From American Hero to Kook in the Basement
Evan I. Schwartz in In "Sparking the Fire of Invention" (MIT Technology Review) contends individual inventors and small research labs are returning to prominence. When the U.S. Census in 1940 eliminated "Inventor" as an occupation, replacing it with "Researcher", it changed the status of inventors. No longer independent, iconic, rugged American symbols, these people were now thought of as kooks in the basement. More recently, kooks in the garage.
Schwartz writes, "The change marks a comeback for those iconoclastic souls who still call themselves inventors -- the people considered the driving force of the economy in the days of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright brothers. From the 1920s and '30s onward, with the rise of giant technology-based companies like GE, AT&T, and DuPont, invention became co-opted by corporate labs that had to answer to management hierarchies. Within corporate labs, inventors were reclassified as 'researchers.' In 1932, the year after Edison died, more U.S. patents were granted to corporations than to individuals for the first time, and in 1940, the U.S. Census Bureau eliminated "inventor" as a job category.
"The new climate for invention, say Myhrvold and others, is the result of four major trends. The first is the reemergence of invention outside big corporations. For nearly a century, the innovations of large corporate research centers such as Bell Labs or General Electric overshadowed those of inventors working alone or in small groups. But now a constellation of forces is bringing the individual inventor and small technology companies -- and sometimes small teams within large firms -- back to the fore."
I'd link directly to the article but The Review is for subscribers only. So do this: use the Google search box above to search for this article. The return you'll want is: Technology Review: Sparking the Fire of Invention. It will list an MIT site. Hit the "Cached" version. That will give you the article without you having to subscribe. Yes, we Americans are indeed an inventive lot.