by Peter B. Meyer
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics --- findings and views are those of the author, not the BLS
APEBH conference, University of Waikato
February 2014
 .
1

1860s Clubs and journals show fixed-wing designs
“Aerial navigation” and “flying machines” are fringe activities – maybe hopeless, useless, dangerous
1890s Glider flights, survey books
Experimenters followed open science, open source practices
Networking ; shared findings, designs – public goods
1903-6 Powered glider flights (notably Wright brothers)
1908-10 Big exhibitions; new industry
After 1910: new results today– work in progress!
Much was documented
My project: gather & count publications, patents, clubs, firms, letters, innovators, etc. to understand technical innovation
2

 1910 Bibliography by
Brockett of Smithsonian Institution
 13,000 entries


Data
 Title, author, year, language, journal
Much cleanup was and is necessary

Duplicates, missing elements, “missing” entries

Source: Brockett bibliography (1910)
Dip at end is because only first half of 1909 is included; another volume goes further

Journal when where entries in
Brockett (1910)
L'Aérophile
Zeitschrift für Luftschiffahrt
Illustrierte Aëronautische Mitteilungen
L'Aéronaute
Wiener Luftschiffer Zeitung
Bollettino della Societa Aeronautica Italiana
Aeronautics
Aëronautical Journal
Scientific American
La Conquête de l'Air
Aeronautical World
Compte Rendus de l’Académie Sciences
Bulletin of the Aerial Experiment Association
La Revue de l’Aviation
American Magazine of Aeronautics
L'Aeronauta
Revue de l’Aeronautique
Flight (Aero Club of UK)
American Aeronaut
Aeronautical Annual
Ballooning and Aeronautics
1893-
1882-
1897-1931
1868-1914
1902-1914
1904-
1907-1921
1897-
1871-
1904-
1902-1903
1836-
1908-
1906-
1907-
1896-1900
1888-96; 1900-1
1909-
1907-1909
1895-1897
1907-
Paris
Berlin; Vienna
Strasbourg; Berlin
Paris
Vienna
Rome
London
London
New York
Brussels
Ohio
Paris
Nova Scotia
Paris
New York
Milan
Paris
London
St. Louis; NYC
Boston
London
425
415
371
343
315
191
157
147
102
95
87
1383
1101
1053
822
604
534
81
81
68
64

from Mouillard’s L’empire de l’air, 1881 The next five from L’Aerophile , 1893-1905

Term/concept in title
Balloon
(aerostat, dirigible, Zeppelin, voyage, ascent)
Navigation
(control, steerable)
Kites, gliders
(gliding, soaring)
Wing
Bird/animal
(animal, fish, insect)
Scientific/measurement
(research, theory, meteorology, atmosphere, experiment, duration, altitude, temperature, weight)
Military
(warfare, army)
Motor
(engine, propulsion, propellers)
Clubs/societies
Entries
(of ~13000)
2100
623
550
180
270
475
400
380
600

 All countries together
 25% of identified patents
(1500) have been classified by tech
 Much overlap between categories here
Balloon, airship (lighter-than-air)
Kite/glider/airfoil
Kite
Glider
Parachute
Wing/airfoil
Propulsion
Propellers
Flapping wing / ornithopter
Engines / motors
Navigation / control
Other of interest
Helicopters
Toys / fun
Instruments
556
186
77
29
43
58
355
79
88
6
297
32
30
26

Aeronautical patents per year, 1860-1909
This sample includes perhaps 40% of the relevant patents of that time.
• From publications of the time, USPTO, google patents, and EPO.
• Sources from the time say whether a patent is aeronautically-relevant.
For flying machines I find so far no licensing fees or suits.
10





Wright brothers 1901-2 glider
1903-5 airplanes
Chanute-Herring glider, 1896

Pratt truss
Wilbur Wright’s first letter to Chanute in 1900 says “the apparatus I intend to employ . . . is very similar to [your] "double-deck" machine [of] 1896-7
. . .”
“. . . I make no secret of my plans
. . . .
I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine , and that only those who are willing to give as well as to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery.
The problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret.” 11

Ferber, 1902, copies Wright design based on report from Chanute
Voisin-Farman winning prize, 1908

Santos-Dumont 1906, 1st airplane flight in Europe
Farman, 1909-10
Source: Gibbs-Smith’s Rebirth of European Aviation 12


13

 Many early attempts to make balloons and other aircraft


Key influential visits and demonstrations from Westerners in 1890,
1909, 1911, 1915, and 1916
Clubs and publications do not arise till 1909 (so far as I’ve seen)

1909: Key military decision to research balloons and airplanes
 Dispatched Capt. Kumazo Hino to Germany and Capt. Yoshitoshi
Tokugawa to France
 They get pilots licenses and fly an airplane in Japan in Dec 1910
 1911-1912 at least 25 Japanese civilians get pilot training in US.
Growth of patents is comparable to growth of patents overall
 Fast progress follows -- almost all engines and aircraft are modifications of a foreign design till 1920

Phases: slow growth, 1860-1906 (data from Brockett 1910, 1921)
1907 – big spike with sudden interest in new industry
1914 – notable drop because of the war, especially in French and German

•
•
•
Like publications did
Presumably fewer applications came from Europe
Data not ready for comparison to other countries and earlier time period

Clubs / Societies
Aerial League of Australia
Canterbury (NZ) Aero Club
Aero Club of Indo-China
Aero Club of New Zealand
German Aerial League of Peking : Deutscher
Luftflotten Verein Peking
Aeroplane Association of Japan
Kikyu Kinkyu Kai
Java Aerial Society [of Batavia] or Club Aerostatic of Batavia
Java Aerial Society [of Sourabaya]
Manila Aero Club
Imperial Aeronautical Association (aka Japan
Aeronautical Association, Teikoku Hiko Kyokwai)
Aero Company of Tokyo
Dutch Indies Aero Club : Nederlandsche Indische
Vereeniging voor Luchtvaart
Dunedin Aero Club
Start Year
1909
1909
1910
1910
1910 or earlier
1910 or earlier
1910 or earlier
1910 or earlier
1910 or earlier
1912 or earlier
1912
1913 or earlier
1913 or earlier
1913 or earlier
Taikaku Keukyakai
Australian Aero Club
People's Aeronautic Society (Japan)
Aero Club of Hawaii
Aero Club of the Philippines
1914 or earlier
1914
1916
1917 or earlier
1917
•
Clubs start much later than in Europe
•
Few firms/military establishments, somewhat behind Europe
Establishment / firm Start year country
Ogilvie, Bertram 1907 New Zealand
1909 or earlier Australia Gibson & Son
Rinji Gunya Kikyu Kenkyu Kai (Provisional
Military Balloon Research Association,
PMBRA)
Walsh Aeroplane Co.
Army Aircraft Factory at Tokorozawa Army
Airfield
Dai-Ichi Kaigan Koku Gijitsuko (Naval Air
Arsenal); popular name, Yokosuka, for location at Yakosuka, Japan
1909
1910-11
1911
1914
Japan
New Zealand
Japan
Japan
Australian Flying Corps School, Mechanics 1915 or earlier Australia
Nippon Flying School (or Japan Flying School)
Commonwealth Arcraft Corporation
Fukunaga Hikoki Seisakusho (Fukunaga
Aeroplane Manufacturing Works)
1916
1916 by 1917
Japan
New Zealand
Japan

1810-1906 aerial navigation experimenters publish and patent




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Growth of patents is comparable to growth of patents overall
Publications grow faster than that
Many clubs and societies arise, at first organized around ballooning
Technology is imitated ; little intellectual property

Note: No firms do this “research” (technological uncertainty)
 motivation mostly intrinsic or altruistic: to fly! change world! attempt challenge
Communication
 imitation, progress

1890s standard glider



Spike in publications and patents, 1907-1913
Wave of new companies appears
Patents matter now




Clubs and firms and military/govt manufacturers appear almost at the same time
In Japan late development model ; military-led
My bibliography source finds Japanese aero publications starting 1910

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
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Especially in French and German
English publications drop, but less
 Presumably because many English speakers are distant from the war
US aero patents drop, presumably also in the other countries
Aero technology is improving now in a military-focused way, not so open-source

Huge investment into aero in the war
•At least 20 companies make war-relevant airplanes in or for Germany and
Austria-Hungarian Empire (including airships)
•Many in France
•Many in Britain
•Few if any from U.S. companies
• Partly a patent war – US military intervenes to pressure companies to make a patent pool in 1917
•Possibly no airplane manufacturing companies in Japan, only government
Tech improves although publications have declined ; secret/industrial model
•Improvements focused on military purpose ; life and death, with big money market demand
•Zeppelin airships flew higher and further
•machine gun placement on aircraft notably Fokker’s synchronized to avoid hitting propeller
•Occasional steel structures ; still usu wood struts
•German air superiority in 1915 and beyond

 Choosing what to make, starting small, with various goals
 Learning from hands-on experience; empirical (no curriculum)
 Sharing info across distances, pooling knowledge

Create / manage communities


Support specialization and standards
Encourage “public goods”

Emergent progress, as opportunities permit
Products evolve iteratively (not by plan) and variants appear
23

(1) Watch new fields , knowing what "prehistories of invention" look like
•
In the air: quadrocopters, personal flight
• biotech, nanotech
• hacker spaces, maker faires
• are open source behaviors visible? suggests opportunity for improvement
• can identify innovative persons?
• ask experimenters what constrains them from progress
• help with open-source copying of institutions, legal documents, taxes, informational infrastructure
(2) Apply open-source practices in government
What would help us innovate in governance?
• wikis to read, share & copy efficiently in govt (Intellipedia, Diplopedia, Statipedia,
Eurostat's, OECD, Canada's, Britain's)
• search engines for our own pooled content
• source code control systems to share & co-develop tools in public/nonprofit sector
• try those that we might recommend ; empower our staff with permission to use outside platforms
• open data (for use in government )
• link to WikiData?
• share source code examples across government

In preliminary samples, only:
•
4% of company people had early patents
•
12% had aero publications before 1910
•
12% were referred to in publication titles before 1910



No firms do this “research” (hopeless, useless, dangerous)

 Networking & writing
 imitation & progress
 Clubs, publications, visits, letters



Lead to standard information platform in mid 1890s
They copy previous work
 relevant to open source software and other cases
Their motivation is mostly intrinsic or altruistic
 To fly! To change the world so others can fly; or, the challenge

 The experts of 1899 did not become industrialists ten years later

This big “case” (airplane as invention and new industry) relates to
 what innovation is (open source innovation vs others)


 measurement of innovation stories of startup industry where new inventions and industries come from
(personal computer industry; open source software industry; biotech; light bulb; photography; steam engines, atom bomb)
It is useful to organize and classify data about this case scientifically
(apart from my telling stories about it) data=publications, patents, letters, clubs, club members, companies, company founders, . . . . lists and counts of things
Plan: keep naïve, keep it interesting and keep counting

Economics has useful micro models of agents:
Investors, employees, firms, R&D, households, consumers, governments, bureaucrats, principal-agent relationships, managers, employees, families, etc.
But these characters didn
’
t bring us the airplane .
•
•
•
•
We could use a model of self-motivated non-profit “ tinkerers ” (scientists) who:
•
Offer information to public
Sometimes avoid intellectual property institutions (patents, copyrights, …)
Standardize technology, modularize, specialize
Evangelize the field and technology
Did bring us the airplane and thus an industry
•
Relevant models/phrasings: user innovation, distributed innovation, collective invention, peer production, open source innovation
If goal is to change the world, open-source behavior can be “rational” (Meyer 2007)

Yes
 Designs were copied
 Publications copied
 Tinkerers in contact


Standards did arise
Rivalry was secondary


No
No sharp boundary
( of common resource)
Usual commons issues are minor
 congestion, free riding, conflict, overuse, pollution (Hess and Ostrom intro, 2006)
 No global formal rules
 Many clubs or journals had rules


No strong collective action; little governance, sanctions, monitoring.
“Soft law” / context
Note relevance of: uncertainty; opportunism; support

These rough counts come from 12 combined historical book indexes about the invention of the airplane, and exclude references to events after 1909.
These institutions serve technical communication. There was much free revealing of tech.
page references
219
131
75 distinct instances
37
39
35
Clubs , society, or association
Journals , periodicals, newspapers, or magazines,
Company
Exhibition , prize, trophy, award, contest, medal, or meet book (fact or fiction) university or school lab, museum, institute, observatory, zoo, or fund military institution conference
67
47
46
46
45
14
18
21
19
16
7
2
30

Brockett/Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian expanded director Langley’s collection
Bibliography has over 13,400 items, listed on 940 pages.
• It was scanned, digitized and made public online
• Archive.org ; also credits to Cornell Univ library, U of Michigan library, and Carnegie-Mellon (posner.cmu.edu)
• with many scanning/OCR errors. I’m fixing those and making a database.
For most publications we have authors, date, language of the title, location of publication.
• Work continues
Chanute’s 1894 book and this 1910 book are my major sources here.
31

(1) R&D: investments which expect financial payback on average
(2) Race to be first (space race; genome project)
(3) Collective invention (Allen, 1983)
 but those are (a) firms, (b) not paying costs to experiment
(4) To earn income or wealth indirectly


Start company, or license patented invention signal to employers; get hired as engineer (Lerner and Tirole, 2002)
These do not apply well to airplane invention
 We need a model of “tinkerers”
(5) Network: a population of agents with i nterest in a problem (a
0
), worthwhile opportunities (p), information flows between them (f)
 experimentation and socially constructed “progress”
No pool of information, or incentive structure, or technical measure of improvement.
32

 Few of the founders, investors, designers in the 1908-1916 firms were experts/experimenters of the 1890s.



Maybe this is how open-source technologies are usually commercialized – by a new or different group
Change from technological uncertainty to feasible/investable tech
Are the authors of technical works different? Don’t know yet.
 Many founders had experience in manufacturing
 Unlike the Wrights
 New firms spin off rapidly from earliest firms
 Klepper (2009): corporate-genealogies in Detroit and Silicon Valley show very high local rates of spinoff; that’s how these places became central to cars and semiconductors



Chanute corresponded with, visited, introduced experimenters, and published book
In model: A tinkerer’s best opportunity for progress may be editing, writing, speeches, evangelism
 a uthors/evangelists are another kind of specialist tinkerer
Octave Chanute, 1894: “The writer’s object in preparing these articles was threefold:
1. To satisfy himself whether . . . men might reasonably hope eventually to fly . . .
2. To save . . . effort on the part of experimenters trying again devices which have already failed.
3. To . . . render it less chimerical . . . to experiment with a flying machine . . . .”
Analogously: Lilienthal’s public demonstrations; Felsenstein at
Homebrew; open source programmers Stallman, Torvalds, etc.
34

What institutions support the activities that leads to the invention/industry?
(taking its importance as known)
Do the experimenters show “open source” behavior?
What does the transition to industry look like?
Methods question: How can we use a bibliography and historical narratives written after the fact to tell a unified quantitative story of innovation?
I am developing databases of
 bibliographies of aeronautical publications and clubs


 patents from the 1860s to 1910 startup firms and their key people (founders, investors, designers) combined indexes from historical books about the airplane’s invention

Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop.
They read up on gliders and experiment with kites and gliders.



Motivation: “I am an enthusiast . . . I wish to . . . help on the future worker who will attain final success."
-- Wilbur Wright, 1899, in letter to Smithsonian
Wilbur writes Chanute, 1900: “I make no secret of my plans
[because] I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine , and that only those who are willing to give as well as to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery. The problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret . . . The apparatus I intend to employ . . . is very similar to [yours].”
Chanute reports on Wrights’ design to others and it is copied in
1902 – before they are famous! (Details Gibbs-Smith 1966)
36

 Like user innovation
(von Hippel) & collective invention
(R Allen)

 But no central organization; few rules
 Copying actual designs
Not like R&D; nor “race” to the finish; nor mainly signaling to employers
Can be modeled micro-economically:
 Suppose tinkerers are


Instrinsically or altruistically self-motivated
Trying to make “progress” on a technical project
 Not competing with others too much
 benefits exceeds costs to experiment, share, specialize, standardize, modularity, platforms (micro model Meyer 2007 “Network of tinkerers”)








Publications
–
13,600 from Brockett’s 1910
Bibliography of Aeronautics
Citations by Chanute’s 1894 Progress in Flying Machines (190)
 and by Historical accounts
(indexes of books)
Clubs and societies to 1910
(hundreds)
Patents
(>2000)
Firms ( >600 up to 1916)
Letters between experimenters
(>400)
Individuals
– from the above, thousands
Much was written because progress was slow and dispersed



 Visitors, publications, speeches, imitation


 File for patent, granted 1906
 They plan to enforce their patent and manufacture airplanes





Would like to fly
Curiosity, interest in the problem (an “intrinsic” motive)
Prestige, recognition
Hope to make better world/country (altruistic)
They didn’t refer to manufacturing or expected profits.
40

Annual increase in all-nations aeronautical patents/year: 4.5%
From sample of perhaps 40% of aero patents – same as rate of growth of overall US patents
Aeronautical publications by language:
• French: 6.7% average growth
•
English: 7.6% / year
•
German: 11.1% / year
•
Italian: 4.4% / year growth
Aero patents grow like other patents in this period (~ 4.5% / year)
Aero publications grow faster than that (~ 7%)