EH.Net Classic Review: Usher’s A History of Mechanical Invention

12 December 2006 at 8:29 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

George Grantham reviews Abbott Payson Usher’s A History of Mechanical Invention (1929), the first book to “establish logical foundations for an empirically based explanation of economic change.”

By what intellectual and social processes do new methods of production, new products, and new patterns of behavior become objects of choice in the stream of economic and social life?

Historians traditionally answered this question in two ways. The first was that inventions are inspired intuition given to exceptionally gifted persons. This approach stressed the discontinuity of inventions and the importance of a small number of inventors in creating the modern world. Usher deemed it “transcendental,” because in taking invention to be what amounts to a miracle, it puts the event logically outside time, so that it can have no mere historical explanation. The second approach took the opposite tack of holding that inventions occur continuously in small steps induced by the stress of necessity, somewhat like Darwinian evolution. Usher termed this approach “mechanistic,” because it relegated the inventor to the status of “an instrument or an expression of cosmic forces.” Neither the transcendental nor the mechanistic account of invention, then, was historical in the sense that explanation necessarily takes the form of a narrative. To the transcendentalist, inventions just happen (and we should all be grateful they do); to the mechanist, they occur automatically in the fullness of time. Neither explains how inventions happen. . . .

Usher proposed that the inventor “sees” a solution to the specific problem occupying his mind at the instant of insight. The problem serves as a focal point for organizing bits of information into a pattern that potentially resolves it. Drawing on a graphical device used by gestalt theorists to illustrate the “law of closure,” Usher compared the moment of insight to mentally arranging a set of broken arcs into a circle, thereby satisfying the desire for completion stimulated by the problem. . . .

The gestalt experiments indicate that the process of invention is strictly sequential, in that a problem must be adequately posed and the materials for its solution assembled before insight can occur. Usher identified a fourth stage in the process. Just as a new scientific finding has to be integrated into the existing stock of knowledge, so technological insight has to be translated into a working model and scaled up (or down) to the size needed to perform the desired task. Not every insight is workable. It took Watt nearly a decade to transform his insight into a commercially viable steam engine, and had it not been for the skills of Matthew Boulton’s machinists and Wilkinson’s boring machine, the effort probably would have failed. Usher termed that stage “critical revision.” Like the other stages, it consists of many acts of problem-solving.

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