By James Pethokoukis and W. Walker Hanlon

What caused the Industrial
Revolution? It’s a perennial question that economic historians love to debate,
with answers varying from geographic to institutional to ideological
explanations. And a new paper offers a fresh perspective that centers on the
rise of the engineering profession as a key mechanism for industrialization.
The author of that paper, W. Walker Hanlon, joined me on a recent episode of
“Political Economy” to discuss his work.

Walker is an associate professor in the department of economics at Northwestern University. Among his thought-provoking works in economic history is a recent working paper, “The Rise of the Engineer: Inventing the Professional Inventor During the Industrial Revolution.”

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis: Why was the Industrial Revolution a period of
sustained progress?

Hanlon: The context here is that
we sort of know, looking back in history, that before the Industrial Revolution
economic growth was sporadic, and it was only after the Industrial Revolution
that we experienced sustained economic growth, the kind that we enjoy today.
Which is what provides us with all of these wonderful devices and benefits that
we enjoy.

And
so something fundamental happened during the Industrial Revolution. And that, I
think, is one of the biggest mysteries of economic history: trying to understand
what happened. And we kind of know it has to be about technology because that’s
what really is the long-run engine for growth. And what this paper is about is
looking inside that system through which technology was being developed and
realizing that it was changing in an important way. And specifically what was
going on is that there was this emerging group of people who became like
professional inventors and designers, and they called themselves engineers.

There have always been people who have sort of invented
and tinkered around with things, when does the term “engineer” start to be used
to describe these folks?

We
know that engineering work had been done before the Industrial Revolution; the
challenge is understanding whether it changed at this time. So in the paper, I
use a variety of different sources. One source is the patent data where you can
just see a group of people who suddenly start calling themselves this new
occupation. But I also looked at other types of engineering, like civil
engineering. In the first half of the 18th century, the largest infrastructure
project built in Britain was a bridge in London that was built by somebody who’d
never built a bridge before.

It’s
a mystery to try to figure out how to identify what’s going on. And in the
patent data, you can see that there are no engineers at the beginning of the
18th century, and then around 1760, they start to appear. And then by the early
19th century, certainly by the middle of the 19th century, they’re a
fundamental part of the system.

Looking at causality, did the engineers drive economic
growth? Or did a more market-oriented society allow people to be engineers? Or
was it all happening at the same time?

It
was all happening at the same time. And this is all an endogenous part of this
evolving economic system. And so there’s lots of work about what may have set
off the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t that someone invented engineering and
then the Industrial Revolution happened. The Industrial Revolution is going on.
And one of the things it’s doing is opening up the opportunities for people to
start to specialize in invention. And what that did is, it was a mechanism
through which economic growth started to accelerate. And it may not have been
the only mechanism. But it was one of the mechanisms, at least I would argue,
through which economic growth accelerated, that emerged endogenously due to
other factors, which include the ability, I think, crucially, to monetize their
inventions and to do it without becoming business owners but through other
means that allowed them to continue to be inventors.

Who were some engineers during the Industrial Revolution?
And what were their contributions during that time?

James Watt is a great example. He was probably the most famous. He has this big bust in Westminster Abbey that sort of showed how important engineers had become. But there are other guys like Joseph Bramah, for example, who invented lots of different stuff. He starts out as a carpenter, so he kind of is a tinkerer at the beginning, but then he begins specializing in just inventing different stuff. And he invents all sorts of different things: the beer engine, which is like a tap; he invents a press; he invents some stuff to make money more difficult to falsify. So you have people like him. And then as the generations go on, you have people who instead of coming into engineering from something else, they’re being trained as engineers. And so you get people like Henry Moseley, who’s inventing a wide range of different stuff.

Yeah.
So what’s really interesting about this type of engineering—which at the
beginning of it they called “civil engineering” because they wanted to
differentiate this from a preexisting occupation, which was military
engineers—is this was really a British phenomenon. And I think it was related
to the fact that Britain had this booming, private market that could support
people who were professional inventors. And these guys who invented stuff, they
could sell their inventions or they can make money off them in other ways.

So you describe a key factor in the Industrial Revolution
as the invention of a new method of invention—the new method being the engineer.
A more recent example might be the industrial lab, and maybe AI will be the
next one. How do you conceive of these new methods of invention?

I
think of these as paradigm shifts in how invention happens. And I think this is
an early one where you sort of had this specialization and these people who
specialized in it, and that was different than what happened before. And the
industrial lab, the research university, and maybe AI: I think these are all
sort of candidates for other paradigm shifts that act as mechanisms through
which we either accelerate economic growth, or maybe we just sustain it where
it would’ve slowed down otherwise.

I
think we should be thinking hard about the process through which innovation
occurs and not just tinkering with the process as we know it. But there may be
sort of deep shifts in how that’s happened and how it will happen going
forward. Just like there have been deep shifts in how we use lots of other
technologies or do lots of other things. Whether AI is the next shift, I don’t
know. That’s a very hard thing to forecast, but we can at least start to think
about the characteristics we would need for this kind of paradigm shift to
happen, and whether there are things we might be able to do to facilitate that.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Walker Hanlon is an associate professor in the department of economics at Northwestern University and author of “The Rise of the Engineer: Inventing the Professional Inventor During the Industrial Revolution.”

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