Doing Business In Connecticut: The history of innovation

History & Culture

of Innovation

Bright ideas are nothing new to the Nutmeg State

By Taryn Plumb

The cutting edge products that come out of Connecticut companies today owe a debt to the inventors that helped established a culture of

innovation here more than 200 years ago. “Connecticut is a place where entrepreneurs, inventors and enterprise have flourished like nowhere else in the world,” said historian and consultant William Hosley of Enfield.

Out of the state came the first revolver and the first cotton gin — and by the mid- 1800s, Connecticut was dominant in the production of typewriters, watches and various brass and silver commodities.

But just as important as the products — perhaps even more so — were the processes developed in the state.

Most notably: The concepts of interchange- able or standardized parts, and incorporating machines into the manufacturing process.

“That’s the way all production is done now,” said state historian Walter Woodward, whose office is located on the University of Connecticut’s Greater Hartford campus. But, he stressed, it was an “extraordinarily innovative idea then.”

A land for experimentation

Woodward attributes the foundation of the state’s inventive spirit to an unexpected source: Alchemy, the form of philosophy and chemistry that involved transmutation of basic substances into great ones. Think turn- ing lead into gold.

John Winthrop Jr., son of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a practitioner, and he traveled the world to recruit people to create a “New London” in southeastern Connecticut.

Winthrop, who later served as Connect icut governor, saw alchemy as cutting edge and believed science was a godly pursuit. His recruits were of all different denominations, and he had a “progressive vision of using science and innovation to create a new world, a perfected world, in Connecticut,” said Woodward. “He instilled into Connecticut a culture of innovation and collaboration.”

One of the prime examples of Connecticut ingenuity is Eli Whitney — most recognized as the man who invented the cotton gin, but whose contributions to history are far greater: In the late 1700s, he figured out how to manufacture muskets by machine so their parts could be interchangeable.

Samuel Colt, whose firearms were used in many of the nation’s wars — including by both the Union and the Confederacy in the Civil War — built upon this idea by patent- ing firearms with interchangeable parts and by creating an assembly line on which they were made.

Meanwhile, Elisha Root is credited with an invention that further revolutionized manufacturing: die casting. He eventually went to work for Colt, helping to mechanize his operations with advanced drop hammers, boring machines, gauges and fixtures.

Today, that inventive spirit lives on in Connecticut, as evidenced by the number of patents generated here every year.

Connecticut secured 130.6 patents per 100,000 workers in 2012.

That ranks the state eighth in the nation and exceeds the national per capita average of 92.7 by 41 percent.

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