MARC Record from Library of Congress

LEADER: 03051cam a22003497a 4500
001 2005615821
003 DLC
005 20050113141337.0
007 cr |||||||||||
008 050113s2004 mau sb 000 0 eng
010 $a 2005615821
040 $aDLC$cDLC
043 $an-us---
050 00 $aHB1
100 1 $aLamoreaux, Naomi R.
245 10 $aFinancing invention during the second industrial revolution$h[electronic resource] :$bCleveland, Ohio, 1870-1920 /$cNaomi R. Lamoreaux, Margaret Levenstein, Kenneth L. Sokoloff.
260 $aCambridge, MA :$bNational Bureau of Economic Research,$cc2004.
490 1 $aNBER working paper series ;$vworking paper 10923
538 $aSystem requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
538 $aMode of access: World Wide Web.
500 $aTitle from PDF file as viewed on 1/13/2005.
530 $aAlso available in print.
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references.
520 3 $a"For those who think of Cleveland as a decaying rustbelt city, it may seem difficult to believe that this northern Ohio port was once a hotbed of high-tech startups, much like Silicon Valley today. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cleveland played a leading role in the development of a number of second-industrial-revolution industries, including electric light and power, steel, petroleum, chemicals, and automobiles. In an era when production and inventive activity were both increasingly capital-intensive, technologically creative individuals and firms required greater and greater amounts of funds to succeed. This paper explores how the city's leading inventors and technologically innovative firms obtained financing, and finds that formal institutions, such as banks and securities markets, played only a very limited role. Instead, most funding came from local investors who took long-term stakes in start-ups formed to exploit promising technological discoveries, often assuming managerial positions in these enterprises as well. Business people who were interested in investing in cutting-edge ventures needed help in deciding which inventors and ideas were most likely to yield economic returns, and we show how enterprises such as the Brush Electric Company served multiple functions for the inventors who flocked to work there. Not only did they provide forums for the exchange of ideas, but by assessing each other's discoveries, the members of these technological communities conveyed information to local businessmen about which inventions were most worthy of support"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
650 0 $aIndustries$zOhio$zCleveland$xHistory.
650 0 $aInventions$zOhio$zCleveland$xHistory.
651 0 $aCleveland (Ohio)$xEconomic conditions.
700 1 $aLevenstein, Margaret.
700 1 $aSokoloff, Kenneth Lee.
710 2 $aNational Bureau of Economic Research.
830 0 $aWorking paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;$vworking paper no. 10923.
856 40 $uhttp://papers.nber.org/papers/W10923