Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation,
but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis ofinvention as a mental
or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using
concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two
telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we
suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with
objects, or what we call mental models and mechanical representations. The strategies
by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical
representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the
development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as
being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius.
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