November 29, 2007
Nothing Left to Invent Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:20 AM EST Today’s feature article is an enthusiastic review by Josh Zeitz of Daniel Walker Howe’s new book, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. As most users of this site will recognize, the title of the book quotes the first message that Prof. Samuel F. B. Morse sent by telegraph at the introductory demonstration of his wondrous new invention on May 24, 1844. Here’s what Howe’s book has to say about the message, which comes from Numbers 23:23 (“It shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!”): “Credit for applying the verse to this occasion belongs to Nancy Goodrich Ellsworth, who suggested it to her daughter Annie, who in turn provided it to Morse. (The professor was in love with Annie.)” As Josh points out, Howe packs an amazing amount of material into his wide-ranging book, even considering its 904-page length, so it’s not surprising that he did not have room to explain who these two women were. But the answer is instructive in several ways. Nancy Ellsworth was the wife of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, an 1810 Yale classmate of Morse who served as U.S. commissioner of patents from 1836 to 1845. And if you believe The Patent Office Pony: A History of the Early Patent Office (1994), by Kenneth W. Dobyns, a volume that has been invaluable to Invention & Technology researchers through the years, Howe’s book has the relationship backwards: “Annie Goodrich Ellsworth (1826–1900), the Commissioner’s seventeen-year-old daughter, according to family tradition had a teenage crush on Samuel Morse, who was a fifty-two-year-old widower. Professor Morse was polite to Annie, which seems to have been all she required to maintain her interest.” Isn’t that always the way? Two lovers break up, and then it’s all he-said, she-said. Personally, I think Howe’s version is more plausible. When you’re Morse’s age, just about any 17-year-old girl looks good, and judging from the admittedly crude drawing in the Dobyns, Annie was quite some punkins. Morse, by this point, was a broken-down, careworn painter-turned-inventor struggling to get by on meager support from his backers, so it’s not clear what Annie would have seen in him. (On the other hand, Annie’s life was not exactly cushy either. According to Dobyns, “Annie was incidentally a part-time employee of the Patent Office. It was the custom of the day for local women to be hired to copy papers out in longhand. . . . Annie copied some 13,000 words at 10 cents per 100 words in 1843.” So her father had a high-ranking government position, and the best job he could find for her was copying papers. Thanks, Dad.) But I didn’t come here to gossip. Instead of trying to sort out who was stuck on whom, I want to mention something that Ellsworth wrote in his 1843 annual report. 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.” That never happened, and the story is not even remotely plausible. It’s hard to say which is more unlikely: Someone who has spent his career in technology believing that no more invention was possible, or a government bureaucrat recommending the elimination of his job. But that hasn’t stopped people from repeating the story ever since, including Richard Nixon in his 1989 book Victory Without War. Nixon would have been a lot more skeptical if the story had come from Alger Hiss, and in fact, the misquote goes back at least to that era. In its May 1, 1951, issue, Forbes magazine said of the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss: “The Patent Office, he likes to remind doubters, almost closed its door in 1844 as having registered all possible advances.” Now here’s the kicker. If you’d been paying attention a few paragraphs back, you would have noticed that 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 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, and Annie must have given her father updates on its progress. 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.
|
