Bottles for Beer: The Business of Technological Innovation in Mexico, 1890-1920

Abstract

Successful technological change in countries outside the northern Atlantic during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on entrepreneurial skills, not inventive expertise. In this examination of the Owens automatic glass-bottle-blowing machine in Mexico between 1905 and 1912, innovation is seen to have occurred within a broad context of incipient social and economic modernization. Although the obstacles encountered by technology importers and innovators were both substantial and stubbornly persistent, in this case, they turned out to be malleable.

Keywords: technological innovation, Mexico, beer, bottling

JEL Classification: L66, O32, O33, N86