Accident or Design? George Ravenscroft's Patent and the Invention of Lead-Crystal Glass

Abstract

Accidental discoveries and inventions are the stock-in-trade of modern-day legends: Newton's apple, Watt's kettle, and Archimedes' bath persist in popular imagination, along with the conception of inventors as unworldly geniuses who are rewarded for their persistence and material privations by stumbling on their invention by some happy accident. No reader of this journal would adopt such an uncritical view of inventive activity or countenance the simplistic heroic model it embodies. Yet, since so much of the history of invention at least starts with a biographical approach, it is unfortunate how far we are dependent on material written by, or drawing on, Victorian hagiographers. It can be difficult to fight one's critical way past the giants of invention, lovingly inflated by Smiles and his like, to discover how an invention really reached the workplace or the market, especially when the records are sparse. Also inherent in this Victorian model are an unwillingness to regard inventors as economic agents, sullied by the search for gain, and a tendency to regard ultimate success as inevitable once the right solution had been discovered, with correspondingly little attention paid to development.' While historians of technology since the 1920s have adopted more sophisticated models of technical change, their tendency to concentrate on innovation and broader socioeconomic questions has meant that a critical reappraisal of invention (with some notable exceptions) has been relatively overlooked.

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