title: Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations
author: Bernhard J. Stern[^1]
date: 1937
publication: Journal of the Patent Office Society, no. 19, p 930
documentclass: article
toc: true
url: https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39
copyright: "Public Domain (US Gov't, no notice, pre-1964)"
lang: en
...

[^1]: Department of Social Science, Columbia University.


From the Government Printing Office: Technological Trends and National Policy: Including the Social Implications of New Inventions (June 1937). Report on the Subcommittee on Technology to the National Resources Committee.

Re-typed with minor corrections --- a few apparent typos, restructuring longer quotes as blockquotes, and standardising footnote formatting from the original. Longer quote are restyled as blockquotes. Oxford comma is used. Archaic spellings or word-usage in both quotes and the original text is generally preserved, though spellings of "Kadiak" and "Leipzic" are moderised.

Copyright Status: As this work was published by the U.S. Government, in 1937, as a government pulication, without copyright notice, this work is believed to be in the public domain. In the alternative, Fair Use is asserted.


Introduction

Prognoses can be made as to inventions in the offing through a knowledge of the cumulative development and lines of research in specific fields of technology. But such predictions are nonrealistic unless they take into consideration the social and economic setting of these innovations. Basic inventions may be still-born and entire lines of potential development may be prevented, not because of deficiency in engineering plans, but because of factors entirely beyond their scope. Predictions based upon the assumption that if valuable or profitable technological inventions are but conceived, they will be incorporated into industrial life, ignore the evidence of past experience. For the history of inventions in technology is replete with frustrations and protracted delays in the acceptance of innovations which subsequently have proven of inestimable value to mankind.

The acceptance or rejection of technological innovations depends to a large measure on whether they are introduced at a time when an economy is static, contracting, or expanding; whether they appear in a setting of social stratification, of anarchic competition and class struggle, or in a planned industrial order. Within these varied frameworks there are other psychological and cultural factors that determine receptivity to technological innovation which can be brought into perspective by a study of specific cases of opposition to technological change.

The purpose of this report is twofold. It is to present evidence through historical, analytical inquiry that resistance to technological innovation is frequent and powerful enough that it must be taken into consideration when discussing trends, and it is to investigate the socio-economic and psychological factors which are involved in this resistance.

Resistance to Technological Innovations in Various Fields

There will be no attempt here to make an exhaustive compilation of all cases where technological change has met resistance. The high frequency of such opposition makes selection imperative. The basis of choice has been not the spectacular, but the normal occurrence of resistance to technological innovations throughout history, but particularly in recent western societies, in fields which most influence man's life and livelihood, and permit his control and effective utilization of his natural environment. The number of cases discussed will be sufficiently diverse and adequate to give insight into the causes of such resistance and to permit generalizations that have wider applicability.

Transportation

It is clearly to man's advantage to be able to traverse distances with facility and in ease, yet innovations permitting more comfortable and more rapid mobility generally have encountered apathy or overt resistance, and their utilization has repeatedly been restricted by vested interests. In the thirteenth century such resistance manifested itself in the use of carriages. Philip the Fair ordered the wives of citizens of Paris not to ride in carriages in order to preserve the prerogatives of the ladies of the court.[^2] A law likewise sought to prevent the use of coaches in Hungary in 1523, and the Duke Julias of Brunswick in 1588 made riding in coaches by his vassals a crime punishable as a felony, largely on the grounds that it would interfere with military preparedness, for men would lose their equestrian skill. Philip II, Duke of Pomerania-Stettin, also commanded his vassals in 1608 that they should use horses and not carriages.[^3] In England, coaches were not widely used until the time of Elizabeth, who rode only reluctantly in this effeminate conveyance which young men scorned.[^4] In Donegal, Ireland, as late as 1821, carts to carry produce, which had previously been carried in creels on ponies' backs, were rejected as useless.[^5]

There were many impediments placed in the way of stagecoaches in all countries. Local authorities often kept the roads in disrepair lest business be diverted elsewhere. Strangers were taxed excessively for horses, repairs, and stoppages. Tolls and passport requirements were onerous. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century one traveling from Gottingen to Rome had to have his passport vised about 20 times.[^6] Such political interference involved delays and expense, and discouraged travel by stagecoaches long after they were well equipped for distance travel.

Railroads

Turnpike companies profiting by tolls, and owners of stagecoaches were among the most active opponents of railroads. They were supported by tavernkeepers along the route of the roads, and by farmers who felt that the introduction of the railroad would deprive them of markets for horses and for hay. In the United States, Congress had initiated an extensive program of road-building and had already built a national road and many post roads that facilitated travel. The argument that a system of macadamized public highways would better serve the Nation than railroads deserved serious consideration when the dispersion of the population and the crudeness of early railroad development is considered. At this time, also, steam carriages were being considered as a commercial possibility to supersede horses in propelling stagecoaches, and the conflict therefore was not merely between slow railroads and fast horses, which often beat the trains on good roads, but rival forms of steam conveyance, one confined to fixed routes on the rails, the other more mobile. The current competition between the railroads and autobuses was thus anticipated. The railroads emerged as victors in such a decisive fashion that extensive roadbuilding and the development of mechanical conveyances on these roads were checked for decades.

[^2]: Yeats, John, The Technical History of Commerce (London, 1872), p. 178.

[^3]: Beckman, Johann, Beyträge zur Geschichte der Efindungen. 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1783--1805) tr. by William Johnston as A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins. 2 vols. (4th ed. by William Francis and J. W. Griffith (London, 1846), pp. 72--73.)

[^4]: Bishop, J. L., A History of American Manufactuers From 1608 to 1869. 3 vols. (3d ed., Philadelphia, 1868) vol. 1, p. 20.

[^5]: Hamilton, John, Sixty Years' Experience as an Irish Landlord, ed. by H. C. White (London, 1894), pp. 47--48.

[^6]: Boehn, Max von, and Fischel, Oskar, Die Mode: Menschen und Moden in neunzehnten Jarhrhundert. 4 vols. (Munich, 1907--19) tr. by Marian Edwardes as Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century. 4 vols (Rev. ed., London, 1927) vol. i, pp. 177--178.

Advocacy of the "people's road" as against monopolistic railroads became one of the political issues of the Jacksonian period. It was argued in Congress that railways were "vastly inferior" to roads and that "Democratic-Republicans" wanted a road on which all could travel together "no toll, no monopoly, nothing exclusive --- a real 'people's road'."[^7] This opposition was engendered not merely by the fact that the railways business required a considerable capital and a corporate form that made it a "moneyed power", but also by the fact that the railroad operators could hardly have been said to have represented the people's interest, or to have acted in a manner to elicit public confidence. Speculative financing which ruined small investors, the many fraudulent construction contracts, the sale of stock on "through-lines" which remained only branches, the wasteful wars between competing companies, the "squeezing out" of minority stockholders, the high stipends of the railroad directors, the land grabs and excessive subsidies obtained through the bribery of corrupt legislators, and other sharp dealings roused public sentiment against the railroad interests and stimulated hostility to their projects.

[^7]: Haney, L. H., "A Congressional History of Railways in the United States to 1850", in University of Wisconsin Bulletin, Economics and Political Science Series, vol. iii (Madison, 1908), pp. 167--438, 247--248.

In England the resistance to the railroad was largely from the landlord class which, with its feudal privileges, arrayed itself against the aggressive industrial bourgeoisie. The temper of the opposition is to be seen in the remarks of Craven Fitzhardings Berkeley, a member of Parliament for Cheltenham: "Nothing is more distasteful to me than to hear the echo of our hills reverberating with the noise of hissing railroad engines running through the heart of our hunting country, and destroying that noble sport [fox hunting] to which I have been accustomed from my childhood." Sir Astley Cooper, the eminent surgeon, is quoted as saying to Stevenson: "You are proposing to cut up our estates in all directions for the purpose of making an unnecessary road. Do you think for one moment of the destruction of property involved in it? Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing is allowed to go on, you will in a very few years destroy the noblesse!"[^8] It was in protest against the mounting spirit of industrialization that Ruskin, rejecting the "nonsensical" railroad, drove through England in a mail coach.[^9]

[^8]: Quoted in Burgess, E. W., The Function of Socialization in Social Evolution (Chicago, 1916), pp. 18--19.

[^9]: Ludwig, Emil, "In Defense of our Machine Age", in New York Times Magazine (Oct. 21, 1928), pp. 1--2, 23.

In the United States likewise there was opposition to the railroad in a similar strain. It was argued that its use would: "introduce manfactures into the heart of the country, divert industry from the primitive healthful and moral pursuits of agriculture, and bring on us the vices and miseries of manufacturing and commercial places."[^10] Many small towns joined the opposition, some on the grounds that their quiet would be interrupted by steam cars and the influx of strangers, others because business would be diverted to the larger cities. Stephen Van Rensselaer, for example, who was originally one of the wealthy backers of a charter for a railroad between Albany and New York, later opposed the plan on the ground that Albany would be ruined because the railway would divert travel and traffic to Manhattan.[^11]

[^10]: Haddock, Charles B., An Address Delivered before the Railroad Convention at Montpelier, Vt., (Montpelier, 1844), pp. 10--14. Quoted in Corey, Lewis, House of Morgan (New York, 1930) p. 25.

[^11]: Laut, A. C., The Romance of the Rails. 2 vols. (New York, 1929), vol. 1, p. 17.

The vested interests of canal owners, and the sentiments of legislators committed to the building of public canals in which there were already considerable investments, were arrayed against the railroads. Surveyors laying out the road for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway were threatened with violence by the manager of canal properties on the estate of the Duke of Bridgewater and by Lords Derby and Sefton, and farmers were incited against them.[^12] Aided by the landed gentry and the turnpike owners, the canal companies campaigned so vigorously against the railroad that the expenditure of £27,000 was required by the railroad interests to win Parliamentary approval.[^13]

[^12]: Smiles, Samuel, The Life of George Stephenson, (Boston, 1858), pp. 197--202.

[^13]: Kaempffert, Waldemar, "When the Locomotive was a Mad Idea", in New York Times Magazine, (Oct. 6, 1929), pp. 4--5, 29.

In the United States when, in 1812, John Stevens wrote his Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railways and Steam-carriages over Canal Navigation addressed to the commissioners appointed by the State of New York to explore a route for the Erie Canal, his proposals were regarded as ingenious but visionary, and dismissal in the face of the recommendation for the canal by DeWitt Clinton, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert R. Livingston. The latter, Steven's brother-in-law, had been granted a monopoly to navigate the waters of New York State by steamboat and could, therefore, not be expected to be receptive. His letter, dated March 11, 1812, gives the reaction of an "expert" of the time:

Albany, 11th March, 1812

...I had before heard your very ingenious propositions as to the railway communication. I fear, however, on mature reflection that they will be liable to serious objections, and ultimately more expensive than a canal. They must be double, so as to prevent the danger of two such heavy bodies meeting. The walls on which they are placed must at least be four feet below the surface, and three above, and must be clamped with iron, and even then would hardly sustain so heavy a weight as you propose moving at the rate of four miles an hour on wheels. As to wood, it would not last a week; they must be covered with iron, and that, too, very thick and strong. The means of stopping these heavy carriages without a great shock , and of preventing them from running upon each other (for there would be many on the road at once) would be very difficult. In case of accidental stops, or the necessary stops to take wood and water, etc., many accidents would happen. The carriage of condensed water would be very troublesome. Upon the whole, I fear the expense would be much greater than that of canals, without being so convenient.[^14]

When later in 1815 in New Jersey, and in 1823 in Pennsylvania, Stevens received a charter for railroads, capitalists could not be sufficiently convinced of the efficacy of his proposals to give him adequate funds.[^15]

[^14]: Stevens, John, Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railways and Steam-carriages over Canal Navigation (New York, 1812), p. 21.

[^15]: Mitman, C. W., "The Beginning of the Mechanical Transport Era in America", in Smithsonian Inst. Ann. Rept., 1929, (Washington, D.C., 1930), pp. 507--558.

After New York had incurred a heavy debt in the construction of the Erie Canal, mass meetings throughout the State demanded that railroad competition should not be permitted to affect the receipts of the canal. When the charter of the Utica and Schenectady Railroad was granted in 1833, the line was prohibited from carrying any property except the baggage of passengers, a prohibition which prevailed until 1844, when permission to carry freight was granted but only when navigation was suspended and upon the payment of canal tolls. The general railroad incorporation act of 1848 levied canal tolls from railroads parallel to canals and within 30 miles and not until 1851 were restrictions of this character removed. In Pennsylvania also, where there were many State canals, popular sentiment was strong against railroad competition and tonnage taxes were imposed on the Pennsylvania Railroad that were not lifted until 1861.[^16]

[^16]: Cleveland, F. A., and Powell, F. W., Railroad Promotion and Capitalization in the United States, (New York, 1909), pp. 73--75.

Propaganda of vested interest groups was potent. It was easy to arouse opposition of farmers along the right-of-way, on the grounds that the roaring locomotives would startle the cattle and prevent them from grazing in safety, that hens would not lay, that the poisoned air from the locomotives would kill the wild birds and destroy vegetation, that farmhouses would be ignited by sparks, and property would deteriorate. Farmers likewise were made apprehensive lest through competition there would be no market for horses, and that their crops of oats and hay would be valueless.[^17] But the propaganda did not stop with such arguments. An eloquent divine in the United States went so far as to declare that the introduction of the railroad would require the building of many insane asylums, as people would be driven mad with terror at the sight of locomotives rushing across the country with nothing to draw them. Railroads were likewise denounced as impious because they were not foreseen in the Bible.[^18]

[^17]: Francis, John, A History of the English Railway, 2 vols, (London, 1851), vol. i, pp. 101--102, 107--108.

[^18]: Laut, op. cit. vol. i, pp. 12--13.

The railroad deviated from its predecessors slowly. Before steam power was used on the railroads, horse-drawn cars were employed as well as horsepower treadmill cars. First, wooden, and then short-lived and expensive cast-iron rails were used for the horse-drawn railroad coaches that differed so little from the stage coaches that they were sometimes equipped with arm straps to ease the jolts of the journey. In 1829 a horse treadmill car carrying 24 passengers was given a price of $500 by the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad. Cars equipped with a mast and sail were tried by two railroads that would not commit themselves to steam until the success of George Stephenson's "Rocket" in England in 1929 removed most doubts.[^19]

[^19]: Mitman, op. cit. p. 536.

The early inventors of steam-drawn vehicles had all been discouraged (see [Automobile]). Stephenson, too, had had his difficulties. In 1814 he had developed an engine for a coal tramway that drew 8 loaded wagons weighing 30 tons at 4 miles an hour. Yet seven years later, when he became engineer for the Stockton and Darlington line, the projectors <!-- sic --> of the company were so doubtful of steam transpiration that the act which they had passed by Parliament specified only that the haul should be "with men and horses or otherwise."[^20] The indifference and resistance to steam for transportation provoked Oliver Evans to indignant observation:

[^20]: Smiles, op. cit. pp. 92, 159.

When we reflect upon the obstinate opposition that has been made by a great majority at every step toward improvement; from bad roads to turnpikes, from turnpike to canal, from canal to railways for horse carriages, it is too much to expect the monstrous leap from bad roads to railways for steam carriages at once. One step in a generation is all we can hope for. If the present shall adopt canals, the next may try the railways with horses, and the third generation use the steam carriage.[^21]

[^21]: Mitman, op. cit. p. 529.

Disparagement of the efficiency and potentialities of the steam railroad flourished on fertile soil. Passengers were frightened by the danger that boilers would burst, as they sometimes did. Some asserted that locomotives would never be a success because their weight prevented them from attaining speed. It was frequently argued that mud and dust in summer and snow in winter would render a railroad impractical. Daniel Webster, for example, doubted its ultimate success, arguing that frost on the rails would prevent a train from moving, or if it did move, from being stopped. No reputable engineer would appear before the British Parliamentary Committee to testify in favor of steam locomotives, and Stephenson's request for a charter was at first refused. The early locomotives could in fact run only on almost level ground: they lacked much power and were expensive.[^22]

[^22]: Haney, op. cit. pp. 200--201; Cleveland and Powell, op. cit. pp. 46--66.

In 1826 an engineer, quoted with approval in Amroyd's work on internal navigation, declared "a rate of speed more than 6 miles an hour would exceed the bounds set by prudence, though some of the sanguine advocates of railways extend this limit to 9 miles an hour."[^23] John Steven's prediction of the possibilities of 20 miles an hour or more was satirized in a newspaper in a manner that reveals latent fears:

[^23]: Crozet, C., in George Amroyd, A Connected View of the Whole Internal Navigation of the United States, (Philadelphia, 1830), p. 570.

Twenty miles an hour, sir! Why you will not be able to keep an apprentice boy at his work! Every Saturday evening he must have a trip to Ohio to spend a Sunday with his sweat heart. It will encourages flightiness of intellect. All conceptions will be exaggerated by the magnificent notion of distance. Only a hundred miles off! Tut, nonsense, I'll step across, madam, and bring you your fan.[^24]

[^24]: Mitman, op. cit. p. 534.

In England, Nicholas Wood, whose position was that of "railway expert", declared Stephenson's claim of a possible speed of 20 miles an hour absurd and added "Nobody could do more harm to the prospects of building or generally improving such coaches than by spreading abroad this kind of nonsense." In Germany, it was proven by experts that if trains went at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour on the proposed Rothschild railroads, blood would spurt from the travellers' noses, mouths, and ears, and also that the passengers would suffocate going through tunnels.[^25] As late as 1831 the average rate of speed of railroads was not much greater than that attained by horses on good roads, so that mail contracts were sometimes awarded to stages for making better time.[^26] Almost universally there was a stress on hazards and imperfections, and a failure to conceive of the potentialities of the railways. It was not until 1860 in Germany, for example, that the use of railways for the transport of troops in case of war was considered.[^27] The derogatory attitude toward the steam locomotives is reflected in the bantering designations given them, such as "hell on wheels", "pulling John Bulls", "devil wagons", "black dragons", "snorting race horses". The commercial profit-making drive of the railroad builders did much to augment the revulsion of the agricultural groups to this symbol of industrialism, for they were not concerned with remedying its ugliness, smoke, and grime. Aesthetic considerations were considered outside of their province. When a famous artist volunteered to paint a mural in a railway terminal in London his offer was refused on the ground that art had nothing to do with machinery.

[^25]: Corti, E. C., Das Haus Rothschild in der Zeit seiner Blute, 1830--1871 (Leipzig, 1928) tr. by Brian and Beatrix Lunn as The Reign of the House of Rothschild (New York, 1928), pp. 77, 94.

[^26]: Haney, op. cit. pp. 237--238.

[^27]: Boehn and Fischel, op. cit. vol. iii, p. 129.

Each improvement in railroad equipment and organization has been marked by opposition and delay especially when it involved costly equipment rendering the older stock obsolete. Commodore Vanderbilt dismissed Westinghouse and his new air brakes with the remark that he had no time to waste on fools.[^28] When W. R. Sykes in 1874 presented plans for a system of automatic signalling on British railroads, the board of trade and the directorate of the railway companies maintained that personal care by signalmen was much better than any automatic system.[^29] It was charged in 1912, before a Senate committee that a railroad company had taken out patents on safety devices and had refused to manufacture them.[^30] It took Janney 10 years before he could get a founder to manufacture his car-coupler.[^31] The design of the Pullman sleepers in the United States has remained relatively static since it was first built in 1859.

[^28]: Hart, Hornell, The Technique of Social Progress (New York, 1931), p. 631.

[^29]: Hatfield, H. S., The Inventor and His World, (London, 1933), p. 105.

[^30]: U.S. Congress. Senate, Committee on Patents, Revision of Statutes Relating to Patents: Hearings, 67th Cong., 2d Sess. (1922), p. 205.

[^31]: Mitman, op. cit. p. 545.

The wide use of electric locomotives has been delayed because of capital loss on old equipment, and the belief that the costs of electrification and new equipment are not justified by the volume of traffic. Railroad companies vigorously opposed the legislation requiring their installation on trains entering the limits of New York City through tunnels. Streamlined trains were tried on the continent as far back as the nineties, and in 1900 the Baltimore and Ohio ran one that made 82 miles an hour on open road with a six car train.[^32] But the cost of replacing the old engines and the rolling stock, and the need for improvement of road beds, have delayed their extensive introduction.

[^32]: Leonard, J. N., Tools of Tomorrow, (New York, 1935), pp. 205--206.

Recent attempts to coordinate railway terminal facilities have been marked by strenuous opposition from many of the directors of large railroad systems because such coordination threatens to disrupt the hold they have on freight traffic in many of the important centers of the country, and by the railroad brotherhoods who seek protection for railroad workers, who will be displaced.

The railroad interests are now in the position that the turnpike and canal interests were at the beginning of railroad history. As entrenched groups having difficulty to compete because of the costs of modernizing their obsolete equipment, they are combating the increasing competition of auto trucking and bus transportation by devious obstructions --- legislative and otherwise. They are likewise arrayed in opposition through lobbies and through widespread propaganda against the extension of waterways.

Automobile

There were many precursors of the modern automobile that failed to survive the opposition and apathy of their times. A three-wheeled carriage driven by two steam cylinders was invented by Joseph Cugnot in 17869 which actually moved a load in addition to its own weight, but did not succeed in capturing popular support. In England when William Murdock built a one-cylinder steam-driven vehicle about 1784, Watt, his employer, who opposed the use of steam engines for road transportation, discouraged him. Maryland in 1787 granted Oliver Evans rights for a steam wagon with the comment that "it would doubtless do no good, but certainly could do no harm", and later his project was called chimerical. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney's steam coach made regular trips between Cheltenham and Gloucester in the 1820s, and although it was financially successful, it was abandoned because of the opposition of the landowners, stagecoach proprietors, and the breeders and users of horses. All animal lovers were marshalled in defense of the horse by vested-interest groups, and the steam coach was denounced as dangerous to the health of the community because of the smoke, steam, and hot ashes it left in the streets.

In the 1860s it appeared that mechanical transportation had come to stay in England, but again the opposition of horse breeders and railroads stood in the way. They secured passage of an act of Parliament, in 1861, for the regulation of horseless vehicles which practically made it impossible for them to operate. This act provided that tires must be at least 3 inches wide, that engines must consume their own smoke, that each vehicle must have at least two drivers, and that no vehicle was to exceed 10 miles an hour in the country and 5 miles an hour in the towns. In 1865 an even more drastic act was passed requiring three drivers for each vehicle, one of whom must precede the carriage at a distance of 60 yards, carrying a red flag by day and a red lantern by night. Speed was reduced to 4 miles an hour for the country and 2 miles an hour for the towns, and local communities were given the right to tax the operation of the vehicles and to prescribe hours of operation which they did in a discriminatory manner. With such restriction, which were not repealed until 1896, the steam carriage was doomed.[^33] In the United States, George Brayton fitted a gasoline engine to a Providence streetcar in 1873, and another to a Pittsburgh omnibus in 1878, but both were denied the streets.[^34]

[^33]: Hunt, F. B., "Self-Propelled Cars Sought 500 Years Ago", in New York Times, Apr. 27, 1930, p. 11.

[^34]: Duryea, C. E., "It Doesn't Pay to Pioneer", in Saturday Evening Post, vol. cciii (1931), pp. 30, 98, 102.

The automobile propelled by the internal-combustion engine made its way slowly against ignorance, apathy, and competition. In 1890 and 1891 the Chicago World's Fair advertised universally for exhibits in "steam, electric, and other road vehicles propelled by other than animal power", but made no specific mention of the internal combustion engine. One of the greatest sales obstacles the gasoline car had to overcome was the widespread conviction that Edison would invent a superior and cheaper electric automobile. As late as 1896, A. R. Sennett read a paper before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in which he maintained that the steam engine rather than the internal-combustion engine would prevail and that petroleum propulsion had to improve a great deal before heavy loads could be dealt with or passengers conveyed "free from excessive vibration and offensive exhalations and with a degree of luxury at all comparable with that which we have come to identify with horse-drawn vehicles." He likewise contended that horseless carriages would not be widely used because they required such great skill, inasmuch as the driver "has not the advantage of the intelligence of the horse in shaping his path."[^35] In a communication to the city council in 1908, the mayor of Cincinnati declared that the driving of an automobile requires such qualifications that no woman is physically fit to undertake the task.

[^35]: Quoted in Robbins, L. H., "Old Cry 'Get a Horse' Echoed in the Sky", in New York Times Magazine, Dec. 23, 1928, pp. 4, 13.

Automobiles did not develop beyond an embryonic stage for many years and their possibilities were not envisioned. The first cars were really only horse carriages with crude power plants. It was not until 1909 that left-hand drive and center control were introduced. The first Packard car body delivered to the manufacturers had a whipstock on the dash-board. Breakdowns were frequent. Repairs were distressingly difficult and expensive. Parts were not standardized and not easy to get. The automobile came to be known as the "rich man's toy", and there was no conception of it as a reliable and indispensable means of transportation. As late as 1902, when President Theodore Roosevelt rode in an automobile it was followed by a horse-drawn carriage in case of an accident. Not until 1909 did production figures of passenger cars pass the 100,000 mark, and the production of motor trucks did not reach 10,000 until 1911.[^36]

[^36]: Automobile Manufacturers Association, Automobile Facts and Figures, (New York, 1935), p. 4.

The attitude toward the automobile was more than apathetic; it was scornful. In 1895 Samuel Bowles II, the editor of the Springfield Republican, refused an invitation to ride in the car with which Duryea had won the first American automobile race, on the grounds that it was incompatible with the dignity of his position.[^37] Lord Montague vividly describes the prevalent hostile attitudes toward the early motorists: "Among our friends we were considered mad. In the press we were held up to public derision, sometimes as fools, sometimes as knaves; and every accident that happened, even remotely connected with the motor car, was attributed to the 'new Juggernaut' as it was called. The papers were almost without exception hostile."[^38]

[^37]: Duryea, op. cit. p. 102.

[^38]: Robbins, op. cit. p. 4.

The task of changing popular attitudes was a paramount one before automobiles could be sold. Slogans such as "Get a Horse" and "Down with Road Hogs" had to be replaced by "Goodbye Horse" and "Nothing to Watch but the Road". Songs like "Get Out and Get Under" were counteracted by "My Merry Oldsmobile". Active propaganda was necessary to combat the influence of clergymen, who flayed "automobilitis" as deleterious to morals and religion. European monarchs delayed long before they admitted that an automobile was dignified enough for them. Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria, who died in 1916, for example never entered an automobile. Horse-drawn carriages are still used in royal processions, and they likewise are utilized widely for funerals in all countries.

Financiers were in nowise ahead of popular sentiment in reference to the automobile. They had no conception of its future development, and looked askance upon it. Both R. E. Olds and Charles E. Duryea testify as to the hostile reception they received in Wall Street where the bankers could not see the wisdom of investing a few thousand dollars in what they considered a plaything. Chauncey M. Depew confessed that he warned his nephew not invest $5,000 in Ford stocks because "nothing has come along to beat the horse". W. C. Durant's prediction that some day 500,000 automobiles would be manufactured annually in the United States is said to have provoked George W. Perkins to declare "If he has any sense, he'll keep those notions to himself if he ever tries to borrow money." J. P. Morgan & Co. refused to buy for $5,000,000 a block of securities which were later incorporated in General Motors and rose to a value of $200,000,000.[^39] The financiers exaggerated the numerous mechanical imperfections that existed in the early cars, stressed the absence of good roads, were deterred by litigations over the early patents, and above all could not envisage a profitable market.

[^39]: MacManus, T. F., and Beasley, Norman, Men, Money, and Motors, (New York, 1929), pp. 5, 113, 117.

Changes in the automobile that would increase its sales possibilities by making its use simpler and its power greater were accepted slowly. The self-starter was invented in 1899, and installed on one brand of car in 1902. It was impossible, however, to get manufacturers to spend money on "refinements", and by 1912 less than 5 percent of the manufacturers were offering cars with self-starters as standard equipment.[^40]

[^40]: Epstein, R. C., The Automobile Industry, (Chicago, 1928), pp. 105--107, 110.

French auto manufactures perfected a V-shaped eight-cylinder motor several years before American manufacturers showed the feasibility of producing an eight-cylinder car in quantity. In 1914, such a car was produced, yet by 1926, production still consisted of 64 percent fours, 34 percent sixes, and 2 percent eights. It was not until 1932 that Ford --- who had likewise delayed adopting the standard selective three-speed transmission until December 1927 --- deserted the four-cylinder types to manufacture eights. By 1934, when fours practically ceased being manufactured, eight-cylinder cars still comprised only 40 percent of production.[^41] A large portion of British automobiles were equipped with four-wheel brakes in 1923, when only 3 percent of American cars were so equipped; it was not until 1927 that as many as 90 percent had four-wheel brakes as standard equipments.[^42] It required seven years for the superior balloon tire to lead over the high-pressure tire. The large difference in costs between the closed car and the open car caused the manufacture of open cars to exceed closed until 1925; by 1935 the open car had practically disappeared.[^43] The problem of disturbing the market, through depreciation of price of products, and the rigidity of large-scale enterprise, have been potent factors in delaying acceptance of innovations in automobile production.

[^41]: Automotive Industries (Feb. 22, 1936), p. 239.

[^42]: Epstein, op. cit. pp. 110--115.

[^43]: Automobile Manufacturers Association, Automobile Facts and Figures, (New York, 1935), p. 11.

The delay in the development of interurban bus transportation due to the competition of railroads has already been mentioned. The equally intense and discriminatory competition against busses by streetcar companies possessing "perpetual" franchises delayed the development of auto-bus transportation for decades.

Streetcars

The history of streetcar transportation was likewise marked by insistent opposition in all its phases. The franchise granted the New York and Harlem Railroad in 1831, authorized tracks only in what was then an outlying district of New York City and even these were to be removed if they proved to be an impediment. Wealthy citizens successfully opposed the extension of the tracks southward for many years. A. T. Stewart, the department-store owner, spent over a half million dollars in a quarter-of-a-century fight against replacing the old stages with more modern horse cars, on the grounds that the streetcars would keep his fashionable patrons from driving their carriages to his store.[^44]

[^44]: Lynch, D. T., "Boss" Tweed, (New York, 1927), p. 80.

When in 1858--59 George Francis Train got permission to lay tracks for streetcars in Great Britain, his plans had to be abandoned as unsuccessful largely because the rails projected above the surface of the highway obstructing other vehicular traffic.[^45]

[^45]: Talbot, Frederick A., All About Inventions and Discoveries, (New York, 1916), p. 87.

Horse car lines continued to be installed in the 1880s in New York City after cable cars had proven successful in San Francisco and they persisted in use until the 1900s. Strenuous opposition of civic and municipal authorities to posts planted in streets and wires across highways for overhead conductors delayed the introduction of electric trolley lines. Cincinnati, which began with a two-trolley overhead system has continued it.

The decision of the Appellate Division, First Department of New York Courts in 1896, which refused to approve the building of a subway, began with a quotation from St. Luke and continued:

The probabilities indicate that after sinking $51,000,000 in it (the subway) without being able to complete it, the enterprise would have to be abandoned.... All that beheld it would begin to mock, saying "this city began to build and was not able to finish".[^46]

[^46]: Quoted in Sullivan, Mark, Our Times, 6 vols., (New York, 1926--35), vol. i, pp. 515--516.

Property owners prevented the first subway from being dug along the most desirable routes. Plans for building a subway in Chicago have never been realized, although they have repeatedly been considered. The costs of obsolescence and the vested rights of franchise have prevented urban transportation from keeping abreast of technological changes.

Marine Transportation

Gilfillan, who has made a sociological study of the invention of the ship, declares in reference to resistance to change in marine transportation:

The jib and other fore-and-aft sails, the rudder, steamboat, screw, high pressure, surface condensation, compound and triple expansion, improved rudders and rotorship have had to fight their way. Only the compensated compass do we recall as meeting what might be called an immediate acceptance.[^47]

[^47]: Gilfillan, S. C., The Sociology of Invention, (Chicago, 1935), p. 106.

There is especially well-documented evidence on the opposition to the use of steamboats. John Fitch was reviled and harassed as a deranged and suspicious character. In his memoirs he tells of his reception when in 1787 he appealed for financial support:

[I was treated] more like a slave than a freeman.... Not only that; I have been continually seized with duns from our workmen, and inbarassed <!-- sic -with Constables, for debts; and I was of so bare and mean an appearance that every decent man must and ought to dispize <!-- sic - me from my appearance. Not only that, but dare not scarsely <!-- sic --> show my face in my own Lodgings; .... [I] was obliged to suffer just indignities from my landlord and be henpecked by the women. Added to this, there was the Most Powerful combination against me, who thought that they could not serve God or themselves better than by saying every ill natured thing they could of me.[^48]

[^48]: Quoted in Boyd, Thomas, Poor John Fitch, (New York, 1935), pp. 213--214.

The Pennsylvania Assembly, which had at that time subsidized Whitehead Humphries' experiments with a steel furnace, refused a year's loan to Fitch by a vote of 32 to 28. To raise money which he urgently needed, Fitch wrote to Benjamin Franklin as head of the American Philosophical Society, offering to sell to the society for a nominal sum, a model of the steam engine which Franklin had suggested should be made. The latter never responded and the society took no action. In 1790, when Fitch's steamboat was making technically successful trips on the Delaware River, with its schedule of daily sailings advertised in the Philadelphia daily newspapers, Benjamin Franklin Bache, the philosopher's grandson, ridiculed the boat as follows:

A boat on this construction, barring all accidents of breaking paddles, cranks, gudgeons, watchwheels, chains, Loggerheads, cocks, valves, condensers, pins, bolts, pistons, cylinders, boilers, and God only knows how many more useful parts, would almost stem the tide of the Delaware...[^49]

[^49]: Quoted in Boyd, op. cit. pp. 229--230.

The chief difficulty was in drawing passengers away from the shallops and the stagecoaches; lures of beer, sausages, rum, comfortable cabins, and faster trips did not succeed in doing so.

"The God of Fortune was a Blind Whimsical Jade!", Fitch once wrote. "Here she got Job cannonized <!-- sic -for a Saint while I must bair <!-- sic - the Ridicule of the World." His difficulties were not diminished by the fact that he was an anti-Federalist and a Deist.[^50] His more conventional rival, James Rumsey, who independently and in secret invented the steamboat about the same time, also met ridicule and disparagement.

[^50]: Boyd, op. cit. pp. 187, 205.

Robert Fulton made commercial success of the steamboat and was acclaimed. But a note written in 1807 shows his work was scorned while he was experimenting:

When I was building my first steamboat, the project was viewed by the public either with indifference, or with contempt, as a visionary scheme. My friends, indeed, were civil, but they were shy. They listened with patience to my explanations, but with a settled cast of incredulity on their countenances. As I had occasion daily to pass to and from the shipyard while my boat was in progress, I have often loitered unknown near the idle groups of strangers, gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull but endless repetition of "Fulton's folly". Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, a warm wish, cross my path. Silence itself was but politeness, veiling its doubts, or hiding its reproaches.

[^51]

[^51]: Hes, George, Leading American Inventors, (New York, 1912), pp. 60--61.

Those who loaned him money to continue his plans on the steamboat stipulated that their names be withheld for fear of ridicule and loss of status were it to be known that they supported so "foolhardy" a project.

The idea of propelling ships by steam met opposition in England and on the Continent as well. In 1804, a bill was introduced in the House of Commons at the insistence of the British Admiralty, against the introduction of steam power in the British Navy. England had only 20 steamers by 1815, and it was not until 1833 that Britain built her first steam-driven warship. The first steamer on the Continent was the one that ran between Paris and Rouen in 1816. There were no steamers on the Rhine or the Elbe until 1818, nor on the Danube until 1830.[^52]

[^52]: Boehn and Fischel, op. cit. vol. ii, pp. 24--26.

Other advances in marine transportation met resistance. The United States Navy hesitated about adopting Ericsson's screw propeller.[^53] "Incredulously and pityingly they [shippers and shipbuilders] often looked upon me", writes Flettner, "and they often shrugged their shoulders when I mentioned that in a storm or hurricane this free rudder thrown about by the waves would swing back and forth without the steadiness of the ships course bing affected in the slightest degree ... they even looked upon me as an impractical dreamer."[^54]

[^53]: Hes, op. cit. p. 232.

[^54]: Flettner, Anton, Mein Weg zum Rotor (Leipzig, 1926) tr. by F. O. Willhofft as The Story of the Rotor, (New York, 1926), p. 19.

Although the first iron barge had been made to float in Yorkshire in 1777, arguments against the use of iron ships continued for decades. Wilkinson wrote in 1787, when his iron boat was launched: "It answers all my expectations, and has convinced the unbelievers who were 999 in a thousand. It will only be a 9-days wonder and then will be like Columbus' egg." But the relative cheapness of wood, the early difficulties involved in preparing iron plate, and the opposition of the powerful shipbuilding interests, long delayed the building of iron ships. Men continued to insist, moreover, that iron ships would not float, that they would damage more easily than wooden ships when grounding, that it would be difficult to preserve the iron bottoms from rust, weeds, and barnacles, and that the iron would deflect the compass.[^55] Ericsson's plan for the Monitor was first rejected by the United States Navy because it was claimed that this iron battleship lacked stability.

[^55]: Gilfillan, S. C., Inventing the Ship, (Chicago, 1935), p. 149.

Leonardo da Vinci records that he suppressed his invention of the submarine because "it was too satanic to be placed in the hands of unregenerate men."[^56] The inventor of the submarine, John P. Holland, was considered insane for his persistent experiments with under-water transportation. The fact that the experiments were financed with money of the Fenian movement which sought to free Ireland from British imperialism enhanced the ridicule and skepticism that greeted his work.[^57] H. G. Wells joined the popular disparagement of the submarine, writing: "I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarines doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea."[^58] By 1896 Holland had built a successful submarine which was sold to the United States Government. It was not however, until the World War that the submarine came generally into use.

[^56]: Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, (New York, 1934), p. 85.

[^57]: Talbot, op. cit. pp. 71--84.

[^58]: Wells, H. G., Anticipations, (London, 1902), p. 217.

Airplane

Attitudes toward the possibility of the invention of the airplane went beyond healthy skepticism even on the part of engineers and scientists. The early trials which ended in disastrous failure and the many fantastic attempts to realize man's hopes to imitate the birds gave grounds for doubt of success and occasioned ridicule of those that hazarded. In 1871, the New York Times proclaimed editorially that there was "abundant precedent for the supposition that the laws of gravity will always prove too much, in the aerial field, for the ambitious dexterity of man."[^59] Later when Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, predicted early establishment of an air transportation that could attain unprecedented speeds, the Popular Science Monthly rebuked him, saying:

[^59]: New York Times, June 25, 1871.

The secretary of the Smithsonian Institution should be the representative of American science and should be extremely careful not to do anything that may lend itself to an interpretation that will being injury on the scientific work of the Government or of the country.... He could have placed his scientific knowledge at the disposal of Army officers and expert mechanicians, and this would have been better than to attempt to become an inventor in a field where success is doubtful and where failure is likely to bring discredit, however undeserved, on scientific work.[^60]

[^60]: "The Progress of Science: Aerial Navigation", in Popular Science Monthly, vol. lxiv (1903--4) pp. 95--96.

An editorial in the New York Times in 1904 saw no possible objection if those interested in flying cared to indulge in "airy persiflage" across the "walnuts and wine", but averred that they "should not expect those who have not dined with them to take them quite seriously."[^61] Simon Newcomb's attitude was defeatist. He did nothing to use his scientific authority to stimulate further research, in fact discouraging it, at a time when success was just in the offing, by his widely publicized statement:

[^61]: Quoted in editorial in New York Times, Mar. 30, 1931.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practicable machine by which men shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.[^62]

[^62]: Newcomb, Simon, Sidelights on Astronomy, (New York, 1906), p. 345.

Helmholtz likewise questioned the possibility of the success of a heavier than air machine.[^63] H. G. Wells acknowledged that air flying would be mastered, but he failed to see its possibilities declaring: "I do not think it at all probable that aeronautics will ever come into play as a serious modification of transport and communication."[^64]

[^63]: Flettner, op. cit. p. 92.

[^64]: Wells, op. cit. p. 35.

With the invention of the light-weight internal-combustion engine, successful airplanes were flown. Yet the British War Ministry refused to negotiate with manufactures of airplanes in 1907, 2 years after the Wright's first flight was officially recorded and 4 years after his first actual flight.[^65] Previous to April 1926, when it established a separate class for aircraft, the German Patent Office had the same classification for airplanes as for children's toys, popular amusements, and shooting galleries.[^66]

[^65]: Literary Digest, vol. xciii (June 25, 1927), p. 9.

[^66]: Flettner, op. cit. p. 92.

It has not been merely fear of flying that has delayed the popular use of flying as a means of transportation. The establishment of airdromes at great distances from the centers of large cities because of the high prices demanded for the land by property holders has contributed toward retarding the development of air service. The owners of existing transportation services, the railroads, steamboats, and autobus lines, as well as automobile manufacturers have propagandized against the extension of air routes. Recently in Alaska the drivers of dog teams and those that sold them fish, were vigorous in their opposition to air mail service. Established airplane companies have discouraged new capital from entering the field as is reflected in an editorial in the Business Chronicle, January 27, 1930:

The airplane business is to gravitate into control of comparatively few strong corporations as has the manufactures of automobiles. The day for the creation of new factories doubtless passed during 1928 and 1929. A few infant industries to supply airplane materials might yet gain foothold in Pacific Coast States, but community boosters will do wisely to move very slowly now in encouraging any new plane manufacturing enterprise. In most cases the money and effort can better be devoted to some other more promising project.[^67]

[^67]: Business Chronicle, vol. xxx (1930), p. 1.

Communication

Innovations in the field of communication have likewise been opposed at every step, in spite of their utility in diffusing and perpetuating knowledge and thus augmenting man's control over his environment. Priestly classes in many early societies resisted the recording of tradition in writing, and the extension of literacy has frequently been opposed by ruling classes as a ferment to discontent.

Writing

Writing as a conserving instrument is itself extremely conservative. Scripts acquire highly emotionalized attachments, and become identified with cultural and nationalist symbolism. The result is that styles of writing and alphabets become tenacious. The ancient and medieval scripts prevailed for over five centuries, the Gothic for over eight centuries, and is today being revived in Nazi Germany. Even when one script displaces another, the older form persists in use for special purposes.[^68] Organized resistance has been made to changes in alphabets as when the elimination of three letters from the Bulgarian alphabet in 1922 provoked the resignation of two ministers.[^69] The Latinizing of the Turkish alphabet was strenuously opposed especially in religious circles. Simplified spelling has aroused not only ridicule and disparagement, but at times bitter resentment.

[^68]: Stern, Bernhard J., "Writing" in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. xv, (New York, 1935), pp. 500--502.

[^69]: Ullmann, B. L., Ancient Writing and Its Influence, (New York, 1932), p. 221.

The same conservatism is evident in numerical notation. In 1299 an edict was issued in Florence forbidding bankers to use Arabic numerals, and Roman numerals are still widely used especially for ceremonial purposes.[^70] Continued use of Newton's notation by English mathematicians throughout the eighteenth century, and even by many English writers on mechanics today, while the French and German mathematicians usually employed that of Leibnitz, created a barrier between English and Continental mathematics that impeded their development.[^71] Opposition to the enforced or even optional use of the metric system of measurements in the United States has been based on sentimental appeals to a poetic tradition and postulated superiority of the English system as well as upon arguments based on the costs of the change. An attempt by leading silk merchants in Foochow [Fuzhou\ Ed.] to adopt a standardized lineal measure failed because most of the merchants refused to use it, and there remain in China several kinds of units of lineal measure --- the Shanghai foot, the tailor's foot, the carpenter's foot, and the engineering foot --- all of differing lengths.

[^70]: Taylor, Isaac, The Alphabet, 2 vols, (London, 1883), vol, ii, p. 263.

[^71]: Wolf, Abraham, History of Science and Technology in the 16th and 17th Centuries, (London, 1935), p. 217.

Printing

The spread of block printing westward from China was checked by the opposition of the Islamic world. Resistance arose among the calligraphers in the scriptoria of Cordova and in other Islamic cultural centers where there was large scale production of superb texts far superior in artistic merit to the products of early printing. When permission was granted in 1727 for the establishment of a printing press in Constantinople, with the proviso that the Koran should not be printed, the venture none the less aroused such intense opposition that it was abandoned and printing was not introduced again for about a century. The Koran was never printed in any Islamic country until a few years ago. The reason given was the belief that to touch the name of Allah with a cleaning brush made of hog bristles was blasphemy. In India, the Brahman caste successfully resisted the introduction of printing until a printing press was set up at Goa by the Portuguese late in the sixteenth century.[^72] The introduction of printing was delayed in Paris 20 years by the hostility of the guild of scribes.

[^72]: Carter, T. F., The Invention of Printing and its Spread Westward, (rev. ed. by D. C. McMurtrie, New York, 1931), pp. 112--113.

The first printed books were crude, costly, and inferior to the artistic work of the skilled calligraphers of the guilds, and therefore resistance is easily explicable. But even as printing improved, there was, for a long time, little realization of its possibilities as an agency in the dissemination of knowledge and propaganda. When this realization came, printing was hedged in by drastic governmental restrictions, often initiated by church authorities, as when Leipzig printers were forbidden to print Protestant literature for about two decades.[^73] A widespread sentiment against printing was expressed by Governor Berkeley of Virginia, when he said in 1670:

[^73]: Duffus, R. L., "Printing and Publishing", Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. xxi (New York, 1934), pp. 406--415.

... I thank God there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government.[^74]

[^74]: Quoted in Simons, A. M., Social Forces in American History, (New York, 1911), pp. 47, 48.

Types, as in the case of scripts, are exceedingly conservative and become supercharged with emotional tones that form the basis of intense resentment to changes. Many newspapers and magazines retain the same types and formats for long periods after they have become outmoded, in order to not alienate their readers.

New machinery in the printing industry in the composing room, the pressroom, and the bindery, has been delayed by the costs involved in the obsolescence of old equipment and by workers faced with unemployment. When the stereotyping machine was first introduced by William Ged in Edinburgh in 1725, opposition was so strong that it was discontinued. The Linotype machine, which, when originally patented, was not regarded by printers as a practical machine, supplanted straight matter typesetting by hand slowly between 1886 and 1903, without strenuous opposition on the part of labor because of agreements with the printers' unions over employment and output. Mechanically fed platen and cylinder presses were adopted gradually in commercial printing, comprising less than 4 percent of presses in 1913 and still only 66 percent in 1921.[^75] Printers have led the opposition to lithographing and photographic processes that compete with them.

[^75]: Baker, E. F., Displacement of Men by Machines, (New York, 1933), pp. 15, 16.

Typewriter

For a long time after the typewriter was actually produced for sale in 1874, the response to it was apathetic when not overtly hostile. The question of costs loomed large. Many questioned the value of paying approximately $125 for a machine that would do the same work as a 1-cent pen. The description of the early typewriter given by J. G. Priestly clearly indicates one of the causes of the delay of its reception:

It (the typewriter) had the old double keyboard --- typing then was a muscular activity. If you were not familiar with these vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying about one of those grim structures than you would have thought of travelling with a piano.[^76]

[^76]: Priestley, J. B., English Journey, (London, 1934), pp. 122--123.

The value of the typewriter in commercial activities was hardly glimpsed even after it became more efficient. Questions of the status of women in society and of etiquette became involved in the controversies over its utilization. The girl typist became a symbol of women's emancipation and aroused responses accordingly. In 1881 when the New York Y.W.C.A. announced typing lessons for women, vigorous protests were made on the grounds that the female constitution would break down completely under the strenuous six months' course offered. As for etiquette, it was, and still is in some quarters, considered bad taste to use the typewriter for personal letters. The machine was long looked upon as affectation, a pretense to authorship or professionalism on the part of a layman. Some people looked upon the receipt of typed letters as an aspersion upon their literacy. All these factors tended to delay the wide utilization of the typewriter until recent years.

The production of typewriters is highly concentrated and there is no outlet for patents on new inventions except through a few manufacturers. Such monopolistic control is also characteristic of the mimeograph industry where the dominant corporation which controlled, in 1915, 85.1 percent of the commerce in the United States in stencil duplicating machines, has suppressed innovations by compelling the users of such machines to purchase stencil duplicating paper, ink, and other duplicating supplies exclusively from them.[^77]

[^77]: Federal Trade Commission, Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1917, (Washington, D.C., 1917), pp. 60, 61.

Telegraph and Telephone

There was an indifferent response to Morse's invention of the telegraph patented in 1837. Few were interested when he exhibited it, for its uses were not comprehended and it was regarded merely as a scientific toy. When Morse asked for $30,000 as a governmental appropriation for an experimental telegraph line, it was regarded by some of the legislators as fantastic. One suggested that half that sum be spent on mesmerism and another that Millerism be the recipient of the other half. Morse was finally awarded the appropriation in 1843 by a margin of eight votes. Later the government declined to buy the invention for $100,000. The first apparatus was clumsy, with a weight of 185 pounds, as compared to less than 4 ounces in 1912. So little confidence did the public have in the telegraph that 2 years after the line had been installed, the receipts for one quarter were only $203.43 at the rate of 1 cent for four characters.

In England, where the British Admiralty had declared in 1816 that telegraphs were totally unnecessary, Morse's telegraph met the opposition of a rival method. Wheatstone and Cooke's needle instrument, which required two lines to complete a circuit, had already been installed. On October 9, 1845, Morse wrote:

I have many obstacles to contend against, particularly the opposition of the proprietors of existing telegraphs. But that mine is the best system, I have now no doubt; all that I have seen, while they are ingenious, are more complicated, more expensive, less efficient, and easier deranged. It may take some time to establish the superiority of mine over the others, for there is the usual array of prejudice and interest against a system which threws others out of use.[^78]

[^78]: Hes, op. cit. pp. 160, 164, 167.

The telegraph companies, once entrenched, did not encourage and were slow to respond to the innovations in their own and related fields. They did not encourage the invention of the cable and even after the first cable had been laid they continued their efforts to have transoceanic communication by way of Alaska and Siberia. Neither the telegraph nor the cable companies invented the telephone. Bell's offer to sell it to the Western Union Telegraph Co. for $100,000 was rejected. In 1883 eight leading business men in New York City met to decide whether to buy rights to the Bell telephone or the printing telegraph, both of which were offered at the same price, $300,000, and they decided to buy the latter.[^79] When the telephone began seriously to compete with the telegraph, and to menace its interests, the telegraph companies accentuated public skepticism by a campaign of ridicule and disparagement. The inventor was characterized as a crank and a charlatan. His work was the devil's work, disturbing the tranquillity of the countryside, and inducing break-downs among its users. The widespread currency of this attitude even among the sophisticated is seen in Thorstein Veblen's statement as late as 1914 that the use of the telephone "involves a very appreciable nervous strain and its ubiquitous presence conduces to an unremitting nervous tension and unrest wherever it goes."[^80] Imperfections in the apparatus and in service were stressed. The plan to connect cities, villages, and isolated homes into one comprehensive system was denounced as folly.

[^79]: Fessenden, R. A., "The Inventions of Reginald A. Fessenden", in Radio News, vol. vi (1925), 1140--1142, 1851--1853, 1999.

[^80]: Veblen, Thorstein, The Instinct of Workmanship, (New York, 1914), p. 316.

The monopolistic control over the basic telephone patents which the Bell corporation acquired made it impossible to introduce improvements without its sanction. Thus when Edison, Blake, and Berliner improved the Bell telephone, their important contributions could not be utilized without the basic invention, and so they came under the control of the owners of the Bell patents.[^81] In 1937, the Federal Communications Commission declared that the Bell Telephone System suppressed 3,400 unused patents in order to forestall competition. Of these, 1,307, it said, were "patents voluntarily shelved by the American company and its patent-holding subsidiaries for competitive purposes." In answer to the company's declaration that the other 2,126 patents were not used because of "superior alternatives available", the Commission reported:

[^81]: Vaughan, F. L., Economics of our Patent System, (New York, 1925), p. 72.

This is a type of patent shelving or patent suppression which results from excessive patent protection acquired for the purpose of suppressing competition. The Bell System has at all times suppressed competition in wire telephony or telegraphy under its telephone and telephonic appliance patents, and this exclusion is extended to patents covering any type of construction. Moreover the Bell System has added to its ... patents any patent that might be of value to its competitors. This policy resulted in the acquisition of a large number of patents covering alternative devices and methods for which the Bell System has no need....

Provisions tending to suppress development are found to be present in patent license contracts between the Western Electric Co. and independent manufacturing companies.[^81a]

[^81a]: Federal Communications Commission, Patent Study of Bell Telephone System, Special Docket No. 1, 1937 (Washington, D.C., 1937).

Automatic telephone switchboards were introduced slowly. The chief engineer of a leading telephone company denounced the automatic system before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. It was difficult for the public to orientate itself to the automatic systems. The United States Senate, for example, had a new dial telephone system removed after a short trial. There were protests by workers against the installation in terms of technological unemployment. But the delay was chiefly occasioned by the depreciation costs on obsolete equipment. Similarly, the cradle or French telephones were long in use on the Continent before they were installed in the United States and then a service charge was added largely in order to retard their introduction.

The telephone, cable, and telegraph companies did not invent the wireless telegraph; they at first declined to purchase it and later sought to suppress it. Jealous rivalry between the Italian and German wireless telegraph systems led the German company to refuse to accept messages dispatched from German ships equipped with the Marconi instruments. The Italian company retaliated and service was crippled. As a result of this type of competition telegraphy was discredited for a number of years.[^82]

[^82]: Talbot, op. cit. p. 24.

The telegraph, cable, and wireless companies declined to purchase the wireless telephone.[^83] DeForest recounts the great difficulties he had promoting his wireless telephone. He writes that when he exhibited his experiments in this field before five engineers of Western Electric Co., months passed and he heard nothing from them. Refused by bankers, he sought to raise money from his classmates of the Yale Class of 1896; he succeeded in raising only $500.[^84]

[^83]: Fessenden, op. cit. p. 1140.

[^84]: Carneal, Georgette, A Conqueror of Space, (New York, 1930), p. 204.

There were vast time lags between the discovery of the scientific principles underlying radio by Joseph Henry, Hertz, Lodge, and others and the practical application of these finds. Even when in 1907 DeForest put the radio tube in workable form at the same time as others had made like inventions independently, he was unable to sell his patent and let it lapse rather than pay $25 for its renewal.[^85] The beginnings of radio were very crude, and there appears to have been no anticipation at all of its extensive development when the first broadcast occurred in 1920. Patent litigation in the radio industry particularly as between the Armstrong patent controlled by Radio Corporation of America and DeForest patents, with repeated reversals of the courts, made the ownership of the patent rights uncertain. This delayed the development of radio because of the fear of infringement suits. Concentrated control makes it imperative that all radio inventions clear through a few companies if they are to be marketed successfully, which involves their suppression when the new inventions disturb existing market conditions. Competition between newspapers and radio for advertising has repeatedly and in diverse ways interfered with the full utilization of radio facilities.

[^85]: Agnew, P. G., "Harnessing Scientific Discoveries" in Scientific Monthly, vol. xl (1935), pp. 170--173.

Rivalry between monopolistic groups for its control led to the recent opposition to the construction of the coaxial cable between New York and Philadelphia, over which 2,400 telegraph messages may be sent at one time, and which can carry a band of frequencies of at least one million cycles. It was argued before the Federal Communications Commission by the Western Union and Postal Telegraph and Cable companies, as well as by broadcasting companies that its use would disrupt existing communication and broadcasting services. After rehearings, each involving delays, during which the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. sought to use the cable exclusively, the F.C.C. ordered against monopolistic control.[^86]

[^86]: New York Times, May 25, July 16, July 25, 1935; Jan. 7, Feb 27, 1936.

Power

Steam Engine

There were many anticipations of the steam engine that remained unfulfilled. Hero of Alexandria (c. 50 A.D.) in his treatise on pneumatics, describes a machine which, by means of an altar fire, could be made to open temple doors, another which produced a steam jet on which a light ball could be supported, and an aeolipile which was essentially a reaction steam turbine. With the prevailing economic situation and an attitude toward practical and mechanical activity in ancient Rome, the significance of his inventions was not appreciated. Steam was used in the tenth century by Sylvester II to operate an organ. The Italian chemist, Branca, used a jet of high pressure steam to turn a paddle wheel; his plan showed the boiler in the form of the head and body of a man. Kircher, Jesuit philosopher, in Rome; Baptista Porta, the mathematician, in Naples; and Solomon de Caus, the French architect and engineer, all operated fountains by steam in the sixteenth century. The English bishop, Wilkins, a brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, made experiments with aeolipiles. But there was then no conception of steam as an industrial motive power.

In 1663, Edward Somerset, second Marquis of Worcester, obtained rights for 99 years by act of Parliament, for his "water commanding engine" the first serious attempt known to make practical use of steam. But he, and his widower following him, were unsuccessful in forming a company to develop his invention. Thomas Savery around 1698 invented an engine designed to deal with the accumulation of water in the Cornish mines. He circulated a pamphlet in 1702 among the mining operators --- one of whom had to use 500 horses in raising water by horsegins and buckets --- entitled "The miner's friend, or an engine to raise water by fire, described, and of the manner of fixing it in mines, with an account of several other uses it is applicable unto; and an answer to objections made against it." But his machine was costly, wasteful, and dangerous, largely because no one knew how to make boilers and pipes strong enough to resist the requisite steam pressure, and so the miners continued to use their horses. In 1712 Thomas Newcomen announced his epoch-making atmospheric steam engine to pump water, but it failed to create any significant amount of public comment or excitement. James Watt, who worked under the patronage of Dr. John Roebuck, a wealthy <!-- TK??? --> industrialist, got a patent in 1769 on what was originally only an improvement of the Newcomen engine. By an extension of his patents until 1800 by an act of Parliament, he acquired a monopoly on the steam engine that, as Watt himself admitted, killed all further invention in this field in England until the next century. (For opposition to the application of the steam engine in the textile industry, see [Textile Machinery].) The restrictive laws of Great Britain which prohibited machinery from being exported, delayed the development of the steam engine in other countries. Watt opposed the development of higher pressure engines, and was limited in his vision as to the uses of his invention[^87] (see [Railroads]).

[^87]: Wolf, op. cit. pp. 543--556; Mitman, op. cit. pp. 507--515; Dickinson, H. W., James Watt, (Cambridge, England, 1936), pp. 43, 45, 57.

The invention of an efficient steam engine in Russia in 1763 by Ivan Ivanovich Polsunov was acknowledged by an award from Empress Catherine, but was stillborn in an industrially backward setting.[^88] In the United States, Oliver Evans was granted rights on flour-mill machinery driven by steam, in 1786 by Pennsylvania, and in the following year by Maryland. But not a single miller in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, or Virginia, would purchase "such rattle traps".[^89] The introduction of power machinery in shoe-making was vigorously opposed by the Lynn Laster's Union in Lynn, Mass. Ericsson demonstrated, in 1828, the effectiveness of a steam fire engine in London, but municipal authorities decided against the engine and pumping was done by hand for 32 more years.[^90]

[^88]: Vasilevsky, E. M., The Land of Inventors, (Moscow, 1933), p. 30.

[^89]: Mitman, op. cit. p. 531.

[^90]: Iles, op. cit. pp. 222--223.

Coal

Coal encountered strenuous opposition before it was accepted as a fuel. It was denounced in London during the reign of Edward I as a "public nuisance, corrupting the air with its stink and smoke to the great detriment of their health", with the result that the king prohibited its use and in 1306 a citizen was tried, condemned, and executed for burning "sea cole".[^91] In 1580 Queen Elizabeth prohibited the use of coal in London while Parliament was in session, because "the health of the knights of the shires might suffer during their abode in the metropolis". A "health tax" was imposed on fireplaces by King Charles II in 1662.[^92]

[^91]: Masson, E. O., and Chubb, L. W., "Smoke" in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. xxv (1911), p. 275.

[^92]: Norman, O. E., The Romance of the Gas Industry, (Chicago, 1922), p. 160.

In the United States coal was discovered in Richmond, Va., in 1702, but the mines were not opened until 1750. As late as 1795 coal users were ridiculed.[^93] Wherever wood was in abundance, the utilization of coal was delayed.

[^93]: Darrow, F. L., "Buried Sunshine --- The Story of Coal", in Kaempffert, W., ed., A Popular History of American Invention, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), vol. ii., pp. 116--117.

Gas

Opposition to the use of gas for lighting when it was first introduced in the beginning of the nineteenth century had manifold roots. There were fears of fires and suffocation, which, though sometimes based on ignorance of the process involved, were often well grounded because of the defective methods of transmission causing frequent leaks and fatal explosions. But numerous other arguments were adduced. One group of objectors declared that the use of gas would deprive Britannia of her ability to rule the waves, because by eliminating whale oil lamps it would destroy the whale oil industry, the nursery whence Britain drew her sons to man her fighting ships. This line of reasoning sounded cogent to many, as the Napoleonic Wars were then being waged.

Relentless opposition arose when Samuel Clegg and Frederick Albert Winsor sought Parliamentary sanction for their plans for a central gas distribution system to supply gas for private dwellings, factories, public buildings, and thoroughfares. Their application for the incorporation of the London and Westminster Chartered Gas Light & Coke Co. was vehemently assailed. Scientists led the opposition by ridiculing the plan to store gas in reservoirs. Sir Humphrey Davy thought the plan impractical and sarcastically asked whether Clegg intended to use the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral as a gas-holder. Wollaston and Watt and the Royal Society likewise declared the project not feasible. Financiers and insurance companies ranged themselves in opposition and cited in proof a disastrous explosion that had occurred in London. Streetlamp lighters went out on strike. Parish authorities announced their intention of uprooting any lampposts and pikes planted in the streets within their jurisdiction. Caricaturists such as Cruikshank and Rowlandson satirized the plan, as did Byron. Sir Walter Scott wrote to a friend in incredulous amazement: "There is a madman proposing to light the streets of London -- with what do you suppose -- with smoke." Lighting with candles and torches was lauded as picturesque. Gas was denounced as a symbol of commercialism studding the landscape with unsightly reservoirs. The charter was finally granted in 1810, but it was not until three years later that the public accepted the new system of lighting.[^94]

[^94]: Talbot, op. cit. pp. 49--58; Timbs, John, Wonderful Inventions, (London, 1868), p. 172.

Opposition to gas lighting was not restricted to England, but arose in some degree in all countries. Napoleon characterized the idea as une grande folie and when Paris attempted to introduce the new system in 1818, it met with little favor.[^95] Berlin did not install a gas system until 1823, and the streets were not lighted by gas until 1826. The bursting of the gas lanterns on the day it was introduced on Unter den Linden gave those who had predicted failure temporary elation.[^96]

[^95]: Luckeisch, M., "From Rushlight to Incandescent Lamp" in Kaempfert, W., ed., Modern Wonder Workers, (New York, 1921), pp. 546--547.

[^96]: Boehn and Fischel, op. cit. vol, ii, pp. 145--147.

Gas was installed in Baltimore in 1821, but it was many years before popular prejudice was allayed against gas as a danger to health and safety, and the skeptical ceased to frown upon its efficacy. As late as 1833, a petition to the Philadelphia Common Council warned against the use of gas "as ignitable as gunpowder and as nearly fatal in its effects as regards the immense destruction of property." It was also argued that the city should continue to be lit with oil, because the discharge of tar from the gas works into the surrounding waters might drive away the shad and herring.[^97] It was accepted with much more alacrity in the new cities where extensive street lighting systems had not already been set up, and there were no losses incurred through obsolescence. Long after gas became generally accepted as a means of illumination, churches continued the use of candles and oil. The lights of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster are still relit at Easter by flint and steel, although a modern mechanical device is used.

[^97]: Luckeisch, op. cit. p. 554.

Improvements in gas lighting also met resistance. Welsbach gas mantles were invented in 1885, but largely because of their costs they were not used extensively until 1890, although they gave a better light with lower gas consumption.[^98]

[^98]: Norman, op. cit. pp. 54--55, 171.

Electricity

Early experiments with electricity were ignored or ridiculed. Franklin's letters to Collison, which described his experiment with the kite that charged a Leyden jar by electricity drawn from the clouds, performed in June 1752, were read before the Royal Society, but remained unnoticed.[^99] Galvani, engaged in 1762 in experiments with reactions of frogs' legs to electric shocks, is reported to have said:

[^99]: Thompson, Holland, The Age of Invention, The Chronicles of America Series, vol. xviii, pt. i (New Haven, 1921), p. 11.

I am persecuted by two classes: The scientists and the know-it-alls. Both call me "the frogs' dancing master." Yet I know that I have discovered one of the greatest forces in the universe.[^101]

<!-- Numbering restarts in the published article at '1', skipping 100, we're going to bump-->
[^101]: Quoted by Hart, op. cit. p. 629.

The possibilities of electricity were seen by Faraday in 1832, but before efficient generators of large size were produced on a commercial basis the steam engine was firmly established and the costs of obsolescence in steam manufacturing equipment delayed their wide use.

The electrical companies themselves were long remiss in understanding the uses to which electricity could be put. The chief engineer of one of the largest electrical companies declared that "electricity could never be used except as an auxiliary on shipboard." The high-frequency alternator was not invented by the electric companies and when one was made up at the inventor's expense, an electric company returned it with a letter stating that in the opinion of its engineers "it could never be made to operate above 10,000 cycles."[^102]

[^102]: Fessenden, op. cit. p. 1140.

It can hardly be said that Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp was universally acclaimed. The issue of the New York Times of December 28, 1879, in which Edison's demonstrations at Menlo Park are described, carried a statement of Prof. Henry Morton, the president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, protesting against the trumpeting of the results of Edison's experiments in electric lighting as "a wonderful success" when "every one acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure." He declared that Edison "has done and is doing too much really good work to have his record defaced and his name discredited in the interests of any stock company or individual financier." He then predicted the failure of the lamp inasmuch as all previous attempts had been failures. Other scientists denied the possibility that carbon could be used for filaments because carbon contained the elements of its own destruction. The managing editor of the New York Herald rebuked the city editor of his paper for publishing a feature article on Edison's electric light on the grounds that such a light was against the laws of nature.[^103]

[^103]: White, F. M., "Edison and the Incandescent Light" in Outlook, vol. xciv (1910), pp. 487--488.

Early demonstrations by Edison of the incandescent lamp disturbed the London stock exchange. Uneasiness on gas share quotations in one day amounted to a veritable panic because the sensational reports in the press led to the belief that gas was to be superseded entirely.[^104] But gas lighting yielded slowly to electricity. The expense involved in making and operating the lamps which were very short lived seemed to many to negate any prospect of their wide use.[^105] By opposing franchises for electrical lighting, the gas companies retarded its application. Gas lighting was put forward as the model of safety and electricity was denounced as hazardous. Those installing electricity in dwellings were often obliged to use fixtures permitting the use of gas as well. Dim gas street lighting was characterized as romantic as contrasted with the glare of electric lighting and the lamplighter was sentimentalized. As late as June 27, 1929, when gas lights were to be replaced in various parts of San Francisco, a local paper in a news report said:

[^104]: Bryn, E. W., The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century, (New York, 1900), p. 71.

[^105]: Usher, A. P., A History of Mechanical Inventions, (New York, 1929), p. 366.

Many people view the passing of the gas light with regret, because the lamplighter --- either a young man working his way through school, or an old man trudging by at sunset --- was a personality. Especially on Russian Hill the people are not anxious for speedy substitution of new lights. They feel that the gas lights fit the Bohemian character of the neighborhood.

Changes within the electric industry have been retarded by the buying and suppressing of patents by large corporations which dominate the field. From 1896 to 1911 the General Electric and the Westinghouse electric companies had a patent-purchasing agreement that neither would acquire a patent that would tend to injure the other, and that many inventors could not find a market for their patents.[^106] A superior electric lamp, which is estimated will save electric light users $10,000,000 a year has been invented, but has not been put on the market.[^107]

[^106]: Vaughan, op. cit. pp. 210--211.

[^107]: New York Times, Jan. 2, 1936, p. 50.

For household uses the wood range held out a long time against the coal range and the oil burner. In turn the coal range has resisted the gas range, and the gas range the electric range.

Metals

When artificers among the early Europeans first used copper for tools and weapons, they did not sense the possibilities of the metal and their copper celts closely resembled the shape of the stone celts. Iron was long regarded with suspicion, and there were protracted delays before it was utilized in the place of bronze and stone. Certain tribes of East Africa, among them the Akamba, retain their objection to the iron hoe which they believe keeps away the rain. Iron was not worked by the Caribou Eskimos during the musk ox hunting season, and the Kadiak <!-- sic --> Eskimos continued to use slate spearheads because of the belief that they brought on death more quickly than iron spearheads.[^108] In the Biblical story of the building of Solomon's temple, it is declared that the sound of iron tools was not heard,[^109] and the Mormon temple at Salt Lake City was built without iron. No bolts or iron were permitted in the repair of the Publican Bridge across the Tiber as late as the fall of the Roman Republic.[^110] Stone knives were used by the Jews for circumcision and by the Egyptians for embalming, long after they were familiar with iron. The first successful cast-iron plow invented in the United States in 1797 was rejected by New Jersey farmers under the theory that cast iron poisoned the hands and stimulated the growth of weeds.[^111]

[^108]: Sayce, R. U., Primitive Arts and Crafts, (Cambridge, England, 1923), pp. 182, 185, 193, 194.

[^109]: I Kings, 6: 7

[^110]: Burgess, E. W., The Function of Socialization in Social Evolution, (Chicago, 1916), p. 16.

[^111]: Thompson, op. cit. p. 112.

The prohibitive price of wrought iron prevented its wide utilization. In 1591 a forge could not make more than two tons a week, and owing to a shortage of water often made only 50 tons a year. Water tanks and pipes therefore continued to be constructed in pewter and lead. Savery's engines seem to have failed because the lead pipes burst under the pressure he applied. Even at the close of the seventeenth century the product of forges was often insufficiently decarbonized and crumbled when hammered.[^112]

[^112]: Wolf, op. cit. p. 542.

Abraham Darby's discovery in 1709 of how to eliminate the bad effects of the sulphurous fumes of coal in making iron was practically ignored. In France, Réamur's process was neglected for many years. Henry Cort, who took out patents on the use of coal in forges and on the processes of puddling and rolling in 1783 and 1784, went bankrupt. An official report of the British government of his patents said in 1805: "It does not seem that any opportunity has occurred, though endeavors have been used, to make them available to any profitable purposes." The influence of early inventions was so negligible that a member of the House of Commons could declare in 1806, nearly a century after Darby's discovery, and over 20 years after Cort's discoveries: "Formerly and till within the last 5 or 6 years, wood or charcoal was the only material by which it was supposed that iron could be made; but the ingenuity of the manufacturers led them to find a substitute in coak."[^113] <!-- sic -->

[^113]: Hammond, J. L., and Barbara, The Rise of Modern Industry, (London, 1925), pp. 137, 140.

When, in 1856, Bessemer at Cheltenham made public his process of making steel, many iron makers accepted his convertors <!-- sic --> readily, but their early efforts to produce steel proved a dismal failure because of the chemical composition of the pig iron which contained too much phosphorus. Bessemer repurchased the patents and after a short period of experimentation he discovered the causes of the previous failure, and began to manufacture the steel himself. For a time, however, his product appeared to be a drug on the market. His firm did little business during its first two years, for the trade was slow to acknowledge the virtues of the new metal partly because of the failure of its first commercial exploitation.[^114] In the United States, when, in 1846, William Kelly discovered independently the same process as Bessemer, his father-in-law, who believed the method ridiculous, and such experimentation harmful to the credit of his iron works, threatened to withdraw his financial support. Customers rejected the new product and insisted on iron refined by the regular methods.[^115]

[^114]: Bessemer, Henry, An Autobiography, (London, 1905), ch. xii.

[^115]: Spring, L. W., "The Story of Iron and Steel" in Kaempffert, W., ed. A Popular History of American Invention, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), vol. ii, p. 21.

The United States Steel Corporation has initiated few technological changes in the steel industry, and has been slow to respond to innovations. It rejected or neglected, largely because of its vast investments in other processes, Henry Gray's invention of a structural section that could be rolled together in one piece; John B. Tytus's method of manufacturing steel sheets by a continuous process like that used in the manufacture of paper; Gayley's process of supplying a dry blast to blast furnaces; the new centrifugal process of casting ingots which eliminates ingot molds, soaking pits, and blooming mills. It lagged in the development of the stainless steel market. Because its prices are calculated in tonnage, it has discouraged and has refused to experiment or pioneer in alloy steels which make possible reduction in the weight of steel without sacrificing strength.[^116] Louis D. Brandeis in 1914 cited with approval the judgement of the editor of Electrical News:

[^116]: O'Connor, Harvey, Steel Dictator, (New York, 1935), pp. 126--129.

We are today something like 5 years behind Germany in iron and steel metallurgy, and such innovations as are being introduced by our iron and steel manufacturers are merely following the lead set by foreigners years ago. We believe the main cause is the wholesale consolidation that has taken place in American industry. A huge organization is too clumsy to take up the development of an original idea. With the market closely controlled and certain of profits by developing standard methods, those who control our trusts to not want the bother of developing anything new.[^117]

[^117]: Brandeis, L. D., Other People's Money, (New York, 1914), pp. 150--151.

It is not that German industrialists were invariably responsive to innovation, for when, about 1880, a Canadian metallurgist suggested the use of iron-nickel alloys for guns, Krupp rejected the idea.[^118] In 1916, a committee on foundry methods of the National Founders' Association estimated that not more than 25 percent of the foundries of North America had installed available mechanical appliances.[^119]

[^118]: Wadhams, A. J., "The Story of the Nickel Industry" in Metals and Alloys, vol. ii (1931), p. 168.

[^119]: Stecker, M. L., "The Founders, the Moulders, and the Moulding Machine" in Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xxxii (1917--18), p. 281 n.

Great Britain is also faced with the problem of lag in the steel industry. The Committee on Industry and Trade reported:

In the efficiency of its coking plant and in the organization of the coking industry, Great Britain still undoubtedly lags behind the United States and the continent of Europe.... In the main the older ovens have been retained, and it is said that there are few plants that have been scrapped altogether since 1906. The explanation given by the representatives of the coke oven owners is broadly that it does not pay to install new ovens in this country in view of their relatively high capital cost ... the financial condition has made it difficult to raise new capital for replacements and extensions.[^120]

[^120]: Great Britain, Committee on Industry and Trade, Survey of Industries, 4 vols, (London, 1927--28), vol. iv., pp. 25--27.

In the United States monopoly control retards, for instance, the development of the aluminum industry. Production of aluminum was originally so costly that Deville and Bunsen regarded its use as impractical, but the process of obtaining metal by electrical reduction cheapened its production drastically. The Aluminum Co. of America obtained its monopolistic position by the purchase of this process patent for producing aluminum, issued to Charles M. Hall in 1889, and augmented it later by the purchase in 1903 of a conflicting and competing patent issued to Charles S. Bradley. In 1937, the United States Attorney General's office charged that:

By virtue of its 100 percent monopoly of the production and sale of alumina and virgin aluminum in the United States, Aluminum Co. has acquired and is maintaining a monopolistic control of the production and sale of alumina, aluminum, aluminum sheet, alloy sheet, basic fabricated products, and through them of products manufactured therefrom, sold in interstate and foreign commerce, and possesses the power to fix arbitrary, discriminatory, and unreasonable prices and to extend and perpetually maintain said monopolistic control and to exclude others who would, except for said monopolistic control, engage in competition with Aluminum Co. in the production and sale of bauxite, alumina, virgin aluminum, and aluminum products manufactured therefrom. Because new enterprises desiring to engage in the aluminum industry would be placed at the mercy of a single powerful corporation controlling essential raw materials, and because of the great hazard necessarily involved in venturing into a business so completely monopolized by Aluminum Co. and its wholly owned subsidiaries, said monopolistic control has had and will continue to have the direct and immediate effect of suppressing and preventing substantial competition which would otherwise arise in the production and sale in interstate and foreign commerce of bauxite, alumina, aluminum, and aluminum products manufactured therefrom, and is inimical to the public interest....

Retardation in the development of the aluminum industry due to monopoly control is detrimental to many fields of industrial growth, particularly because of the importance of aluminum in the development of alloys.[^120a]

[^120a]: United States of America v. Aluminum Co. of America et al., petition filed Apr. 23, 1937, in the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, Equity No. 85--73, pp. 21--22. See also "Aluminum Co. of America", Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 69th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C., 1926); and Federal Trade Commission, Report on the House Furnishings Industry, vol. iii (Washington, D.C., 1925), ch. iv.

Textile Machinery

The textile industry was the first battleground of machine technology against hand tools. The beginnings of the conflict developed as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the Continent, and for three centuries guild and local authorities frequently ordered new machines destroyed and their inventors imprisoned. In 1397, for example, the tailors of Cologne were forbidden to use a machine for pressing the head of pins. In 1272 Borghesano's automatic machine, run by a water wheel, for twisting silk thread, was used in Bologna. Its secret appears to have been maintained through fear of the death penalty, so that it did not become known in Switzerland until 1555 and in England until 1718.[^121] It is reported that about 1579 the Council of Danzig had had strangled the inventor of a machine which would weave four to six pieces at once, lest his invention reduce many workers to beggary. Rev. William Lee, who in 1589, invented the first knitting machine, the so-called "stocking frame", was refused a patent of monopoly by Queen Elizabeth and James I. He then accepted an invitation from King Henry IV of France, and went to Rouen in Normandy with several looms, only to have his inventions unrealized because of the king's assassination. The manufacture of looms made by Giambattista Carli of Gemona was ordered discontinued in consequence of the poverty of Venetian stocking-knitters. In England, it was not until 1696 that looms were common, and then their exportation was forbidden in order to keep the improvements secret. In Leyden about 1621, magistrates interdicted the use of a weaving machine because of protests of workers. In numerous parts of Germany, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the ribbon-loom was prohibited, and it was sometimes publicly burned. It was not until 1765 that the electorate of Saxony permitted the use of the looms.[^122]

[^121]: Corey, Lewis, "Machines and Tools" in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. x (New York, 1933), p. 19.

[^122]: Beckman op. cit. vol. ii, pp. 371--375, 528--531; Marx, Karl, Das Kapital, 3 vols. (4th ed. Hamburg, 1890), vol. i, tr. by E. and C. Paul (London, 1928), pp. 457--458.

Kay's Flying shuttle or "spring loom", invented in 1733, was not in general use in England for cotton weaving until 1760, and its utilization in the woolen and worsted industries, while common in Gloucestershire and parts of Wiltshire by 1803, still caused disturbances in Somerset as late as 1822. Blackburn spinsters in 1768 invaded Hargreave's home and destroyed his spinning jennies which first operated 8, and before long 100, spindles. Workers protested by demonstrating against the jenny when it was first introduced in the South-West clothing district in 1776 and petitioned the House of Commons to abolish the use of the jenny lest it "tend greatly to the Damage and Ruin of many thousands of the industrious Poor." The objection to the spinning jenny symbolized the resistance to the factory system. "Spinning houses" had been organized by the clothiers on their own premises, and weavers feared that they too would be obliged to work under their employers' roofs. A scribbling mill at Bradford, Wilts., was burned down about 1790.

Beginning in Lancashire in 1776, and especially in 1779, there was a systematic attack throughout England on the use of new machines invented by Arkwright, which used water and horsepower for carding, roving, and spinning, and which forced spinning out of the cottage into the factory. In their petition to Parliament in 1780, the cotton spinners of Lancashire described the threat of total loss of employment which made the patent machines "a Domestic Evil of very great Magnitude." They declared that the worker's plight was so "intolerable as to reduce them to Despair, and many thousands assembled in different Parts to destroy the Causes of their Distress." They gave evidence that the work produced by the machines was inferior to hand work, and called the machines a mere monopoly "for the immense profits and Advantages of the Patentees and Proprietors." After the new parliamentary committee reported in favor of the new machinery, they again showed the larger social significance of the conflict by their complaint that "the Jennys are in the Hands of the Poor and the Patent Machines are generally in the Hands of the Rich." It is this monopolistic character of Arkwright's inventions that led to wide public sympathy with the workers' attempt to check their use. Arkwright was exceedingly unpopular with other manufacturers because he kept his inventions secret. The landed class not only resented the inventions as facilitating the growing power of the industrialists, but feared that the poor rates would be increased by the burden of persons, whom the machines threw out of work.[^123]

[^123]: Hammond, J. L., and Barbara, The Skilled Labourer, 1760 -- 1832 (London, 1919), pp. 49, 160, 53--56, 145--146, 149.

The introduction of textile machinery continued to be opposed into the next century. When Cartwright argued that weaving should be done by machinery, experts derided him. His power loom, invented in 1785, Heaton declares to have been in fact almost worthless in its original form.[^124] The introduction of weaving machinery was responsible for what has become known as the Nottingham Luddite riots of 1811--12, during which framework knitters sought to break all frames that were being used to make "cut-ups" --- that is, pieces which could be cut up into gloves, socks, sandals, and stockings of an inferior kind --- and the machines of manufacturers that failed to pay wages agreed upon. In Yorkshire a small band of highly organized and skilled workmen in the woolen industry sought to destroy the gig mills and shearing frames.[^125] In France, Jacquard's looms for the weaving of brocaded silks, invented in 1801, were destroyed by displaced workers. The inventor lamented, "The iron was sold for iron, the wood for wood, and I, its inventor, was delivered up to public ignominy."[^126]

[^124]: Heaton, H., "Industrial Revolution" in Encyclopaedia of the Social Scineces, vol. viii (1932), p. 7.

[^125]: Hammond, op. cit. pp. 257--260, 301--302, 171--174.

[^126]: Yeats, op. cit. p. 276.

Opposition to power-driven machinery flared when steam, used in 1785 for the first time in a cotton mill, began to be installed widely. In 1793 "respectable residents" at Bradford, England, protested successfully against the use of the steam engine in worsted mills as "a smoky nuisance" by threatening the proprietor with legal proceedings.[^127] Strenuous resistance to the use of steam looms for cotton weaving arose at Lancashire.[^128]

[^127]: Hammond, op. cit. p. 153.

[^128]: Hammond, Rise of Modern Industry, p. 107.

As new machinery, which allowed for increased production was invented in the textile industry, it met the opposition of the executives of the industry, who feared that overproduction would disturb existing price levels, and who hesitated to scrap the older machinery until it was worn out physically.[^129] They likewise invariably aroused workers' hostility because of the dread of technological unemployment, the initial difficulties of adapting themselves to the new machinery and the lowered wages and greater speed-up that usually accompanied their introduction.

[^129]: Jerome, Harry, Mechanization in Industry, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., Publication no. 27 (New York, 1934), p. 333.

Competition between various textile products sometimes impedes innovation, as is strikingly shown in the case of the campaign against rayon by the silk manufacturers. When rayon was first put on the market, a committee appointed by silk manufacturers to study its possibilities declared it a transient fad. When it proved to be otherwise, large sums were spent in advertising to discredit the new product.

Sewing machine

The first sewing machines were regarded either with indifference, amused curiosity, and skepticism as to their utility, or with hostility as to their effects on the livelihood of workers in the needle trades. The machine invented by Thomas Saint in 1790 was viewed as a mechanical toy. In 1832 Walter Hunter's machine was withdrawn by the promoter, George A. Arrowsmith, on the grounds that the introduction of the machine would be injurious to the interests of the hand-sewers. The army uniform factory of Bartholomey Thimmonier in Paris, in which there were 80 of the sewing machines that he had invented in 1830, was destroyed in 1841 by workers who feared for their livelihood, and in 1848 his second factory was likewise destroyed. His machine was never widely used in France and when it was shown at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, no notice was taken of it in the English press. The resistance to the sewing machine patented by Elias Howe in the United States in 1846 was not primarily on account of its displacement of hand workers, although his machine sewed more rapidly than five of the swiftest needle workers. The chief reasons were that it was very expensive, costing $200 to $300 to build, that it could sew only a straight seam, and that break-downs were frequent.[^130] After the machine was improved by A. B. Wilson and mass production methods were introduced by Isaac Singer, patent controversies delayed progress. In 1856 the leading manufacturers pooled their patents, and by their control of these basic patents, suppressed any variants that would disturb the market.[^131]

[^130]: Lewton, F. L. "The Servant in the House: A Brief History of the Sewing Machine", in Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1929, (1930), pp. 559--583.

[^131]: Vaughan, op. cit. p. 36.

The introduction of electric sewing machines was delayed long after they had been devised because they would depreciate the value of the hand- and foot-power machines. Consumers, moreover, hesitated to purchase new models in spite of their undoubted superiority, because of costs, and because the previous machines gave sufficient satisfaction not to make substitution imperative.

Agricultural Machinery

There has been strong consistent opposition to changes in technology in agriculture. The opposition of farmers to the cast-iron plow has already been mentioned. When Jethro Tull sought to introduce mechanical planting of grain by drilling machines to display broadcast sowing by hand, he was by threats of violence forced to leave many English farm villages.[^132] Amos Bronson Alcott would not allow his land to be manured because he considered it "a base and corrupting mode of forcing nature."[^133] Whitney's cotton gin was not accepted at once, not only because of the rumor which had its source in Manchester, that the gin injured the cotton fiber, but because of the excessive levy which Whitney and his partner Miler, imposed on the planters who used it.[^134] The Hammonds write of the destruction of the threshing machines in England in 1830:

[^132]: Horine, M. C., "Farming by Machine" in Kaempffert, W., ed., A Popular History of American Inventions, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), vol. ii, pp. 256--257.

[^133]: Seldes, Gilbert, The Stammering Century (New York, 1928), p. 208.

[^134]: Iles, op. cit. pp. 82--83.

Threshing was one of the few kinds of work left that provided the laborer with a means of existence above the starvation level.... It is easy to imagine what the sight of one of these hated engines meant to a parish: the 15 men, their wives and families would have found cold comfort, when they became submerge in the morass of parish relief in the reflection that the new machine extracted for their masters' and the public benefit 10 percent more corn than they could hammer out by their free hands.[^135]

[^135]: Hammond, J. L., and Barbara, The Village Labourer, 1760--1832, (London, 1911), pp. 220--221.

James Buchanan's wind stacker was opposed in the 1880s on the grounds that it would pull the grain out of the pipe or shoe with the straw, and that it would use too much power.[^136] Ownership of the Buchanan patents on wind stackers later enabled the Indiana Manufacturing Co. to control the introduction of improvements and to suppress those that disturbed the market.[^137]

[^136]: Horine, op. cit. p. 297.

[^137]: Vaughan, op. cit. p. 46.

Small-town bankers and businessmen refused for many years to lend money on tractors on the grounds that they were a menace to farmers. They argued not only that farmers could not operate the machine profitably, but also that if they were successful, the farmer would have too much leisure time. They had investments in horses and foresaw their eventual decline in price if tractors were utilized. The national horse associations led in circulating propaganda against tractors and were joined by the local bankers. Farmers were easily susceptible to such a campaign for the price of tractors was high, horse-drawn implements became almost a total loss, and the farmers were often sentimentally attached to their horses. Farmers rarely had sufficient evidence one way or the other on the question whether the breakage on the tractor and the amount of fuel required were excessive. The opposition of the farm wage workers displaced by the tractor, was also great.

Delay in the effective utilization of tractors is in many countries and regions due to the system of land ownership prevailing, for in order to be exploited profitably, tractors require vast concentration of land areas, as in the western United States and in the collective farms of the Soviet Union. Any trend toward smaller holdings as is advocated widely in the United States and especially in Fascist countries tends to negate and make impossible the application of modern agricultural technology.

Fear of overproduction of cotton with consequent shattering of existing price levels, and of drastic displacement of cotton pickers, is deterring the introduction of the automatic cotton picker invented by the Rust brothers. According to the estimate of the Delta Experiment Station of Stoneville, Tenn., the Rust machine, which can pick in 7½ hours as much as a good hand picker can pick in 5 weeks, will displace over 75 percent of the labor population in the southern cotton country if the invention is thrown upon the market in the regular manner. The inventors, cognizant of the revolutionary consequences attending their invention, are themselves withholding its application, except for its trial use on a cooperative farm in Mississippi and in the Soviet Union, where the problem of unemployment does not exist and the introduction of the machine can be regulated.

In general, a situation such as exists in capitalist countries where food production is being curtailed in the interest of price maintenance for profit is hardly conducive to the introduction of improvements in agricultural technology. In fact, retrogression has been apparent, with technologies already introduced being abandoned, particularly during the depression.

Building

Architecture has always been conservative. When the early dwellers on the Alpine lakes descended into the Italian plains, they continued to build pile dwellings, even when they settled on hilltops.[^138] It took 350 years and 13 kings to eliminate inflammable straw roofs from Danish towns.[^139] In spite of their extreme combustibility and the inadequate protection from the cold that they afforded, and the easy availability of timber which was cheaper and better, thatched cottages survived for a long period in the American colonies.[^140] Churches and public buildings still cling to ancient and mediaeval forms. There was long delay in using iron in building, and when it was used it was either hidden, or when unavoidably shown, employed with no idea of its aesthetic possibilities. When Buffington took out patents for the steel-frame skyscraper in 1888, the Architectural News predicted that the expansion and contraction of iron would crack all the plaster, eventually leaving only the shell.[^141].

[^138]: Giuffrida-Ruggeri, V., "A Sketch of the Anthropology of Italy" in Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Journal, vol. xlviii (1918) pp. 99--100.

[^139]: Lowie, R. H., Are We Civilized? (New York, 1929), pp. 72--73.

[^140]: Wertenbaker. T. J., The First Americans, 1607--1690, (New York, 1927), pp. 248--285.

[^141]: Polk, Grace, "Sire of the Skyscraper", in New York Times Magazine (New York, Nov. 21, 1926), p. 15.

The pressure of vested interests has been a decisive factor in retarding change in housing materials. The lumber companies long fought legislation prohibiting the building of inflammable wooden buildings in large cities.[^41a] Wooden shingle companies lobbied against laws for fireproof roofing.[^41b] Brick manufacturers carried on a persistent campaign for years against concrete structures, predicting their collapse.

[^41a]: National Lumber Manufacture's Association, Highlights of a Decade of Achievement, (Washington D.C., 1929) pp. 33--40, 53--55, 62.

[^41b]: "Brief on behalf of the National Lumber Manufacture's Association" before the Federal Trade Commission (Washington, D.C., 19126), pp. 46, 51.

Central heating systems have met stubborn and persistent opposition. In England particularly advances in heating methods have been widely ignored.

Adequate toilet facilities, still regarded as incidental luxuries by many builders of homes for workers, were only slowly introduced into the homes of the middle-class late in the nineteenth century. Earlier the bathroom was regarded as a superfluity in the palace of Versailles, and the bathtub was removed and put in the garden for a fountain.[^142] There is ample evidence that inhabitants of the palace acted in the spirit of Philip of Spain, who had authorized the destruction of all public baths left by the Moors on the grounds that washing the body was a heathen custom dangerous to believers.[^143] In the 1840s the bathtub was denounced in the United States as an epicurean innovation from England designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic. The medical profession warned against it as a producer of rheumatic fevers, inflammatory lungs, and all zymotic diseases. Attempts were made to legislate against it. An ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15 failed passage in the Philadelphia Common Council in 1843 by only two votes. Heavy water rates were levied against those who had bathtubs in Virginia, and a tax of $30 imposed on their possessors in certain towns. When President Filmore installed a bathtub in the White House in 1851, there was an outcry against it as a "monarchial luxury" which could well be dispensed with inasmuch as former Presidents had gotten along without them.[^144]

[^142]: Boehn and Fischel, op. cit., pp. 79--80.

[^143]: Hogben, Lancelot, "Genetic Principles" in Medicine and Social Science (London, 1932), p. 213.

[^144]: New York Times, Nov. 21, 1926. Sec. VIII, 12:1.

Organized skilled workers in the building trades have slowed down the introduction of processes that threaten to endanger their health, destroy their skill, lower their wages, and cause technological unemployment. Between 1911 and 1921, prohibitions against cutting, measuring, and threading by machine, of iron pipe of specific diameter were incorporated in agreements between plumbers' unions and builders' associations and there were restrictions in regard to the use of substitutes for ferrules and brass soldering devices.[^145] Granite cutters resisted the introduction of surfacing machines and of pneumatic hammers which, in addition to speeding up, involved the hazard of silicosis. Painters object to the paint spray which endangers health by benzol <!-- sic --> poisoning.

[^145]: Montgomery, R. E., "Industrial Relations" in the Chicago Building Trades (Chicago, 1927), p. 168.

When recently the mechanized industries, particularly in metal, entered the housing field with the production of "prefabricated houses", they were met by the resistance of property holders, especially of the banks, who hold mortgages on about 58 percent of all 1933 value of all urban real estate,[^146] and who fear that an influx of cheap modern dwellings would subtract substantially from the market value of existing structures.[^147] These banks and loan companies have been unwilling to finance prefabricated houses except in rare exceptions and then on a limited basis. Lumber companies and manufacturers of other materials which are being displaced in the production of prefabricated houses, have sought to prevent their construction through building-code restrictions and by organizing boycotts by dealers and building crafts. Moral and ethical rationalizations have been used against prefabricated houses. The director of the New England division of the American Institute of Architects in May 1934 attacked prefabricated houses as tending "to substitute a life of vagrancy for responsible citizenship in the community".[^148] The author of an article entitled, "Houses Cannot be Built Like Automobiles", who speaks on behalf of architects against prefabrication, argues plaintively, "Spiritual, mental, and physical well-being is enhanced always by the exercise and development of individualism, especially when related to the home and its environment. Housing that fails to respect these human values must be considered among the 'chats' to be discarded".[^149]

[^146]: Clark, Evans. The Internal Debts of the United States (New York, 1933), p. 6.

[^147]: Lonberg-Holm, K., and Larson, C. T., "Trends in Building Production", in Real Estate Record, vol. cxxxvii (Apr. 18, 1936), pp. 19--25.

[^148]: "Pre-Fabrication", in Architect and Engineer, vol. cxvii (May 1934) 73--74.

[^149]: North, A. T., "Houses Cannot Be Built Like Automobiles", in American Architect, vol. cxlii (December 1932), pp. 18--20.

Planned public housing projects such as slum clearance which afford the most efficient methods of utilizing advanced technologies in the building industry, crash against the wall of vested private-property interest. They meet the combined opposition of the owners of obsolete buildings, that nonetheless are still profitable, of landowners who demand prohibitive prices, of holders of mortgages who fear a depreciation of housing values through the increase in available homes. Achievements in building technology lie sterile in the face of the opposition of these interests. It has been calculated that at the rate of replacement between 1921 and 1933 of homes and apartments, the American house will be in use 142 years.[^150] Such slow replacement, based on profits derived from old houses, impedes the building of new structures, however pressing the housing needs for the mass of the population of the United States may be.

[^150]: Clark, op. cit., p. 67.

Psychological and Socio-Economic Factors Involved

Each example of opposition to technological innovation that has here been given has obviously its unique constellation of circumstances and causes. But comparable situations appear frequently enough to permit a tabulation of the basic factors involved in resistance to technological advance. In every case there are both cultural and psychological factors present, related in an inextricable manner, as aspects of the same situation; the cultural gives the historical and socio-economic setting which provoke a specific psychological response from the individuals participating. From the results of this study it is apparent that the psychological factors of habit, fear, desire for personality equilibrium and status, and the tendency of groups to coerce their members to conformity, are latent predisposing factors toward resistance to change. The manner and degree in which these factors function depend on forces in the cultural environment. The most potent of the cultural factors are clearly economic: Efforts to maintain economic advantage and hegemony over competing classes, and over competitors in the same industry and rivals in the same market in allied fields; costs of introducing the new method or product, which in its early form is usually crude and unstandardized, and but one of a number of innovations designed to solve the specific problem at hand; the losses incurred through the depreciation of machinery and goods made obsolete by the innovation; the unwieldy structure and the rigidity of large scale corporate enterprises that hesitate to disturb a market which already yields profits through restricted production; the difficulties of small-scale enterprise to make the necessary capital investments; the stultifying influence of capitalist crises; and labour's efforts within a profit system to prevent being victimized by technological unemployment, by loss of skill, by speed-up and lowered wages. There are also political factors that have their own dynamics of functioning which may be directed to impede technological change, as for example the restricting influence of nationalism; faulty patent legislation and judicial decisions justifying suppression; the system of issuing "perpetual" franchises; the power of dominant industrial groups to control legislation to the interests as against beneficial innovations that imperil their profits. There are likewise religious forces that, as a rule, cement the status quo, and buttress resistant attitudes whose roots lie in more materialistic causes.

A classification of causes in this manner tends to be too bare to be of much value, just as the diversity of their functioning in each particular case of resistance to technological change, tends to obscure the common principles involved. For this reason, it is important that a framework of reference be given, by a picture of the psychological roots and the general socio-economic setting of this conservatism.

Men, however variable, are everywhere of one species and for this reason similar psychological factors underlie all human behavior under whatever social institutions men live. Resistance to change is, to this extent, rooted in the individual, just as is its antithesis, receptivity to new experience.

The tendency of an individual to persist in certain forms of set behavior and to select experience in terms of these forms, ignoring or opposing variants, is based in part on what is vaguely called habit, or conditioned response. Although Pavlov and others have shown experimentally the genesis of these conditioned responses, the physiology of retention at the basis of their formation is still little known.[^151] Various theories have been proposed. Cason believes that the nature of the retention depends upon the degree of elasticity of the surface membranes of the nervous system, which is determined by their chemical composition.[^152] The theory of learning stemming from Sherrington regards the permeability of the synapse as the decisive factor.[^153] Kappers holds that permanent connections in the nervous system are established through the growth of dendrites and axones under the influence of bio-electric currents.[^154] None of these theories are as yet conclusive; and the problems of the physiological basis of retention as one aspect of conservatism remains for future clarification. It should be recognized, moreover, that there is not necessarily any correlation between specific retention abilities and resistance to change. Conservatism is made possible by neural retention but excellent retention can be associated with agile flexibility of behavior and attitude, while the arch-conservative may be weak in his power of retention. Resistant attitudes must be explained largely in terms of the symbolic rather than the neurophysiological level of behaviour.

[^151]: Pavlov, I. P., Conditioned Reflexes, tr. from the Russian (Leningrad. 1926) by G. V. Anrep (Oxford, 1927); Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes tr. by W. H. Gantt (New York rev. ed. 1936); and "An Attempt at a Physiological Interpretation of Obsessional Neurosis and Paranoia", in Journal of Mental Science, vol. lxxx (1934) pp. 187--197.

[^152]: Cason, Hulsey, "The Physical Basis of the Conditioned Response", in American Journal of Psychology, vol. xxxvi (1925) pp. 371--393.

[^153]: Sherrington, C. S., The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, Yale University. Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures (New York, 1906).

[^154]: Kappers, C. U. A., "Further Contributions on Neurobiotaxis: IX. An Attempt to Compare the Phenomena of Neurobiotaxis With Other Phenomena of Taxis and Tropism. The Dynamic Polarization of the Neurome", in Journal of Comparative Neurology vol. xxvii (1916--17) pp. 261--298.

The adjustment of a person to his environment demands that he channelize his behavior to some extent in the interest of personality integration. He cannot be continuously expending his energies and undergoing crises in making decisions. Judgements once made must serve as guiding precedents. A large part of his behavior of necessity becomes quasi-automatic involving little deliberation or judgement. This behavior, oft-repeated, becomes suffused with emotional tones of pleasure, particularly when it involves skillful movements. One's personality becomes relatively at ease when it has attained an element of equilibration with the objects and persons with whom he comes in contact. Personality becomes bound up with environment by sentiments of intimacy. The strength of these attachments vary, depending upon the degree of the stability of the culture in which one lives. Where social forms are more dynamic and transient, the extent of permanency in adjustment is less than in a relatively static society. There is an emotional and aesthetic feeling of happiness derived from identification with the customary forms when these forms provide a minimum of gratification of human wants. Escape mechanisms facilitate a specious sense of adjustment and fantasy creates a world of unreality which obscures actual discomfort particularly when the economics of a society offer no certainty of employment and subsistence to its masses, and these live within the threatening shadow of insecurity.

An innovation, especially one which affects one's economic status as in the case of technologies, rudely shatters whatever equilibrium a person has attained. It demands not only motor reconditioning but reorganization of personality to meet the needs of the new situation. Poise gives way to at least temporary uncertainty. One's place in the new configuration is uncertain. New decisions are demanded. Efforts must be expended; discomforts of readjustment experienced. Life becomes more complex, in that it is less routinized, and appears to teem with hazards.

It is little wonder that an innovation, whatever its nature may be, provokes feelings of impropriety, and repelling defense attitudes of ridicule and disparagement, or is deliberately ignored and thus not permitted to enter experience. No matter how meager the adjustment that has been attained, it is often viewed as superior to the seemingly tempestuous uncertainties involved in reorientation. Unless there are incentives which stimulate conscious effort toward change, rationalization are used to justify the established behavior by excuses which sanction it. This has been well expressed in the Declaration of Independence: "... all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Resistances involving rationalizations are often made even if only slight changes in behavior are demanded because of he distrust of possible future commitments. But the closer the new approximates the old, the more likely it is to be accepted. Innovations are smuggled in through transitional forms. The earlier forms of an innovation growing out of a specific culture --- that is, not coming from without through diffusion --- as a rule deviate little from the preceding forms that are being displaced. This happens sometimes by intention, but primarily because of the limitations of innovators, who, like their public, are bound by previous experience. Changes are made detail by detail and not at once, not only because of psychological inertias, but because an invention is circumscribed by existing knowledge and by the tools and materials available. To avoid the acceptance of the new, moreover, old forms of techniques may be reinterpreted or modified slightly, acquire new utility and value, and survive as rivals of the new.

In the absence of unusual incentives, when an innovation is drastically novel, or because of its complicated nature, exacts fatiguing efforts for readjustment, or involves pain, however temporary and slight, resistance is intense and rationalizations flourish. To cling stubbornly to the old forms, however overwhelming the details of their performance may be, is often regarded as preferable to going through the temporary disturbing process of readjustment.[^155]

[^155]: Stern, Bernhard J., Social Factors in Medical Progress (New York, 1927), pp. 1--19.

Deliberation before accepting an innovation is of course commendable, for innovations are not always efficacious, and the hopes of the inventor are often illusory. Inventions, later to prove epoch-making, are sometimes in their initial form very crude, and even inferior to the forms in use. The social significance of many innovations is not realized, a fact well characterized by MacIver's analogy: "Inventions enter the world like new-born babes. Their power to change the modes of life and the thoughts of men does not appear until they are grown up."[^156] They often in their early trials prove failures. Furthermore, with innovations crowding upon one another, especially in modern times, when skills and fields of interests are specialized, it is difficult to know, and few are competent to judge, which will prove to be successful. Skepticism thrives on the fact that the annals of invention are crowded with innovations, originally hailed as epoch-making, that have come to naught. A mistake in judgement concerning one invention leads to excessive caution: "Once bitten; twice shy."

[^156]: MacIver, R. M., "Civilization versus Culture", in University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. i (1931--32) pp. 316--332.

Opposition to innovation is not invariably on a quasi-automatic level. Especially in economic and technological fields, there is involved conscious self-interest in the maintenance of status, and in some cases, even of life itself. Abstract "progress" usually rates insignificantly compared to the actual, immediate effects which an innovation has directly on the person or class involved.

Contemporary education in the United States appears to do little to facilitate or promote receptivity to technological innovation and is rather occupied with the organization and perpetuation of past experience and tradition. The majority of graduates, even of universities, remain ignorant of the relation of technology to contemporary culture, and few technologists are educated outside the narrow limits of their specialties. With few persons equipped with the experimental or scientific method of verifying data, or accustomed or able to analyze proof as a criteria of truth, there must be recourse to authority. The virtue in such use of authority is counteracted by the fact that in the field of technology experts have been historically conservative, have been indifferent to and have lacked understanding of the social aspects of their work, and have often been too biased in terms of their own schooling and specific research to give deliberate and reasoned judgements.

There are factors involved in resistance to change that are implicit in group behavior. The collective behavior of groups is expediated by orderliness based on the ability to anticipate the behavior of their members. Innovations are disruptive in that they affect not isolated persons but members of groups who influence the behavior of all with whom they come in contact. There is in consequence group resentment against innovators because they disturb established relations, upset routines, and cause temporary confusion. Social pressure upon the deviant to conform follows. Caviling criticism, ridicule and disparagement, economic discrimination, social ostracism, and violence are utilized. In order to avoid such reprisals most persons endorse customary procedures and refrain from projecting or supporting innovations. Social approval gives the tone to personal adjustment, and the restraints imposed by group attitudes are thus powerful deterrents of change. The size of the community is a factor in determining the strength of its power of coercion. If it has many members, cohesion is not as close, and the innovator, finding some support, may be able to ignore detractors, but in a small community contacts are more immediate and the influence tends to be more direct. The deterrent of group criticism functions not only in the general group life of the community, but within specific industrial organizations. To avoid the unpleasant, an individual tends to continue established routines rather than to venture with revolutionary innovations that will meet the resistance of his co-workers and superiors. "Not to venture, is not to lose", becomes a guiding principle unless incentives are strong.

In different cultures, opposition to technological change has varied in its character and strength. The factors inhibiting innovation in primitive societies apply to a large extent to small isolated communities throughout history, and to rural communities in the modern world. Absence of a knowledge of writing in preliterate societies, and illiteracy in civilized societies, establish the need of conserving tradition through speech and behavior. Sparcity of the technological base, a relatively scant margin of safety and wealth which permits few risks, the conformity demanded within closely related groups, little division of labor which diminishes the possibilities of experimentation, dominantly nonempirical attitudes, isolation which limits horizons and experience and permits few collisions with novel concepts from without, and close integration of different aspects of the cultural configuration --- all intensify conservatism.

In the ancient world, technological advances such as Hero's steam engine and mechanical appliances for construction work, were neglected mainly because of the abundance of the labor supply, because of the belief that it was degrading to science to put it to practical uses, and because of the disparaging social attitude toward artisans and manual labor.

The cultural retrogression of the Middle Ages in Europe, which made the situation prevailing in many medieval communities approximate in some respects that of primitive societies, was not conducive to innovation, least of all in the field of technology. The hierarchic social stratification that was sanctioned as divinely ordained by the Church, which spiritualized poverty and denounced materialism and experimentation, created an economic setting and authoritarian attitudes fatal to scientific progress and technological change. Medieval society was not entirely immobile and unprogressive. But local self-subsistence was a limiting economic frame, and the anti-scientific attitude of the Church enforced by heresy trials afforded an environment hostile to scientific and technological innovations.

The revival of interest in classical science, slowly followed by the beginnings of the experimental methods; the discovery of new continents, the plunder of which brought vast new wealth to Europe; the rise of cities with consequent increasing power of the burghers formed the social setting of capitalism that accelerated change and led the way to increasing receptivity to technological progress. Delays were now occasioned not only by efforts of the aristocracy to check the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie, but factors, peculiar to the structure and functioning of capitalism, impeded technological advance.

Under capitalism, the almost exclusive incentive to the incorporation of technological improvements into industry has been the drive for profits. The profit motive undoubtedly served as a ferment, accelerating change, in the early days of capitalism in contrast to a relatively static feudal economy. Its effectiveness in this respect was and is dependent upon the availability of markets, and the need to acquire or maintain control of that market in competition with rival capitalists. When new continents were being opened as markets, and capitalism was an expanding economy, new machinery could more readily be used to supplement the old. Competition between entrepreneurs, although it led to wasteful anarchic production and marketing, to some extent stimulated a response to technological innovation to keep ahead of competitors. But in the degree to which monopoly in the setting of the profit system is able to control prices, standardize products, and restrict production, alertness to technological change is diminished, a brake is put on inventions and their applications.

William M. Grosvenor has, in Chemical Markets, expressed the sentiments of modern corporate management toward the utilization of new inventions:

I have even seen the lines of progress that were most promising for the public benefit, wholly neglected or positively forbidden just because they might revolutionize the industry. We have no right to expect a corporation to cut its own throat from purely eleemosynary motives.... Why should a corporation spend its earnings and deprive its stockholders of dividends to develop something that will upset its own market or junk all its present equipment ... when development is directed by trained and experienced men responsible to stockholders for expenditures, they have little inducement to try to supersede that which they are paid to develop and improve.[^157]

[^157]: Grosvenor, W. M., "The Seeds of Progress", in Chemical Markets, vol. xxiv (1929) pp. 23--26.

Harry Jerome, after a study of mechanization of industry under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research, likewise formulated the principle that guides the relation of present-day capitalism to technological progress:

Technical progress far outruns actual practice. This margin of nonuse is in part due to nonpecuniary factors, but the major explanation is simply that, on the whole, industry must be conducted with profits as the immediate goal; hence the first and major consideration in any choice of method is not merely, "Will it do the work?" but also "Will it pay?"[^158]

[^158]: Jerome, op. cit., p. 33.

The results upon technological invention of excessive rigidity of monopolistic enterprise, arising from its fear of imperiling its heavy investments, especially in durable goods, and from its elaborate mechanics of functioning, was noted before the Oldfield Hearings on Patents in 1912, by Louis D. Brandeis:

These great organizations are constitutionally unprogressive. They will not take on the big thing. Take the gas companies of this country; they will not touch the electric light. Take the telegraph company, the Western Union Telegraph Co., they would not touch the telephone. Neither the telephone company nor the telegraph company would touch wireless telegraphy. Now, you would have supposed that in each one of these instances those concerns if they had the ordinary progressiveness of Americans would have said at once, "We ought to go forward and develop this." But they turned it down, and it was necessary in each one of those instances, in order to promote those great and revolutionizing inventions, to take entirely new capital.[^159]

[^159]: U.S. Congress, House Committee on Patents, Oldfield Revision and Codification of the Patent Statutes: Hearings, 62d Cong., 2d sess. (1912) no. 18, p. 12.

Charles F. Kettering, vice president and director of research of the General Motors Corporations, likewise stated in this connection in 1927:

Bankers regard research as most dangerous and a thing that makes banking hazardous due to the rapid changes it brings about in industry....[^160]

[^160]: Address before Association of National Advertisers, in Detroit, May 9, 1927.

Monopolies are themselves not only irresponsive to change, but through their control of basic patents and improvements, and also of kindred patents, only a few of which they utilize or develop, they prevent others from making technological changes in the fields which they preempt. Such is the testimony of the Inventor's Guild:

It is a well known fact that modern trade combinations tend strongly toward constancy of process and products, and by their very nature are opposed to new processes and new products originated by independent inventors, and hence tend to restrain competition in the development and sale of patents and patent rights; and consequently tend to discourage independent inventive thought.[^161]

[^161]: Vaughan, op. cit., p. 212.

Judicial decisions in United States courts have sanctioned the suppression of patents in decisions which are of primary importance when resistance to technological change in the United States is being appraised. In 1896 the judgement of the court was that the patentee:

may reserve to himself the exclusive use of his invention or discovery... His title is exclusive, and so clearly with the constitutional provisions in respect of private property that he is neither bound to use his discovery himself, nor permit others to use it.

When this decision was reaffirmed in 1909, it was declared that "the public has no right to compel the use of patented devices or of unpatented devices when that is inconsistent with fundamental rules of property."[^162] Technological progress is thus inextricably made dependent upon property rights interpreted in terms of individual rights and the rights of a specific industry as against the interests of the community. In practice, this interpretation benefits large corporations. For it is the consistent experience of inventors that they are helpless to promote their patents independently in fields which are dominated by such corporations. A chief obstacle is, of course, lack of capital to put their plans in operation.[^163]

[^162]: Vaughan, op. cit., pp. 161, 164.

[^163]: Rossman, Joseph, The Psychology of the Inventor (Washington, 1931), pp. 161--162; Wyman, W. I., "Patents for Scientific Discoveries", in Patent Office Society Journal. vol. xi (1929), p. 552.

[^164]: Grosvenor, op. cit., p. 24.

It is often argued that the establishment of laboratories and research associations by large corporations and cartels disproves the charge of inflexibility of giant industry. But these relatively few research departments give the corporations greater control over the innovations that might disturb the market. According to Grosvenor, only 12 out of the 75 most important inventions made between 1889 and 1929 were products of corporations' research.[^164] Evidence that inventions under these auspices are not fully utilized is given in the British Report of the Committee on Industry and Trade, made in 1929, by Sir Arthur Balfour:

It is when we come to consider the relation between the research associations and the industries themselves, and the extent to which these industries avail themselves in practice of the results of research by their own associations, that we find most cause for disquietude.... We have laid special stress on the importance of this aspect of the question of scientific research in relation to industry, because, in our opinion, it is the imperfect receptivity toward scientific ideas on the part of British industry which is at the moment the main obstacle to advance.[^165]

[^165]: Great Britain, Committee on Industry and Trade, Final Report, Comd. 3282 (London, 1929), pp. 215, 218.

The dominance of profit over these research activities is seen in the drastic retrenchment in research staffs concomitant with the economic crisis.
While in its early periods capitalism was more responsive to advance in technology, there have always been within it forces which have checked maximum receptivity to technological innovations. Factors inherent in the structure of capitalism have often made technological innovation overwhelmingly, and sometimes exclusively, in the interests of a relatively few owners of industry, and to the disadvantage, sometimes temporary but often permanent, to the masses of the population. The technical innovations in the early phases of the industrial revolution were introduced with callous disregard of the havoc which they wrought in the lives of the skilled artisans as have such changes, with few exceptions, since. They have in fact been utilized repeatedly to curb the militance of labor. Andrew Ure acknowledged this already in 1835 when he called the invention of the self-acting mule "a creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes" and added "This invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlists science in her service the refractory hand of labor will always be taught docility."[^166] James Nasmyth is quoted to have declared that the desire to break strikes was a prime factor in the introduction of machinery:

In the case of many of our most potent self-acting tools and machines, manufacturers could not be induced to adopt them until compelled to do so by strikes. This was the case with the self-acting mule, the wool-combing machine, the planing machine, the slotting machine, Nasmyth's steam-arm, and many others.[^167]

[^166]: Ure, Andrew, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London, 1835), pp. 367--368.

[^167]: Smiles, Samuel, Industrial Biography (new ed., London, 1876), pp. 294--295.

Workers can hardly be expected to be receptive to technological changes in the specific fields in which they are employed, when they are cognizant that their skills will be rendered worthless and their status imperiled by resulting unemployment. It is opposition so motivated that has sometimes reached dramatic proportions in many industries, particularly in the textile mining, iron and steel shoe, machinery, clothing, railroad, cigar, and glass industries.

The degree of trade-union or class consciousness determines the extent to which workers in a situation of technological change understand, articulate, and act upon their resentment at being the victims of such change. It also decides the form which their expression takes. Among unorganized workers, action is often directed against the machine itself as the immediate cause of their degradation, with the result that machine wrecking occurs. Trade-unions reject the tactic of destroying machinery and seek to substitute organized measures of bargaining with employers to lessen the impact of the tragedy of displacement through the more gradual introduction of the machine or process, and by demands for compensation to those displaced. Socialists and communists likewise discourage wrecking of machinery, support trade-union methods to get as much for the workers involved as is possible in a given situation, advocate social insurance programs to take care of the unemployed, as do many trade-unionists, and at the same time seek to crystallize resentment in preparation for a seizure of power by labor to establish an economy in which technology will not be subject to the exigencies of a profit system but may be used to the fullest in the interests of the entire population.

The failure of industry to keep abreast of technique is due in part to the periodic crises in capitalist economy. Even in periods of the upward swing of the cycle there is always the inhibiting fear of introducing technological changes that will cause overproduction and accelerate another crisis. Inasmuch as attempts at planning under capitalism have been directed toward restricting production, they have acted as curbs upon technological innovation. In the midst of a crisis, with available machinery working at but a fraction of its capacity, few new inventions are utilized except for the purpose of lowering labor costs. In 1932, for example, purchases of industrial machinery in the United States are reported to have declined 74 percent under the annual average for 1919--1929.[^168] In hearings before the House Committee on Patents in 1932, Representative Hatton W. Sumners of Texas argued that the Patent Office should cease granting patents on labor-saving devices because of unemployment.[^169] Efforts were made to restrict productive capacity and thus to maintain or raise prices under the N.R.A. The Research and Planning Division of the N.R.A. reported in February 1935 that all construction was restricted by code provisions in the following industries: Cordage and twine, petroleum, glass container, excelsior, American glassware, crushed stone, structural clay, roofing tile, drain tile, China clay, floor tile, alloys, iron and steel, carbon black, pyrotechnics, candle, tool and implement, and ice. Ten of these codes merely stipulated that no construction be made without authorization of the code authorities, and six permitted "modernization". Code amendments also restricted construction in the cotton, textile, and lace manufacturing industries.[^170] On the other hand, the raising of wage levels led many employers to substitute machinery for labor, and to rationalize their plants, so that the influence of the N.R.A. in discouraging technological change varied in different industries.[^171]

[^168]: "Industry is Thirty Billion Dollars Behind on New Equipment Purchases and Industry Needs Modernization but Awaits Low-Cost Capital", in Business Week, no. 154 (1932) 20--21; no. 155 (1932) pp. 14--16.

[^169]: Sumners, H. W., in U.S. Congress, House Committee on Patents. Patents: Hearing on General Revision of Patent Laws, 72d Cong., 1st sess. (1932). pp. 39--46.

[^170]: U.S. National Recovery Administration, Research and Planning Division, Report on the Operation of the National Industrial Recovery Act (Washington, D.C., 1935), p. 53.

[^171]: Strachey, John, "The Two Wings of the Blue Eagle", in Nation, vol. cxxxvii (1934), pp. 42--43; Lyon, L. S., and others, The National Recovery Administrations, Brookings Institution, the Institute of Economics, Publication No. lx (Washington, D.C., 1935); Standard Statistics Co., Inc., Standard Trade and Securities, vol. lxxi, no 2. sec. 1 (Jan. 3, 1934), pp. M6--M8, vol. lxxxvi, no. 35, sec. 3 (June 19, 1935), P. MA--9 --- MA--11.

In public works and in private industry, there have been moreover in times of crisis definite evidences of retrogression in technology. Advocacy of the return to earlier mechanical processes in public works derives from an attempt to solve the problem unemployment. The Engineering News Record of December 11, 1930, declares replacement of machines by hand labor to be:

a burning question with many city engineers and administrative officials. Some have already answered it in favor of hand labor.... Minneapolis is planning to use pick-and-shovel men instead of machinery in its winter program of municipal improvements. Boston proposes to abolish the use of snow-loading machines in clearing its streets after a snowfall. Newark has just begun hand excavation in converting the abandoned Morris Canal to a subway roadbed. Akron and Sacramento have put the pick-and-shovel plan into practice.... And so the list goes.[^172]

[^172]: Schmitt, F. E., "Hand Against Machine Work", in Engineering News-Record, vol. cv (1930), p. 915.

In private industry the shrinking of the markets which favored mass-production methods has necessitated in some cases the abandonment of the technologies at the basis of such methods and the return to machinery which produces more economically for a local market. Albert Kelsey, technical advisor to the Pan American Union, reported in 1931 that several South American countries were contemplating steps to abolish machine work and to substitute hand labor, that Bolivia had practically penalized the use of machines in mining, and that Chile was considering the abolition of motor trucks.[^173]

[^173]: New York Times, Dec. 29, 1931, p. 7.

A return to small-scale production methods in industry and agriculture cannot help but curtail technological progress at this period of history. Scientific research upon which modern technological invention is based has too many ramifications and is too costly to be undertaken and financed by small producers. Inevitably, existing technology, which is the primary contribution of the western world to civilization, could not be maintained; its continuance has already met strenuous opposition wherever the theory or practice of small-scale production is current.[^174]

[^174]: The Frustration of Science, by Sir Daniel Hale, J.G. Crowther, J.D. Bernal, and others (London, 1935); Rubinstein, M.I., Science, Technology, and Economics under Capitalism and in the Soviet Union (Moscow, 1932).

Retrogression has been justified and even commended in antimachine polemics such as those of Spengler who writes: "The flight of the born leaders from the machine is beginning." Comparable sentiments are expressed in the works of publicists attached to agrarian movements such as the Southern Agrarians in the United States.[^175] In most of this literature love of the past degenerates into a flight from the present; and the Middle Ages has been idealized as an escape from the depressing conditions of a capitalist crisis. Nineteenth century movements for the revival of handicrafts, such as that led by William Morris, were similarly backward looking in their implications. They were not motivated, however, by aristocratic revulsion to the machine as invading the prerogatives of a landlord class, as are primarily the social philosophies of Spengler in Germany, and comparable publicists in England, and in the United States, but rather by sympathy for the plight of machine workers and aesthetic dissatisfaction with the ugly product of early machine production. Gandhi's attempt to prevent the displacement of handicraft by machine economy is due to his identification of machine technology with British imperialism. In most countries there have been requests for "scientific holidays" and a "moratorium on inventions", which have found echo in business and scientific circles. Such climate of opinion is hardly healthy for technological advance. On the other hand, in the Soviet Union technological progress is being fostered as a means of achieving the governmental objective of a socialist, planned, large-scale economy for the satisfaction of expanding consumers' needs.[^176]

[^175]: Spengler, Oswald, Der Mensch ud die Technik (Munich, 1931), tr. by C.F. Atkinson as Man and Technics (New York, 1932). Agar, Herbert, and Tate, Allen, eds., Who Owns America? (Boston, 1936).

[^176]: Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (New York, 1936), pp. 767--771; Moore, Harriet, "The Stakhanov Movement" in American Russian Institute, Research Bulletin, vol. i, no. 2 (New York, 1936).

In summary, resistance to technological change has been so much a part of the texture of the historical process, that it cannot be ignored when the future of technology is charted. There are psychological factors in individual and group behavior which predispose toward inertia in receptivity to innovation, but these may be counterbalanced by potent incentives that promise material and nonmaterial rewards. The basic determinants of the presence or absence of impediments to technological change lie therefore in the nature of the social, and primarily the economic, structure of a society, in the degree to which it offers incentives to the masses of the population and in the manner in which these can be realized through a planned economy. Capitalism has inherent in its structure and functioning, factors which militate against such realization, and thus prevent industrial practice from keeping apace with scientific knowledge.

Edit
Pub: 19 Apr 2021 18:04 UTC
Views: 1737