Who wants to be a millionaire? Failure and bankruptcy in the pursuit of innovation during the First Industrial Revolution

This is a British Academy funded research project led by Dr Joe Lane in collaboration with Dr Stephen Billington at Ulster University.

History often remembers the most successful inventors, but rarely those who failed. This survivorship bias toward successful inventors skews our understanding of why those inventors were so successful when others were not, potentially providing misleading interpretations concerning the incentive to innovate during periods of technical change. This project bridges this gap, by examining English bankruptcy and debtors prison records of inventors who held patents during the First Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830. By revealing the causes and extent of failure, we will be able to further our understanding of what differentiates successful and unsuccessful invention as we face the Fourth Industrial Revolution.