The Rational Optimist (29 page)

This nicely captures the paradox of the modern world, that people embrace technological change and hate it at the same time. ‘People don’t like change,’ Michael Crichton once told me, ‘and the notion that technology is exciting is true for only a handful of people. The rest are depressed or annoyed by the changes.’ Pity the inventor’s lot then. He is the source of society’s enrichment and yet nobody likes what he does. ‘When a new invention is first propounded,’ said William Petty in 1679, ‘in the beginning every man objects and the poor inventor runs the gauntloop of all petulant wits.’

What is the flywheel of the perpetual innovation machine that drives the modern world? Why has innovation become routine and how was it that in Alfred North Whitehead’s words, ‘the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention’? Is it down to the expansion of science, the application of money, the granting of intellectual property or is it something else, something much more bottom-up?

Driven by science?

Much as I love science for its own sake, I find it hard to argue that discovery necessarily precedes invention and that most new practical applications flow from the minting of esoteric insights by natural philosophers. Francis Bacon was the first to make the case that inventors are applying the work of discoverers, and that science is the father of invention. As the scientist Terence Kealey has observed, modern politicians are in thrall to Bacon. They believe that the recipe for making new ideas is easy: pour public money into science, which is a public good, because nobody will pay for the generation of ideas if the taxpayer does not, and watch new technologies emerge from the downstream end of the pipe. Trouble is, there are two false premises here: first, science is much more like the daughter than the mother of technology; and second, it does not follow that only the taxpayer will pay for ideas in science.

It used to be popular to argue that the European scientific revolution of the seventeenth century unleashed the rational curiosity of the educated classes, whose theories were then applied in the form of new technologies, which in turn allowed standards of living to rise. China, on this theory, somehow lacked this leap to scientific curiosity and philosophical discipline, so it failed to build on its technological lead. But history shows that this is back-to-front. Few of the inventions that made the industrial revolution owed anything to scientific theory.

It is, of course, true that England had a scientific revolution in the late 1600s, personified in people like Harvey, Hooke and Halley, not to mention Boyle, Petty and Newton, but their influence on what happened in England’s manufacturing industry in the following century was negligible. Newton had more influence on Voltaire than he did on James Hargreaves. The industry that was transformed first and most, cotton spinning and weaving, was of little interest to scientists and vice versa. The jennies, gins, frames, mules and looms that revolutionised the working of cotton were invented by tinkering businessmen, not thinking boffins: by ‘hard heads and clever fingers’. It has been said that nothing in their designs would have puzzled Archimedes.

Likewise, of the four men who made the biggest advances in the steam engine – Thomas Newcomen, James Watt, Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson – three were utterly ignorant of scientific theories, and historians disagree about whether the fourth, Watt, derived any influence from theory at all. It was they who made possible the theories of the vacuum and the laws of thermodynamics, not vice versa. Denis Papin, their Frenchborn forerunner, was a scientist, but he got his insights from building an engine rather than the other way round. Heroic efforts by eighteenth-century scientists to prove that Newcomen got his chief insights from Papin’s theories proved wholly unsuccessful.

Throughout the industrial revolution, scientists were the beneficiaries of new technology, much more than they were the benefactors. Even at the famous Lunar Society, where the industrial entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood liked to rub shoulders with natural philosophers like Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, he got his best idea – the ‘rose-turning’ lathe – from a fellow factory owner, Matthew Boulton. And although Benjamin Franklin’s fertile mind generated many inventions based on principles, from lightning rods to bifocal spectacles, none led to the founding of industries.

So top-down science played little part in the early years of the industrial revolution. In any case, English scientific virtuosity dries up at the key moment. Can you name a single great English scientific discovery of the first half of the eighteenth century? It was an especially barren time for natural philosophers, even in Britain. No, the industrial revolution was not sparked by some
deus ex machina
of scientific inspiration. Later science did contribute to the gathering pace of invention and the line between discovery and invention became increasingly blurred as the nineteenth century wore on. Thus only when the principles of electrical transmission were understood could the telegraph be perfected; once coal miners understood the succession of geological strata, they knew better where to sink new mines; once benzene’s ring structure was known, manufacturers could design dyes rather than serendipitously stumble on them. And so on. But even most of this was, in Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘a semidirected, groping, bumbling process of trial and error by clever, dexterous professionals with a vague but gradually clearer notion of the processes at work’. It is a stretch to call most of this science, however. It is what happens today in the garages and cafés of Silicon Valley, but not in the labs of Stanford University.

The twentieth century, too, is replete with technologies that owe just as little to philosophy and to universities as the cotton industry did: flight, solid-state electronics, software. To which scientist would you give credit for the mobile telephone or the search engine or the blog? In a lecture on serendipity in 2007, the Cambridge physicist Sir Richard Friend, citing the example of high-temperature superconductivity – which was stumbled upon in the 1980s and explained afterwards – admitted that even today scientists’ job is really to come along and explain the empirical findings of technological tinkerers after they have discovered something.

The inescapable fact is that most technological change comes from attempts to improve existing technology. It happens on the shop floor among apprentices and mechanicals, or in the workplace among the users of computer programs, and only rarely as a result of the application and transfer of knowledge from the ivory towers of the intelligentsia. This is not to condemn science as useless. The seventeenth-century discoveries of gravity and the circulation of the blood were splendid additions to the sum of human knowledge. But they did less to raise standards of living than the cotton gin and the steam engine. And even the later stages of the industrial revolution are replete with examples of technologies that were developed in remarkable ignorance of why they worked. This was especially true in the biological world. Aspirin was curing headaches for more than a century before anybody had the faintest idea of how. Penicillin’s ability to kill bacteria was finally understood around the time bacteria learnt to defeat it. Lime juice was preventing scurvy centuries before the discovery of vitamin C. Food was being preserved by canning long before anybody had any germ theory to explain why it helped.

Capital?

Perhaps money is the answer to the question of what drives the innovation engine. The way to incentivise innovation, as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist will tell you, is to bring capital and talent together. For most of history, people have been adept at keeping them apart. Inventors will always go where the money can be found to back them. One of Britain’s advantages in the eighteenth century was that it was accumulating a collective fortune, made from foreign trade, and a comparatively efficient capital market to distribute funds to innovators. More specifically, the industrial revolution required long-term investment in capital equipment that could not easily be liquidated – factories and machines, for the most part. More than other countries, Britain’s capital markets were in a position to supply this investment in the eighteenth century. London had managed to borrow from Amsterdam and nurture in the eighteenth century joint-stock, limited liability companies, liquid markets in bonds and shares, and a banking system capable of generating credit. These helped to give inventors the wherewithal to turn their ideas into products. By contrast in France capital markets were haunted by John Law’s failure, banks haunted by Louis XIV’s defaults, and corporate law haunted by the arbitrary extortions of tax farmers.

In an eerie repetition of the same pattern, Silicon Valley owes much of its explosion of novelty to its venture capitalists on Sandhill Road. Where would Amazon, Compaq, Genentech, Google, Netscape and Sun be without Kleiner Perkins Caulfield? It is no coincidence that the growth of technology industries took off after the mid-1970s when Congress freed pension funds and non-profits to invest some of their assets in venture funds. California is not the birthplace of entrepreneurs; it is the place they go to do their enterprising; fully one-third of successful start-ups in California between 1980 and 2000 had Indian- or Chinese-born founders.

In imperial Rome, no doubt scores of unknown slaves knew how to make better olive presses, better watermills and better wool looms, while scores of plutocrats knew how to save, invest and consume. But the two lived miles apart, separated by venal middlemen who had no desire to bring them together. A telling anecdote about glass repeated by several Roman authors rather drives home the point. A man demonstrates to the emperor Tiberius his invention of an unbreakable form of glass, hoping for a reward. Tiberius asks if anybody else knows his secret and is assured nobody does. So Tiberius beheads the man to prevent the new material reducing the relative value of gold to that of mud. The moral of the tale – whether it is true or not – is not just that Roman inventors receive negative reward for their pains, but that venture capital was so scarce, the only way to get a new idea funded was to go to the emperor. Imperial China, too, sent strong signals of discouragement to anybody whose inventiveness challenged the status quo. A Christian missionary in Ming China wrote: ‘Any man of genius is paralysed immediately by the thought that his efforts will bring him punishment rather than rewards.’

The financing of innovation gradually moved inside firms in the twentieth century. Private sector companies, haunted by the Schumpeterian fear that innovation can pull their whole market from them, and equally dazzled by dreams that they can pull the whole market from under their rivals, had gradually learnt to sew innovation into their culture and to set aside budgets for it. Corporate research and development budgets are only a century old and they have been growing pretty steadily all that time. The proportion of GDP spent by firms on research and development in America has more than doubled, to nearly 3 per cent, over the past half-century. Little wonder that there has been a corresponding increase in invention and application.

Delve beneath the statistical surface though, and the picture changes. Far from being able to spend their way into novelty and growth, companies are perpetually discovering that their R&D budgets get captured by increasingly defensive and complacent corporate bureaucrats, who spend them on low-risk, dull projects and fail to notice gigantic new opportunities, which thereby turn into threats. The pharmaceutical industry, having tried again and again to instil a sense of radical thinking into its research departments, has largely given up the attempt and now simply buys up small firms that have developed big ideas. The history of the computer industry is littered with examples of big opportunities missed by dominant players, which thereby find themselves challenged by fast-growing new rivals – IBM, Digital Equipment, Apple, Microsoft. Even Google will suffer this fate. The great innovators are still usually outsiders.

Though they may start out full of entrepreneurial zeal, once firms or bureaucracies grow large, they become risk-averse to the point of Luddism. The pioneer venture capitalist Georges Doriot said that the most dangerous moment in the life of a company was when it had succeeded, for then it stopped innovating. ‘This telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a means of communication. The device is of inherently no value to us,’ read a Western Union internal memo in 1876. That is why Apple, not IBM, perfected the personal computer, why the Wright brothers, not the French army, invented powered flight, why Jonas Salk, not the British National Health Service, invented a polio vaccine, why Amazon, not the Post Office, invented one-click ordering and why a Finnish lumber-supply company, not a national telephone monopoly, became the world leader in mobile telephony.

One solution is for companies to try to set their employees free to behave like entrepreneurs. Sony did this after it discovered in the 1990s that its famously pioneering technologists had succumbed to a ‘not-invented-here’ mentality. General Electric under Jack Welch managed it for a while by fragmenting the company into smaller competing units. 3M – flush with success after its employee Art Fry dreamed up the idea of nonstick sticky notes (Post-its) while trying to mark the place in his hymn book in church in 1980 – told its technologists to spend 15 per cent of their time working on their own projects and by harvesting customers’ ideas.

Another solution is to out-source problems to be solved by a virtual market of inventors with the promise of a prize, as the British government did with the problem of measuring longitude at sea in the eighteenth century. The internet has revived this possibility in recent years. Sites like Innocentive and yet2.com allow companies both to post problems they cannot solve, promising rewards for their solution, and to post technologies they have invented that are looking for applications. Retired engineers can make good money and have good fun pitting their wits on a freelance basis through such sites. The old model of in-house R&D will surely rapidly give way to this marketplace in innovation, or ‘idea-agora’ as Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams call it.