Hanlon, 2020

• W. Walker Hanlon. The Rise of the Engineer: Inventing the Professional Inventor During the Industrial Revolution. November 17, 2020, https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jwff4o3tdpdwnc1/AACXasfNmkxEcK222VxOBP6ra/1Hanlon.pdf
• Author info: W. Walker Hanlon. NYU Stern School of Business, NBER, CEPR

Notes

• On engineering as an occupation, mapped in Britain with patent data from 1770-1849 and afterward
• "Engineering as an occupation . . . was linked to older occupations, such as the millwrights studied by Mokyr et al. (2020), but also coal viewers, military engineers, carpenters, shipbuilders, iron founders, and toolmakers. The craft skills used in these older occupations were incorporated into engineering, and formed an important part of the skillset of many engineers." (7)
• This study draws on three main types of data. The first and most important was digitized from the two-volume Titles of Patents of Invention, Chronologically Arranged, produced by the British Patent Office (BPO) and published in 1854. (Woodcroft, 1854b) The list of patents contained in these volumes provide a number of useful details about each invention and each inventor from 1700-1851, though, because I often estimate results by decade, I end my main dataset in 1849. The data include the patent number, date, and a short title, and the name, address and occupation of the patent filers. This study uses inventor names and occupations, which were entered for 12,546 individual patents and 13,972 inventor-by-patent observations. A patents can have multiple inventors. Patent laws were largely stable during that period. In 1852 there was an important patent reform act that lowered the cost of patenting substantially, raising the number of patents filed annually from several hundred to several thousand (see Appendix Figure 7). I analyze some additional data for the 1850s and 1860s, but the main results focus on the 1700-1849 period. (p8)
• After 1852, about 20% of the patents don't have the inventor's occupation.
• Can show that engineers were more productive of patents than other people, and were more likely to work in teams.
• Thinks of this occuaption as a professional R&D sector, in a way
• In a related working paper "Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Input Supplies and Directed Technical Change", Hanlon wrote (p48): "I constructed a database covering all of the patents granted in Britain between 1855 and 1883, 118,863 in all. Each patent is classified into one or more of 146 technology categories by the British Patent Office (BPO)."

Original title	The Rise of the Engineer: Inventing the Professional Inventor During the Industrial Revolution
Simple title	The Rise of the Engineer: Inventing the Professional Inventor During the Industrial Revolution
Authors	W. Walker Hanlon
Date	2020
Countries
Languages
Keywords	patents, British patents, engineers, Industrial Revolution, economic growth, output, productivity
Journal
Related to aircraft?	0
Page count
Word count
Wikidata id