Authors: Matte Hartog, Andres Gomez-Lievano, Ricardo Hausmann, Frank Neffke

Between the mid-19th and mid-20th century, the US transformed from an agricultural economy to a frontier in science, technology, and industry. We study how the US transitioned from traditional craftsmanship-based to today’s science-based innovation. To do so, we digitize half a million pages of patent yearbooks that describe inventors, organizations, and technologies on over 1.6M patents and add demographic information from US census records and information on corporate research activities from large-scale repeated surveys on industrial research labs. Starting in 1920, the 19th-century craftsmanship-based invention was overtaken within just 20 years by a rapidly emerging system based on teamwork and a new specialist class of inventors and engineers. This new system relied on a social innovation: industrial research labs. These labs supported high-skill teamwork, replacing family collaborations with professional ties in firms and industrial research labs. This shift had wide-ranging consequences. It not only altered the division of labor in invention but also reshaped the geography of innovation, reestablishing large cities as epicenters of technological progress and introducing new barriers to patenting for women and foreign-born inventors that have persisted into the 21st century.