The post-heroic generation: American independent inventors, 1900--1950

This dissertation considers the changing fortunes of American independent inventors from approximately 1900 to 1950, a period of expanding corporate R&D, the Great Depression, and two world wars. The nineteenth century had witnessed the so-called "heroic" era of invention, when mythic individuals like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell created entirely new industries from their inventions while achieving widespread fame. However, beginning in 1900, several large firms like General Electric, Du Pont, and AT&T established the first research and development (R&D) laboratories in which teams of anonymous Ph.D. scientists developed new products with all resulting patents assigned to the company. By World War I, the public (and later, many historians) had come to believe that corporate R&D labs had displaced individual inventors as the wellspring of innovation. However, a close look at the historical U.S. patent data shows that patents granted to individual inventors outnumbered corporate patents until 1933 and still represented 46.5% of total patents in 1950. Indeed, independent inventors continued to contribute many important innovations throughout the early twentieth century, including Samuel Ruben's Duracell batteries, Edwin Land's Polaroid film, and Chester Carlson's Xerox photocopying process. Thus, individual, "post-heroic" inventors remained an important, though less visible, source of inventions in the early twentieth century.;Drawing upon the archival records of several inventors, firms, industry groups, and government agencies, this study fills an important interpretive gap in the history of American innovation. Historians know comparatively little about the professional and political activities of "post-heroic" independent inventors relative to their heroic forefathers or corporate contemporaries. Accordingly, the dissertation documents how this lesser-known cohort of inventors navigated the evolving business practices and political-economic crises of the early twentieth century. More broadly, it helps explain how American independent inventors---once revered as heroes---gradually lost their cultural primacy while corporate brands became increasingly associated with high-tech innovation. Overall, this research documents the underappreciated role of independent inventors as a continuing and important source of innovation in the first half of the twentieth century.