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Just posted my latest newsletter, on how necessity was *not* the mother of invention. Although invention increased in the teeth of one of England’s worst ever crises, it was because the inventors themselves did not let the crisis go to waste. https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-never-let-a-crisis">https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-...
I think there are lessons here for how present-day innovators treat their image and the image of innovation in general. In fact, this is just one illustration of my wider thesis:
that, essentially, the innovators of the British Industrial Revolution were so successful because they had fantastic PR!
(Both from their own initiative, and because they had some highly effective cheerleaders on their behalf).
(Both from their own initiative, and because they had some highly effective cheerleaders on their behalf).
They were extremely proactive in creating the institutions that fostered further innovation, and seemingly more successful in doing so than elsewhere (though that’s not to say that they weren’t often inspired by what others were doing abroad).
What does that look like, exactly? Well, it’s what my book will be about, and I’ll post more soon too, but in the meantime look at cases like the English obsession with what the Spanish were doing: https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-the-house-of-trade">https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-...
By the mid 17thC, they were also looking to the Dutch, and in the early 18th the French.
But while it’s tempting to see this as international competition, bear in mind that such rivalry is ancient. Yet it had not had the same effect before.
But while it’s tempting to see this as international competition, bear in mind that such rivalry is ancient. Yet it had not had the same effect before.
So I think a lot of this is opportunistic. It’s a rhetorical device. A killer argument to get and then keep the rivalry-obsessed political elites on-side (especially when inventions cause unemployment, which said elites did not want for unrest/stability reasons).
Inventors and their cheerleaders honed their arguments in England and then Britain over decades and centuries. And we’re still living with the results today, having experienced a few centuries of continuous technological improvement.
