The Development of Inventions

Abstract

Although when this work was started it was not intended to say anything in detail about the development of inventions, it subsequently became increasingly apparent that some comment on it was unavoidable. For even those who are prepared to accept the description and analysis of invention as given in the foregoing pages might well protest that this is, after all, the less important part of the story of technical progress and that the real determinants of the rate of advance will be the scale and the speed of the efforts made to perfect new commodities and devices and to contrive ways of producing them cheaply and in quantity.¹

The writer may derive a more delicate satisfaction from the free confession of his ignorance, and from his prudence in avoiding that error, into which so many have fallen, of imposing their conjectures and hypothesis on the world for the most certain principles. — David Hume.

[A discussion of the later studies on Development, together with additional material we have ourselves been able to collect, will be found in Chapter X, pp. 212–19.]