faster trains and cheaper telegraphing and telephoning, and easier communication between all these and Washington by these means and by aviation, radio, and eventually television. All these inventions will help officials to confer with each other and with their staffs, experts to advise, every kind of distant business to be more easily handled, elected officers to be known to wider constituencies, and voters to be somewhat informed on and interested in broader issues.

Many shifts of power from smaller to larger units of government have been made by law, but many others are effected in more indirect fashion, by a transfer upward of interest, prestige, legislative, and administrative vigor and efficiency. Sometimes the inventional origin of a change is evident, as when the auto bus and better roads bring in the consolidated school and district, when the auto brings national road financing and need of wider police organization, when the superpower line and national holding company bring Federal regulation of electric power, and when the radio and airplane develop to require national and international regulation. More often than from single inventions, and indeed always in part, the change really comes largely because of the whole mass of thousands of transport and communication inventions which all go to encourage centralization of authority, even though among these only a few may be conspicuous.

One quiet force making for wider areas of control is the need of a wider source for taxation. So long as the country's wealth was mostly in real estate, especially agricultural land, the general property tax and local administration of it sufficed very well for most purposes. But new inventions in agriculture and industry have helped cut the farm population to a quarter of the whole, and communication and transport progress have gathered much of the Nation's wealth into the hands of great national corporations, of which 200 are said to control 38 percent of the business wealth of the country, according to Berle and Means. The ownership of the corporations is scattered among people who live mostly in the metropolitan centers, far from their industrial properties, and who can be taxed most effectively only through the national income tax. Hence the growing inability of the small, local governments to bear their burdens of education, relief, etc., and a disposition to support and administer such services from the State and National capitals.

Just as the improvements of communication and transportation all tend to involve the different regions of the country more with one another, and therefore to build up the central, national authority as the only possible harmonizer of conflicting interests, so the same inventions, but especially those for transoceanic

freight, passenger, and ideal traffic, tend strongly to build up international cooperation and organization. Take such problems as international postal and telegraph services, the repartition of radio wave lengths, the repression of the illicit drug traffic, the protection of labor, the establishment of international languages such as the marine signal code and the scientific terminologies, calendar reform, the business of the many world conferences occurring each year and drawing up international agreements, and any encouragement of world peace—such problems can be solved only internationally. The world-spread culture gives a basis for mutual understanding, and whether the League of Nations be followed or not, there result inevitably international conventions and common action, involving every important country. This means that we follow not simply our own will, but more that of the consensus of the nations; whence national government is, in some small degree, superseded by international organization.

On the other hand, increasing contacts in some ways bring new frictions, as through radio propaganda, and the fear of airplane raids. In such ways international disorganization is promoted; but probably the uniting effect is the greater. While invention modifies political practices, in turn political principles modify what will be done with inventions. For illustration, when the first railway cars were being built in America, far from making them identical or at least interconnectible, some little roads even deliberately adopted a different rail gage, to prevent all possibility of through movement of cars. Much later rival singletrack roads were built side by side for great distances. Unity would always have been technically desirable, and was enforced in Europe, but in America the political philosophy of that age saw more advantage in free competition. The standardized, interconnectible, and life-saving Janney car coupler was not insisted on until the beginning of the century. But when, at later epochs, the airplane and radio came along, national and even international standardization and control were enforced early, not because the needs of these devices were essentially very different from those of the railroads, but because the political philosophy had changed, and no strong vested interests nor established customs stood in the way.

Every page of this chapter has been pointing out inventions of significance to government, i. e., forthcoming technological developments in which the federal or a minor government might probably, if it wished to, accomplish some progress or ward off some impending evil by taking some sort of legislative or administrative action with reference to the new invention. As examples, there have been pointed out

the immense political power of television, the opportunity for machines in education, and the tendencies for noise to increase. References have been on the basis of the political principles usual today; according to those of the 1880's, such matters were no concern of government.

Examples of how, under modern conditions, invention may invite governmental action are found in the case of all sorts of materials for consumers' goods. Technological improvements introduce vast numbers of new products, notably chemical products and foods. The consumer is confused by the multiplicity of the substances which he has no way of distinguishing. Trade names add to his confusion. Acetate rayon, for example, commonly bearing some trade name, needs quite different treatment in cleaning and dyeing from ordinary cellulose rayon and from all natural fibers. One plastic may be heated with impunity, while another would soften or catch fire. The need that people generally shall know how the materials which they have bought can be protected, cleaned, resurfaced, repaired, altered, and finally salvaged or used for scrap, may call for action by Government or trade associations, for proper labeling, as already in the case of drugs.

Broadly considered, the drive toward integration which has accompanied technological developments has meant that the activities of government have come to concern themselves more and more with situations and organizations, rather than with individuals as such. In past decades, many a person was killed by horse traffic. But with horses and vehicles unstandardized and so fully in the control of individuals and small dealers, the Government made little attempt to regulate them, almost wholly confining itself to

ordaining that whoever did injury by reckless driving should pay damages or be punished. Today, with nearly all the autos in the country being built by a dozen companies, they seem more "get-at-able", and governments try to prevent accidents before they happen, by requiring brakes and lights up to certain standards, and establishing traffic signals and rules, and police to command each move where the traffic is thickest. Today we are inclined to regulate situations and group units, by many special laws. Formerly we punished people after the wrong was done, by general laws, on the theory that they chose to be reckless or malicious, and that their punishment would deter others in the future. When every American family made its own light from tallow, pitch pine, or what they could find, State regulation of the light business would have been absurd. But when the lights in a city are dependent upon one generating station and one company, regulation becomes feasible and desirable. The growing interdependence of economicʻlife with its high degree of organization, and the fact that now almost every vital concern of life is at some stage on a wholesale basis, make it both easier and often needful to regulate the large-scale stage, rather than to attempt to pick out and punish some individual wrongdoer after the harm is done.

Acknowledgments

The author's hearty thanks are due to Drs. Samuel A. Stouffer, William F. Ogburn, and S. McKee Rosen, Chicago. Technical advice is gratefully acknowledged from Drs. Richard O. Cummings, Martin J. Freeman, Marius Hansome, Paul S. Hartsuch, Lloyd W. Mints, Barkev S. Sanders, and Robert N. Wenzel.

Introduction

Prognoses can be made as to inventions in the offing through a knowledge of the cumulative developments and lines of research in specific fields of technology. But such predictions are nonrealistic unless they take into consideration the social and economic setting of these innovations. Basic inventions may be still-born and entire lines of potential development be prevented, not because of deficiency in engineering plans, but because of factors entirely beyond their scope. Predictions based upon the assumption that if valuable or profitable technological inventions are but conceived, they will be incorporated into industrial life, ignore the evidence of past experience. For the history of inventions in technology is replete with frustrations and protracted delays in the acceptance of innovations which subsequently have proven of inestimable value to mankind.

The acceptance or rejection of technological innovations depends to a large measure on whether they are introduced at a time when an economy is static, contracting or expanding; whether they appear in a setting of social stratification, of anarchic competition and class struggle, or in a planned industrial order. Within these varied frameworks there are other psychological and cultural factors that determine receptivity to technological innovation which can be brought into perspective by a study of specific cases of opposition to technological change.

The purpose of this report is twofold. It is to present evidence through historical, analytical inquiry that resistance to technological innovation is frequent and powerful enough that it must be taken into consideration when discussing trends, and it is to investigate the socio-economic and psychological factors which are involved in this resistance.

1. Resistances to Technological Innovations in Various Fields

There will be no attempt here to make an exhaustive compilation of all cases where technological change has met resistance. The high frequency of such opposition makes selection imperative. The basis of choice has been not the spectacular, but the normal occurrence of resistance to technological innovations, throughout history, but particularly in recent western societies, in fields which most influence man's life and livelihood, and permit his control and effective utilization of his natural environment. The number of cases

discussed will be sufficiently diverse and adequate to give insight into the causes of such resistance and to permit generalizations that have wider applicability. Transportation

It is clearly to man's advantage to be able to traverse distances with facility and in ease, yet innovations permitting more comfortable and more rapid mobility generally have encountered apathy or overt resistance, and their utilization has repeatedly been restricted by vested interests. In the thirteenth century such resistance manifested itself in the case of the use of carriages. Philip the Fair ordered the wives of citizens of Paris not to ride in carriages in order to preserve the prerogatives of the ladies of the court.2 A law likewise sought to prevent the use of coaches in Hungary in 1523, and the Duke Julius of Brunswick in 1588 made riding in coaches by his vassals a crime punishable as a felony, largely on the grounds that it would interfere with military preparedness, for men would lose their equestrian skill. Philip II, Duke of Pomerania-Stettin, also commanded his vassals in 1608 that they should use horses and not carriages. England, coaches were not widely used until the time of Elizabeth, who rode only reluctantly in this effeminate conveyance which young men scorned. In Donegal, Ireland, as late as 1821, carts to carry produce, which had previously been carried in creels on ponies' backs, were rejected as useless.

In

There were many impediments placed in the way of stagecoaches in all countries. Local authorities often kept the roads in disrepair lest business be diverted elsewhere. Strangers were taxed excessively for horses, repairs, and stoppages. Tolls and passport requirements were onerous. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century one traveling from Gottingen to Rome had to have his passport vised about 20 times.6 Such political interference involved delays

1 Department of Social Science, Columbia University.

2 Yeats, John, The Technical History of Commerce (London 1872), p. 178.

Beckman, Johann, Beyträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen. 2 vols. (Leipzic 1783-1805) tr. by William Johnston as A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins. 2 vols. (4th ed. by William Francis and J. W. Griffith (London, 1846), pp. 72-73.)

4 Bishop, J. L., A History of American Manufactures From 1608 to 1860. 3 vols. (3d ed., Philadelphia, 1868) vol. i, p. 20.

5 Hamilton, John, Sixty Years' Experience as an Irish Landlord, ed. by H. C. White (London, 1894), pp. 47–48.

"Boehn, Max von, and Fischel, Oskar, Die Mode; Menschen und Moden in neunzehnten Jahrhundert. 4 vols. (Munich, 1907-19) tr. by Marian Edwardes as Modes and Manners of the Nineteenth Century. 4 vols. (Rev. ed., London, 1927) vol. i, pp. 177-178.

and expense, and discouraged travel by stagecoaches long after they were well equipped for distance travel. Railroads.-Turnpike companies profiting by tolls, and owners of stagecoaches were among the most active opponents of railroads. They were supported by tavernkeepers along the route of the roads, and by farmers who felt that the introduction of the railroad would deprive them of markets for horses and for hay. In the United States, Congress had initiated an extensive program of road-building and had already built a national road and many post roads that facilitated travel. The argument that a system of macadamized public highways would better serve the Nation than railways deserved serious consideration when the dispersion of the population and the crudeness of early railroad development is considered. At this time, also, steam carriages were being considered as a commercial possibility to supersede horses in propelling stagecoaches, and the conflict therefore was not merely between slow railroads and fast horses, which often beat the trains on good roads, but rival forms of steam conveyance, one confined to fixed routes on the rails, the other more mobile. The current competition between the railroads and autobuses was thus anticipated. The railroads emerged as victors in such a decisive fashion that extensive roadbuilding and the development of mechanical conveyances on these roads were checked for decades.

Advocacy of the "people's road" as against monopolistic railroads became one of the political issues of the Jacksonian period. It was argued in Congress that railways were "vastly inferior" to roads and that "Democratic-Republicans" wanted a road on which all could travel together "no toll, no monopoly, nothing exclusive a real 'people's road." This opposition was engendered not merely by the fact that the railways business required a considerable capital and a corporate form that made it a "moneyed power", but also by the fact that the railroad operators could hardly have been said to have represented the people's interest, or to have acted in a manner to elicit public confidence. Speculative financing which ruined small investors, the many fraudulent construction contracts, the sale of stock on "through-lines" which remained only branches, the wasteful wars between competing companies, the "squeezing out" of minority stockholders, the high stipends of the railroad directors, the land grabs and excessive subsidies obtained through the bribery of corrupt legislators, and other sharp dealings roused public sentiment against the railroad interests and stimulated hostility to their projects.

Haney, L. H., A Congressional History of Railways in the United States to 1850, in University of Wisconsin Bulletin, Economics and Political Science Series, vol. iii (Madison, 1908), pp. 167-438, 247-248.

In England the resistance to the railroad was largely from the landlord class which, with its feudal privileges, arrayed itself against the aggressive industrial bourgeoisie. The temper of the opposition is to be seen in the remarks of Craven Fitzhardinge Berkeley, a member of Parliament for Cheltenham: "Nothing is more distasteful to me than to hear the echo of our hills reverberating with the noise of hissing railroad engines running through the heart of our hunting country, and destroying that noble sport [fox hunting] to which I have been accustomed from my childhood." Sir Astley Cooper, the eminent surgeon, is quoted as saying to Stevenson: "You are proposing to cut up our estates in all directions for the purpose of making an unnecessary road. Do you think for one moment of the destruction of property involved in it? Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing is allowed to go on, you will in a very few years destroy the noblesse !" 8 It was in protest against the mounting spirit of industrialism that Ruskin, rejecting the "nonsensical" railroad, drove through England in a mail coach.9

"10

In the United States likewise there was opposition to the railroad in a similar strain. It was argued that its use would: "introduce manufactures into the heart of the country, divert industry from the primitive healthful and moral pursuits of agriculture, and bring on us the vices and miseries of manufacturing and commercial places." 10 Many small towns joined the opposition, some on the grounds that their quiet would be interrupted by steam cars and the influx of strangers, others because business would be diverted to the larger cities. Stephen Van Rensselaer, for example, who was originally one of the wealthy backers of a charter for a railroad between Albany and New York, later opposed the plan on the ground that Albany would be ruined because the railway would divert travel and traffic to Manhattan.11

The vested interests of canal owners, and the sentiments of legislators committed to the building of public canals in which there were already considerable investments, were arrayed against the railroads. Surveyors laying out the road for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway were threatened with violence by the manager of canal properties on the estate of the Duke of Bridgewater and by Lords Derby and

8 Quoted in Burgess, E. W., The Function of Socialization in Social Evolution (Chicago, 1916), pp. 18-19.

Ludwig, Emil, In Defense of Our Machine Age, in New York Times Magazine (Oct. 21, 1928), pp. 1-2, 23.

10 Haddock, Charles B., An Address Delivered before the Railroad Convention at Montpelier, Vt. (Montpelier, 1844), pp. 10-14. Quoted in Corey, Lewis, House of Morgan (New York, 1930), p. 25.

11 Laut. A. C., The Romance of the Rails. 2 vols. (New York, 1929). vol. i, p. 17.

12

Sefton, and farmers were incited against them.1 Aided by the landed gentry and the turnpike owners, the canal companies campaigned so vigorously against the railroad that the expenditure of £27,000 was required by the railroad interests to win Parliamentary approval.13

In the United States when, in 1812, John Stevens wrote his Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railways and Steam-carriages over Canal Navigation addressed to the commissioners appointed by the State of New York to explore a route for the Erie Canal, his proposals were regarded as ingenious but visionary, and dismissed in the face of the recommendation for the canal by DeWitt Clinton, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert R. Livingston. The latter, Steven's brother-in-law, had been granted a monopoly to navigate the waters of New York State by steamboat and could, therefore, not be expected to be receptive. His letter, dated March 11, 1812, gives the reaction of an "expert" of the time:

ALBANY, 11th March 1812.

I had before heard your very ingenious propositions as to the railway communication. I fear, however, on mature reflection, that they will be liable to serious objections, and ultimately more expensive than a canal. They must be double, so as to prevent the danger of two such heavy bodies meeting. The walls on which they are placed must at least be four feet below the surface, and three above, and must be clamped with iron, and even then would hardly sustain so heavy a weight as you propose moving at the rate of four miles an hour on wheels. As to wood, it would not last a week; they must be covered with iron, and that, too, very thick and strong. The means of stopping these heavy carriages without a great shock, and of preventing them from running upon each other (for there would be many on the road at once) would be very difficult. In case of accidental stops, or the necessary stops to take wood and water, etc. many accidents would happen. The carriage of condensed water would be very troublesome. Upon the whole, I fear the expense would be much greater than that of canals, without being so convenient.14

When later in 1815 in New Jersey, and in 1823 in Pennsylvania, Stevens received a charter for railroads, capitalists could not be sufficiently convinced of the efficacy of his proposals to give him adequate funds.15

12 Smiles, Samuel, The Life of George Stephenson (Boston, 1858), pp. 197-202.

13 Kaempffert, Waldemar, When the Locomotive Was a Mad Idea, in New York Times Magazine (Oct. 6, 1929), pp. 4-5, 20.

14 Stevens, John, Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railways and Steam-carriages Over Canal Navigation (New York, 1812), p. 21.

15 Mitman, C. W., The Beginning of the Mechanical Transport Era in America. in Smithsonian Inst. Ann. Rept., 1929 (Washington 1930), pp. 507-558.

After New York had incurred a heavy debt in the construction of the Erie Canal, mass meetings throughout the State demanded that railroad competition should not be permitted to affect the receipts of the canal. When the charter of the Utica and Schenectady Railroad was granted in 1833, the line was prohibited from carrying any property except the baggage of passengers, a prohibition which prevailed until 1844, when permission to carry freight was granted but only when navigation was suspended and upon the payment of canal tolls. The general railroad incorporation act of 1848 levied canal tolls from railroads parallel to canals and within 30 miles, and not until 1851 were restrictions of this character removed. In Pennsylvania also, where there were many State canals, popular sentiment was strong against railroad competition and tonnage taxes were imposed on the Pennsylvania Railroad that were not lifted until 1861.16

Propaganda of vested interest groups was potent. It was easy to arouse opposition of farmers along the right-of-way, on the grounds that the roaring locomotives would startle the cattle and prevent them from grazing in safety, that hens would not lay, that the poisoned air from the locomotives would kill the wild birds and destroy vegetation, that farmhouses would be ignited by sparks, and property would deteriorate. Farmers likewise were made apprehensive lest through competition there would be no market for horses, and that their crops of oats and hay would be valueless.17 But the propaganda did not stop with such arguments. An eloquent divine in the United States went so far as to declare that the introduction of the railroad would require the building of many insane asylums, as people would be driven mad with terror at the sight of locomotives rushing across the country with nothing to draw them. Railroads were likewise denounced as impious because they were not foreseen in the Bible.18

The railroad deviated from its predecessors slowly. Before steam power was used on the railroads, horsedrawn cars were employed as well as horsepower treadmill cars. First, wooden, and then short-lived and expensive cast-iron rails were used for the horsedrawn railroad coaches that differed so little from the stage coaches that they were sometimes equipped with arm straps to ease the jolts of the journey. In 1829 a horse treadmill car carrying 24 passengers was given a price of $500 by the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad. Cars equipped with a mast and sail were tried

16 Cleveland, F. A., and Powell, F. W.. Railroad Promotion and Capitalization in the United States (New York, 1909), pp. 73–75.

17 Francis, John, A History of the English Railway, 2 vols. (London, 1851), vol. i, pp. 101-102, 107-108.

18 Laut, op. cit. vol. i, pp. 12-13.