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Innovation and Management Policies — The Textile Machinery Industry: Influence of the Market on Management
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2012
Extract
Many will think it strange that the textile machinery industry should have been chosen to point up a discussion of innovation, especially technological innovation. No industry in America has been more consistently singled out as an example of technological backwardness. About a decade ago the Honorable Henry Wallace, while on a lecture tour of New England, voiced the opinion that the American textile machinery industry was a hundred years behind the times. That Mr. Wallace based his statement on information so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless is of little importance. What is important is that all with eyes to see are likely to agree with him. Anyone who is familiar with the modern spinning frame and who, on visiting the Smithsonian Institute, chances to see on display there the spinning frame built by Samuel Slater in 1790 is inevitably struck by the similarity between the two machines.
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- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1951
References
Editor's Note: This paper was read at a joint meeting of the Business Historical Society, Inc., and the American Historical Association, held in Chicago on December 28, 1950.
1 Stern, Boris, “Mechanical Changes in the Cotton-Textile Industry, 1910–1936,” Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, August, 1937.Google Scholar In contrast to American experience, a Report of the Cotton Textile Mission to the United States of America, March-April, 1944 (London, 1944), stated that cotton machinery efficiency in the United Kingdom increased very little after 1910.
2 See Gibb, George S., The Saco-Lowell Shops: Textile Machinery Building in New England, 1818–1949 (Cambridge, 1950)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chap, ix, and Navin, Thomas R., The Whitin Machine Works since 1831: A Textile Machinery Company in an Industrial Village (Cambridge, 1950), Chap. xiii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Probably the most exceptional of all devices invented between the 1850's and the 1920's was the Draper automatic loom, an innovation that would be considered of the first order in any industry. But the Draper loom was as exceptional in its origin as in its design. The Drapers had the advantage of an established position in the textile industry; they were no mere upstarts. They had made their money from the royalties on a patent pool which they controlled. Having need of only a small plant, they had no need to reinvest their earnings in fixed assets; their capital was large and it was liquid. As they saw their key patents about to expire, they turned every effort toward inventing a satisfactory automatic loom. What they achieved was unusual indeed, but no more unusual than the special set of circumstances that drove them to risk such large sums on developmental work. Similar risks could never have been taken by other manufacturers in the industry; others had neither so much to lose nor so much liquid capital to risk. It is worth noting that the Drapers, upon becoming large-scale manufacturers themselves, did not take such risks again.
4 The rest of this paper deals with the influence of the market on innovations in the design of textile machinery. The paper should not, however, give the impression that the market has been the only factor governing innovations of this type.
5 Other sources of ideas were the foreign machine builders who, until about the 1920's, were usually ahead of the American machine builders in their technological progress, but they, too, generally derived their new ideas from customer mills.
6 Many present-day automobile purchasers follow the same policy.
7 This paper deals only with innovations in product design. Still another paper might be written on the influence of the market on innovations in manufacturing methods. In such a paper the machinery builders would themselves become the market, since they would be the purchasers of goods and services such as steel and pig iron, drill presses and lathes, management consulting services, and wage incentive advice. The conclusions of this second paper might, however, differ radically from the conclusions set forth above. In comparison with the relationship between machinery builders and theircustomers, the relationship between the suppliers of the machinery builders and the many different types of customers whichthose suppliers have (automobile manufacturers, farm machinery suppliers, air frame fabricators, etc.) is highly complex. Consequently the influence of the market on those suppliers would be considerably less easy to analyze and rather less subject to generalization.
8 Many in the machinery industry have long insisted that quite naturally a technique as old and as much worked over as the production of textile goods can be improved only with increasing difficulty and with diminishing returns, and that modifications are the only possible means of advance. Others have taken a scoffing view of this notion. Clearly the burden of proof will remain with the scoffers until such time as some radically new machines are perfected.