The Geography of Invention in the American Glass Industry, 1870 1925

Geographic clustering in inventive activity has often been attributed to clustering in production. For the glass industry, we find that despite a general association between location of invention and production, there were significant deviations. Centers of production were not always centers of invention, and some of the most inventive areas, such as southern New England, had very limited production. We hypothesize that the growth of a market for technology facilitated a geographic division of labor between invention and commercial exploitation and stimulated inventive activity in places where there were institutions capable of mediating among inventors, suppliers of capital, and firms seeking new technologies.