Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis:  A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004.

Thomas Hughes’ book American Genesis is a foundational work in the area of American Technological history.  Hughes’ primary thesis is that the United States is a nation of inventors and system builders, rather than a nation of business.  America is the original “modern technological nation.”[1] For Hughes, the business of America is not business, but invention of systems for control of the natural and human world.  Hughes hopes to look at the work of inventors in three major stages of American History: the era of independent inventors, from 1870 to the First World War; the era of the scientists, from World War I to the Great Depression and World War II, and the era of government supported invention beginning in World War II and running to the counter-culture era of the 1960’s.[2] The goal, ultimately, is to take an academic approach to the history of American inventiveness and to dig deeper than the hagiography so commonly found in literature on the subject.  Hughes wants to know what the inventors have in common with each other in terms of method, choice of problem, and sources of funding.  To some degree, Hughes seems to hope to explain why, as he says, America has been the most inventive nation in history through this work.

The book is remarkably disciplined in its approach and organization.  Hughes has given a relatively simple thesis, and supported it with numerous generalities about the state of science and invention in the industrializing West, in order to put American inventiveness in the context of world culture.  His assertion that Americans are the most inventive nation on earth seems at first to be a very subjective statement, but he does provide some examples to support the idea.  The distribution of chapters and their content is, though, well done, easy to read, and helps the reader to follow Hughes argument easily.  The book is also written well, and is very interesting.  It is one of the few academic books that seem well suited for the trade market as well.

The first two chapters are maybe the most fascinating of all for readers used to the vast collection of hagiography on American inventors.    Hughes’ academic approach does not concentrate on the genius of these people, but rather looks for similarities in method, and in choice of problems to solve, and links those to the ever-present problem of finding funds to support their work.  He sees this period as the “American genesis” – launching the United States on the trajectory of great inventiveness he wants to claim as its historical legacy.  Still, he does not make that claim based on un-measurable claims of intellectual brilliance.  Instead, he explains, and then takes on, the measure of success that most of these inventors used themselves – counting patents.  Hughes provides some amazing statistics in this regard.  Edison, for example, produced more than 1000 patents over his inventive lifespan.

In these first chapters Hughes delves into what these inventors did and finds patterns.  They often worked in scientific style using experimentation.  They uniformly conducted research into the problem and earlier attempted solutions.  They rarely worked alone, but instead almost always had assistants who were craftsmen and could turn their ideas into models and real prototypes.  Finally, most had private laboratories, libraries, and large inventories of equipment so that whatever might be needed in the heat of experiment was easily found.

Chapter two is specifically about the way in which the inventors chose the problems they were going to work on.  Here, Hughes tries to make the point that they were always attempting to solve problems that were already identified and the subject of study by others.  They also studied these problems intently, often combing through former patent applications, studying prior proposed solutions deeply to try to identify their weak points, then choosing to work on them.  But, the problems were inevitably big ones.  For the most part, independent inventors like Edison, Sperry, and Tesla were not interested in improving systems that already worked, but in creating new inventions that were generative of such systems.  The first Hughes takes pains to identify as “innovation” – the improvement and distribution of a new solution to a problem, whereas the second Hughes calls “invention” and defines as the creation of a new solution to a major problem.

In Chapter three, Hughes identifies the military industrial complex as existing long before World War II.  In fact, he pushes it back to the turn of the twentieth century, and notes that in the search for funding and practical use of their inventions, even such lionized inventors as the Wright Brothers hoped that the military might be the first and most important purchaser of airplanes.  Others, such as Maxim, and even Edison and Tesla identified the U.S. Military as the most likely entity to be interested in the practical applications of many of their inventions, and often lobbied hard to get the military to see the utility of inventions.  After 1911, this lobbying began to pay off as the Navy began to fund testing of inventions intended for its use.[3]

This leads Hughes into the era of World War I, and the beginning of the era of scientist inventors.  Hughes paraphrases Raymond Aron in The Century of Total War in introducing this new era of inventions by remembering World War I as a war of technological surprises.[4] Concerns about American preparedness for war led the United States to look to its inventors to help with innovation as well.[5] To do this, Edison was recruited (he practically asked for the job) to head a “Naval Consulting Board.”  Edison conceived of this board’s responsibilities as helping to modernize the United States military by preparing it to use labor saving machines in the “factory of death” that he conceived the modern battlefield to be.[6] In the end, the creation of this board, and Edison’s exclusion from it of academic scientists led to a wartime competition between the independent inventors and the scientists to determine who was more the source of innovation.[7]

In Chapter four, Hughes returns to his separation of “invention” from “innovation”, and makes the case that because the independents’ stock in trade was invention of new systems to solve new problems, they became less important in the postwar world, where the need of the government and manufacturers was for new designs to improve systems already in operation.  This conservative approach to invention, what Hughes calls “innovation” was exactly what the academic scientists were good at.  In addition, the profits brought by improvements in existing systems became the battleground for inventors claiming patents on their improvements, or control of patents that improved basic systems they had built.  The legal and business implications of invention and patent became more byzantine, requiring more organization.  In addition, often the improvement of a patented system brought more profit than the original system as invented.  Thus inventors came to require more organization, and more capital.

Hughes locates the beginning of corporate invention in Bell Telephone’s establishment in 1894 of an engineering department, which was responsible for improving systems, but eventually became the company’s research and development arm.[8] Discussing AT&T, General Electric Corp., and du Pont, Hughes comes to the conclusion that the major changes in the invention landscape do not include the complete loss of place for the independent inventor.  Instead, corporate laboratories prove to be good at “routinizing invention” – providing large sums of money, and large numbers of minds, for concentration on innovation in existing systems.  Corporations like du Pont, found this when they attempted to develop new technologies in the dyestuffs industry internally, but overinvestment and lack of return eventually forced them to follow  the AT&T pattern by acquiring smaller companies that already had the knowledge and patents to allow them to move forward with diversification plans.[9] The upshot of this chapter is evidence of the current assumption that while big business can and should do research and development, only the independent inventor (called, today, an ‘entrepreneur’, combining business and technological invention in a single term) is nimble enough to come up with the really new ideas.[10]

In his fifth and sixth chapters, Hughes elaborates on the idea, discussed in the introduction as a part of his thesis, that invention in the United States has not been limited to machines, or in mechanical and electrical solutions to problems.  Instead, Hughes wants to think of invention as having to with the invention of systems that ultimately come to create and control a kind of built environment that is separate from and in control of nature.  In other words, inventions are only parts of ever-larger systems, and the American genius has been to invent these systems.  To show how this works, Hughes first discusses Taylorism, or “scientific management” – the idea that humans should be a part of the manufacturing process, rather than apart from it, making humans, in a way, part of the machinery.  This is the source of the title of the chapter: “The System Must Come First” – the idea being that in the past, production and technology existed for the service of people, but in the modern invented world, the people exist for the system.  These systems include manufacturing, such as the system for Midwestern power distribution created by Samuel Insull, including the systematic way of understanding load and profit maximization, and the system for automobile manufacture created by Henry Ford at his giant River Rouge plant.[11] This service of people to the system, and the ever-increasing size and integration of systems in society – is the essence of American modernism for Hughes.  That essence of modernism is what, he claims, is of interest to the Soviet Union, and to Weimar Germany, when they began adopting, with mixed success, the manufacturing processes, scientific management, and integration of industrial systems of the United States after World War I.

In the seventh chapter, Hughes claims that the invention of systems, industrial, social, economic, and political, in the United States was a cultural transformation, and that this transformation was better recognized from outside the United States than by those taking part in it.  Americans saw the transformation as technological and industrial, but Europeans came to see it as cultural.[12] Hughes supports this point by discussing the futurism of people like Louis Mumford, whose predictions of a “neotechnic” society where future technology and manufacturing processes would exist in small, de-centralized factories operated by highly skilled technicians amounted to a prediction in change of culture characterized by a retreat from the massive centralized factories and cities and an expansion into better lifestyles, less population congestion, and better, more efficient use of communications technology and natural resources.[13] Hughes also locates cultural change in the connection of art to the invented technology of the day, celebrating the order and precision of the systems, from mechanical to social, of inventive America.  Art celebrated inventions, and inventions and innovations became art.[14]

In Chapter eight, Hughes takes on the third phase of his thesis, discussion the era of government supported invention.  The key difference here from the support of government in the era of the two world wars is that, beginning with the Great Depression, government harnesses its support of invention and innovation not only to military technology, but also to civilian uses, and not only to mechanical innovation, but also to social engineering.  The point of the entire chapter can be captured in the way Hughes uses the Tennessee Valley Authority to represent the New Deal.  The Tennessee Valley Authority is shown to be a model of technical innovation, but at the same time an effort in social engineering, used to put people to work, re-build the economy of a large local area, and transform the political and social, as well as economic and technical, climate of the nation.[15] In many ways, this chapter gives us a microcosmic view of continuation of the cultural change Hughes discussed in his previous chapter.

As Chapter eight ends, appropriately, with the Manhattan project – the design and construction of the most destructive weapon ever made, Chapter nine begins with the assertion than since World War II, Americans have come to increasingly distrust technology, industry, and system-building.[16] Here, Hughes brings attention to the perception, exemplified by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, for example, that over-enthusiasm for technological change and development has caused us to destroy, or lose touch with, many parts of the natural world and the past which we may not be able to reclaim.  Returning to Mumford, this time Hughes tells us that he came to see the scientific and technical world as a “sterile wasteland.”[17] Jacques Ellul, says Hughes, came to see modern humans as selling themselves as slaves for a plethora of goods and services.[18] In the end, though, Hughes sees modern humans as unable to wean ourselves from technology, and perhaps at the edge of a new fascination with it.

I found this book fascinating, and Hughes’ organization lends itself well to his thesis.  There are two weak points which I think deserve some attention, though.  First is Hughes’ claim that the United States is the most inventive nation in history.  By some of his criteria, including number of patents granted, and perhaps sheer number of inventors, this estimation may work.  But it is such an un-provable proposition that it almost smacks of American exceptionalism.  For such a well-organized and well-researched book, and one that claims to turn the discussion of inventors into an academic discourse, this seems a somewhat unhelpful claim to make.  Second, it seems, looking over Hughes’ timeline, that the three stages he wants to claim in the history of American inventiveness really occurred almost simultaneously, or at least overlap each other to a degree that makes the claim that they are successive stages somewhat difficult to support.

In all, however, this book seems to me to rank with those of Thomas Kuhn, as seminal in the way it looks at the history of a society and at the history of a phenomenon – the process and effect of invention and inventiveness.  The book is well worth reading, and the more one reads, I suspect, the more one will find.

Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis:  A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004.

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[1] Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis:  A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004), 3.

[2] Ibid., 5-11.

[3] Ibid., 99.

[4] Ibid., 115.

[5] Ibid., 117.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 121.

[8] Ibid., 151.

[9] Ibid., 182.

[10] Ibid., 182-83.

[11] Ibid., 226-43.

[12] Ibid., 295.

[13] Ibid., 302.

[14] Ibid., 324-52.

[15] Ibid., 359-81.

[16] Ibid., 443.

[17] Ibid., 448.

[18] Ibid., 458.  Hughes here is paraphrasing Ellul, who was likening modern humans to the biblical figure Esau.