James Shepherd-Barron
Latest posts by James Shepherd-Barron (see all)
- HOT FROGS and the monetization of money - 3rd March 2021
- CoVid Lessons Un-Learned - 29th January 2021
- HOLE IN THE WALL (Book Extract) - 18th January 2021
Alexander Fleming did not realise how important his discovery was; for a decade after discovering the penicillin mould, he focused instead on the bacterium’s potential use as a topical antiseptic for wounds and surface infections and as a means of isolating certain bacteria in laboratory cultures. It was left to his fellow Nobel laureates, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, to demonstrate in 1940 that penicillin could be used as a therapeutic agent to fight a large number of bacterial diseases.
We tend to rewrite the histories of technological innovation, making myths about someone who had a great idea that changed the world when, in reality, that person was usually not the inventor at all but the person who knew how to exploit the idea and bring it to scale. Such was the case with penicillin, where Alexander Fleming has been credited with an idea actually discovered and pioneered by a fellow chemist from the same laboratory, Howard Flory.
It was a similar story with the light bulb. Invented by the British chemist Humphrey Davy in the early 1800’s, the concept of the electric light bulb spent nearly eighty years being passed from one hopeful physicist to another like an unwanted Easter egg. In 1879, an American entrepreneur, Thomas Edison, finally figured out how to make an incandescent bulb that did not explode and people would actually find cheap and useful enough to buy. At least, that’s the story. But Edison did not actually invent the lightbulb any more than Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. That honour fell to a one-time British rival and later business partner, Joseph Swann. Edison was the one, however, to bring the idea to a scale sufficient for the public to notice, and so came away with the credit. Edison’s achievement was not the lightbulb per se, but in putting together the electrical systems that contained all the elements necessary to make the light-bulb practical, safe, and economical to operate. He and his team at Menlo Park outside New York had to invent the parallel circuit; a durable glass bulb that wouldn’t explode when hot; an improved dynamo; an electrical conducting grid; capacitors for maintaining constant voltage; safety fuses; insulating materials; light sockets, and on-off switches. Before Edison could make his millions, every one of these elements had to be developed into practical, reproducible components, and eventually fitted together into an integrated functioning whole.
The difference is that innovation takes an existing idea and applies it in a new way, whereas invention demands a radical departure from what is known. Innovation and invention, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not the same thing. Innovation entails using the stuff we already have in better ways; invention involves creating new stuff, new ideas, new machines, from scratch. Innovation is re-engineering, re-purposing, or re-inventing what people already know how to do.
In his book The Innovators, Walter Isaacson points out that most innovation is not the product of one person acting alone. He cites the case of the man credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer, Charles Babbage, and his collaboration with Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, without whom his Difference Engine would not have been so very different. His collaboration with Gottfried Leibnitz, the most famous German mathematician of his day, and Alan Turing of Bletchley Park and Enigma fame is highlighted, as is the fact that the British government supported his work to the tune of £170,000, then equivalent to twice the cost of a battleship. Someone somewhere had seen merit in the idea and had ‘sponsored’ it. The book also explores what Ada Lovelace called “political science” … that machines and their creators are not just about cold calculation and mechanics, but about the essence of human creativity. “Those who helped lead the technology revolution were people in the tradition of Ada, who could combine science and the humanities,” he writes. Innovation is all about getting the mix right.
There is inevitably a backward-looking component to deciding who is a genuine inventor, and who is not. By definition, the inventor breaks the mould by doing something different, the true importance of which might be hard to identify until years, or even decades, later. Early iterations of the ATM involved refining the process of dispensing pre-counted packets of cash, and it was fully 15 years before its wider potential began to be realised. This retrospective component also tends to favour western industrial economies, not least because of their ability as free-market societies to communicate each successful innovation through advertising and the media. Western economies also have strong legal and patent systems to protect and nurture transformative ideas. The Wright brothers were just as determined to protect their flying machine from unscrupulous competition through the courts as they were in learning to fly. The same was true of Edison’s lightbulbs.