What’s the most important invention in history?

I often ask groups in innovation teams to nominate the most important invention in the history of mankind. The ‘usual suspects’, the ones that come up most frequently, are the wheel, printing and the internet.

But how about paper? Twenty years ago, I used to hear so much about the impending arrival of the 'paperless office'. That never looked close to happening. And in more recent times it’s been the supposed death of newspapers and books.

But still paper remains central to our lives.

So when was it invented – and by whom?

It seems to have been born in China, sometime around 100AD, and has been ascribed to a eunuch in the Han court called Cai Lun. In its earliest incarnations, paper was made from hemp waste, but over time this was mixed with other plant materials – tree bark, bamboo etc.

Over the following centuries, paper-making spread throughout Asia, arriving in Europe and North Africa around the 12^th century, gradually replacing parchment and vellum.

The arrival of printing in Europe in the 14^th century led to a massive growth in its usage.

Its uses nowadays remain so many and varied – from packaging to Post-it notes, from banknotes to bodily waste. And in the office.

 

The arrival of wire-less

I found this interview with Guglielmo Marconi in Leslie Baily’s BBC Scrapbooks. It was conducted in 1896 shortly after Marconi had installed a transmitter on the roof of the GPO and a receiver in a building on the Thames Embankment, 500 yards away.

“Was the message quite clearly received?” asked the American reporter.
“Quite clearly.”
“And do these waves really pass through things?”
“I am forced to believe the waves will penetrate anything and everything.”
“Won’t fog prevent them?”
“No, sir, nothing prevents them.”
“Do you mean to say, Mr Marconi, that I could send my report of this interview from London to New York?”
“Please remember wireless is a new field. With regard to the future, so far as I can see it does not present any impossibilities to signal to New York.”

Wire-less communication. One of the most important inventions of the past 100+ years?

The Importance of Being Plausible

Walking the canals in Birmingham (more there than in Venice, don’t you know) with friends from Sydney, I was asked by one of them who had invented the vitally important system of locks.

I had no idea. “Don’t think it was the Romans,” was all I could offer.

So I decided to approach the skipper of a passing narrow-boat. He and his crew at that moment had just negotiated their way through another lock (more than in Venice, we can be sure). He looked to me very much the expert, cap set at jaunty angle.

Not fazed at all by my approach, he gave us a rather comprehensive answer. The Chinese were involved, of course. The Babylonians. The Dutch (very flat, Holland). And something about Robert Barron in England, who had invented the “double-acting tumbler lock” in 1778.

I was impressed and said so to our helpful informant, adding: “At least, it all sounded very plausible to me – and plausibility is very important, you know.”

My little jest did not result in any smiles from Mr Jaunty Cap. In fact he gave me a rather odd look.

As we walked away, my wife Sophie said to me: “You do know who that was?”

“No idea,” I responded. “Who?”

“That was David Suchet." Only one of our finest (and most plausible) actors. And a passionate supporter of our canals.

“Gradually, then suddenly”

I came across this phrase from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in Narelle Hanratty’s blog. And it occurs to me that so many discoveries and inventions happen this way - gradually, then suddenly.

A good example is the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in the early 1950s. I wrote about the way that they battled with this fundamental problem (20 December 2009), together with Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and others, over a long period of time, and how quite suddenly one day the sun rose - and the answer was clear.

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson, describing the Eureka moment in his exciting book, The Double Helix.

Of course an analogy in animal life is the gestation of foetuses followed by the birth of the young.

Have you noticed examples of this in your innovation work and elsewhere?

Mr Hotchkiss and the stapler

I asked a group of managers in Tokyo to name their personal favourite inventions. We got a diverse range of proposals from them. Then they asked me for mine.

The humble paper staple, together with its stapler, I said. Such a deceptively simple piece of engineering.

It overcame all the disadvantages of its celebrated predecessor, the paperclip. The great adman, David Ogilvy, exhorted us to abandon the paperclip in favour of the staple in his Confessions of an Advertising Man. I never travel without it.

But who invented it? I’d never known. Well, they told me in Tokyo, in Japan it’s called a Hotchkiss. Was Mr Hotchkiss by any chance the inventor?

Apparently not. He seems merely to have been the importer of the product to the land of the rising sun.

So who did invent it? This is not quite so simple a question as one might expect.

George W McGill patented an early version in the USA in 1866 and continued to develop his product through the 1880s. Meanwhile CH Gould, working in parallel with McGill, took out a patent in England in 1868. Rather like early mobile phones, these initial staplers were bulky and heavy.

The slim and elegant product that we know today was invented by another Englishman, John Munford. He sold it to his employer in the early twentieth century (at a low price) and never has been properly recognised for his work.

Microphones changed the way we sing

One of the most important inventions of the early twentieth century was the microphone. It came into general use in the recording industry in the mid-1920s.

Of course, over time they became not only a means of transferring and enhancing sound, they also profoundly influenced the way in which singers sang.

No longer did performers need to project their voices to the back row of the gods, as opera and music-hall singers had always learned to do. In fact, they could sing very quietly and still be heard clearly.

An early example of this is Harry Plunket Greene’s recording of Schubert’s “The Hurdy Gurdy Man”. Born in 1865, the Irish baritone had necessarily learned the art of projecting his voice.

But by the time of the recording he was 69 years old and his voice was a pale shadow of what it had been in his prime. So he almost whispered into the microphone. The result is extraordinary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW04f0olXUY

Let me know what you think…

Best thing since…

How is it that sliced bread became the byword for step-change in innovation?

The key to it was the creation of a machine that would slice a loaf of bread evenly. This was invented by one Otto Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, who built his first prototype in 1912 – so next year is its centenary.

Unfortunately, in 1917 his prototypes were destroyed in a fire, together with the blueprints, and it was not until 1928 that he had a fully functional machine ready. What took him so long?

Were there insuperable obstacles? Certainly the early response of bakeries to the concept was not enthusiastic. Maybe he ran out of cash? Did it take him a long time to obtain a patent? Did he go away to war? Were there lots of other nifty inventions from him in the meantime?

And if sliced bread is such a significant thing, why don’t we all know about Mr Rohwedder?

Rohwedder’s loaf-slicer was first used by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Missouri – and was a success immediately. In 1930 sliced Wonder Bread became the first brand to market the product nationally. It was the coincidental invention of the pop-up toaster that gave massive added stimulus to the growth of sliced bread.

So what would be outstanding candidates for the role of “Best Thing Since Sliced Bread”?

www at twenty

Two days ago, Saturday 6 August, was the twentieth anniversary of the World Wide Web.

It was on that day that the first website was posted by the 36 year-old physicist, Tim Berners-Lee. It’s still there: http://info.cern.ch/

Is it the most important and life-changing invention of the twentieth century?

(Thanks to Deborah Mills for flagging this up on Facebook.)

Words, words, words

At risk of catching the dread disease of definitionitis (see blogpost, 27 October 2010), I think it’s useful to distinguish between some words that are commonly used and confused. For example…

Invention: is the application of creativity to solve a problem, usually involving technology of one sort or another.

Discovery: is usefully applied to productive new insights and new understandings.

Creativity: is the generation of new thinking, ideas that may be quite speculative in nature.

Innovation: is the process of turning new ideas into reality, making them happen. It usually involves problem-solving.

How am I doing?

The wheel - the first breakthrough technology?

When asked to name an early invention of the greatest importance, people in my workshops seem most often to come up with the wheel. It seems to represent the mother and father of innovation in folk’s minds. Asked what they know about its development, there’s usually a longish silence.

Archaeologists tell us that the earliest evidence of the wheel is in Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in what is roughly modern-day Iraq), some 5,500 years ago.

The problem that was solved by its invention was the need to move heavy loads without high levels of friction between the earth and the vehicle. (Sledges are only good for this purpose on ice or snow.)

The idea of using tree trunks as rollers had been in use since much earlier times. It seems likely that the use of two cross-sections of a tree, joined together by a pole (a primitive axle) would have been a first step, but it would have been discovered quite quickly that, with any substantial weight, the wheels would have split. So a long period of incremental innovation followed.

The spoked-wheel chariot used in warfare seems to have emerged in Syria early in the second millennium BC, arriving in China some 500 years later. In Egypt, the river Nile had always provided an important means of transport for the materials of the pyramids, and wheeled transport emerged there around 1,700BC.

Of course, we can only speculate on the process by which the wheel was invented. Was it one person's Eureka? Or several people in parallel? Was there a long period of trial and error? Did tribal elders support or oppose its development? Was it primarily driven by military needs?

At home, we recently discovered the frame of a nineteenth-century farm cart in the barn we are converting – unfortunately without its wheels. In many ways our cart is not so very different from wheeled vehicles that existed five millennia ago. It had been stored in the roof of the barn, I guess in the 1930s, when motorised vehicles arrived on the farm. Perhaps it was prudently saved against the day when it might be needed once again. We will be keeping it!

The first breakthrough technology. Unless you know otherwise, of course…

Edison: Lighting the World

If you ask people about Thomas Edison, they nearly always come up with the light bulb. But in truth, that’s just the start of it.

In 1878 on a vacation with a group of scientist friends in the Rocky Mountains, he was struck by a thought of one of them, Professor George Barker, that he might look at the possibility of producing light electrically. Gas lighting was the standard at that time.

The existing electrical system, the arc light originally developed by Humphry Davy in 1808, was “too bright and too big”, wrote Edison. “What we wished for was little lights, and a distribution of them in people’s houses in a manner similar to gas.”

It is clear that from the start Edison envisioned the whole thing - from the generation of the electricity, through its distribution, to the lamps and fittings themselves, together with necessary fuse systems. So many parts of this system needed either to be invented from scratch, or to have adaptations made to existing inventions.

In developing the electric lamp, a key problem was that the early filaments tested were both too expensive and burned out far too quickly – in less than ten minutes. Over time they tested more than 7,500 materials. “Finally, I carbonized a strip of bamboo from a Japanese fan, and saw that I was on the right track,” wrote Edison. Now they had to establish which strain of bamboo would be best suited for the purpose. It was in the end in Japan that they found exactly what they were looking for. It gave 900 hours of continuous light.

In parallel, Edison built a glass-blowing plant at his labs at Menlo Park in New Jersey, installing the most advanced vacuum equipment. He calculated the size and cost of using copper mains, worked on an improved dynamo, driven by steam and producing a steady 110 volts, created a system for sending power from the generators, through feeder wires, to distribution points, and from there to individual streets and buildings.

Having got the whole system up and running, Edison first provided the complete lighting system for a newly-built ship, the SS Columbia. Then he had eight miles of underground electric mains laid at Menlo Park, lighting the houses in the village – together with lamp posts across the fields for streets that did not yet exist.

He invited the city council of Manhattan to come and observe this amazing phenomenon, and they were persuaded that this could all work. So Edison turned his attention to Manhattan, moving his headquarters there and laying eighteen miles of underground electrical mains. “I saw every box poured and every connection made on the whole job,” he said. “There was nobody else who could superintend it. I used to sleep nights on piles of pipes at the station.” On September 4th, 1882, the lights were switched on.

Edison was thirty five. The world was never to be the same again.