For most, the word “invention” evokes the creations of individuals like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell or perhaps more recent icons like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. For most of the twentieth century, however, “invention” conjured images of enormous corporations that conducted in-house R&D. While few know the names of the individuals behind the great innovations of the middle twentieth century (Chester Carlson, Bill Kirby, Reynold Johnson), almost everyone is familiar with their corporations (Xerox, Texas Instruments, and IBM, respectively). When it came to invention, individuals were largely anonymous, while corporations reigned supreme in the American imagination. The goal of Hintz’s book is to shine the light back on the independent inventors during this period when corporate inventions were dominant.
In this respect, Hintz is largely successful. His book is full of fascinating anecdotes of independent inventors who overcame long odds to advance the technological frontier. These stories will serve as a useful repository of examples when teaching the history of technology or motivating research questions. Moreover, the corporations and independent inventors detailed in these pages wrestled with many of the same issues that economists have explored over the last several decades. When is it better to produce an innovation in-house versus purchasing or licensing it from a third party? Should one disclose their invention or keep it secret? Is it a good idea to pool one’s intellectual property with others’?
After an introductory chapter, Hintz begins by explaining how independents came to be so obscure. This was no historical accident; instead, large corporations conducted extensive public relations campaigns to convince the public that corporations were as creative as lone geniuses. Hintz next discussed the particular challenges faced by independent inventors in trying to bring their inventions to market, as well as the challenges firms faced in sourcing new technologies from the public. Independent inventors tried to respond to these challenges by forming cooperative organizations, but the challenges of organizing such a heterogeneous group (along with mismanagement and occasionally outright fraud) largely doomed these collective efforts. Hintz next discusses patent reform; many reform proposals from the 1920s to the 1940s will be very familiar to any who followed debates over the America Invents Act in the early 2010s. The next chapter describes the unique role of independent inventors during America’s World Wars, as they struggled—often unsuccessfully, especially during WWI—to cut through bureaucracy and advance the war effort. Finally, Hintz covers the postwar period in which corporations were most dominant, followed by the reemergence of independent inventors as heroic figures in the last decades of the century.
Hintz deserves credit for highlighting independent inventors’ challenges during the second half of the twentieth century. Economists have extensively studied the transition period during which corporate R&D became common and firm patenting rose to account for the majority of issued patents (e.g., Lamoreaux and Sokoloff Reference Lamoreaux and Sokoloff2005; Mowery Reference Mowery1983; Nicholas Reference Nicholas2010). But beyond simply documenting long-run trends in patenting by independents and firms (Andrews Reference Andrews2021; Berkes Reference Berkes2018), scholars have done little to investigate what independents were doing during the subsequent half-century when corporate invention was dominant. This is obviously an important oversight: focusing only on corporate patents would ignore about 15 percent of all patents issued since the end of WWII.
But Hintz goes beyond arguing that independent inventors are relatively underrepresented in innovation scholarship. Instead, he claims that independents are “assumed to be extinct” (p. 7)! Do independent inventors really need such a rousing, perhaps even over-wrought, defense? It is hard to know for sure what researchers assume about the existence of independent inventors. But about two-thirds of the papers published in five top economics journals since 2012 that use the word “patent” in their title or abstract do not include any data from independent inventors (author’s calculations, available upon request). And from personal experience, I have had multiple interactions with scholars working with patent data who did not realize that U.S. patents are issued to individuals and not to firms. Hintz’s attempt to revive the independent inventor in the eyes of scholars and the public is, therefore, most welcome.
The coherence of Hintz’s argument suffers, however, from the fact that the concept of “independent inventor” is never clearly defined and morphs throughout the book. For instance, should we think of an inventor as independent if they assign a patent to a firm they founded? Do we really want to count as “independent” those inventors who spin out from a corporate R&D lab (a la Alan Shughart, discussed on pp. 215–17) or inventors who were academic faculty at the time of invention (e.g., Herb Boyer, mentioned on p. 223)? Thomas Edison, perhaps America’s most famous inventor, illustrates this conceptual confusion. Early in the book, Edison is held up as a menace, “falsely claiming credit” for independents’ ideas and using his deep-pocketed organization to harass independents as they struggled to commercialize (p. 27). Later, Edison is presented as the face of America’s independent inventors during WWI (pp. 171–81).
A final quibble is that Hintz, quite understandably, seems to have developed substantial sympathy for his independent inventor subjects. One, therefore, cannot help but wonder if he is not too quick to indict corporations for abusing the patent system while letting independents off the hook for similar abuses. Consider, for instance, the case of “submarine patents,” in which inventors intentionally prolonged prosecution of their patent applications to keep them out of the public record, only to emerge and sue when others began commercializing similar ideas. Many who exploited submarine patents were independents, like George Selden or Jerome Lemelson. Hintz discusses Selden’s deleterious effects on other independent automobile inventors without stressing that Selden was an independent himself, and he claims that Lemelson’s reputation was tarnished by “corporations [who] tried to shift perceptions in the court of public opinion” (p. 235); meanwhile, he berates the corporation Hartford Empire for these same tactics of “legal extortion” (p. 151).
While Hintz may therefore err in being too sympathetic to independent inventors, his work is nevertheless a useful corrective for the too-common misconception that all innovation comes from large corporations. Hintz deserves strong praise for bringing to the fore stories about a group of innovators who made important—if limited—contributions to U.S. invention over the last century. His book contains a wealth of interesting and entertaining anecdotes and should become a valuable resource for anyone seeking to understand why some innovation occurs inside the boundaries of the firm and some occurs outside.
