The purpose of this project is to expand the knowledge of the sources of technological change by examining patterns in the location of invention in the U.S. manufacturing sector between 1870 and 1929, a period of integration of national product markets as well as of radical change in technology and industrial structure. Location will be analyzed in two different senses. The first is geographical. Despite the frequent references to cases such as machinery in nineteenth-century New England and semi-conductors and computers in today's Silicon Valley, the geographic clustering of inventive activity has received little in the way of systematic investigation. The core issues are: whether such centers of invention have been common and persistent and what conditions or behaviors gave rise to them if they were; whether there were local externalities in invention, and if so, whether they pertained only to a certain class of industries or a certain stage in an industry's development; whether geographic clustering in production has been systematically associated with geographic clustering in invention; and whether firms located in production clusters have been systematically associated with geographic clustering in invention; and whether firms located in production clusters have manifested higher rates of productivity than those that were more isolated. The second aspect of the locational question is organizational. It is conventional to think of invention as an activity that occurs within the bounds of firms, but at various times in various industries firms have bought or licensed much of their technology from outside suppliers, and inventors in turn have chosen to extract their returns by selling off or licensing their inventions. A goal of this project is to measure the extent of this market for technology and to explore how it widened and deepened over time, how its mechanisms of exchange evolved, and the nature of the institutions that mediated between inventors and those interested in developing and commercializing new technologies. Another goal is to understand changes in the extent to which inventive activity was located within the firms that used the technology. Finally, the interaction of the organizational factors and geographical clustering of invention will be analyzed.
