1. Canals and American Economic Development
2. The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855;Rothenberg;Journal,1981
3. This feature of the record is not transparent because of the noise resulting from the small numbers of sample patents for the first two sub-periods, 1791–1798 and 1799–1804. After allowing for this problem, the stability of the national patent shares is striking. For example, in 1805–1811 and in 1843–1846, the proportion of patents classified as agricultural is the same, 19.2 percent; the proportion of manufacturing patents rises only slightly, from 44.7 to 47.1 percent. The surface stability in the national distribution of patents after 1805–1811 appears to be largely the result of averaging across regions that were in different phases of a common transition and were growing at different rates. Although the signal in the data is weak, regions seem to have experienced an increase in the proportion of their patents that were agricultural when they underwent their first major spurt in inventive activity; as they developed further, the agricultural share declined. For example, when Southern New England realized its acceleration in patenting during 1805–1811, the agricultural and manufacturing shares amounted to 16.7 and 42.6 percent respectively; by the middle of the 1830s, they had shifted to 7.9 and 56.3 percent. This process is visible in New York as well, but is screened in the national record by the relative growth of the Other U.S. region and the later development of the rest of the Northeast. The stability is surprising, but is at least partially accounted for by patents having been classified on the basis of final use (where the latter was apparent). Accordingly, manufactured goods such as seed drills and ploughs are included in the agricultural category. More generally, agricultural invention might have flourished during the earliest stages of development in a region, because many farmers would have benefited from expansion in their markets and increasingly specialized in producing for that market, and because certain agricultural products were important inputs in manufacturing processes.