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The Revolution of Ideas: Widespread Patenting and Invention During the English Industrial Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Richard J. Sullivan
Richard J. Sullivan
Affiliation:
The author is Assistant Professor of Economics at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610.
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Abstract

Sectors of the English economy recognized as technological leaders have records of accelerated patent activity soon after 1760. But the patent record also reveals considerable inventive activity during the same period in industries not normally associated with advancing technology. It is therefore unlikely that there was a “leading technological sector.” The widespread increase in patenting is consistent with macroeconomic causes of accelerated invention.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 349 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1990

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References

He thanks Jeremy Atack, David Wishart, Carolyn Cooper, Leslie Sullivan, Julian Simon, Tim Sullivan, Jack Powelson, Thomas Hughes, and Paul Hohenberg for their helpful comments.Google Scholar

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2 Landes, David, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, MA, 1969), p. 78, 41.Google ScholarSee also Mathias, Peter, The First Industrial Nation (New York, 1969), p. 134Google Scholar; Hartwell, R. M., “The Causes of the Industrial Revolution” in Hartwell, R. M., ed., The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1967), p. 79Google Scholar; and Crafts, British Economic Growth, pp. 85–88.Google Scholar

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6 I use the industry as a basis for classification because most writing about eighteenth-century English invention focuses on industrial sectors. In his discussion of this paper, Thomas Hughes noted that classification based on productive systems (for example, motive power or machine tools) might be more appropriate.Google Scholar

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