How America's individual inventors persisted alongside corporate R&D
labs as an important source of inventions.
During the nineteenth century, heroic individual inventors such as
Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell created entirely new industries
while achieving widespread fame. However, by 1927, a New York Times
editorial suggested that teams of corporate scientists at General
Electric, AT&T, and DuPont had replaced the solitary "garret inventor"
as the wellspring of invention. But these inventors never disappeared.
In this book, Eric Hintz argues that lesser-known inventors such as
Chester Carlson (Xerox photocopier), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries),
and Earl Tupper (Tupperware) continued to develop important technologies
throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, Hintz explains how
independent inventors gradually fell from public view as corporate
brands increasingly became associated with high-tech innovation.
Focusing on the years from 1890 to 1950, Hintz documents how American
independent inventors competed (and sometimes partnered) with their
corporate rivals, adopted a variety of flexible commercialization
strategies, established a series of short-lived professional groups,
lobbied for fairer patent laws, and mobilized for two world wars. After
1950, the experiences of independent inventors generally mirrored the
patterns of their predecessors, and they continued to be overshadowed
during corporate R&D's postwar golden age. The independents enjoyed a
resurgence, however, at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Apple's
Steve Jobs and Shark Tank's Lori Greiner heralded a new generation of
heroic inventor-entrepreneurs. By recovering the stories of a group once
considered extinct, Hintz shows that independent inventors have long
been--and remain--an important source of new technologies.
