RELATION OF DISCOVERY AND INVENTION

turns. For example, in the United States , throughoutthe period of national expansion from 1820 to 1880, whilethe growth of farming, mining and manufacture wenthand in hand with canal and railroad building, socialincome increased sharply through investment, return, andpartial reinvestment. Rising national income marks allperiods of advancement in industrial arts and practices.The statistics of income recently made available by theNational Bureau of Economic Research show just suchrapid rise, concurrently with a period of great inventionsin electricity, chemistry, automotive engineering, radioand aviation. Thus in the United States capital invest-ment per worker rose from $560 in 1849 to $5,000 in1919, with a greater yearly increase in capital employedthan the increase in working population. Horsepower perindustrial worker increased from 1914 to 1925 from 3.3to 4.3. 1 The increased prosperity of the United States, due largely to increased utilization of inventions and sci-entific management, is shown by an increase of aboutthree-eighths in national income from 1921 to 1927, withan appreciable increase in real annual wages, while sal-aries showed a constant rise, as expressed in purchasingpower, after 1919. The total realized national income ofthe nation rose from $35,700,000,000 in 1913, to an esti-mated total of $89,000,000,000 in 1928. 2

§3. Invention Causes Revaluation of Capital

Those enterprisers and risk takers who are first to enterthe new investment field, opened up by an invention,or, in the slang of business, “get in on the ground floor”

1 Report on Recent Economic Changes, National Bureau of EconomicResearch, p. 87.

’Ibid., Chapter XII.

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