Modern Age - Modern Historian [antikvár]

BY T.C. BARKER AND F.M.L. THOMPSON COMPLEMENTARY AND COMPETING TECHNOLOGIES: ROAD TRANSPORT BEFORE THE MOTOR It is well known that new technologies do not instantly replace the estabilished technologies for which thg- are substitues. This paper is written on a manual typewriter, although word processors have long been available. In China it m^ be perfectly sensible to build roads and railways with coolie labour, although earth-moving machinery has existed for decades. In many parts of India it may be more efficient to plough the land with buffalos than with tractors. These are examples were questions of labour costs, availability of skills, and the infrastructure of supporting repair and maintenance services tilt the balance in favour of continued use of older and technically obsolescent technologies. In other historical situations it has normally happened that a new technology has been, during an initial development period of varying length, a less than overwhelming competitor for the established ways of doing things. New machnines and devices tend to be ofuncertain reliability, inefficient in theiruse of some resources for example of skilled labour or of fuel restricted and inflexible in their applications, and high in initial cost. Such drawbacks have meant that new technologies, however dazzling in conception, have usually been less than convincing substitutes for older methods in practice; their weaknesses have, for a time, provided their older competitors with an incentive to introduce relatively minor improvements and refmements in order to remain economically competitve. The result has been more or less long periods of overlap in which rival technologies have co-existed, and the economically useful life of older methods and older equipment has been prolonged, often to the short-temi advantage but longer term loss of those industries or entire economies that possessed the largest commitments to the old technologies at the moment the new advances were made. The classic case of a traditional technology that was given a new lease of life by the invigorating competition of a revolutionary new technology is that of the sailing ship. Spurred on by the arrival of steamships and borrowing some ofthe fruits of new technology in the iron industry, notably for iron-framed and all-iron hulls, sailing ship design and performance was so improved that sail retained its ascendancy, in the long-haul routes in which it had the greatest comparative advantage, until the 1880s, nearly 75 years after paddle steamers had first proved themselves in sheltered waters.' Similarly, water power as a prime mover for industry reached its highest level of technical development after the advent o a new and ultimately more versatile competitor in the steam engine, and arguably only became highly sophisticated when harnessed to the generation of electricity. While horse power, although already an outmoded technology by 1780 for providing motive power for turning machinery, continued to be used and to be developed with greater engineering efficiency which improved input/final drive ratios, right through the nineteenth century.^ In all these cases the persistence and late flowering of the older technology was due partly to the constraints and limitations on the application ofthe new one, and partly to the capacity of the older one to mark out a sphere of operation which was complementaty to, or ancillary to, the revolutionary techniques. Similar characteristics can be found in the competition between rail and coastal shipping, al-tough in that case both modes of transport employed steam power.