North, South, East, West

In my recent reading, I came across another reminder of the role that technology played in the development of the United States.  At the time of the revolution, the U.S. was a set of thirteen colonies arrayed along the Atlantic coast.  Virtually all economic activity within the colonies was confined to this natural North-South orientation.  But with independence, the lands west of the Alleghenies became open for settlement.  The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 only expanded the available territory.  People had begun to move to the Kentucky territory along the Cumberland Road, laid out by Daniel Boone, even before the war, but peace brought a tremendous drive to move west.

Getting over the Alleghenies, even by the Cumberland Road, was not easy or for the faint of heart.  Almost all of the early settlers were attracted by the lure of cheap farm land.  For people that had next to nothing, farming offered not only a way to fill their bellies but a path to a more prosperous future.  The United States population expanded by a third between 1790 and 1800 (from 3.9 million to 5.3 million people).  Many of these pioneers headed for the lands to the west, especially in the Old Northwest Territory of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.  More and more, farmers needed to find a way to get their produce to market and the only cost-effective route was by water.  The Ohio and Mississippi Rivers offered the only low-cost transportation option. Barges and keel-boats brought the products of the western farms downstream to New Orleans for shipment. The lack of any viable route to the east over the Alleghenies created a separate economy that was only marginally linked to the Atlantic seaboard.

So where did technology play a role in changing this linkage to New Orleans?  The leaders of the young nation (including Washington and Jefferson) recognized that a western United States without strong ties to the East was ripe for exploitation by a European power either by conquest or by political and economic alliances.  Washington even founded a commercial effort to link the West to the East using the Potomac River and a network of canals to form a water link.  That effort was a bust for both investment and technical reasons but the idea of a water route was successfully carried out with the building of the Erie Canal, opened in 1825.  With the Canal, the cost of shipping goods east to New York became even cheaper than sending produce to New Orleans.  The products of the farms started moving East.  More canals were built and then an extensive network of railroads, all to cheaply transport farm goods to both Eastern and European markets.  Transportation technology knit the Eastern and Western segments of the United States into a cohesive whole.

Technology also played a role in the North-South divisions.  As I wrote recently, the invention and massive replication of the cotton gin opened the way for the less fertile lands of the South (away from the coastal lowlands) to be put under cotton cultivation.  Such a massive expansion in cotton production could only be accomplished by increasing the number of slaves to work the land.  Hence, technology reinforced the institution of slavery and increased the divide between the interests of the North and the South.

When the Civil War came, the Old Northwest Territory went with the Union.  The economic self-interest of the East and West were tied together.  The South, with its limited resources to match those of the industrialized North, lost the war -- and a way of life.  Of course, the technologies that were nurtured in the North's manufacturing-based economy only strengthened the ties between East and West as the farmers looked to the factories of the East for their factory-made goods.

Technology is a powerful force in shaping the course of history.  I'm reminded of the old saw, "for want of a nail...the war was lost."  Maybe in the case of the United States it should be modified to "because of a canal ... the war was lost."

TBTI (Too Big To Innovate)

TBTF  The acronym, TBTF (Too Big To Fail), is everywhere these days.  It describes in a nutshell the problem with companies, especially banks, that are so large that their failure would wreck the economy.  Fearing that a number of banks fit this category, the Fed and the Treasury bailed them out last fall.  It is puzzling to me how banks that were considered TBTF then could be allowed to continue without restructuring now.  Why would we do nothing to restructure these institutions to bring them down to a scale where they are not TBTF?  No business should be allowed to grow so large that its very size should make it a candidate for a Federal bailout - or threaten the economy as a whole.

TBTI These mega-banks make me wonder about many other U.S. companies that may not be TBTF but are TBTI (Too Big To Inovate).  What do I mean by TBTI?  General Motors is a great example.  GM grew to such a massive size that it was no longer in touch with the market.  The senior executives of GM felt that they set the market.  What was good for GM was good for the country.  The arrogance that comes with size is a classic symptom of companies that have become TBTI.  Innovation died at the hands of finance MBAs who drove the company to make bigger and fancier SUVs, who decried any new approach such as the EV-1 (electric car) in favor of the Hummer.  Who tried to fend off the Japanese automakers with tariffs rather than increase their own quality. Who spouted the corporate line about "increasing shareholder value."  In a nutshell, GM quit listening.  The executives were into complete entitlement - corporate jets, country club memberships, and golden parachutes.  But who would want to bail out?  It was so much cozier inside the corporate tower where reality could be blithely ignored.

But my comments are not limited to General Motors.  Many highly-respected Fortune 500 companies have moved beyond the glory of their growth years and into TBTI.  To be fair, there is a lot of lip service provided on the topic of innovation but most of it is just that.  Whether you think of GM or a host of other American icons, the sad fact is that most of them have become far more interested in "protecting the corporation" than in innovating.  Scale does that to you.  When you are big enough to become a target for significant lawsuit awards, you can't help but develop a hunker-down mentality that keeps you away from anything that might be construed as risky (aka, innovative).  When you become that large, you can't help but develop a bureaucracy and middle management that is more interested in the competition for self-advancement within the company than in serving the customer.  You can't help but develop an organizational structure that walls off departments and makes customer responsiveness way too limited.  You can't help but develop a senior management that wants to hold onto the reins of control in an ever tighter manner lest someone lower in the organization take an unwarranted risk.

TBTI comes most easily when you forget what made you large in the first place.  Growth came from customers who found the company's product or service to be worth the money and better than the competitions'.  Dollars to doughnuts, innovation played a part in that early growth phase.  After the struggle to survive subsided and the first long march to profitability had been completed, management turned its attention to a different task: making more of the stuff that sold so well and making it more efficiently in order to make more profit.  After a long struggle, it is natural to want to take the easy road for awhile.  The trouble comes when you think that the easy road is the only road, when the hard work of innovation becomes too risky, when today's profit is better than next year's growth.  At this point, companies become TBTI.

What to do about companies that are TBTI?  I would suggest a similar therapy to those who are TBTF:  get smaller.   But the kind of getting smaller is quite different between these two corporate pathologies.  For companies that are TBTF, the goal is breaking the corporation up into autonomous pieces that are able to survive independently - and below the TBTF threshold.  The goal for companies that have become TBTI is slightly different.  The corporation as a whole doesn't need to be broken up but the business units within the company need to be segmented down to a size and given enough autonomy that decisions once again happen more at the business unit level than the corporate level.  Innovation is unleashed by giving it oxygen in the case of business units, resources and autonomy.  Businesses that are close to the street will know what is needed to please their customers.  Corporate headquarters will remain largely clueless.  This will, of course, take guts on the part of the senior management team.  It will mean trusting their business unit management teams once again.  It will mean being willing to not have a knee-jerk reaction to protect the corporation first.  It will mean keeping the business units small enough (usually less than 300 people) that the players know each other by first name and know what each is capable of without doing an HR Performance Appraisal.

The irony of radical surgery on the TBTF banks and automakers is that they are likely to become more innovative.  Not in the smoke-and-mirrors innovation of derivatives and CDOs but true innovation that adds value to their customers and not just the management team's bonuses.  I think E.F. Schumaker was right, small is beautiful (not to mention functional, innovative, exciting to work for, and growing).  I don't know about you but I have had enough of Big for awhile. Let's hear it for Small.

The Power of the Green Screen

Update 2: Still correcting some font problems.

I recently saw James Cameron's new movie, Avatar.  It is a tour de force of computer animation and special effects.  Unlike many sci-fi and action films, this one actually had a decent (if predictable) story.  Movies like this really blur the lines between special effects and reality.

In quite a different way, the use of so-called Green Screen (or more correctly, Chroma Keying) technology is doing much the same thing for movies set in actual locations.  It is getting so that you can hardly tell what has been shot in the studio and what is real.  The video below from Stargate Studios shows with amazing clarity what can be accomplished with this superposition technology.


Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Demo from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.

Of course, another possibility that emerges from all this technology is the idea so popular with the conspiracy theorists who believe that, along with other major news events, the Apollo moon landings were staged. Hopefully, my paranoia is under control but it does bother me that I am not so sure that any of us can know what is real when we see it on the screen.

Worth a Look:  I saw this video on one of my favorite blog sites, Open Culture, which does a terrific job of highlighting web-based cultural opportunities (along with a host of other great features).  Check it out.

Science Ideas to Consider

I put together a short video of some quotations that I like that have to do with science.  It works best if you let the video load about halfway before you begin watching it.  Hope you enjoy.

The IBM 1401 Computer

Update: I reformatted the video to show the full 16:9 video screen.

My brother works for IBM.  He sent me a link to a video that IBM made to celebrate the building of the IBM 1401 computer.  The picture at left is the control panel for the computer. The 1401 was an all-transistor, medium-sized computer that was one of IBM's most successful products.  Over 20,000 of the systems were manufactured between 1959 and 1971.  The computer could be configured with up to 32K of memory, although most were sold with only 8K or 16K on board.  IBM leased the machines rather than sold them, which was typical of their business model.  According to the company, by 1961, one in four computers in the United States was an IBM 1401.

I really enjoyed the video.  It focuses on the people and their evident pride in what they had accomplished so many years ago.  It reminded me once again of Warren Bennis' work on Great Groups which I blogged about a year ago when I was writing about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.  One of the essential features of a Great Group is that it cannot last.  It is a moment in time in which people come together to accomplish something extraordinary.  That seems to have been the case with this IBM team.  The pride these people continue to feel is palpable.  Maybe, if we are lucky, we will also be part of a Great Group.  The memories last a lifetime.

The Love Affair with the Automobile May Be on Its Way Out

I just read a short report from the Earth Policy Institute which revealed  that after a century of growth, the U.S. car fleet peaked in 2009 and started to decline.  The 14 million cars that were scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold.  The report gave many reasons for the downturn including higher gas prices, the poor economy, longer commutes, and growing urbanization.  But another reason that intrigued me is that young people just don't care about cars like their parents and grandparents did.  The car is no longer the portal to socialization - it is now better accomplished on social networks and cellphones.  New teenage drivers' licenses are in decline.  The number of teenage licenses peaked in 1978 at 12 million and is now under ten million.

I remember in my own teenage years that my friends and I would drive endlessly up and down the main street of our small town looking to see who else was driving up and down the main street.  This endless do-loop of a drive was punctuated by occasional stops at the drive-in restaurant for a soda and some french fries.  The whole point was to see and be seen in something that looked a great deal like the movie, American Graffiti.  Of course, every family had a telephone but that usually involved talking in a place where any conversation could all too easily be overheard by parents or siblings.  The web, text messages, and cell phones allow so much more privacy from prying ears.  These newer technologies are perfectly adapted to teenagers who are dealing with the angst of adolescence (which comes with a certain built-in level of paranoia).

There has always been a push to develop new communications technologies.  We are a social species and we feel compelled to share our thoughts and ideas.  We need to connect with other people to have the sense of community. It was revolutionary when Gutenberg made it possible to widely share ideas in book form.  The telegraph and then the telephone changed long-distance communications forever.  Radio, television, motion pictures, and now cellphones and the web have all been driven by our insatiable desire to connect in richer and more immediate ways.

One of the byproducts of new communication channels is a reordering of older technologies, in this case, the automobile.  Who would have guessed that a cause for fewer cars on the road would be changing communications patterns in young people?  I always figured that the next generation would help solve the energy crisis but I didn't guess that it would come about because their new ways to connect mean they don't need cars to do so.  This is not good news for automakers anywhere.  But changing patterns are never good news for the old ways.  Still, I put my faith in our kids.  They will be better connected, and greener, than their parents.

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.

The Universe, in Awesome Color

The New York Times has a review of the book Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, by Michael Benson.  This new book (which I have not seen) is reported to have some simply spectacular images that Benson has collected from the world's greatest observatories.  An accompanying slideshow on the Times site (with 16 of the images) can be seen here.  The image on this post (and part of the slideshow) of the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebulae is taken from the Hubble telescope.  This book review particularly caught my eye after I wrote about Hubble in one of my last posts.  The book is not about Edwin Hubble but it does give you a sense of the fascination that motivates those who look deep into the night sky. I highly recommend watching the slideshow to get some sense for the awesome beauty that can be found in our universe.

Edwin Hubble

My wife and I have been watching a Teaching Company lecture series entitled "Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe", taught by Sean Carroll.  It is a fascinating look into the makeup of the universe, of which only five percent is the stuff that is known to be visible anywhere.  Twenty-five percent is Dark Matter which can't be seen but which behaves like particles and exhibits a gravitational pull.  The other seventy percent is Dark Energy which does not behave as particles and is thought to be evenly distributed throughout the universe.  It is postulated to be there because it is the only way in which the behavior of the universe can be explained.

Carroll is a good teacher.  In his second lecture, he was talking about the expansion of the universe and the role that Edwin Hubble (1889 - 1953) played in providing data to show that this expansion was taking place. Hubble was able to demonstrate that the farther a galaxy was from any observation point (like the earth) the faster it was receding away from that point.  This is now called Hubble's Law.  It works no matter where you might stand in the universe.  If you are a long way from the earth, it is not that the intervening galaxies would be seen to be coming towards your point of observation.  They would be seen as receding even there.  It seems counter-intuitive, as is much of particle physics and cosmology.

My ears perked up a bit higher when Carroll was describing the path that Edwin Hubble took to become a world famous astronomer.  Turns out, he was a bright kid and a great high school athlete.  He excelled at track-and-field at the University of Chicago and set a high jump record while a student there.  He won a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to Oxford University where he first studied law and then switched his major to Spanish.  When he came back to the States, he taught Spanish, physics, and mathematics at the New Albany, Indiana High School before enlisting in the army in World War I.  Does this sound like the path to becoming a world renowned cosmologist?

After the war, Hubble returned to the University of Chicago to pursue what he had decided was going to be his career: astronomy.  He studied at the Yerkes Observatory at the University and after he received his Ph.D., he was invited to join the staff at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles.  He spent the rest of his career at Mt. Wilson.

There is hope for all of us late bloomers who can't quite figure out what we want to be when we grow up.  It took Hubble some time to figure out where he needed to be but when he did, he was extremely productive.  Hubble was not alone.  Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton were both accomplished artists in their first careers before finding later success in technology.  Henry Ford was a mechanic at the Detroit Edison.  Thomas Edison was a telegraph operator.  It would seem that a lot of creative people don't come into their own until they have passed through an incubation period of shorter or longer length.  What seems to be common among these people is that when they heard their muse, they followed it.  Maybe we would be better off as a society if more people left their dead-end jobs for more creative paths.  Certainly, Hubble didn't go directly from the high school classroom in Indiana to Mt. Wilson.  He needed education, and he got it at the University of Chicago.  So what if it takes a little retooling?

Most of us are not going to have a scientific law named after us or a satellite-based observatory named in our honor.  But that's not the point.  It seems to me that the point is to do what releases what is best in each of us.  The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, is quoted as having said, "Follow your bliss".  I think following your passion would do just as nicely.

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.

Book Highlights From My 2009 Reading

With the year (and the decade) drawing to a close, I thought I would give my own version of the ever-popular "best of" listings for the year.  When I went back over the books I read in 2009, I realized that  my selections are not to be found on any current bestseller list.  Truth be told, I am much happier burrowing like a mole into some musty corner of a used bookstore.  Nonetheless, I think the books below are definitely worth a look if you relate to anything I write here.  So here is my list in no particular order:

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon.  This book provides a fascinating history of the growth of Chicago. But moreover, Cronon describes how the city and its surroundings were inextricably linked. Without the Great West, there would be no Chicago.  He focuses on railroads, lumber, meat-packing, and commerce to illuminate his points.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Reif Larson.  This is to show that contrary to popular opinion around our house, I do indeed read novels.  This recent book tells the tale of a precocious young genius (Spivet) who wins a fellowship to the Smithsonian. What they don't understand is that Spivet is a 12-year-old boy from Montana.  The story is full of humor and interesting little drawings in the margins (supposedly drawn by Spivet, himself).  One of the things that captivated me was Larson's wonderful descriptions of the world including a Union Pacific freight train that Spivet hops to get to D.C.  Lots of fun.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe.  This Pulitzer Prize-winning history from the Oxford History of the United States series is long, detailed, and very really well-written.  Howe makes that blank period in my understanding of American history come to life.  For those who find current events to be full of partisan bickering and yearn for the "good old days", Howe makes it clear that things haven't changed.  There has always been partisan bickering (and worse). The title is the famous line that Morse used to open the telegraph which was one of the two technology revolutions that Howe talks about.  The other was the railroad.  Worth the read despite the length

The Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America: 1865 - 1900, by Jack Beatty.  I added this one to the list with mixed feelings.  Beatty lays out a litany of Gilded Age sins in this book but I found his treatment to be sometimes compelling and sometimes tedious.  His narratives on the injustices committed against the recently-emancipated slaves in the South will make your blood boil.  His descriptions of some of the rulings of the Supreme Court of that era should do the same but these are less clearly told. Still worth the read.

Invention in America:  With Images from the Library of Congress, by Russell Bourne.  This slim volume is very well-written and well-illustrated.  Bourne does a great job in looking under the hood of American invention to fill in the blanks on much of what we think we know on the topic.

Wedding the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, by Peter L. Bernstein.  The Erie Canal really was a Big Deal.  Bernstein tells the tale of the politics behind its construction, the engineering prowess of the amateurs who built the canal, and the canal's impact on American history. It was the marvel of its age - and deservedly so.

Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America, by James Green.  Before reading this book, I had this fuzzy image that, yes, there was something special about the "Haymarket" but I couldn't have told you what it was.  Green's book brings history to life, describing the events in Chicago in the middle of the 1880's when labor was being systematically exploited by very wealthy capitalists.  This story makes clear that our fear of Communism is much older than the McCarthy Era.  This is a tale of injustice, well told.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It, by Arthur Herman.  This is really a tale of the Scottish Enlightenment.  The number of 18th Century thinkers coming out of Edinburgh and Glasgow was (and is) astounding.  Almost everything that we consider to be modern has at least a trace that goes back to this period in Scottish history.  The mystery is why Scotland didn't continue to be an intellectual leader.

The Big Switch:  Rewiring the World:  Edison to Google, by Nicholas Carr.  Carr shows us the parallels between Edison's world and the world of the Internet.  Both depend on large networks for their impact.  Moves right along but an interesting read.

The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson, by Kevin J. Hayes.  This biography of Jefferson will appeal to any bibliophile as it tells the story through both the books that influenced Jefferson, the works that he wrote, and the libraries that he built.  Jefferson is famously quoted as saying, "I cannot live without books". This book tells you why.

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.

Charles Babbage

NPR produced a story recently about Charles Babbage, the British mathematician who conceived of both a Difference Engine and an Analytical Engine that would have been two of the earliest computing machines. I say "would have been" because they were never built in his lifetime.  He tried to build the Difference Engine but ran out of money after ten years to support his efforts.  He never knew with certainty whether it would work.

A museum curator, Doron Swade, at the Science Museum in London came across Babbage's drawings in the 1980's and was amazed to find out that no one had ever tried to build Babbage's Difference Engine.  Swade organized a team of engineers who built the machine using Babbage's original drawings and only materials that would have been available in Victorian England.  The finished machine weighs five tons, has over eight thousand parts, and is powered by a hand-crank.  But most importantly, it works just as Babbage said it would.  I won't repeat the whole NPR story here.  It is well worth the time to click through to their website.  You should particularly take the time to watch the short video which shows the machine in action. The Engine has a mesmerizing beauty in its revolving gears and wheels.

This story reminded me in some ways of the efforts of museum curators to recreate the hand-cranked Antikythera Mechanism from Ancient Greece that I have written about several times previously, here and here.  Technologists and historians find it fascinating to recreate an old idea that has never been seen in modern times.  And when these old designs do work as described, it delights and amazes us.

I was also not surprised to read about how difficult it was for Babbage to get funding to support an idea that was so far ahead of its time.  While he was a brilliant mathematician/inventor, he was a difficult personality and not a great entrepreneur.  His inability to sweet-talk the money out of investors left him a frustrated and bitter old man.  So often, inventors who may have truly novel ideas can still lack the interpersonal skills to sustain their work.  If Babbage had prevailed, there might have been a Victorian Information Age that would have moved computing forward by fifty years almost overnight.  Who knows where we might be now had Babbage realized his Difference Engine? It's fun to speculate.

(See my related post on the origin of punch card computing by way of the U.S. Census Bureau here.)