TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1113 University Press of Virginia in 1992. This important collection of 18th- and 19th-century papers will contain selected documents per taining to Dr. Thornton’s life (1759—1828). Barbara S. Janssen Ms. Janssen is a specialist in the Division of Textiles at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. She has written the exhibition catalog, Technology in Miniature: American Textile Patent Models, 1819 to 1840, and recently edited Icons ofInvention: American Patent Models. The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States. By Ross Thomson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Pp. xiii + 296; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95. Although historians have produced a number of studies about the impact of industrialization on the shoe industry and on shoe workers and their community, few of these works have looked at the problem atic nature of mechanization itself. Ross Thomson begins his impor tant work by asking how mechanized production came to replace craft production in the shoe industry. Institutions, customs, and social relations gave rise to the produc tion of shoes. In a preindustrial world those institutions were tied to craft production. Mechanization revolutionized that world. Thomson wants to know how that change occurred when the institutions were qualitatively changed as well. In problematizing the process of tech nological change, Thomson rejects the view that superior technology inevitably replaces earlier methods. He argues that the shoe machin ery developed according to the logic of a commodity path where structural social processes generate and diffuse change. Machine sales led to machine diffusion and to learning. Machine inventors learned from customers the needs for both new machines and machine improvement. This process contributed to machine firm growth and revenue for investment in new machines. Thomson does not argue that markets drove technological devel opment. Before major mechanical invention, the market for a com modity was not developed, and machine-makingability and knowledge of technical problems and the skills to solve them were isolated. Yet the institutions of the shoe industry, which were already integrating mar kets, concentrating production, and increasing scale, encouraged the emergence of new techniques. Once the original mechanical invention had been made, agents and social forms of innovation developed through the process of sales, bringing together those with particular needs and those who had the skills to solve technological problems. This new process also created marketing practices and financial in struments. 1114 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE To tell this story, Thomson mined the U.S. Patent Office records. Linking patents with inventors, Thomson was able to find regional links and sketch patterns of connections. Unfortunately, although the work has a great deal of information to offer the economic historian, its presentation does not encourage readership. Except for his discussion of the development of the sewing machine, it is a dry story that Thomson tells. If he can capture the historical story, as he does in his discussion of the sewing machine, and combine it with the detail of analysis that informs the rest of the book, his next work should find a more general audience. John T. Cumbler Dr. Cumbler teaches in the Department of History at the University of Louisville. The Bell System, and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South, 1877-1920. By Kenneth Lipartito. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi + 283; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $29.50. This book recounts the history of the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company from 1877 to 1920. The work is based on Kenneth Lipartito’s prize-winning dissertation in economic history. Its most interesting material explores how a large-scale, nationwide system—the telephone network—adapted to the regional peculiarities of the South during the early stages of its development. As the author puts it, the attempt to develop a nationwide telephone system led to the discovery that “America was not simply a flat, uninterrupted economic plane on which any edifice could be built” (p. 208). The South’s economy was more localized and lacked the capital and entrepreneurial skills of regions such as New England. Lipartito notes that it took two imported northerners, James Ormes and Edward J. Hall, to develop fully...