In the history of technology, nothing is more mysterious yet more central than the act of invention. Technological historians, however, have yet to develop a precise interpretation of how an inventor identifies an opportunity, develops a new idea, and manifests it in a physical device. In response to this conceptual lacuna, Dr. Carlson and Dr. Gorman are studying invention as an intellectual or cognitive process. To do so, they will examine the invention and development of the telephone from 1870 to 1880. They will investigate and compare the work of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Elisha Gray. They have chosen to focus on these inventors because their work is well documented by notebooks, sketches, and artifacts and because their efforts to perfect this invention have received limited scholarly attention. To analyze and compare the work of these inventors, they will employ concepts from cognitive science. In particular, they will consider three elements of the cognitive process of invention: how an inventor conceptualizes an invention (mental representation); the strategies used to develop an invention (heuristics); and the specific technical devices used to construct the invention (mechanical representations). In their investigation, they will examine how an inventor's personal style may be viewed as the synthesis of these different elements. Through this research, they will: 1) enrich the history of technology with a new conceptual framework and a detailed study of a major invention; 2)suggest to cognitive scientists how technological creativity may be effectively studies; and 3) help interested laypersons to see inventors not as mysterious geniuses but as individuals with specific talents and skills.
