What's Needed for Successful Innovation?

In Sunday's New York Times, Susan Cain, who is an author and essayist, published a piece entitled, "The Rise of the New Groupthink". In this very well-written essay she more or less bursts the bubble of the current trend which prioritizes group activities over solo efforts. As she writes in her opening paragraph,

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink., which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there's a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. 

I couldn't agree with her more. In my 35 years of experience working in, and directing, R&D labs, I saw numerous examples of the best ideas coming from the solitary work of individuals. Team meetings had their place but not at the creative front end. This was the territory of the individual, not the team.

In thinking about what makes successful innovation tick, I see four things that are needed for successful (in this case, commercial) innovations:

1. Very bright people who have the spark to think in new ways.
2. Freedom for those individuals to explore their ideas without close supervision.
3. Extreme persistence that provides the energy to surmount the inevitable naysayers.
4. A very smart commercialization team that knows how to get the innovation to market.

When I was running R&D labs, I saw my job as identifying those people who had the really glorious new ideas and giving them space, time, and resources to flesh out their ideas. Often, my "management" meant wandering into their labs from time to time to have them show me what they were up to. Being willing to give them the support they needed quickly opened the door to their enthusiastically showing me their early ideas. The worst thing I could do would be to assign a team to them too early before the creative work was well along.

Our labs would often have fifty to a hundred technical people in them but not everyone had the creative spark. Many were more comfortable shepherding the creative ideas of others along the path to commercialization. It was never easy to pick out the really creative people during the hiring process.  Sometimes, those who seemed creative were just blowing smoke.  It often turned out that the quiet people were the really creative individuals. They were comfortable in the world of ideas more than they were in interacting with people.

Even so, getting a new innovation underway often took the combined efforts of both the innovator and supportive management. There was always a reason that the really creative ideas were deemed by upper management to be impractical or unattractive from a marketing perspective.  The innovator was often the best person to explain the technical nuances of his or her idea. My role in management was to wrap the idea in the acceptable attire of our business so that it wasn't seen as too outside the box to be acceptable. Often, ideas would percolate for years before suddenly becoming "obvious" to everyone that they should be commercialized.

At that point, getting a really good team of people together to go through the paces of manufacturing, marketing, perhaps regulatory approvals, and sales became the priority. Great teams could do wonders to get the idea out the door. But not all teams were great and many good ideas would languish for want of a strong commercialization team.

The inventors and innovators were often gratified to see their ideas go all the way through commercialization but that wasn't what motivated them. Their motivation came from the freedom to do it again -- to come up with another new idea.  They basked in the knowledge that they were appreciated for what they could create.  We all crave the approval of our peers. For them it came not through promotion to becoming a team leader but through the ability to have the space to explore their ideas.

In Ms. Cain's Times' essay, she quotes Steve Wozniak, the engineer who designed the Apple II computer:

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me... they live in their heads. They're almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone... I'm going to give you some advice that may be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team. 

I couldn't agree more.

Outside the Box

Ships have been with us for a long time. We all know what they look like - a long rectangular box with a pointed bow and rounded stern. A few structures somewhere on the top of the long box to provide a place for the crew to live and to operate the ship.  A smokestack sticks up somewhere - usually towards the rear of the ship.  What could be more ordinary?  But why does it have to be that way? Why not think, if you allow me the little pun, outside the box?

Take a look at the ship in the picture below.  Something just looks... well... different about this ship, doesn't it?  Whose slightly delirious dream was this?

Steamer A.D. Thompson
Library of Congress Collections

The ship in the picture is the A.D. Thompson and it is a class of ship known affectionately to those who sailed them as a whaleback.  Whalebacks were never used for whaling.  Most of them (but not all) sailed on the Great Lakes.  The name (nickname, really) came from the shape of the hull which looked like a whale's back sitting low in the water when the ship was fully loaded.  The name was intended to be descriptive, even complimentary.  If you look at the way the bow comes to a little flat point, you can immediately understand the origin of the other, more derogatory nickname - the pigboat.

The whaleback design was the brainchild of ship's master, serial-entrepreneur, and inventor, Alexander McDougall. McDougall was born in Scotland in 1845.  His parents emigrated to the Lake Huron region of Ontario when he was a young boy.  His father died when McDougall was only ten and he took up a variety of odd jobs to help feed his family. By his late teen years, he had signed on as a deckhand on a Great Lakes freighter.  Being talented and hardworking, he rose rapidly and got his ship master's license when he was just 25, one of the youngest captains on the Great Lakes.

In the latter decades of the 19th century, the Great Lakes were the Northern highway for bulk freight traffic as lumber, iron ore, and grain were shipped from the western regions to the population centers in the East. The Great Lakes were home to hundreds of ships.  At first, these were schooners and other forms of sailing ships, but steam engines rapidly took over as the means to power these ships.  The size of the ships wasn't initially limited by the steam engines, it was limited by the small canals, channels, and locks that the ships had to navigate.  To increase the amount of tonnage that could be hauled on each trip, smaller ships began towing small barges (sometimes called consorts). McDougall was an experienced captain and he knew the difficulties of pulling these unpowered hulls, often through large waves and high winds.  Towing a barge could be a decidedly tricky task, more-so as the weather got bad.

McDougall began thinking about how to design a better barge. He wanted the most volume for the least perimeter, the least resistance to winds and waves, and a shallow-draft design that could be moored at docks with only a limited depth of water.  His innovation was his patented hull design, later dubbed the whaleback.  McDougall built his first consort, named simply Hull No. 101, over the winter of 1887-1888.  It was a technical success. But when McDougall tried to raise capital to build more consorts using his novel design, he was met with derision by the experienced businessmen around the Great Lakes.  Undaunted, he headed to New York where he enlisted the financial backing of several Eastern capitalists including John D. Rockefeller.

Two whaleback consorts in tow out of Poe Lock
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan
Library of Congress Collections

McDougall founded the American Steel Barge Company in 1889 and began building his cheap, efficient barges in Duluth, Minnesota. After he had built five whaleback consort vessels, McDougall moved his entire shipbuilding operation next door to Superior, Wisconsin.  In 1890, McDougall built his first self-powered whaleback steamer, the Colgate Hoyt (named for one of his first financial backers).  This ship cost just a little more than twice the cost of one of his unpowered barges and could steam at 16 knots - very respectable for its day.

In 1893, McDougall built his only whaleback passenger ship, the Christopher Columbus.  The ship was used to ferry passengers from downtown Chicago, six miles south to the World's Columbian Exposition.  Following the Exposition, the passenger ship was placed in regular service between Cleveland and Chicago.

S.S. Christopher Columbus
Only Whaleback Passenger Ship Ever Built

While McDougall's innovative vessels proved themselves to be workable, the design never caught on.  Whalebacks suffered from a few practical limitations: the curve of the hull made the hatch openings smaller than on conventional ships and barges. This also made the hatches more prone to being bent in the loading and unloading process.  The hatches were expensive to repair. The design also lacked a protected passageway below decks from the front to the back of the ship making it difficult for the crew to communicate in rough weather (remember that this was before radio was invented).  Mostly though, the design just didn't look good to the more established shipping company owners.  The American Steel Barge Company was eventually absorbed into the American Ship Building Company in the late 1890s.

McDougall, ever the entrepreneur, didn't limit himself to ship design.  He operated a company that managed over a thousand stevedores on various Great Lakes docks. He owned an insurance company that wrote policies on Great Lakes shipping. He sat on the board of directors of several electric companies. And in 1899, after selling the whaleback company, he bought the Collingwood (Ontario) Shipbuilding Company, reorganized it, and ran it successfully for many more years building conventional ships.

McDougall died in 1924.  While his vision of a new type of hull did not have the impact that he had hoped for, he was able to demonstrate that his technical ideas were highly workable.  The whaleback ships were gradually scrapped out over the years.  One, the Thomas Wilson, lies at the bottom of Lake Michigan just outside the Milwaukee harbor entrance and is a popular diving destination.

Now, only one whaleback remains in existence.  The S.S. Meteor has been slowly rusting away as a museum ship in Superior, Wisconsin, where it was built in 1896.  When she's gone, none of these daring and innovative ships will remain.  But the old photos still tell the tale of the days when the whalebacks were the talk of the Lakes.

S.S. Meteor
Superior, Wisconsin

Fail Early, Fail Often? Not.

Business is full of pithy aphorisms.  One that you hear frequently is meant to be a mantra for innovation: Fail early, fail often.  The idea behind this little nugget is to experiment with many variations on an idea without investing much in any of them.  Get out there and get market feedback as quickly and as cheaply as you can.  Sounds like good advice, doesn't it?

I spent my career working with inventors and not many of them attempted to fail -- early or otherwise.  And they certainly didn't want to fail often.  That was a one-way ticket to unemployment or at least being moved into a position where they couldn't spend the company's money quite so easily.  Inventors work more from the old saw: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  The first time out, their invention is a flop.  The second time it might be an even bigger fiasco.  But the dedicated inventor "knows" that their idea is just what is needed to make the world a better place (and make them a boatload of money).  They might finally even get an idea out that does the technical job but the money is another story.

The histories of technology and innovation are filled with stories of inventors who pioneered a new area only to go bankrupt.  Often, a savvy business person was watching in the wings waiting for market conditions to improve or shift.  Then with the biggest risks of invention out of the way, they would turn it into a money-making venture by better marketing or more efficient manufacturing.  And what of the inventor?  Often, these intrepid souls would be on to their next great idea.

Are inventors naive?  Are they over-confident about their ideas or abilities?  Why do they continue in the face of such daunting odds?  It seems to me that inventors have two drives: to shepherd their wonderful idea into the world and to get rich doing it.  At their core, they are made up of creativity and optimism.  They have a great inner eye that lets them see a new and untested idea before others can see it.  Their energy comes from their need to create.  They are more akin to artists than engineers.

But the same characteristics that makes a great inventor makes for a really lousy business person.  The business mind is focused on efficiency, scale, and profit.  Business has its own form of creativity but it shares little with that of the inventor.  Once an invention has proven itself, the business person wants nothing to do with further change.  Change is wasteful.  Change is inefficient. Now the drive is to get it out at the lowest possible cost.

It more often happens that an inventor thinks that he or she can also be a great business person than vice versa.  Business can't be that hard, can it?  The invention is the hard part, right? Most business people that I know don't often mistake themselves to be inventors.  The clear, cold thinking that makes them good at business puts a quick stop to any naive beliefs that they can also excel as inventors.

Inventors need business people to commercialize their ideas.  But without inventors the New New would never happen.  It is a symbiotic relationship.  The business people get most of the money, of course.  But the inventors get something equally valuable to them - the freedom to continue to invent.  And the cycle continues.

Of Stereroscopic Vintage Photos and Rock Bands

Image via Wikipedia

I am too old to have paid much attention to Rock-and-Roll music beyond the mid-70's.  All the good stuff happened before then anyway.  But I was interested to read an article in the Arts Section of the New York Times about Brian May (the link is at the bottom of this post).  I could never have told you this, but Brian May was the lead guitarist in the mega-Rock-and-Roll band, Queen.  I also could never have told you that he is one of the premier collectors of vintage stereoscopic viewing cards.

You've seen these old cards: two dusty images that look identical, printed on cardboard.  They were the earliest version of the Viewmaster or now, 3D movies and television.  These cards were immensely popular with the middle-class both in America and in Europe during the latter half of the 19th Century.  For the first time, people got a sense of the reality of the photograph. Oliver Wendell Holmes was quoted as saying:

The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced.  The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture.  The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out as if they would scratch our eyes out.  The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable.  Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us.  A painter shows us masses; the stereoscopic figure spares us nothing...

Brian May has written the first of three planned books on one of the photographic subjects that he collects.  The book is entitled, "A Village Lost and Found".  The village referred to is Hinton Waldrist, in Oxfordshire, west of London.  The village was photographed stereoscopically over the years by an early practioner of the art, T.R. Williams.  Nobody could identify the place in these old photos until May posted one online.  Within 36 hours, someone identified the location for him.  He has visited it many times since then, comparing current views to the originals in the old images.

The Library of Congress has a collection of over 52,000 stereographic images on a wide range of subjects. Maybe ten percent of these are online. 

But there was yet more to impress with regards to Mr. May.  After the band broke up, Mr. May eventually returned to the university to complete his studies.  He got his Ph.D. in astrophysics in 2008.  His thesis was entitled, "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud".  So now, it is Doctor May, Rock Star, to you...

Related articles by Zemanta

• Village Green, Preserved: Brian May's Photo Recovery (nytimes.com)
• Queen's Brian May Discusses Vintage 3-D Photography in New York (spinner.com)

Why Technology Changes

I have been reading a book entitled, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium, by Robert Friedel (MIT Press, 2007).  Friedel's book is a high-level overview of a thousand years of Western technology.  But his book is not simply intended to give yet another review of everything from water-wheels to steam engines.  Friedel asks the question, "Why did the West [meaning Europe and America] continue on an upward technology trajectory for the past thousand years?"  He postulates two basic reasons: a culture of improvement, and ever better means of capturing new ideas.

I don't intend to write a review of Friedel's book here.  I haven't read enough of it yet.  From what I have read, however, I am not finding that Friedel provides many explicit examples to support his thesis.  He covers a lot of technology areas but he doesn't get at the motivational aspects as well as I had hoped. This left me wondering, "Why do things change?" Certainly, there are lots and lots of examples of rigidity to change.  We can all recall expressions like, "Because we've always done it this way."

From my point of view, I see technology change as being motivated by three different causes.  The first (and simplest) reason is because it makes our lives easier.  Why carry the bundle of wood if I can do the same job by putting it on a wheeled cart?  Why carry water from the well if I can lay some pipes into the house?  Basically, changes that come about from a desire to make things easier saves us sweat, time, money, or scarce resources.  While I mentioned money, the motivation is not making money but saving money.

The second basic motivation for technology change is making money - the more, the better.  By inventing an electric lightbulb that replaced gas lighting, Edison made a fortune.  And to be clear, his motivation was indeed to make a fortune. If I had invented the cellphone to replace the land-line telephone, I would be living like a king.  The motivation is wealth and the vehicle is a business, selling something new, better, or different.  A business person is less motivated directly by a change per se than how much he or she can make by selling the new product or service.

The third basic motivation (and probably the least common in everyday life) is the pure psychic juice that an inventor gets out of creating, much like the artist derives satisfaction from creating.  There might be a secondary motivation of labor-savings or making money but the prime mover is creative joy.  It seems to me that true inventors, more often than not, invent more than one thing.  Many are serial inventors who just keep moving from one invention to the next for the creative "high" it gives them. This is not to say that any of their inventions have to be successful selling in the marketplace.  The inventor has to invent just like the painter has to paint.

The other point I would add about the second motivation of making money that differentiates it from the other two is that competition is a positive spur to innovation.  The inventor is not so much driven by competition as creativity.  The desire to make your own life easier doesn't require a competitor.

To summarize, my three candidates for why technology changes are 1) to make life easier, 2) to make money, and 3) as an act of creation.   There is no rocket science here, but I think the motivations are so fundamental to most people that it is hard to see how technology could not change.  We have all experienced each of these motivations, even if we didn't always follow through on them.

All of the motivations I have outlined are at the level of the individual. I think the answer to Friedel's question of why the West has advanced might lie in things beyond individual motivation.  To give just a couple of  examples, Europe has always been made up of numerous countries under differing governments, competing with each other for power, wealth, and territory.  As time progressed, power and wealth were decided as much in the marketplace as they were on the battlefield.  Competition between countries fosters innovation as surely as it does between competing companies.  

Another reason that Europe accelerated so dramatically was also tied to the fact that there were numerous countries - countries who traded with each other.  Trade is cooperative and, unlike competition, fostered the transfer of technology between seller and buyer.  If Europe had been homogeneous (more like China in that era), perhaps there would have been less trade or rivalry and hence less rapid technological advancement.

So what?  The reason to think about these things is so that people can contribute as best they can to improving our situation.  We need inventors.  We need innovators.  We need improvers.  Our standard of living is embedded in technology change.  I like the life we enjoy in the United States.  We ignore innovation at our own risk.

Invention and Technology

One of the magazines that has been publishing well-researched articles on the history of technology is American Heritage magazine's, Invention and Technology.  American Heritage has gone through some rocky times but it is back in print again.  Invention and Technology has also suffered in recent years as its sole advertiser, General Motors, pulled out because of its own financial problems.   But Invention and Technology is back and the magazine still provides excellent articles on the history of technology.

American Heritage has made all of the past articles from Invention and Technology available free to the public on their website.  You can find them here.  It is well worth your time to browse some of these stories.  Better yet, buy their magazine on the newsstand.  You won't be disappointed.

[Disclaimer: I have no stake, financial or otherwise in American Heritage or Invention and Technology.]

Rebuilding the Past (Yet Again)

I came across a little tidbit in a book I am reading that sent me off, once again, in search of another lost technology story.  The book, The Company, A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, was written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge of The Economist magazine.  I was re-reading the book because of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate contributions to political campaigns under the argument that corporations are people and campaign money is the same as free speech.  Anyway...the authors were talking about how early companies protected their competitive space either through government charters or patents.  The example the authors used was the English steam engine firm of Boulton and Watt which bullied Parliament into granting them a broad patent on James Watt's steam engine.

A brilliant young Scottish engineer, William Murdoch (image at right), worked for Boulton and Watt and invented the first steam-powered "road locomotive" in 1784 (drawing at top of page).  He even built working models of his invention and showed them to a number of people in his Cornwall community.  This was 45 years before the first successful railroad was operational in England.  Murdoch was way ahead of his time.  To protect his idea, Murdoch decided to go to London to obtain a patent.  On the road there, who should he meet but his boss, Matthew Boulton, returning from a trip to London.  Boulton talked Murdoch out of the idea of patenting his road locomotive.  As reported in Wikipedia, Boulton later wrote to a friend about the encounter with Murdoch:

He said He was going to London to get Men but I soon found he was going there with his Steam Carg to shew it & to take out a patent. He having been told by Mr W. Wilkn what Sadler had said & he had likewise read in the news paper Simmingtons puff which had rekindled all Wms fire & impations to make Steam Carriages. However, I prevailed upon him readily to return to Cornwall by the next days diligence & he accordingly arivd here this day at noon, since which he hath unpacked his Carg & made Travil a Mile or two in Rivers's great room in a Circle making it carry the fire Shovel, poker & tongs.

Murdoch returned home to Cornwall and put away his ideas for the steam carriage.  But Murdoch was a born inventor and went on to dream up many other useful inventions including gas lighting from coal gasification. (No patent here, either.)

So that's the backstory.  Now for what really caught my attention.  People (make that mostly men) seem to have a deep desire to show that old inventions really could have worked.  People like to rebuild old cars, old locomotives, old clocks, old (your entry here) to bring them back to life.  Well,  you guessed it, so did a group of men with Murdoch's steam carriage.  They first built a non-operational, full-sized model...and then they got carried away.  They built small steam-powered models and then decided in 2002 to take on building a full-scale, working road locomotive.  Four years later, they had completed the task.  You can see a video of their road locomotive chuffing around a parking lot here.  William Murdoch would have been proud.

Some people seem to remain much more linked to past technology than the rest of us.  They can't seem to resist the pull of finding out if something that has vanished years or centuries ago can be made to work once again.  The same curiosity that motivated Murdoch's admirers resulted in the modern reconstruction of the two-millenia old Antikythera Mechanism (see my posts here and here).  Much the same process motivates a lot of archaeology.  Deep down, we want these old machines and devices to work.  We want to be pleased and surprised like young children who crank the Jack-in-the-Box over and over again.  The child knows the puppet will pop out but there is always a joy in the moment of surprise when it happens.  So often, we come to take our current technology for granted or we complain loudly when it doesn't work.  But the old machines are our adult Jack-in-the-Boxes.   We love the surprise when they work once again.

Miller and Whitney: Early Innovation

"An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor."

- Eli Whitney

Every child knows (or maybe every kid used to know) that Eli Whitney (1765 - 1825) invented the cotton gin.  Like most stories of the Hero Inventor, this one is a much-distilled and over-simplified version of the truth.  Cotton gins had been around for a long time before Eli Whitney came along. These earlier gins squeezed cotton between rollers and the friction pulled the seed from the cotton fibers.  The roller gins did a good job on long-staple cotton but there were a couple of limitations.  First, long-staple cotton only grew in the rich soil found near the coast, and secondly, while the roller gins worked, they were slow and favored good fiber over production output.

Eli Whitney was a Yale-educated son of a Connecticut farmer.  He seems to have been quite mechanically inclined from a young age.  After Whitney graduated from Yale, the president of the college, Ezra Stiles, arranged for Whitney to take up a tutoring position in the South.  Stiles put him in touch with another young Yale man, Phineas Miller, who had graduated a few years earlier.  Stiles had previously arranged for Miller to be a tutor in the South at the plantation of the Revolutionary War General, Nathaniel Green.  The general had died around this same time and Miller became not only the tutor to Green's five children but also the plantation manager for Green's widow, Catherine Green.

Whitney traveled with Miller and Mrs. Green from New York City to Savannah and stayed with them for several months.  The story goes that once there, Whitney turned down the tutoring job because of a dispute over the pay and stayed on at the plantation to invent his cotton gin. The exact order of events was deliberately obscured by Whitney and his new business parter, Phineas Miller, in order to facilitate getting a patent and to get a head start on manufacturing machines.  The partnership that was formed was always known as Miller and Whitney (not the other way around).  Once again, we see the indispensable role of the entrepreneur (Miller in this case) in moving an invention towards the market.  Miller not only had more business savvy, he had the deep pockets of Catherine Green's money.  Miller had married her at about this same time.

Miller conceived of a business plan in which their company would manufacture the gins in Connecticut and build service locations throughout the South where farmers would bring raw cotton for ginning.  The ginning mills would also have cotton seed presses to capture this source of revenue as well.  The company would be paid for their services, not in cash (which was very scarce), but by keeping one third of the ginned cotton output.  It seemed like such a great idea but like most great ideas, there were problems.

First, while Whitney's cotton gin did a good job of stripping out the seeds, it left the cotton fibers entangled in little knots called neps which created problems for the subsequent spinning operations to make cotton thread.  Spinning companies in England complained bitterly about the poor quality of the fiber from Whitney's gins.  The second problem was that Whitney's gin was elegantly simple and hence easy to pirate and there was a strong incentive to do so because of the high output of the gin. Many Southerners made copies or improved on Whitney's gin, ignoring Whitney's patent of 1793.  Miller and Whitney fought back in over 60 lawsuits but the number of infringers and the bias of the Southern courts towards helping local plantation owners proved to be too costly to continue.  While they lost most of the cases, Miller and Whitney were eventually awarded some compensation by the legislatures of the states of North and South Carolina (Georgia never did recognize their claims).

Whitney's gin galvanized local mechanics to come up with their own ideas on how to improve his design.  In this way, it was a tremendous spur to Southern innovation. The most common approach was what was called the saw gin in which the individual wire teeth of Whitney's gin were replaced by teeth mounted on a circular saw blade.  Eventually, the designs were improved to the point where the problems with fiber neps were reduced to an acceptable level.  Cotton production exploded because the short staple, green-seed cotton could be grown in much poorer soil conditions in the upland South. With the expansion in cotton production came a massive increase in the number of slaves to work the land.

What became of Miller and Whitney?  Miller died in 1803 having poured most of his money (or rather Catherine Green's money) into the venture. He never recovered his investment.  Whitney, penniless from his cotton gin venture, turned his back on the South and in 1798 went into the business of manufacturing firearms for the U.S. government at a factory in New Haven, Connecticut.  He didn't do as well financially as he had hoped with his new business but he did cement a name for himself as having had a crucial role in the development of manufacturing using interchangeable parts.

Whitney would never have been remembered for the cotton gin had it not been for the motivation and resources of Phineas Miller.  I find this interesting because in most cases in our culture it is the entrepreneur who gets the credit for an inventor's ideas.  Perhaps Miller would have been the one remembered had the company of Miller and Whitney been financially successful.  When it failed and Miller died, Whitney lived on until 1825 to continue to remind people of his patent and his inventions.  Miller was to become only a minor footnote in Whitney's later retelling of the story.

It helps to be the one to write the history of a venture.  You can give yourself all the credit you think you deserve. But I, for one, think that Phineas Miller ought to be up there as the Hero Entrepreneur as much as Eli Whitney was the Hero Inventor.  Invention is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for innovation.  That takes money, business savvy, and often more than a little good fortune.

Happy New Year: 1960

The New Year is usually the time to look forward, make those resolutions, vow to do better.  I thought I would take a look back in time fifty years, to 1960, and see what has changed.  Of course, the answer is "a lot", but I have forgotten just how pervasive the changes have been. Here are some things that come my mind.  If you have others to add, drop me a comment.

In 1960....

- Television was analog, black-and-white, and came in through your antenna.
- Telephones were owned by AT&T, were mostly black, and still had rotary dials.
- Cars had no seat belts, shoulder harnesses, air bags, or other collision safety features.
- Tires were bias-belted, not radial, and lasted about a third as long.
- Airliners were almost all propeller-driven.
- We still had not put a person in space, let alone on the moon.
- The only computers that existed filled large rooms and were tended by special gurus.
- Cameras still used film which was predominantly black-and-white.
- Home record players and televisions were built with vacuum tubes.
- 45 RPM records were the rage for hit rock-and-roll songs.
- 33 PM Long-playing records were just coming on the scene.
- Automobiles had carburetors, mechanical ignitions, and needed frequent tune-ups.
- Long distance phone calls were an infrequent event and reserved for special events.
- Phoning someone when away from home required a pay phone, found in a phone booth.
- Gasoline cost about 35 cents a gallon.
- Plastic was just coming into its own as a material for consumer products.
- Flying from New York to Paris on a 707 required a fuel stop in Gander, Newfoundland.
- The Interstate Highway system had only been underway for a little over five years.
- Engineers did complex calculations with slide rules and mechanical calculators.
- Shoe store fluoroscopes that allowed you to see how shoes fit had just been banned.
- Doctors were routinely shown smoking in cigarette commercials.
- Just about everything that was in a bottle came in one made of glass.
- Dishwashers in the home were still very uncommon.
- Many women sewed a portion of their families' clothing on a home sewing machine.
- Milk was still delivered to the home by milkmen.
- The U.S. launched its first weather satellite in 1960.

You get the idea.  Of course, the equally interesting list is what wasn't around.  There were no:

- cellphones
- mp3 players
- video cameras
- home vcr or dvd players
- microwave ovens
- personal computers
- internet or worldwide web
- e-mail
- stereophonic music systems
- lasers
- LED or LCD anything
- high speed (bullet) trains
- catalytic converters for cars
- anti-lock brakes
- intermittent windshield wipers
- video games
- car navigation systems

The theme that runs through most of these items is the importance of solid-state electronics. Our world has been fundamentally remade on silicon.  While not a new observation, it does show how pervasive and powerful one technology concept, the microchip, can be.  I wouldn't be writing this on my laptop and posting it on my blog without it.

But the electronics revolution is only one part of a larger theme:  a materials revolution.  Not only did the last fifty years bring silicon and all its derivatives, but t also brought polymers and plastics which have had an almost equally large impact.  It brought fiber optic filaments which allowed the world to be wired with high-speed networks based on laser pulses (also a silicon technology).

Materials technology is down there at the ground level of invention and innovation.  That is why there is so much hype about nanomaterials.  These promise to unleash another wave of innovation.  Whether they do so remains to be seen.  Maybe the collateral risks to our health and environment will knock them out in their infancy.  Further out is the promise of materials engineering through biotechnology.

It is fun to think for a minute about what the lists for 2060 will be.  It seems quite certain that someone looking back to today will think of us as hopelessly antiquated.  Kids will wonder how anyone could have even survived in those backward days.  Happy New Year from the Good Old Days of 2010.

Inventor or Innovator?

Was Thomas Edison an inventor or innovator?  How about Henry Ford?  The Wright Brothers? Robert Fulton? Fred Smith (FedEx)?  Steve Jobs?

Our language leaves lots of room for ambiguity on the meaning of some words, especially words that have fuzzy boundaries.  When does something stop being an invention and start to be an innovation?  Are these two concepts simply degrees on the same scale?  Why care at all?  I think the reason to think about it is that we are inundated with news stories, blogs, and websites on the need for innovation to jump-start the economy. If only we were more innovative in this county (the stories go), unemployment would plummet, business would prosper, and we would be back on the road to prosperity.  Of course, there are many reasons why this isn't so simple but I want to propose that part of the reason is that we are not clear about what differentiates innovation from invention.  Moreover, we are not clear about the differences between innovators and inventors.  If you were forced to describe yourself as one or the other, which would you be?

Let's start with invention.  The Patent Office defines an invention as something that is useful, new, and non-obvious to someone skilled in the art.  That is a pretty broad definition of what constitutes an invention, hence the protracted arguments between would-be inventors and the Patent Office.  This definition sweeps in everything from the slightly modified laundry detergent to fundamentally new technology.  I tend to think of true invention as being on the latter end of the scale.  New means new, as in a significant capability that has not existed in the past.  Small product improvements don't count as a true invention in my book.  I agree with the non-obvious provision.  If it were obvious, it would have qualities that were so apparent it would not constitute an invention.  The usefulness requirement is where things get sticky.  Many really fundamental inventions may not be useful at all in the sense of being a product (even though they might be patentable).  Think of Wright Brothers first airplane.  No one was standing in line to buy one.  The Wrights had to do a lot of promotion to the military of a number of governments to get them to see that airplanes might be useful mobile observation platforms.  Usefulness is in the eye of the potential customer.  The more radical the invention, the less current customers will find it of interest.  Real invention is almost by definition outside of the norms of current products.  And the corollary is equally true: real inventions work, but sometimes only marginally and only with a limited set of capabilities.  The first powered airplane flew only a few hundred feet.  It was a true heavier-than-air flying machine but not very useful (yet). Inventions are more than improvements.  They offer fundamental new capabilities that haven't existed before.  Most people would use words like prototype to describe the first embodiments of new inventions.  They have a long way to go before they are new products.

Why were they created, or put another way, what motivates inventors?  Often it is not due to obvious market needs.  No one knew (including the Wright Brothers) where the airplane was going.  No one could foresee any day soon when airplanes would transport large numbers of people or be the lethal military weapons.  The Wright Brothers invented the airplane to prove that a heavier-than-air machine could fly.  Period.  Inventors are motivated by the challenge of creating some capability that has never existed before.  The very act of creation is one of the rewards that drives them to invent.  Of course, recognition, fame, being the first to accomplish something, also plays a part.  So does money, but to a surprisingly small degree.  Generally, inventors don't need any customers or existing markets to motivate them.  Inventors are internally motivated. They share much with artists who feel a compelling need to create.

Innovations have a completely different origin.  They are driven by perceived needs in the marketplace.  The needs may be stated directly by potential customers or they may be unspoken but believed to be real by the innovator.  Innovations can be incremental improvements in a product or a process but that does not make them either trivial or easy.  Real innovation can be very difficult and expensive to implement.  Think of what Fred Smith had to put in place to build FedEx:  airplanes, warehouses, trucks, and information systems all needed to be there before the system would work.  The innovation was to see a way to create an effective system and build it.  Fred Smith didn't invent anything but he surely innovated.

Unlike inventors, innovators are people of and for the market.  They think about customer needs.  They also think about the customers' ability to spend money.  Innovators are motivated by building systems, by doing things in a better way, and by making money -- lots of money.  Innovators are externally motivated.  Robert Fulton wasn't the first to operate a commercial steamboat in the United States but he was the first to build a steamboat that filled a large unmet need to move passengers and freight on the Hudson River.  He was unapologetically in it for the money and the glory.  Steve Jobs also fits the definition of an innovator.  His early partner, Steve Wozniak, was the inventor in the duo.  Jobs is a genius at identifying and fulfilling unmet customers' needs.  He uses largely existing technology to meet those needs.

Thomas Edison was a much better inventor than he was an innovator.  He created new-to-the-world machines and devices but he wasn't very good at seeing how to use them.  He thought the phonograph would be the answer to office stenography, not the birth of a music industry.  His lighting system was built for DC power which was unscalable to meet wide-spread customer needs.  Henry Ford was also an innovator.  He did not build the first gasoline-powered automobile.  He didn't even invent the moving assembly line.  That idea was borrowed from the Chicago meat packing plants and their disassembly lines.  Ford saw the unmet customer need for an inexpensive automobile and did everything in his power to give it them.  He focused relentlessly on that single idea, even to the point of painting all of his cars black to reduce costs and hence price.

To summarize, invention is not innovation.  Inventors are more like artists motivated by the creative act.  Innovators are more like farmers growing new crops.  Because our society tends to give credit to the person who successfully commercializes an idea, we tend to remember the names of innovators more than we do inventors.  Often, inventions have a very long incubation period of trials and failures before they have enough capability to be commercialized. By that time, the inventor(s) have been displaced by innovators who have a much better commercial sense. Innovators tend to change the world using incremental technology.  Inventors create new technologies.  Both are important.  While the news media focuses on innovation, maybe it would be worthwhile to also give some virtual ink to the need to foster invention.   Innovators can change the rules of the game.  Inventors play a new game altogether.

What Hath God Wrought, the Book

I just finished reading Daniel Walker Howe's recent history of Antebellum America that goes by the title of today's blog.  The book won a Pulitzer Prize in history and it is a mighty read indeed...all 850 pages of it.  But the book, despite its length, was a great read; more a story than a dull historical tract.  Howe makes the premise that two technology revolutions were fundamental to the changes in the United States during the time period he covered: 1812 to 1848.

The first revolution was in transportation.   America moved from the slow plodding of foot and horse travel to the swiftness of canals, steamboats, and railroads.  This tied the ever-expanding geography of the country together.  The plunging cost of shipping (whether raw materials, agricultural products, or finished goods) made a business-driven society possible.

The second revolution was in communications, more specifically the telegraph.  For the first time in history, communications over long distances became instantaneous.  While we often feel like we are living through the biggest communication revolution that has ever happened, I think it takes second place to the telegraph.  Our expectations have always been for instantaneous communications.  But when the telegraph was invented, people had no prior experience to prepare them for such an amazing technology.

The U.S. Government, which initially was reticent to fund the telegraph, finally put up seed money to build the first demonstration line.  On May 24, 1844 Samuel Morse (pictured at right), in the offices of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. typed the message, "What hath God wrought", to his colleague in Baltimore who echoed it back to him within a minute.  Observers understood immediately the significance of the invention.  The message, by the way, was chosen from a biblical text (Numbers 23:23) and was selected by Nancy Goodrich Ellsworth, who suggested it to her daughter Annie. Morse was in love with Annie and was hence disposed to listen to her suggestion.  (Nancy Ellsworth's husband was Henry Levitt Ellsworth, head of the patent office and a friend of Morse.)

The telegraph was used immediately by business  for stock and commodity prices, the news establishment (it led to the Associated Press being formed in May, 1846), governments, and finally private citizens.  Markets in cities like Chicago and New York could start to transact business on a near real-time basis.  The railroads soon picked up on the technology to schedule the smooth flow of trains.

But I digress.  The point is not to focus on the telegraph but rather on Howe's book and its central hypothesis that technology shapes history.  Howe didn't say this but I might wonder if these two technology revolutions accelerated the gap between the mercantile North and the plantation and slave-owning South, making the Civil War all the more likely.  Technology can have far-reaching effects, often created by the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Today, the Web is creating similar far-reaching changes and we cannot foresee what the unintended consequences may yet be.  It would be interesting to get a peek at the history books that will be written in another hundred years to see what comes of it all...or, maybe not.

Antikythera Mechanism Update

About 18 months ago, I wrote a blog entry describing when I first learned about the Antikythera Mechanism, a two thousand year old astronomical computer. You can read the original post here but the short version is that this device was discovered in an ancient shipwreck site more than a hundred years ago. People have always been fascinated by the complex gearing of this long-lost antiquity. Research has now shown that it is a very sophisticated and complex small scale planetarium able to predict the motion of the sun, moon, the five known planets, the eclipses of the sun and moon, and even the dates of the Olympic games.

For the past several years, a new research team has been using some of the most recent lab analytical tools to examine the mechanism (which is in Athens). Both digital computed tomography and surface reflectance measurements have allowed previously unknown details of the device to be seen for the first time.

There is a very interesting post about the mechanism at the Network World website. The news brief also connects you to a YouTube video showing a modern reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism based on the latest research findings. It is truly a mind-boggling accomplishment for the mechanical technology of any age but most especially dating from an age when such technology was completely unheard of and thought not to exist.

Much of the new research has been published in Nature which has produced a very nice Flash video describing the new results on the mechanism.

It is indeed humbling. I highly recommend checking it out.

The Origin of the Computer: Counting Noses

I was interested to learn that it was the U.S. Census that provided the compelling need for the development of the calculating machine, the predecessor of the computer. Herman Hollerith was a young engineer who went to work for the U.S. Census Bureau in 1880. He witnessed firsthand the long and tedious hand tabulation methods used on the 1880 Census data. It took the Census Bureau eight years to finish the tabulations! Hollerith saw the need but nothing came of it immediately.

Hollerith left the Census Bureau for a teaching position at MIT in 1882. He began looking at ways to encode information in punch marks on a continuous paper tape. The needle penetrating through the holes would complete an electric circuit and trigger an electric counter. But the paper tape had too many problems to be practical. On a train ride, Hollerith observed the conductor punching his train ticket. As Harold Ellis relates in They Made America:

The train ticket that Hollerith handed the conductor was also a form of identity card, called a punch photograph, which matched the presenter of the ticket with the purchaser. "The conductor punched out a description of the individual as 'light hair, dark eyes, large nose, etc.' said Hollerith, who then commented on his adaptation of this system to the census: "So you see, I only made a punch photograph of each person."

On January 8, 1889, he was issued U.S. Patent 395,782 , claim 2 of which reads:

The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.

Hollerith's invention intrigued the Census Bureau but it did not take it by storm. The Bureau arranged a trial between three competing systems on a limited set of data. Hollerith's machine trounced the other two contenders. The Census Bureau ordered multiple machines, machines that Hollerith had no factory to produce. He contracted his electric tabulators to Western Electric and his punch card machines to Pratt and Whitney. Where it had taken eight years to complete the 1880 Census, it took only one year to complete the tabulations for 1890, even though the population had grown by twenty-five percent.

You might have thought people would have been thrilled. Hollerith's tabulations showed that the United States in 1890 had 62,622,250 people. Some people felt that the numbers were much too low to represent the grand growth they saw everywhere around them. The New York Herald even ran a headline stating:

SLIPSHOD WORK HAS SPOILED THE CENSUS
MISMANAGEMENT THE RULE
Speed Everything, Accuracy Nothing!

Hollerith's calculations stood the test and the he was vindicated. Hollerith's invention found immediate acclaim and for the next 15 years it was used to tabulate census data not only in the U.S. but also in many other countries. But success was not to last. Hollerith charged exorbitant fees to census bureaus to lease his machines. The U.S. Census Bureau balked after the 1900 Census and invented a machine of their own. The competition soon surpassed his devices and his company languished.

In 1912, Hollerith sold the company to the Computer Tabulating Recording Company. This company was created from a variety of lackluster companies in the general field. It continued to languish until Thomas Watson, Sr. took over as the head of sales and marketing. Hollerith was still chief design consultant for the company, but he hated Watson. They hardly ever spoke. Hollerith finally left the company entirely in 1921. The company was renamed the International Business Machine Company (IBM) and the rest, as they say, is history.

Quote for the Day

Here is a short passage from the biography, Edison, by Matthew Josephson which speaks to the relationship between the inventor and the business person:

To make an invention, even to possess the talent to do this, was, however, not enough. Capital and plant and the commercial ability to win acceptance for one’s product from the public were needed. Now, the “business talent” for promoting an invention and bringing it to market, as Jermey Bentham, the philosopher of utilitarianism, had written long ago, seemed to occur in men “in inverse proportion to the talent for creating inventions.” As Bentham defines the problem, your typical “poor inventor” must somehow “penetrate the antechamber of the rich or the noble whom it may be necessary to persuade… Admitted to their presence, how will the necessitous man of genius behave when he has arrived there? Often he will lose his presence of mind, forget, stammer…and retire, indignant that his merits should be misappraised.” Obsessed with his overruling idea, he remains unware of related problems and practical conditions which must be dealt with before his novel product can be brought to general use. Novelty itself is a disadvantage, inasmuch as most men are wont to cling to antique equipment still useful to them, while fearing to “waste” money on some device of uncertain value and future. The inventor, meanwhile, thinks only of what is in his own mind and not of the calculations and anxieties of his prospective patrons. “Thus”, Bentham concluded sagely, “in every career of invention…minds should be attended by an acchoucher,” one who has, primarily, the gift of persuasion, one who “knows the world, half-enthusiast, half-rogue.” On such matters wiser words were never uttered.

[Image of Thomas Edison with his first phonograph, Wikipedia]

The Mouse that Roared

On this date (November 17) in 1970, the first patent for a computer mouse was issued to Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart was working at SRI, heading a lab he called the Augmentation Research Center (ARC). The device he created was called a "mouse" because the cord that came out of the back of the device loked like the tail of that little critter.

Engelbart was (still is) a genius at seeing how computing can enhance thinking. He was an early developer of the ARPANET which was the precursor of the internet. Engelhart now runs a small organization called The Bootstrap Institute which is dedicated to taking on large-scale problems using collective intelligence enabled by computational tools.

When I was looking up Engelbart on Wikipedia, I was disturbed to read the following:

SRI's management, which disapproved of Engelbart's approach to running the center, placed the remains of ARC under the control of artificial intelligence researcher Bertram Raphael, who negotiated the transfer of the laboratory to a company called Tymshare... At Tymshare, Engelbart soon found himself marginalized and relegated to obscurity--operational concerns at Tymshare overrode Engelbart's desire to do further research.

This marginalization of the inventor by the business person happens so often. I have seen it in my own corporate experience. The history of technology overflows with similar stories. Why does this happen? Is it a clash of personalities? Ego? The Money?

I think part of the answer comes from the fundamentally different worldviews of the inventor and the business person. Inventors are divergent thinkers. They see the future in terms of exanding possibility. Many would not describe themselves as practical. They seek creation and successful creation is its own reward. Business is convergent. It seeks ever-increasing focus and discipline. Efficient production of a product to maximize profits is the goal. Invention (after the first one that gives birth to a product) is annoying. Inventors keep distracting the business person from their focus on the current product and maximizing sales and profits.

Most inventors I know (and have read about) are not good (translation: lousy) business people. They are just not wired for it. Edison was a great inventor and even started a lot of companies but he did not have the commercial relentlessness to focus on any of his ideas for that long. His goal was not the scaling-up of his companies but the next new creation.

The converse is also true: few business people could invent anything. They don't have that creative gene that sparks the inventor. They can think of new ways to grow their companies. They might even be superb marketers. But they are not inventors. Steve Jobs come to mind here. Jobs is a superb visionary of market trends and customer wants. And he is also renowned as a ruthless business person. Jobs saw the work of Engelbart and others from both SRI and XEROX Parc and recognized the value of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). He relentless drove this idea into the market with the first MacIntosh computer. But he could never have invented it.

In our culture, money speaks. Business feeds on invention. Invention that is not moved into the market may be clever, interesting, perhaps even mind-boggling. But it is not available for use and hence has limited value to society. Money is the measure of value so perhaps it is not surprising that business people are our current heroes. Jobs is a living legend. But Engelbart should be a household name, too. How many people know his name? Hail the inventors! Or, to hell with the inventors!

You decide.

[Image of Engelbart's mouse from Wikipedia]

Quote for the Day

"These familiar examples [of the atomic bomb, cotton gin, steam engine] deceive us into thinking that other major inventions were also responses to perceived needs. In fact, many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiosity or by a love tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind. Once a device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Only after it had been in use for a considerable time did consumers come to feel that they "needed" it. Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purposes. It may come as a surprise to learn that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging for the airplane and automobile, through the internal combustion engine and electric light bulb, to the phonograph and transistor. Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.[Italics mine]"

- Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Some Observations on Innovation

I'm curious about invention and innovation. We enjoy the fruits of not only today's innovations but also the world that was created by past innovations. Here is a list of a few of my thoughts about innovation. I invite you to add to the list or correct me if I am off base.

1. People have always been innovative.
2. People were just as intelligent 5000 years ago as they are today.
3. Innovation arises from both need and the desire to create.
4. Innovations can be lost as well as gained.
5. Innovations must be received by the community to succeed.
6. Applied innovations are mostly based on serial improvements.
(Who really invented the ------?)
7. Innovations do not depend on scientific understanding (but can be greatly aided by it).
8. Innoations often come from the diffusion of ideas.
9. Successful innovation seems to couple an inventor with an entrepreneur.
10. Innovation is more likely when there are multiple sources of sponsorship.
11. Patents are not a good measure of innovation.
12. Innovations are constrained by the tools of their day.
13. Money is not the root cause of innovation.
14. Innovation runs in cycles which can be reinforced or dampened.

Understanding these factors can help would-be innovators and inventors achieve their goals: having their work make a difference.

George Selden and the Automobile

Yesterday, I wrote about the invention of the cash register. Today marks another important patent anniversary. On this date in 1895, George Selden was granted his patent on the automobile. This was to prove to be both highly lucrative and highly contested in the seminal automobile industry.

As a young man, Selden was more or less pushed into Yale Law School by his father, Judge Henry R. Selden. Young George did not do too well at the law, he was more interested in tinkering in his shop. But he did finish law school and actually practiced for awhile, even representing George Eastman's photography interests.

Selden was interested in the idea of an automobile, long before such a machine was practical. Many people were interested in this same concept. Working with some skilled mechanics, he developed a prototype and filed for a patent in May, 1879. He did not commercialize his automobile though. At that point in time, no one could build a practical automobile because there wasn't a light enough gasoline engine to power such a vehicle. Selden must not have been asleep during all of his law classes because he recognized that for the patent to have commercial value, it must issue just before automobiles started to be manufactured in quantity for commercial sale. Selden amended his patent claims four times, delaying its issuance for 16 years! When it finally did issue in 1895, the automobile industry was about to be born.

Selden licensed his patent rights to William C. Whitney who was proposing to build electric taxi cabs for the New York market. Whitney and Selden together formed the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALAM). They intended to extract an upfront payment and a 0.75% royalty on every automobile built in America. Most car manufacturers agreed to the terms rather than fight it in court. But a group headed by Henry Ford decided to fight ALAM. Ford and his group eventually won because the engine in Selden's patent was based on a type of gasoline engine using the Brayton Cycle and the engine actually used by commercial auto makers was based on the Otto Cycle. ALAM was defeated in appeals court in 1911 but not before ALAM had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties. The Selden patent was never declared to be invalid but it expired in 1912 shortly after the appeals court ruled in favor of Ford.

Did the Selden Patent (and the formation of ALAM) help the fledgling automobile industry? No, in fact it inhibited the industry. It was a classic example of extracting value from what was arguably not an invention at all. Many people had envisioned the coupling of engines with wagons to make a self-powered vehicle. It took a very strong man, Henry Ford, to stand up to ALAM and defeat what was essentially an attempt to control the early automobile industry.

Image from Wikipedia

Where Do Inventions Come From?

On November 4, 1879, James Ritty of Dayton, Ohio received a patent for the "Ritty Incorruptible Cashier", the first cash register. Ritty ran a saloon in Dayton in which he billed himself as a "Dealer in Pure Whiskies, Fine Wines, and Cigars". Ritty's problem was that the hired help kept purloining the cash from the customers. Ritty needed a way to insure the money made it to the till. Except there wasn't any till, perhaps just a cash box. Recording transactions left a lot to be desired.

Ritty took a steamship to Europe in 1878. While aboard ship, he was shown a device that through the use of rotating disks could give a readout of the revolutionary speed of the propeller shaft. [This was most likely a modification of the planimeter which had been adapted to this purpose in about the same period]. When Ritty got home, he immediately set to work with his brother, John, who was a skilled craftsman to use the rotating disk idea to keep count of the money in each customer transaction. It took three prototypes to get it right but they finally did develop a successful machine. The first cash register had no cash drawer, just a clock-like dial [see picture above from the Smithsonian Instiution] and a bell to signal transactions. Ritty and his brother started a company to manufacture his invention but the going was slow and Ritty soon needed to spend his time on his saloon business. He sold the company to Jacob Eckert who formed the National Manufacturing Company. Eckert in turn sold the company in 1884 to John H. Patterson who changed the name to the National Cash Register Company. NCR, of course, exists to this day as a major player in the cash register and computer industry.

So my question: "Where do inventions come from?" Ritty seems to have invented nothing else in his life. Why would this seemingly common problem that every small businessman had to deal with stick with him in such a way that he would see a connection with the speed indicator of a ship's propeller shaft? What spark went off in his head that said he could convert the idea to a cash counter? Ritty didn't even have the technical skills to make his idea real. That was left to his brother.

Inventions are strange. The spark that creates an idea can be almost a mystical event, one that lies in the same realm as that of the great writer or composer. No one seems to be able to define where this spark of creativity comes from. But where would we be without it? Because of a propeller shaft speed indicator, the cash register...and later NCR...was born.