A cognitive analysis of component-stimulated invention: Electromagnet, telegraph, and the capitol dome's electric gas-lighter

Technology and Culture

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 376-398

  Schiffer, Michael Brian ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

^b SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 44349092502     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0014     Document Type: Review

References (104)

1. Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, 1983);
2. Michael B. Schiffer, "The Devil Is in the Details: The Cascade Model of Invention Processes," American Antiquity 70 (2005): 485-502.
3. In a study of the adoption pattern of electric motors, Brent Goldfarb refers to components that can serve in many devices as "general-purpose technologies"; see Goldfarb, "Diffusion of General-Purpose Technologies: Understanding Patterns in the Electrification of US Manufacturing, 1880-1930," Industrial and Corporate Change 14 (2005): 1-29.
4. I sought electromagnetic inventions in Scientific American, 1845-70,
5. and Mechanics Magazine, 1840-70;
6. also consulted were M. D. Leggett, Subject-Matter Index of Patents for Inventions Issued by the United States Patent Office from 1790-1873, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1874);
7. Great Britain, Commissioners of Patents, Patents for Inventions: Abridgments of Specifications Relating to Electricity and Magnetism, Their Generation, and Applications (London, 1859);
8. Great Britain, Commissioners of Patents, Patents for Inventions: Abridgments of Specifications Relating to Electricity and Magnetism, Their Generation, and Applications - Part II, A.D. 1858-1866, 2nd ed. (London, 1874).
9. New components can stimulate both invention patterns, sequentially and simultaneously.
10. Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge, 1978).
11. This kind of analysis does not explain the process per se, but it furnishes a rich description.
12. In this article, "inventor" denotes not an occupation or social role, but an invention's author(s). A "performance characteristic" is a property of a component, device, or technological system that can come into play during interactions with people and/or other artifacts. On performance characteristics, see Michael B. Schiffer and Andrea R. Miller, The Material Life of Human Beings (London, 1999), chap. 2;
13. and Michael B. Schiffer, "The Electric Lighthouse in the Nineteenth Century: Aid to Navigation and Political Technology," Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 275-305.
14. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York, 1969).
15. Other authors treat invention as a process of combining elements; see Lee Fleming, "Recombinant Uncertainty in Technological Search," Management Science 47 (2001): 117-32,
16. and Robert J. Weber, Stacey Dixon, and Antolin M. Llorente, "Studying Invention: The Hand Tool as a Model System," Science, Technology, and Human Values 18 (1993): 480-505. Students of technological change have also employed cognitive approaches for studying invention, but their projects differ from mine.
17. See, for example, W. Bernard Carlson and Michael E. Gorman, "Understanding Invention as a Cognitive Process: The Case of Thomas Edison and Early Motion Pictures, 1888-91," Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 387-430;
18. Michael E. Gorman, "Mind in the World: Cognition and Practice in the Invention of the Telephone," Social Studies of Science 27 (1997): 583-624;
19. Gary B. Magee, "Rethinking Invention: Cognition and the Economics of Technological Creativity," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 57 (2005): 29-48;
20. and Robert J. Weber and David N. Perkins, eds., Inventive Minds: Creativity in Technology (New York, 1992).
21. For insights into structuralism, I relied mainly on Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, 1963).
22. Jonathan Friedman showed recently that structuralism can illuminate creative processes; see Friedman, "The Iron Cage of Creativity: An Exploration," in Locating Cultural Creativity, ed. John Liep (London, 2001), 46-61.
23. Roy D'Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (Cambridge, 1995);
24. S. Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge, 1990);
25. Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (London, 1996);
26. James L. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology (Walnut Creek, Calif., 2002);
27. Colin Renfrew and Ezra B. W. Zubrow, The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology (Cambridge, 1994).
28. Henry H. Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville, Tenn., 1975);
29. James Deetz, Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, N.Y., 1967).
30. For a history of the electromagnet, see W. James King, "The Development of Electrical Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Electrochemical Cell and the Electromagnet," United States National Museum Bulletin 228 (Washington, D.C., 1962).
31. A nineteenth-century source is Silvanus P. Thompson, The Electromagnet and Electromagnetic Mechanism (London, 1891)
32. . For Sturgeon's writings, see William Sturgeon, Scientific Researches, Experimental and Theoretical, in Electricity, Magnetism, Galvanism, Electro-Magnetism, and Electro-Chemistry (Bury, Lancashire, 1850).
33. On some of Sturgeon's professional activities, see Iwan R. Morus, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, N.J., 1998).
34. Joseph Henry, Scientific Writings of Joseph Henry (Washington, D.C., 1886).
35. The authoritative biography is Albert E. Moyer, Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist (Washington, D.C., 1997). Documents pertaining to Henry's life and research are in The Joseph Henry Papers, various editors, 11 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1972-2007). When the young Joseph Henry began experimenting around 1828, he was an obscure instructor at the Albany Academy in New York State. He quickly gained international acclaim through his electromagnetic research. In 1832, he assumed a professorship in natural philosophy at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he continued his studies in electromagnetism. Henry subsequently became the founding secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in large part because of his contributions to electromagnetic research. Although his experiments created a host of new effects, Henry offered no theoretical synthesis of electromagnetism.
36. Henry also showed that one had to have an appropriate match between the number of cells in the battery and the number of turns in the coil - an early formulation of impedance matching. This crucial insight, communicated to Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse, made telegraphy possible.
37. Joseph Henry, "On a Reciprocating Motion Produced by Magnetic Attraction and Repulsion," American Journal of Science and Arts 20 (1831): 340-43.
38. Battery failure occurred quickly because the copper electrode of a "couple" - a cell in today's nomenclature - became covered with nonconductive hydrogen bubbles. Eventually called polarization, this phenomenon was appreciably ameliorated, beginning in 1837, by so-called constant batteries such as Daniell's and Grove's. For a survey of early batteries, see Alfred Niaudet, Elementary Treatise on Electric Batteries (New York, 1880).
39. John J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy, to the Year 1837 (London, 1884).
40. Henry made his first telegraph while at the Albany Academy, but he did not publish a description; see William B. Taylor, "An Historical Sketch of Henry's Contribution to the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph: With an Account of the Origin and Development of Prof. Morse's Invention," in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1878 (Washington, D.C., 1879).
41. On early telegraphs and their inventors, see, for example, Kenneth Beauchamp, History of Telegraphy (London, 2001);
42. Brian Bowers, Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS, 1802-1875 (London, 1975);
43. Geoffrey Hubbard, Cooke and Wheatstone and the Invention of the Electric Telegraph (London, 1965);
44. Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York, 2003).
45. Daniel Davis, Davis' Manual of Magnetism: Including Also Electro-Magnetism, Magneto-Electricity, and Thermo-Electricity (Boston, 1842);
46. Daniel Davis, Catalogue of Apparatus, to Illustrate Magnetism, Galvanism, Electro-Dynamics, Electro-Magnetism, Magneto-Electricity, and Thermo-Electricity (Boston, 1848). The commercial replication of Morse-Vail telegraphs around the world that began in the mid-1840s demanded a workforce knowledgeable in basic electrical technology. Electricity-savvy telegraphers had the job of maintaining a station's equipment and sometimes conjured new applications for the electromagnet; Thomas Edison was merely the most famous telegrapher-inventor. I hasten to add that many inventors of electromagnetic devices were not telegraphers.
47. On Edison's telegraph-related inventions, see Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York, 1998).
48. A reverse salient is a component that lags in a developing sociotechnical system; see Hughes (n. 1 above). A cultural imperative is the vision of a device, held by a particular constituency or community, that stimulates inventive efforts toward its realization, especially as new components become available. See Michael B. Schiffer, "Cultural Imperatives and Product Development: The Case of the Shirt-Pocket Radio," Technology and Culture 34 (1993): 98-113.
49. On the development of the American patent-management system, see Carolyn C. Cooper, Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard's Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1991),
50. and Robert C. Post, Physics, Patents, and Politics: A Biography of Charles Grafton Page (New York, 1976).
51. Both a source of current and connecting wires are assumed to be present in every case.
52. I believe that such simple cognitive operations are likely to be available to most, if not all, adults and may be deployed consciously or unconsciously. Psychologist Herbert Simon argues, and I agree, that invention makes use of common cognitive mechanisms; see Simon, "Discovery, Invention, and Development: Human Creative Thinking," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 80 (1983), pt. 2: "Physical Sciences," 4569-71.
53. Interchangeable elements, not found in the examples, are placed in parentheses; thus the expression (person, mechanism) indicates that this element can consist of either a person or a mechanism.
54. Because time's arrow goes from left to right in these models, the traditional loop to indicate negative feedback is not used; this is why "system" appears twice, representing its states before and after adjustment.
55. Strictly speaking, this exercise would be retrodiction, not prediction.
56. Construction of the Washington Monument began in 1848, with private donations, but was halted a few years later when money ran out. In 1876, Congress took charge and appropriated funds for completing the obelisk, which was not dedicated until 1885. The Statue of Liberty was paid for by the French people and was erected with private donations, along with token federal assistance.
57. The definitive history of the Capitol is William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics (Washington, D.C., 2001);
58. on its dome, see William C. Allen, The Dome of the United States Capitol: An Architectural History (1992). Background information on the Capitol extension project comes from these sources.
59. Allen, History of the United States Capitol, 187.
60. Ibid.
61. On Brumidi and his art in the Capitol, see Myrtle C. Murdock, Constantino Brumidi: Michelangelo of the United States Capitol (Washington, D.C., 1950);
62. and Barbara A. Wolanin, compiler, Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol (Washington, D.C., 1998).
63. "Another Use for the Telegraph Wires," Scientific American, 4 September 1852, 406.
64. Born in Massachusetts, Gardiner appears as a New York resident in the federal census of 1860, but in 1870 he is recorded as living in Washington, D.C.
65. U.S. patent numbers for Gardiner's ore-processing machines are 9,610, 11,368, and 13,645.
66. H. L. Hudson, "History of the Galvanic and Magnetic Gas Lighting Inventions of the Capitol of the United States," undated manuscript, pp. 4-5, U.S. National Archives, RG-48, entry 291, box 3, "Dome-Lighting." James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, acknowledged receipt of this document, enabling it to be dated; Harlan to Hudson, 28 December 1865, U.S. National Archives, RG-48, entry 295, "Capitol Extension, Letters Sent, 19 April 1862 to 8 March 1869," p. 152.
67. Draft patent application, U.S. National Archives, RG-241, "Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, Patented Files," box 345, patent no. 18,945 (hereafter USNA, RG-241).
68. Curiously, in questioning the application, the examiners did not cite the prior British patent of Charles Cowper, issued 22 July 1855 (no. 1,732), for "lighting and extinguishing gas lights." Its gist is: "The valve or cock is opened by means of electro-magnetic arrangements, and at the same moment (or immediately afterwards) an electric spark is passed through the issuing gas, or a fine platinum wire is ignited in the gas"; see Patents for Inventions (1859) (n. 3 above), 583-84. A year later, patent no. 1,775 was issued to Isham Baggs for a similar invention (Patents for Inventions [1859], 587-90). Gardiner's patent, applied for on 4 April 1857, was issued on 22 December 1857 (USNA, RG-241). Ironically, by this time his invention had already received a British patent (no. 1,060), issued in the name of William E. Newton, on 14 April 1857, despite the British precedents.
69. Norton deposition, 2 December 1857, USNA, RG-241.
70. New York Times, 28 May 1857, 4. Hudson, in "History of the Galvanic and Magnetic Gas Lighting Inventions," himself claimed that this trial was largely a failure.
71. "Galvanic Gas Lighter," Scientific American, 13 June 1857, 320.
72. S. Marshall, manager of the Broadway Theatre, was deposed by the Patent Office. He stated, somewhat ambiguously, that Gardiner's system "was put in successful operation in May last" (Marshall deposition, 5 December 1857, USNA, RG-241).
73. The patent numbers and dates are as follows: 19,766 (1858), 45,239 (1864), 45,240 (1864), 45,241 (1864), 55,641 (1866), 55,642 (1866), 57,697 (1866), 62,125 (1867), 87,039 (1869), 124,126 (1872), and 125,387 (1872). Patent 45,241 was given the reissue number of 6,377 in 1875.
74. On the system in Gardiner's house, see "Gas-Lighting by Electricity," American Gas-Light Journal 1(1859): 62-63.
75. General information about home lighting is from New York Times, 30 September 1859, 8.
76. I have found no evidence that Gardiner was actually paid for this installation. Perhaps, like so many electrical firms later in the century, he installed it in the expectation of receiving favorable publicity as well as other government lighting contracts.
77. "Gardiner's Galvanic Gas-Igniter," Scientific American, 15 February 1860, 133.
78. On the political and technical difficulties of completing the extension project, see Allen, History of the United States Capitol (n. 29 above),
79. and Montgomery C. Meigs, Capitol Builder: The Shorthand Journals of Montgomery C. Meigs, 1853-1859, 1861 (Washington, D.C., 2001).
80. George C. Hazelton Jr., The National Capitol: Its Architecture, Art, and History (New York, 1897), 60; this source also supplied the figures and dates in this paragraph.
81. Allen, History of the United States Capitol, 335.
82. Thomas Walter to Gardiner, 20 December 1862, and B. B. French to Gardiner, 29 December 1862 (U.S. National Archives, RG-46, "Records of the U.S. Senate, 42nd Congress, Sen. 42A-H3, Petitions and Memorials," box 104, "Gardiner and Glenn"). Gardiner's proposal is in this file.
83. These names and numbers come from affidavits, U.S. National Archives, RG-48, entry 291, "Interior Department, records relating to the extension of the U.S. Capitol, 1851-1872," box 3, "Lighting of the Dome."
84. Allen, History of the United States Capitol, 366, gives 1,083 as the number of gas lamps in the dome.
85. General information about the dome-lighting system was liberally paraphrased from "Lighting up of the Capitol Dome," Scientific American, 10 February 1866, 97,
86. and "Gas Lighting by Electricity," Scientific American, 12 January 1867, 23.
87. The project is also discussed by Edward H. Knight, Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary, vol. 2 (New York, 1876), 1315-16,
88. and more recently by Allen, History of the United States Capitol, 366,
89. and Denys P. Myers, Gaslighting in America: A Guide for Historic Preservation (Washington, D.C., 1978), 229.
90. The dial-plate switch was covered by U.S. patent no. 57,697 (1866).
91. Secretary of the Interior Harlan's estimate for the project, just prior to its completion, was $19,000 (Harlan to Clark, 13 October 1865, U.S. National Archives, RG-48, entry 295, "Interior Department, Capitol Extension, Letters Sent, 19 April 1862 to 8 March 1869," p. 143). The Harlan Commission gave the cost of lighting the dome as $28,225 (untitled report, 26 April 1866, U.S. National Archives, RG-48, entry 291, "Interior Department, records relating to the extension of the U.S. Capitol, 1851-1872," box 3, "Lighting of the Dome").
92. On Freedom and Luetze's painting, see Allen, History of the United States Capitol, 308, 315-16.
93. "Lighting up of the Capitol Dome," 97.
94. George A. Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside (Hartford, Conn., 1873), 143-44.
95. Other guidebooks mentioning Gardiner's lighting system include Ellis, The Sights and Secrets of the National Capitol (New York, 1869), 77,
96. and B. Randolph de Keim, Keim's Illustrated Handbook: Washington and Its Environs (Washington, D.C., 1884), 83, 103. Deborah Jean Warner called my attention to these sources.
97. Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York, 1981), 133.
98. See Carlson and Gorman (n. 8 above). By this transmission mode an individual can create more than one model, each built around a different combination of performance characteristics.
99. Over several decades, the laser stimulated invention in many fields, from medicine to printing. This new component was described at first as "a solution looking for a problem"; see Mario Bertolotti, The History of the Laser (Bristol, U.K., 2005), 262.
100. The most important commercial application of electricity, apart from the telegraph, was electroplating - then variously known as electro-typing, galvanoplasty, or electrometallurgy - which was commercialized at about the same time as the telegraph. Electromedicine also furnished a market for battery-powered devices for "galvanizing" or "faradizing" a patient. Magneto-electric machines (generators) found limited applications in electroplating, detonation of explosives, and electric lighting. Although electromagnetic motors were invented in profusion following the report of Henry's rocking-beam motor, few, if any, replaced other motive powers, except in demonstration projects, until the late 1870s. An important work on electroplating is Cyril Stanley Smith, "Reflections on Technology and the Decorative Arts in the Nineteenth Century," in Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, ed. M. G. Quimby and Polly Anne Earl (Charlottesville, Va., 1974), 1-64.
101. Sources on electromedicine include Margaret Rowbottom and Charles Susskind, Electricity and Medicine: A History of Their Interaction (San Francisco, 1984),
102. and Sidney Licht, "History of Electrotherapy," in Therapeutic Electricity and Ultraviolet Radiation, ed. Sidney Licht (New Haven, Conn., 1967), 1-70;
103. on generators, C. Mackechnie Jarvis, "The Generation of Electricity," in A History of Technology, ed. Charles Singer et al., vol. 5 (Oxford, 1958), 177-207, and King (n. 12 above);
104. and on early applications of electromagnetic motors, Thomas Commerford Martin and Joseph Wetzler, The Electric Motor and Its Applications, 3rd ed. (New York, 1891).