1 Curtis, Firestone, and Edison were part of a larger, vibrant culture of innovation and growth that took root in nineteenth-century Ohio. Many in Sandusky and other small- to medium-sized midwestern towns believed they could, with enough determination, create something new. Alan Millsap provides an examination of just this kind of innovation and growth in another middle-size Ohio city in Dayton: Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City. A senior fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, Millsap has spent years studying urban development, population trends, labor markets, and federal and local urban public policy. At the book's outset, Millsap posits "a period of optimism" with profiles of exceptional innovators who emerged in Dayton around the turn of the twentieth century (13). His examples are compelling. Union veteran John H. Patterson, for example, moved through a series of businesses where he [End Page 121] was consistently frustrated by a lack of accurate accounting tools. In 1884, he bought a controlling interest in the National Manufacturing Company that produced a recently patented cash register. By the early 1890s, he had changed the name of the company to National Cash Register (NCR) and was selling over 15,000 registers per year. Drawing a parallel with twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, Millsap describes how Patterson "incubated" other start-ups. Two of his employees, Edward Deeds and Charles Kettering, bonded over their common interest as inventors who saw new uses for small electric motors. Deeds had replaced the manual crank on cash registers with an electric motor, and he approached Kettering with the idea of adapting this innovation for the nascent automobile industry. The two formed the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, later Delco (18–19). Luring other engineers away from NCR and working in Deeds's barn, their early breakthrough turned out to be an electric starter that by 1919 had become the industry standard. Orville and Wilbur Wright are easily Dayton's best-known products of its "period of optimism." Millsap emphasizes that the brothers were, like Deeds and Kettering, intensely curious and forward-looking. As they tinkered with bicycles in their shop, they followed developments in the news regarding "the flying problem." They approached the question of power flight by applying their conceptual understanding of the bicycle. They methodically designed a small-scale wind tunnel in their Dayton shop, conducting multiple experiments, and later progressed to applying their discoveries to kites and gliders. On December 17, 1903, Orville piloted their first controlled flight, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Millsap points out that highly respected inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the Smithsonian's Samuel Langley were trying to create a flying machine, but it was two brothers from Ohio, lacking advanced education, outside financing, connections, or government subsidies, who finally succeeded (21). Millsap concludes that the Wright Brothers, Patterson, Deeds, and Kettering were able to thrive in Dayton's culture of innovation (24). They were not the only ones. Millsap also notes that in 1900, Dayton led the list of U.S. cities in the number of patents issued and placed third in 1910. The legacy of this culture brought lasting economic benefit to Dayton. Huffman...