ABSTRACT
If, however, you were to go back and ask a schoolchild in the 1890s about new technology, they would probably tell you all about Thomas Edison or a similar heroic inventor. The image they would offer would be of an eccentric individual who through some mix of genius, luck, and hard work created revolutionary new technologies such as electric lights, automobiles, or motion pictures. The child might reveal that the heroic inventor was independent of big companies and free to pursue whatever problems struck his fancy. In contrast to the twentieth-century image of technological innovation, this nineteenth-century vision highlights individual genius and small-scale organizations.
