| My thesis is that inventions occur as a result of competition among capitalists but owing to class conflict over the control of the mode of production inventions may be prevented from being developed and diffused. I take the case of the automobile as steam carriage which was invented in England in the 1820's by Goldsworthy Gurney. I examine the failure of the steam carriage to develop by applying the neo-classical economic arguments of cost efficiency and profit incentive relative to railways but find that Gurney is defeated solely because of legislative repression. Whereas railways centralized capital, brought their owners a monopoly over internal trade and promoted the free trade policy of the Lancashire capitalists, the automobile decentralized capital, threatened the railway monopoly and promoted the national economic aims of the English agriculturists.;I pursue the connection between, on one hand, the Lancashire capitalists, merchant bankers and the development of the railway in Europe and America, and, on the other, the repression of the automobile. After the Franco-Prussian War German capitalists successfully revolt against their domination by English capital and France develops a nationalistic middle class which challenges its ruling financial bourgeoisie.;The war over markets for petroleum between the Russian Nobel-Rothschild syndicates and the American Standard Oil gives impetus to Daimler's development of the petroleum automobile and its adoption by French industrialists as a new mode of production for the national-minded French middle class which has come to power.;The English law prohibiting automobiles is overturned and the invention is rapidly diffused to England, Germany, the U.S.A. and elsewhere. Thus I show that invention to be successful must have qualitative as well as quantitative efficiency. |
