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December 1, 2007

Underestimating Our Dynamic Economy: An American Tradition

Frederic D. Schwarz, writing at the American Heritage blog, comments on Daniel Walker Howe’s new book, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, and highlights a delicious irony of timing in American history.

Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, the U.S. commissioner of patents from 1836 to 1845, issued a particularly in-depth annual report of the Commission's activities in 1843:

This report was greatly expanded from earlier ones, with a description of every patent issued during the year and sections written by examiners who specialized in particular fields. Evidently moved by the richness of America’s inventive spirit, Ellsworth surveyed the great reductions in cost of common items over the past 30 years: Shirt cloth down from 62 cents to 11 cents a yard; hooks and eyes reduced from $1.50 a gross to 15 cents; horseshoes, formerly handmade by blacksmiths, now manufactured and sold at five cents a pound.

Then Ellsworth made a statement that has been misquoted, misattributed, and misinterpreted ever since: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." If this sounds vaguely familiar, you’ve probably heard the garbled version in which a patent commissioner supposedly asked Congress to abolish his office on the grounds that "everything that can be invented has been invented." . . .

. . . the year in which Ellsworth marveled at the wonders of progress and invoked “the arrival of that period when human improvement must end” was 1843. The following year [Samuel] Morse demonstrated his telegraph, and as Howe explains, in less than a decade, you could barely recognize the United States as the same country.

To be sure, Morse’s telegraph was hardly unknown to Ellsworth in 1843. Morse had received several patents on his invention and gotten government grants to develop it . . . Yet its success was far from assured; other inventors had been trying to send messages with electricity since the 1820s. Ellsworth’s rhetorical flourish, vague as it was, did convey a sense that technology might soon be expected to reach its limits. Instead, within a few months, it took a huge leap forward, which in turn led to many more huge leaps. That’s how technology works, and however many unforeseen directions it may take in years to come, it is sure to continue working the same way—and surprising people in the process.

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