‘The ingenious crowd': a critical prosopography of British Inventors, 1650-1850

"Economic historians are taking a closer look at inventors. Recently, several studies of inventive activity during early industrialization have adopted a prosopographical approach. The patent records provide an obvious source of collective biographical information, but they capture only a sub-set of all inventive activity and provide only sparse biographical details. In a pioneering prosopography of American ‘great inventors’, Khan and Sokoloff have drawn on biographical dictionaries to supplement their databases of US patentees, thereby throwing new light on inventors’ personal characteristics and entrepreneurial behaviour. The publication of the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provides an excellent opportunity to conduct a similar exercise in Britain. In anticipation of this, we investigate the representation of inventors in the original DNB (published 1882-1900) and subject its selection criteria to critical scrutiny. Methodologically, this is a vital preliminary step. First, the Oxford DNB, while revising the entries of the original edition, includes them all: there are additions to the list, but no deletions. Consequently, the Victorians’ selection criteria will continue to inform the twenty-first century’s concept of ‘the inventor’. Secondly, it is essential to scrutinize our sources for potential biases. Inevitably, this iconic work of collective biography does not provide a random or representative sample of inventors for prosopographical analysis; neither does it offer an objective set of the UK’s greatest inventors. In particular, our analysis suggests that (after gender) the type of invention and the patenting strategy that an inventor adopted were the primary determinants of inclusion in the original DNB."