Now and then

IN THE 19th century, inventors were heroes. The likes of Stephenson, Morse and Goodyear were the shock troops of the Industrial Revolution. Their ideas helped drag humanity from agrarian poverty to manufactured plenty. These days, though, inventor-superstars, while not absent, are fewer and farther between.

That may, in part, be because the process of invention has itself changed since the 19th century. There is no let-up in the growth of the number of patents issued each year, but the introduction of fundamentally new classes of technology seems rarer now than it was in the past. Information technology has certainly transformed the present day. But railways, the electric telegraph, photography, fixed-line telephony, the automobile and the chemical and steel industries each, separately, brought about transformations as big as anything IT has wrought so far. Perhaps the process of invention really was more heroic in Victorian times.