By James Pethokoukis and W. Walker Hanlon

In the field of economic history,
the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution loom large. Competing
theories point to the role of institutions, scientific achievements, and
bourgeois ideas. Setting aside the origins of industrialization, another open
question concerns the mechanisms by which modern economic growth emerged. To
delve into that question, I’ve brought on W. Walker Hanlon, whose work suggests
the engineering profession played a key role.

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.”

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, including brief portions that were cut from the original podcast. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: You open the paper with quotes from Joel Mokyr and Alfred North Whitehead, whose work raises questions about how methods of invention changed during the Industrial Revolution and (if I’m reading the paper right) helped create a sustained period of progress. We’ve had other sorts of bursts of progress in the past, but they were never sustained. So I think what you’re trying to do with the paper is to help answer that question of why the Industrial Revolution was a lengthy period of sustained progress. And what you found was that the engineer is a key factor. Could just talk about that for a second?

Hanlon: Yeah. 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. And so we’re familiar with this group today, but what I
do is I really look back and think about where this group came from and when
exactly they emerge and what that meant for pushing us onto this path of modern
economic growth.

So how does one even begin to figure out who these people
are and what changed? I mean, there have always been people who have sort of
invented things and tinkered around, but you’re talking about something
different here.

Yeah.
That’s the real challenge in the paper. 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 that doesn’t really exist
in the patent data before 1760. But I also looked at other types of
engineering, like civil engineering. And I think there you can really see—if
you look at the individuals involved and the types of projects they’re doing—you
can really see this process changing. So for example, 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.

And
so this is a project that’s the most expensive project this government is going
to do for 50 years. And they have someone who’s not experienced. And if you
look in the beginning of the 19th century, by that time, that just never
would’ve happened because the people who are doing this kind of work are now
experienced people: They’ve been trained through apprenticeships, they have
worked as assistants, and it’s a developed profession rather than just trying to
have to pick out smart people and hope that they do things right.

You couldn’t just find this in a database of professions.
You had to play detective a little bit to figure this out. What did that
process look like?

Yeah,
exactly. But that’s what makes my job interesting. That’s what makes research
so exciting. 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.

Now
you could worry that people are just changing what they call themselves. The
words don’t matter. Now we think that occupations and words that described them
have meaning. But you need to go further than that. And so what I do with the
data is just show that these people actually look different. They’re just
fundamentally different. They’re more productive at generating new innovations,
and they do it in different ways. They work with more co-authors and so they
just look fundamentally different. And that tells you that something really is
changing. It’s not just about terminology.

I kind of think of astronomy where you can’t necessarily
see the planets, if they’re far enough away, so you kind of look for the
gravitational impact of the planets. And that’s kind of how you figure it out.
And so what you describe there is that you’re looking at how people describe
themselves, but also what they produced as a way of determining what they were.

Yeah,
exactly. And I also do it an alternative way, which is we can rely on
historians and we can see what historians call these people. And if you look at
it that way, you see the same pattern. There’s just an emergence of people that
they call engineers that didn’t exist before, which isn’t because people
weren’t doing engineering work. It was because there wasn’t a group of people
for whom that was their primary defining feature of their occupation.

Are these the same people that when I read about the
Industrial Revolution, particularly in Great Britain, are called tinkerers? Or
is this something different?

So this is really something different. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, you have these machines and things like textiles that are primarily done by tinkerers. Now, there are early engineers like James Watt, but a lot of the technologies are things that are done by tinkerers. And those tinkerers are primarily going to run a business that, say, produces textiles, and they’re tinkering with their machines to make them better and inventing useful modifications. That’s just different than an engineer who, by the early 19th century, is somebody whose primary occupation is inventing stuff and they invent lots of different stuff. And they typically don’t want to run those businesses that use their technologies. They want to sell them, or they want to form a partnership, like Watt did with Boulton, with someone who knows how to run a business. Because a lot of them are not great at running businesses. What they’re great at is inventing new things. And so they become professionals at that.

So who are some of the classic examples? You mentioned
James Watt would be one.

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. So those are a few other people that are interesting to look up.

And at least initially, was this primarily a phenomenon
that we saw in Britain?

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. And so in the
paper, I compare [Britain] to France a little bit. France had great engineers,
but they were really military or public infrastructure-type engineers. And they
worked on the things that the state cared about. And so they weren’t out there
inventing the kinds of mechanical devices that were driving economic growth in
Britain. So this new type of engineering, this civil engineering, which is
using their terminology rather than ours, was really a British phenomenon, at
least at the beginning.

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.

You sort of alluded to the subject of why the Industrial
Revolution happened, when it happened, and where it happened. It’s hardly an
understudied area, and there are multiple theories. And I think you’re
suggesting that yours is not a separate theory, but it actually syncs nicely
with some other ideas.

Yeah.
I think that’s exactly right. There has been great work about the importance of
institutions and property rights in making this in an environment in which you
could be an inventor. There’s work by my colleague, Joe Mokyr, on the
importance of the enlightenment culture and this mix of craft skills. So I
think all of these things are going on. And what I’m doing is looking at
opening up the black box and trying to think about, how did this stuff
translate into economic growth? So what exactly was the mechanism through which
that occurred? And of course that economic growth is generated by new
technologies. Those new technologies are invented by somebody. And it turns out
that there’s this group that’s inventing these technologies that wasn’t there
before. And so it kind of ties these existing theories into the outcomes that
we’re interested in.

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?

Exactly.
Yeah. 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.

Does your paper emphasize the role of innovation over new
scientific discoveries? Because engineers aren’t discovering new theories;
they’re innovating.

I think a defining feature of engineering, which sets it apart from some people that were doing things that looked like engineering before, is that they’re practical people. They want to produce things that are going to have economic consequences—in part because they want to benefit, they want to make money off of that stuff, but they are fulfilling an interesting role. So I have another paper where I look at people who are both publishing in scientific journals and patenting new technologies. And if you look at who’s doing that, the engineers are the key bridge between those two worlds. Now, they’re not coming up with new mathematical theorems, but they’re connecting science to technology through this period. It’s still a weak connection in the first half of the 19th century. It becomes stronger over time. But they are a crucial bridge between those two worlds.

I once read that someone described research about the
Industrial Revolution as a “well-squeezed orange,” yet I seem to constantly be
coming across lots of new research about that topic. There’s still plenty of
juice in there. So where is the scholarship about what drove the Industrial
Revolution? Why it happened in Great Britain, when it happened. It sounds like
it’s broadening, that there’s no monocausal explanation, that it just seems to
be a very rich, multi-layered explanation on all those fronts.

Yeah.
I think that there are explanations that seem more or less convincing. There’s
sort of a set that I think most economic historians would say probably
contributed; things like having good property rights institutions, having this
sort of culture that allowed change to take place, having a good apprenticeship
system that meant that you had lots of skilled mechanics who could actually
implement these ideas. So I think there’s still a very active debate on that,
and I’m sure that debate will go on indefinitely. But we’re learning things
here and there that are helping us put the pieces together and limit the set of
ideas that I think are compelling.

Are there ideas that were once in vogue that have sort of
been de-emphasized or set aside?

That’s
a good question. I’m not quite sure about that. I would say maybe if there’s
any idea that I think is maybe a little bit less emphasized, it’s just a pure
resource endowment story. I think there’s reason to believe that having coal,
for example, mattered, but I think Britain wasn’t the only place that had coal
and it wasn’t the only place that had coal in a location where it could be utilized.
And so maybe that story is a little bit less compelling than it was in the
past, although it’s probably still part of the overall picture.

Even though this is historical economic research, are
there public policy lessons we can draw from your paper?

It’s
not really a policy-relevant lesson, but in a sense 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.

My guest today has been Walker Hanlon, author of “The
Rise of the Engineer.” Walker, thanks for coming on the podcast!

This
was great. Thanks a lot for having me.

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 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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