In the middle of the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill, who was capable of taking gloomy views in sunny prose, paused to reflect on the "exceptional" na­ture of the cotton textile industry. For years, he remarked, textiles had benefited from continual freshets of technological improve­ment. As a result, England‘s eco­nomic well-being had kept pace with its growth in population. But Mill, surveying the industrial landscape, thought it unlikely that the experience of the textile trade would be repeated very often in other lines.

Since Mill’s time, other com­mentators have been afraid that new, so-called "ladder" industries would not be forthcoming to haul the human race out of incipient stagnation. During the depression of the 1870′s in America there were predictions that the age of invention was nearing its close. In the 1930′s the Tugwellians among the New Dealers talked of a "mature economy" which would fail in the nature of things to generate sufficient employment to keep free capitalism going.

Reflecting a predominantly pes­simistic strain of thought, econo­mists have often mistaken their "equilibrium" models for a reality that knows no equilibrium. They have thought of profits as some­thing that must tend to disappear as "perfect" competition takes over in all possible fields of en­deavor. But the one "constant" of the past century and a half has been change, even in fields where "know-how" is as old as capital­ism itself. The textile industry, which is still changing (crease­less fabrics, the Sulzer loom), was merely the first of many "ladder" industries which have continually transformed society. An economic model, to be a true reflection, must allow for heavy infiltrations of disruption. And the pace, the incidence, of disruption must re­main a largely unknown quantity unless economists can isolate the causes of invention itself.

When one must allow for an un­known which can’t be expressed even in terms of likely probabili­ties, the scientists must yield to the hunch player, the artist, the man of intuition. But the scientists among the economic prophets haven’t yielded; they have merely left the unknown out of account. Reflecting on this singular state of affairs, the three authors of The Sources of Invention, John Jewkes, David Sawers, and Rich­ard Stillerman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 428pp. $6.75), be­gin their book with a raking broadside directed at most of their economic brethren. "Future historians of economic thought," they say, "will doubtless find it remarkable that so little system­atic attention was given in the first half of this century to the causes and consequences of indus­trial innovation. Material prog­ress, it had long been taken for granted, was bound up with tech­nical advance and technical ad­vance in turn, with change, va­riety, and novelty; but whence this novelty, how closely it was re­lated to rising standards of living, whether and how it might be stim­ulated or stifled: all this ground remained largely untrodden by the economic historian or the eco­nomic theorist."

Seeking to isolate the reasons for the oversight, Jewkes and his collaborators note the complexity of the subject. But the way to deal with complexity is to plunge in and break it down. Jewkes and his team admit to their lack of training in the understanding of technology and invention. They don’t know whether there is an "optimum rate" of invention or not. But since nobody else has volunteered to do the job of ex­ploring the "sources of inven­tion," the Jewkes team has taken the bit between its collective teeth. The result is an extremely ex­hilarating book which assembles many materials for a first go at generalizations that must be made if economics is to allow for the in­novator who, at periodic intervals, blows every equilibrium sky high.

Some Fallacies Exploded

The Sources of Invention be­gins by questioning the big cliché of the moment, that under "mod­ern" conditions invention must in­creasingly tend to issue from giant corporate laboratories. While the authors refuse to dog­matize, they assemble plenty of evidence that the independent in­ventor is still extremely impor­tant. Conversely, they make mincemeat of the cliché that the inventor in Victorian times tended to be an ignoramus from a garret or the back room of a coun­try tool shed. The earliest inven­tors — James Watt of the steam engine, Eli Whitney of the cotton gin and the first American venture in making interchangeable parts, W. H. Perkin of the pioneer ani­line dye — moved in good univer­sity society, kept up with scien­tific development, and compared notes with other pioneers in the industrial arts.

By assembling fifty modern case histories (which they publish in Part II of their book) the authors make it fairly apparent that twen­tieth century invention differs hardly at all from invention going back to the time of James Watt and the many men who turned spinning and weaving from a cot­tage industry into the first approximation of the modern factory system. To begin with, even in days of big corporations inven­tion depends not on a team but on a brain capable of taking a leap which no other man has ever suc­ceeded in taking before. A team can do the work of testing and elaboration once someone has shown it the way to go. But the point which stands out clearly from The Sources of Invention is that the inventor is not an or­ganizable person. He must be free to question, to pursue unlikely look­ing leads, to go off at a tangent, to be uncooperative if he thinks he knows better than the other fellow. As W. I. B. Beveridge has said in The Art of Scientific In­vestigation (quoted by Jewkes and his colleagues), "No one be­lieves an hypothesis except its originator … a corollary … is that a scientist works much better when pursuing his own hypothesis than that of someone else…."

The authors of The Sources of Invention do not question the uses of large-scale corporate research. They pay generous tribute to the Du Pont Company for pouring $6 million into research and $21 mil­lion into plant investment to pro­duce nylon. They praise General Motors for its work on antiknock gasoline and safe refrigerants. They tell the story of the develop­ment of crease-resisting fabrics by the British Lancashire textile firm of Tootal Broadhurst Lee. (Incidentally, Tootal Broadhurst Lee is not a particularly big com­pany.) Invention and inventors would not do very well if corpor­ations weren’t there to supply de­velopment funds, and to provide broadscale testing and pilot plant manufacture. But this is not to say that inventions can be easily commanded "on order" by the big concern.

Du Pont brought nylon into being by a massive attack on the chemistry of polymerization. But the Du Pont Company did not bring nylon into being by "team" invention carried out by due proc­ess of administration. Du Pont "got" nylon because it had the good sense to hire Dr. Wallace H. Carothers, a 32-year-old chemist who had already given a lot of thought to the structure of sub­stances of high molecular weight at Harvard. Moreover, luck played its part in Carothers’ discovery that molten polymer could be drawn out into a long fiber that would greatly increase in strength and elasticity if it were "redrawn" again after it had cooled off.

As for General Motors and its antiknock and refrigeration dis­coveries, it was a case of hiring a known inventor and letting him continue as he had been doing all along. "Boss" Kettering was a law unto himself at General Motors, and it was this stanch individual­ist who had hired Thomas Midgley, Jr., a mechanical engi­neer, to help him before GM bought Kettering‘s Dayton, Ohio, company. Going to GM with Ket­tering, Midgley proceeded to "get up" chemistry for himself. Thus we have the odd combination of Kettering, an electrical engineer, Midgley, a mechanical engineer, and GM, an automobile company, making great chemical discoveries that one might logically have ex­pected to come from oil companies or Du Pont.

What Jewkes and his team pound home without even half try­ing is that it is the free-wheeling individual, not the administrative team, that is the primary source of invention. Major Armstrong, a lone wolf, developed the famous feed-back circuit which made mod­ern commercial radio a possibility — and it was the same Armstrong who developed frequency modula­tion. An Englishman, Frank Whittle, who found it impossible to gain the support of either the British Air Ministry or aeroengi­neering firms, brought the jet en­gine into being before Rolls Royce and the government took it over. Individual inventors were respon­sible for the safety razor, the self-winding watch, continuous steel casting, the zip fastener, the Sulzer loom (which does away with the clumsy shuttle of tradition), color photography (two musicians car­ried this through in a kitchen and between stops on a concert tour before Eastman Kodak hired them), synthetic light polarizers, penicillin and streptomycin, the cyclotron (the first cyclotron was a homemade contraption of win­dow glass, sealing wax, brass, a clothes tree, and an ordinary kitchen chair). Indeed, after Jewkes and his mates get through with their voluminous run-down, it is hard to see how the theory of the inevitability of "group" or "administrative" invention by great companies in the "oligopoly" category ("few to manufacture and sell") ever came into existence in the first place.

Being cautious men, Jewkes and his colleagues fight shy of the all-inclusive statement. Nevertheless, it may safely be said that The Sources of Invention proves the case for the free man whether he works for a big concern, the small company, or all by his lonesome self. As for the economic effects of freedom, the upshot of the Jewkes-Sawers-Stillerman work is that business upturns will take care of themselves as long as in­vention and technology are let alone. John Stuart Mill needn’t have worried about the future in 1850; and, barring interference by politicos, we needn’t worry about it now.

“Citadel, Market and Altar” by Spencer Heath. (Baltimore: The Science of Society Foundation, 1957. 259 pp.)

Reviewed By Murray Rothbard

For more than two decades, Mr. Spencer Heath has served, un­heralded, the cause of freedom in America. Now, with Citadel, Mar­ket and Altar, this keen and sprightly octogenarian offers his magnum opus after what has been a virtual lifetime of thought and effort, following his retirement as an eminent aeronautic engineer and patent attorney.

Heath’s most remarkable qual­ity is the striking originality of his thought; for he has carved out an elaborate philosophic system much of which is his own, and he has pushed these ideas on liberty beyond their usual limits to new and exciting frontiers. He is per­haps the first scholar since World War I to advocate the supply of defense and other "public" serv­ices by voluntary methods instead of coercive taxation. Not only that. He offers a plan for voluntary fi­nance of defense which is unique, and which never occurred to the eminent nineteenth century spon­sors of "voluntaryism."

Heath arrived at his plan in the process of emerging from the Georgist movement, of which he was a prominent member. The Henry Georgists believed that all "public" services should be fi­nanced by a single tax on land (es­pecially urban) rent. Heath, ac­cepting the theory that public services should be paid for by rent, came to ask the question: Why not supplied by private land­lords rather than by government? From this question came Heath’s new theory of "proprietary ad­ministration": that all the land­lords in a given city should pool their assets into one city-wide corporation which would own all the land and supply public serv­ices to the tenants for their rent charges. Taxation and all the other trappings of government would then disappear, and the rights of persons and private property would become truly inviolate. The only voting would be through the shareholders’ democracy that pre­vails in any corporation, with landowners voting in proportion to their shares in the corporate entity.

It is questionable whether the free market, if no longer subject to taxation, would resolve its re­maining problems in precisely the manner Mr. Heath proposes. His proposal is, at any rate, a chal­lenging one, and it deserves seri­ous consideration.

There are many other important contributions in this book. Among them is Heath’s conclusive demon­stration that landlords perform a highly worthy and important function: that of allocating land sites.

Some of the best nuggets are buried in the appendix. Note Heath’s unsurpassed definition of monopoly:

Monopoly exists when government by its coercive power limits to a par­ticular person or organization, or combination of them, the right to sell particular goods or services, and thereby abrogates the right of any other person or organization to com­pete … Neither bigness nor single­ness can be injurious, so far as it results from the unforced prefer­ences of purchasers and freedom of competition prevails.