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Nothing new under the sun? History repeats itself? Not according to two eminent historians, who see unprecedented changes in how inventions come about. The historians—Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, and James Burke, producer of the PBS television series Connections and author of such books on invention as The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible and Other Journeys Through Knowledge—say cheap information technology has created the biggest revolution in creating, distributing, and comparing information since Gutenberg invented the printing press. As a result, they see the capacity for innovation moving beyond an elite, hyper-educated group and diffusing into the hands of the masses worldwide. Everyone now can get in on the act. Molella and Burke offer a fascinating list of inventions that came into wide use because of the oddball juxtaposition of notions and inventions across differing fields of inquiry—they say, for instance, that someone used an antiseptic spray as the model for the first carburetor for internal combustion engines. The two historians say this sort of cross-fertilization will now happen frequently. As a result, though it may seem hard to imagine, the frenetic pace of innovation may keep picking up speed. (Burke knows personally the power of unexpected connections. He was teaching medieval philology at the University of Bologna in Italy and moonlighting on Italian radio when a friend told him the British Broadcasting Co. (www.bbc.co.uk) was looking for an Italian-speaking director. “I said, ‘I can’t do that,’ ” Burke recalls. “He said, ‘They don’t know you can’t.’ ” So Burke gave it a shot. Later, the BBC launched a series on scientific discovery, which Burke wrote and produced.) It’s true that inventions have historically occasionally come from the proverbial garage, such as the Silicon Valley icon in which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded electronic-equipment giant Hewlett-Packard Co. (www.hp.com) in 1939. But the two first got advanced degrees from Stanford University. When Molella and Burke talk about democratizing invention, they are saying that computers will supply the expertise that used to come only from technical degrees and that everyone can be, if not an industrial hero like Hewlett or Packard, then at least the kind of researcher their company employs in its labs. “There is nothing to be but an optimist,” Burke says.
JAMES BURKE: As a historian, I think what’s different about innovation today is that we’re in the last throes of centralism. Until very recently, control over who obtained the rare bits of new technology was generally vested in the state, which made sure the military had cutting-edge capability. In the corporate world, only International Business Machines Corp. [www.ibm.com] and other giant companies could afford major innovation. The individual was out of the loop. Today the falling costs of information technology are diffusing innovative capability out to the individual. It will be very interesting to watch, as technology enfranchises more people, what they do with it. ARTHUR MOLELLA: The military will always find ways to spend money, and the emphasis on high-tech weapons breakthroughs—and staying out in front—may be greater than ever. But we are indeed witnessing almost a democratization of innovative ability these days, made possible by new technologies. That is unprecedented. Democratization is occurring in two ways: Individuals now have this ability to invent without huge amounts of funding, as you point out. In addition, innovation is being done by people who don’t necessarily have doctorates in the subject. There is just a love affair with technology in this country. Some see the software developers working in garages as the great-grandsons and -daughters of the tinkerers who brought us the auto age. That’s fascinating, because we thought the age of tinkerers was gone. Thomas Edison was a great transition figure. He was the ultimate tinkerer, but he also created the industrial research lab, which had large teams doing projects and presumably brought an end to tinkering. But look at what’s going on with the mapping of the human genome. It’s just amazing. The federal government had thousands of people working on it, and they had been at it for close to a decade. Suddenly, you have this rise, again, of individuals. Celera Genomics Group [www.celera.com], a small organization run by J. Craig Venter, challenged the government’s methodical approach with what he touted as a faster and cheaper way of deciphering the genome. Using a so-called shotgun approach and powerful computers, they speeded up the mapping of the human genome. It was presented by Venter as a case of an inventive American versus the government’s plodding effort, though the public scientists strongly rejected the characterization. BURKE: Through history until now, values, standards, and rules of behavior have been based on the idea that only a very few people were empowered to express their talents. Ninety-something percent of the population was illiterate, and remained so until about 1900. Today, though, technology presents the real possibility of some kind of sea change in education—one that would challenge the view that, to use a gross oversimplification, if you have a doctorate you’re intelligent and that if you don’t you’re stupid. MOLELLA: In other words, you’re saying we’ll have a steep decline in the role of the expert in our society? BURKE: It’s already happening. Many devices do work that would take humans hundreds of pencil-chewing years. We’re beginning to be able to do things only because we are machine-assisted, and many areas of craftsmanship or specialist knowledge are being taken over by software. MOLELLA: Some say this cyber revolution is detrimental to human learning and even human development. They postulate that, because there is a veil of software between us and reality, kids won’t develop parts of the brain that require hand manipulation and dexterity—parts critical to overall brain development. Education is undoubtedly getting dumbed down. Kids are learning a lot less precisely because they go to the Internet to write their term papers. BURKE: Again, that’s the last fling of the old centralism. When printing came in, everybody said we wouldn’t have to remember anything anymore because we had these cheap things called books. When I went to school, it had just stopped making Greek mandatory, and there was an outcry among parents. They said their children’s brains would turn to porridge. It’s true that, throughout history, every time there is a major advance in the ability to generate and disseminate information, you get a period of confusion. The new capability diffuses out through society much faster than societal institutions can train people to handle it. After Gutenberg’s printing press, grammar schools were opened to serve the needs of the new commercial world and people were hurriedly taught the necessary tools to live in the new capitalist environment. MOLELLA: I’m both fascinated and concerned by the kinds of cultural changes we can expect as vastly more powerful technologies spread around the world. BURKE: There are consequences to certain technologies spreading to areas besides Western society. If we parachute this stuff into somewhere with cultural values we don’t share—such as the Islamic world—what do they do with their inventive zeal? MOLELLA: In Iran, the government is trying to control the rise of the Internet, to screen the information its people are getting and to influence them. Clearly, though, there is something wonderfully uncontrollable and subversive about innovation. There is this herky-jerky interaction among inventors, inventions, and culture. First, there’s a push to invention that comes from the inventing community, from engineers and scientists. But then it starts to get interesting. You have this wonderful push-pull phenomenon. An invention starts working in society, and society reacts to it, creating a pull. And the push and pull aren’t always in sync. The telephone initially was expected to be kind of a broadcast instrument, at least in [Alexander Graham] Bell’s mind. It evolved in a wholly different direction, because consumers became part of the equation, and fundamentally changed interpersonal relationships. BURKE: In Budapest, they hung it on the wall and broadcast one-way through it, didn’t they? For about 10 years. MOLELLA: Right. BURKE: History is replete, also, with moments when invention happens for serendipitous reasons. In the Middle Ages, for example, people first began really trying to work out what natural phenomena are. Unconsciously, they were laying the foundation for advances that really didn’t happen because of any particular necessity. People like Al Hazen, an Arab, wondered why the sun gets bigger when it nears the horizon and really got into how the eye works. His discoveries allowed people to develop the first eyeglasses. Sometimes you also have stuff lying on the shelf, ready to be used in unexpected ways—kind of one and one making three. For instance, Wilhelm Maybach notices Joseph Lister’s antiseptic spray idea. He puts this misting device together with gasoline and comes up with a carburetor for internal combustion engines. Then somebody else notices Alessandro Volta’s electric eudiometer, devised in the 17th century to create static electricity to explode marsh gas, and it becomes the mechanism of a sparkplug. The modem was originally designed to relay data from Air Force lookout posts along the perimeter of America’s DEW [defense and early warning] line in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Look, also, at the unintended effects of oral contraceptives. MOLELLA: They were huge. The contraceptives were initially envisioned as a way to control the population bomb in developing countries. Instead, American middle-class women began using them, utterly changing family and work relations in this country. The Internet was initially a Cold War attempt to protect the nation’s computer systems in times of war. Instead, it entered the private and commercial sectors in ways that are just unbelievable. As I was thinking about this conversation ahead of time, I realized how profound today’s innovative revolution is compared with the one at the turn of the 20th century, which was considered equally transformative at that time. They had a revolution in culture at every level, including science, painting, and literature. Modernism came into being and made individuals think about things very differently. What’s different about that revolution of a century ago was that it tended to be confined to avant-gardes and elites. This one is penetrating to all kinds of levels. BURKE: I think you’re right. For the first time, everybody’s going to be able to make their ideas public. The first ever free-for-all. And we’re not socially ready for it.
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