When Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone on February 14th, 1876, he beat competing telephone developer Elisha Gray to the patent office by just a few hours.
I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon for a long time. Ideas seem to arrive through multiple people at once, like they’re riding a current that flows just beneath the surface of consciousness. Bell and Gray. Darwin and Wallace (they came up with a theory of evolution around the same time). Newton and Leibniz (are said to have invented calculus concurrently).
It’s as if the idea itself wants to be born, and finds any available vessel.
To me, this speaks to the concept of a collective evolutionary timeline—where innovations don’t belong to individuals so much as they emerge when the “field” is ready. We like to think of ourselves as originators, but maybe we’re more like receivers or translators tuning into a shared frequency.
I’ve seen this play out in my own design and engineering work—developing something I thought was original, only to find others were arriving at nearly the same concept, in the same window of time. At first, it was frustrating. Now I take it as confirmation that the signal is strong.
This phenomenon also shifts the way I think about competition, ownership, and timing in our industry. If the idea has chosen now, then what matters most is how fully I can embody and express my version of it. Not to be the first, but to be the clearest.
Very interesting article. The phenomenon of simultaneous invention is fascinating and historically significant. Your conclusions fit in well with Ian Morris’ conclusion that pre-industrial societies tend to invent technologies and institutions in roughly in the same order.
I think you have a HUUUUGE blind spot in the field of intelligence, which makes you totally unqualified to comment on progress and innovation. I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me. The “great men” vs “tech determinism” can be resolved only if you actually know about how men do thinking. You only have 2 books in your summaries on psychology (and no intelligence category per se). One of them is Pinker (who sucks) and the other is Warne ( https://techratchet.com/2021/07/23/book-summary-in-the-know-35-myths-about-human-intelligence-by-russell-t-warne/ ).
Reading your comments you seem to be not fully aware of your blind spot. You say it’s far from the topic, which cannot be further from the truth. Intelligence is thinking is invention.
Second, you quote Warne who says that the study of intelligence is a great success (meaning outdated bullshit 19th century concepts of IQ and g).
Let me quote Hunt (in cambridge handbook on intelligence) on this:
I note in passing, however, the claim that interest in teaching about intelligence has been declining in recent years. More specifically, the claim is that teaching about intelligence has less of a presence in college curricula in the United States today than it once did. This is not universally seen as a good thing.
"The result was that faculty and administrators who did not themselves study intelligence came to believe that classes on intelligence were at worst an echo of the spurious racism/eugenics arguments of the 1930s and at best a can of worms that should not be opened to avoid trouble on campus. The can of worms argument was strengthened by the fact that, due to cognitive segregation, the personal experiences of most faculty and administrators led them to believe that intelligence was not a very important topic anyway." (p. 158)
Hunt (2014)
📄 Hunt, E. (2014). Teaching intelligence: Why, why it is hard and perhaps how to do it. Intelligence, 42, 156–165.
If one looks into this, one realises that the study, the teaching and development of intelligence are in crisis. This has dire consequences for innovation and human future, but few people have even a basic conceptual foundation to even think about this.
As a follow up it is interesting to examine what causes an invention to have impact and not just end up as a footnote. A twin study of simultaneous inventions.
Wouldn’t the numbers be significantly understated because the inventive laggards would be among the first to learn of success or patents and thus discontinue or even bury their work?
I spent 20 years studying progress when nobody else in the world seemed interested. When it became the topic du jour, I discontinued my work as I saw better minds were making progress on progress.
Yeah this is almost certainly a floor of the actual rate, as it misses people who saw someone else's work and didn't bother, and ones where there were multiple efforts just not well documented.
Just because a lot of people are working on the same idea does not mean it will be successfully invented regardless of any individual effort. The Wright Brothers were disbelieved or called frauds for the 5 years after their first flight, so other aviation pioneers kept developing as if the Wright Brothers didn't exist, and yet no one else during that time figured out what the Wright Brothers had discovered. No one else discovered the importance of banking into turns with a movable rudder, that the Smeaton coefficient was incorrect, and except for Chauviere no one else discovered that a propeller is a rotating wing. Even on that last one, Chauviere only developed his propellers for airships initially and had no intention of using them for heavier-than-air aircraft. In 1908, the best aviation pioneers in the world were still struggling to make a turn in flight that the Wright Brothers could effortlessly do in 1905.
There are many similar discoveries in history that were unnoticed, disbelieved, or forgotten about, so everyone else moved on as if they didn't exist, and yet they didn't get discovered by someone else as would be expected. They went years, sometimes decades or even centuries, before someone else successfully discovered the same thing.
A counterexample is the invention of the effect of lemon (lemon juice) to prevent scurvy.
From the excellent “How to invent everything: a survival guide for the stranded time traveler”
🍋 Until 1910 CE, all humans knew about vitamins was that certain foods gave you different perks:
around 1500 BCE Egyptians knew that eating liver helped you see in the dark without knowing what vitamin A was, and as early as 1400 CE Europeans with no knowledge of vitamin C picked up on how fresh food and citrus kept you from getting scurvy.
But sadly, in what can fairly be described as **“a comedy of errors, only not funny,”** Europeans—who generally like to think of themselves as being a pretty savvy lot—managed to forget and then rediscover this fact about vitamin C at least seven more times over the next five hundred years, including rediscoveries in 1593 CE, 1614 CE, 1707 CE, 1734 CE, 1747 CE, and 1794 CE, until the idea finally stuck in 1907.
How does this happen? Bad communication and bad science.
Humans are one of the few animals that can’t produce vitamin C on our own, but we’re very good at taking it from the foods we eat and storing it in our bodies, and can rely on those stores for about four weeks before scurvy symptoms start to develop. The catch is that vitamin C is easily destroyed by heat (i.e., cooking) and exposure to air, so processed or stored foods won’t have any. In the 1400s CE the fact that 🍋 citrus prevented scurvy was known to Italian sailors, and some Portuguese sailors went so far as to plant 🍊 orange trees on convenient islands along their way, but this knowledge was later lost.
Rediscoveries were then ignored, as they went against the prevailing knowledge that scurvy was a disease “caused by internal putrefaction brought on through faulty digestion.” 🍋 Lemons as a cure did briefly take hold in the British fleet around 1800 CE but was lost in 1867 CE when the fleet switched from lemons to the juice of Key limes. That juice has less vitamin C, and when it was exposed to air, light, and the copper pipes on ships, it was reduced to practically none. However, as faster steam engines had come into use over the foregoing half century, the time most sailors were at sea was reduced, which when combined with better nutrition on land led to fewer instances of scurvy and obscured the (non)effect the new lime juice was having. When sailors on longer expeditions again began developing scurvy, and with the old citrus cure apparently ineffectual, new theories took hold: perhaps scurvy was caused by food poisoning in poorly tinned meat, or even by poor hygiene and morale.
It was only when experiments were done on 🐹 guinea pigs in 1907 CE—a lucky choice of animal, since it’s one of the few nonhuman animals that can even get scurvy—that Europeans (again) discovered that fresh foods and citrus were a cure, and this time, it stuck. Scurvy has caused more death, created more misery, and had a greater effect on our history than any other disease that’s so easily avoided and so trivially, trivially cured.
Excellent point. I think there are two grand examples that any “theory of innovation” must explain in order to be considered — the atomically precise manufacturing of Drexler and intelligence augmentation of Engelbart. These are extremely complex problems that need a concerted systematic effort. Yes, there are small low-hanging fruits, but one can’t get full results through incremental innovation alone.
Aviation/planes is smaller scale, but your points illustrate well how it’s on the same complexity line.
There are inventions like those discussed here with broad practical impact. Also, in the doing of science, engineering, and even other projects there are often inventions where an individual produces an impactful idea that was not obvious in advance to other participants in the project. The project may be local but also might be the attempt across a world-wide community to understand a puzzle or solve a common problem. In a career of more than 40 years in science and engineering, I saw many instances where a solution was invented independently by multiple knowledgable individuals.
This often became a teaching moment, when a young person who invented such a solution found that someone else had too and immediately concluded that “their” idea had been stolen.
I have invented something significant (NeyroKod) only to find out that there is a guy in Germany who had a similar idea, created something that looks similar, left academia to pursue a startup project and even looks eerily like me. And there was a 25-year old project that didn’t go anywhere. Another project I am working on (AeroHES) had two inventors (kind of) who learned about each other. A project I supported (surrogate vision) had a single inventor who worked decades on this without commercial success. My favorite invention had a single inventor (Dean Kamen), but it was later refined by Shane Chen.
Two of technologies I am a bit involved with (nanoassembler/nanofactory and string transport) don’t have independent inventors (unlike something like vacuum trains, for instance).
I think it’s important to recognize that there is a trajectory (according to Altshuller, who was the only inventor/developer of a theory of invention, but who clearly wasn’t the only one trying) - from a narrow technical problem to a wide technical problem to a social problem. What is counted as significant invention is usually (not always) a wide technical problem with social implication that started as a narrow problem. Since technological invention is essentially a search in the solution/application space, there can be parallel instances of search running, but results (success) depends on both the starting situation and individual capability.
Melissa Schilling has described a model for breakthrough ideas which explains it. It has clear (to me) parallels with both Roger Martin’s work on strategy and Marcus Enqvist’s work in animal-human evolutionary transition in intelligence. But I suspect I am the only researcher who made this connection and who may do something with it (everyone else says “ai will do it for us”), because I am also aware of the limitations in the combinatorial innovation theory, the GUTS model, this amazing blog and various dynamics behind innovation (hype cycle, competition between sail ships and ironclad steamships, etc.).
So the conclusion would be “it’s complicated and one needs a better way to think/talk about models”, which was the starting point of my comment.
It's pretty obvious why this happens if you've ever tried to invent something: the usual outcome is someone else obviously thought of it. My friends and I regularly gave it a shot in grad school (pre search engine era) for mad scientist type stuff that seemed original, and we were always disappointed. Most ideas are ideas you had because of something you read. Other people read the same things.
Thank you for this piece. A well known phenomenon to patent lawyers and mathematicians, it somehow seems not widely appreciated by the general public.
The phenomenon has important implications for patent law. I'll post this link here to an excellent analysis of its implications and some potential reforms that might be justified in view of the prevalence of the phenomenon.
As a patent lawyer by profession who has lived in Silicon Valley most of his life, I have to say that I find the extreme views on either side of the debate about how strong patent rights should be to be overly simplistic. On the one hand we have those who say, "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything," and they are not wrong in that an idea that is never successfully built and sold is useless. Countless inventions are worthless for reasons that have nothing to do with the merit of their vision, per se, and come down to mundane but important practicalities such as the viability of supply chains. Patent owners who would arrogate large fractions of the gross margins of successfully commercialized products — and money damages theories are often based on gross revenue, not even gross profit — are a potential threat to the growth of the very markets that they purport to have created.
But on the other hand, I believe, there is a systematic undervaluation of the creative minds that are behind the work of invention. It's a different kind of work from the kind of work required to build and ship a product. It might *not* be as valuable or important in an absolute sense, but it is not without value. I tend to view inventors as akin to artists, many or most of whom will struggle to make ends meet in order to support their seemingly irresistible habits of combinatorial experimentation. They're not scientists and they're not business people. They're a different breed, and they're in danger of extinction in a world in which only those with credible prospects of making and selling products have access to capital.
Your Haber Bosch example is an excellent one albeit incomplete. While Ostvald failed to create an ammonia process, he did create an ammonia to nitric acid process which is still used today. In fact, I am pretty sure Ostvald's ammonia work was because his ammonia to nitric acid invention was only marginaly useful without an ammonia source.
However, Haber Bosch was only the most economically successful of many types of nitrogen fixing technology. Birkelande Eyde, Frank Caro, nitrophosphate, Norwegian saltpeter, Chilean saltpeter are just the most prominent of the many industrially used methods to produce nitrogen fertilizers, all before Haber Bosch won out.
And even then, it was likely World War 1 and the German cutoff from Chilean nitrates that forced Haber Bosch to the fore - due to the need for nitric acid to make explosives with. The end of that war left a massive industrial infrastructure with no market except agriculture...
In this context - the driver was clearly a market need: for nitrogen fertilizers and explosives.
I personally think it is very hard to envision invention without a driver - only in those rare instances like Tesla's work, can it really be said that truly unexpected invention occurs.
A friend of mine visited the US in the summer of 1983. I proudly demonstrated my Apple II. His response: "Fantastic, but it has to be connected to a network." He was a pioneer of Container Shipping and of Information based Ports.
It's not so much the device as how the device is integrated into existing structure which it can then transform.
Could you take a look at the invention of printing in Europe and Corea? I think that multiple
inventions are typical for the period after ca 1650 and that this has to do with the rise of scientific communities, journals etc. Before that it was a one man show (Gutenberg, Da Vinci …)
Another aspect of all this is the context that drives people to invent a certain thing. A great example: in 1870, the Great Horse Flu swept the world. It was an influenza pandemic that infect horses, but not people. It did not kill many horses, but it would incapacitate them for a few weeks. There were many cases where a city's industry would be shut down for a couple of months because the horses could not drag around the city's carts. About 1/3 of Boston burned down because the horse-drawn firefighter carts were not available.
Now, think about how many people worked on "horseless carriages" in the 1870s through the 1890s. It's right there in the name!
From what I have read, Bell's target market was people who were afraid of being buried alive, and wanted to have a handset installed in their grave, inside the casket. The idea was the switchboard would be in the cryptkeeper's office, with people waking up and hollering in panic.
I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon for a long time. Ideas seem to arrive through multiple people at once, like they’re riding a current that flows just beneath the surface of consciousness. Bell and Gray. Darwin and Wallace (they came up with a theory of evolution around the same time). Newton and Leibniz (are said to have invented calculus concurrently).
It’s as if the idea itself wants to be born, and finds any available vessel.
To me, this speaks to the concept of a collective evolutionary timeline—where innovations don’t belong to individuals so much as they emerge when the “field” is ready. We like to think of ourselves as originators, but maybe we’re more like receivers or translators tuning into a shared frequency.
I’ve seen this play out in my own design and engineering work—developing something I thought was original, only to find others were arriving at nearly the same concept, in the same window of time. At first, it was frustrating. Now I take it as confirmation that the signal is strong.
This phenomenon also shifts the way I think about competition, ownership, and timing in our industry. If the idea has chosen now, then what matters most is how fully I can embody and express my version of it. Not to be the first, but to be the clearest.
Great article!
Newton and Leibniz did invent it at the same time. There was 'something in the air'. They read the same journals, had the same friends, etc..
Same for Kilby and Noyce. Deffo not true for Gray and Bell.
Very interesting article. The phenomenon of simultaneous invention is fascinating and historically significant. Your conclusions fit in well with Ian Morris’ conclusion that pre-industrial societies tend to invent technologies and institutions in roughly in the same order.
https://techratchet.com/2020/02/12/book-summary-why-the-west-rules-for-now-the-patterns-of-history-by-ian-morris/
It seems like the Technological Tree presented in strategic video games like Civilization is an accurate representation of reality.
You might enjoy this: https://www.historicaltechtree.com/
I wonder if I should add a field to the database to keep track of multiple inventions...
Great work!
I think you have a HUUUUGE blind spot in the field of intelligence, which makes you totally unqualified to comment on progress and innovation. I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me. The “great men” vs “tech determinism” can be resolved only if you actually know about how men do thinking. You only have 2 books in your summaries on psychology (and no intelligence category per se). One of them is Pinker (who sucks) and the other is Warne ( https://techratchet.com/2021/07/23/book-summary-in-the-know-35-myths-about-human-intelligence-by-russell-t-warne/ ).
Reading your comments you seem to be not fully aware of your blind spot. You say it’s far from the topic, which cannot be further from the truth. Intelligence is thinking is invention.
Second, you quote Warne who says that the study of intelligence is a great success (meaning outdated bullshit 19th century concepts of IQ and g).
Let me quote Hunt (in cambridge handbook on intelligence) on this:
I note in passing, however, the claim that interest in teaching about intelligence has been declining in recent years. More specifically, the claim is that teaching about intelligence has less of a presence in college curricula in the United States today than it once did. This is not universally seen as a good thing.
"The result was that faculty and administrators who did not themselves study intelligence came to believe that classes on intelligence were at worst an echo of the spurious racism/eugenics arguments of the 1930s and at best a can of worms that should not be opened to avoid trouble on campus. The can of worms argument was strengthened by the fact that, due to cognitive segregation, the personal experiences of most faculty and administrators led them to believe that intelligence was not a very important topic anyway." (p. 158)
Hunt (2014)
📄 Hunt, E. (2014). Teaching intelligence: Why, why it is hard and perhaps how to do it. Intelligence, 42, 156–165.
http://www.iapsych.com/articles/hunt2013ip.pdf
If one looks into this, one realises that the study, the teaching and development of intelligence are in crisis. This has dire consequences for innovation and human future, but few people have even a basic conceptual foundation to even think about this.
Why are you commenting about my work at this site?
As a follow up it is interesting to examine what causes an invention to have impact and not just end up as a footnote. A twin study of simultaneous inventions.
Wouldn’t the numbers be significantly understated because the inventive laggards would be among the first to learn of success or patents and thus discontinue or even bury their work?
I spent 20 years studying progress when nobody else in the world seemed interested. When it became the topic du jour, I discontinued my work as I saw better minds were making progress on progress.
Yeah this is almost certainly a floor of the actual rate, as it misses people who saw someone else's work and didn't bother, and ones where there were multiple efforts just not well documented.
Just because a lot of people are working on the same idea does not mean it will be successfully invented regardless of any individual effort. The Wright Brothers were disbelieved or called frauds for the 5 years after their first flight, so other aviation pioneers kept developing as if the Wright Brothers didn't exist, and yet no one else during that time figured out what the Wright Brothers had discovered. No one else discovered the importance of banking into turns with a movable rudder, that the Smeaton coefficient was incorrect, and except for Chauviere no one else discovered that a propeller is a rotating wing. Even on that last one, Chauviere only developed his propellers for airships initially and had no intention of using them for heavier-than-air aircraft. In 1908, the best aviation pioneers in the world were still struggling to make a turn in flight that the Wright Brothers could effortlessly do in 1905.
There are many similar discoveries in history that were unnoticed, disbelieved, or forgotten about, so everyone else moved on as if they didn't exist, and yet they didn't get discovered by someone else as would be expected. They went years, sometimes decades or even centuries, before someone else successfully discovered the same thing.
A counterexample is the invention of the effect of lemon (lemon juice) to prevent scurvy.
From the excellent “How to invent everything: a survival guide for the stranded time traveler”
🍋 Until 1910 CE, all humans knew about vitamins was that certain foods gave you different perks:
around 1500 BCE Egyptians knew that eating liver helped you see in the dark without knowing what vitamin A was, and as early as 1400 CE Europeans with no knowledge of vitamin C picked up on how fresh food and citrus kept you from getting scurvy.
But sadly, in what can fairly be described as **“a comedy of errors, only not funny,”** Europeans—who generally like to think of themselves as being a pretty savvy lot—managed to forget and then rediscover this fact about vitamin C at least seven more times over the next five hundred years, including rediscoveries in 1593 CE, 1614 CE, 1707 CE, 1734 CE, 1747 CE, and 1794 CE, until the idea finally stuck in 1907.
How does this happen? Bad communication and bad science.
Humans are one of the few animals that can’t produce vitamin C on our own, but we’re very good at taking it from the foods we eat and storing it in our bodies, and can rely on those stores for about four weeks before scurvy symptoms start to develop. The catch is that vitamin C is easily destroyed by heat (i.e., cooking) and exposure to air, so processed or stored foods won’t have any. In the 1400s CE the fact that 🍋 citrus prevented scurvy was known to Italian sailors, and some Portuguese sailors went so far as to plant 🍊 orange trees on convenient islands along their way, but this knowledge was later lost.
Rediscoveries were then ignored, as they went against the prevailing knowledge that scurvy was a disease “caused by internal putrefaction brought on through faulty digestion.” 🍋 Lemons as a cure did briefly take hold in the British fleet around 1800 CE but was lost in 1867 CE when the fleet switched from lemons to the juice of Key limes. That juice has less vitamin C, and when it was exposed to air, light, and the copper pipes on ships, it was reduced to practically none. However, as faster steam engines had come into use over the foregoing half century, the time most sailors were at sea was reduced, which when combined with better nutrition on land led to fewer instances of scurvy and obscured the (non)effect the new lime juice was having. When sailors on longer expeditions again began developing scurvy, and with the old citrus cure apparently ineffectual, new theories took hold: perhaps scurvy was caused by food poisoning in poorly tinned meat, or even by poor hygiene and morale.
It was only when experiments were done on 🐹 guinea pigs in 1907 CE—a lucky choice of animal, since it’s one of the few nonhuman animals that can even get scurvy—that Europeans (again) discovered that fresh foods and citrus were a cure, and this time, it stuck. Scurvy has caused more death, created more misery, and had a greater effect on our history than any other disease that’s so easily avoided and so trivially, trivially cured.
in Russian:
https://sdu2020.blogspot.com/2019/07/blog-post_19.html
Excellent point. I think there are two grand examples that any “theory of innovation” must explain in order to be considered — the atomically precise manufacturing of Drexler and intelligence augmentation of Engelbart. These are extremely complex problems that need a concerted systematic effort. Yes, there are small low-hanging fruits, but one can’t get full results through incremental innovation alone.
Aviation/planes is smaller scale, but your points illustrate well how it’s on the same complexity line.
What an impressive amount of research went into this post!
There are inventions like those discussed here with broad practical impact. Also, in the doing of science, engineering, and even other projects there are often inventions where an individual produces an impactful idea that was not obvious in advance to other participants in the project. The project may be local but also might be the attempt across a world-wide community to understand a puzzle or solve a common problem. In a career of more than 40 years in science and engineering, I saw many instances where a solution was invented independently by multiple knowledgable individuals.
This often became a teaching moment, when a young person who invented such a solution found that someone else had too and immediately concluded that “their” idea had been stolen.
I have invented something significant (NeyroKod) only to find out that there is a guy in Germany who had a similar idea, created something that looks similar, left academia to pursue a startup project and even looks eerily like me. And there was a 25-year old project that didn’t go anywhere. Another project I am working on (AeroHES) had two inventors (kind of) who learned about each other. A project I supported (surrogate vision) had a single inventor who worked decades on this without commercial success. My favorite invention had a single inventor (Dean Kamen), but it was later refined by Shane Chen.
Two of technologies I am a bit involved with (nanoassembler/nanofactory and string transport) don’t have independent inventors (unlike something like vacuum trains, for instance).
I think it’s important to recognize that there is a trajectory (according to Altshuller, who was the only inventor/developer of a theory of invention, but who clearly wasn’t the only one trying) - from a narrow technical problem to a wide technical problem to a social problem. What is counted as significant invention is usually (not always) a wide technical problem with social implication that started as a narrow problem. Since technological invention is essentially a search in the solution/application space, there can be parallel instances of search running, but results (success) depends on both the starting situation and individual capability.
Melissa Schilling has described a model for breakthrough ideas which explains it. It has clear (to me) parallels with both Roger Martin’s work on strategy and Marcus Enqvist’s work in animal-human evolutionary transition in intelligence. But I suspect I am the only researcher who made this connection and who may do something with it (everyone else says “ai will do it for us”), because I am also aware of the limitations in the combinatorial innovation theory, the GUTS model, this amazing blog and various dynamics behind innovation (hype cycle, competition between sail ships and ironclad steamships, etc.).
So the conclusion would be “it’s complicated and one needs a better way to think/talk about models”, which was the starting point of my comment.
It's pretty obvious why this happens if you've ever tried to invent something: the usual outcome is someone else obviously thought of it. My friends and I regularly gave it a shot in grad school (pre search engine era) for mad scientist type stuff that seemed original, and we were always disappointed. Most ideas are ideas you had because of something you read. Other people read the same things.
On the "opinion" side, do you think that 50-60% is high or low? How does this fit into the "Great Man" theory of invention?
Thank you for this piece. A well known phenomenon to patent lawyers and mathematicians, it somehow seems not widely appreciated by the general public.
The phenomenon has important implications for patent law. I'll post this link here to an excellent analysis of its implications and some potential reforms that might be justified in view of the prevalence of the phenomenon.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1856610
As a patent lawyer by profession who has lived in Silicon Valley most of his life, I have to say that I find the extreme views on either side of the debate about how strong patent rights should be to be overly simplistic. On the one hand we have those who say, "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything," and they are not wrong in that an idea that is never successfully built and sold is useless. Countless inventions are worthless for reasons that have nothing to do with the merit of their vision, per se, and come down to mundane but important practicalities such as the viability of supply chains. Patent owners who would arrogate large fractions of the gross margins of successfully commercialized products — and money damages theories are often based on gross revenue, not even gross profit — are a potential threat to the growth of the very markets that they purport to have created.
But on the other hand, I believe, there is a systematic undervaluation of the creative minds that are behind the work of invention. It's a different kind of work from the kind of work required to build and ship a product. It might *not* be as valuable or important in an absolute sense, but it is not without value. I tend to view inventors as akin to artists, many or most of whom will struggle to make ends meet in order to support their seemingly irresistible habits of combinatorial experimentation. They're not scientists and they're not business people. They're a different breed, and they're in danger of extinction in a world in which only those with credible prospects of making and selling products have access to capital.
A very nice writeup.
Your Haber Bosch example is an excellent one albeit incomplete. While Ostvald failed to create an ammonia process, he did create an ammonia to nitric acid process which is still used today. In fact, I am pretty sure Ostvald's ammonia work was because his ammonia to nitric acid invention was only marginaly useful without an ammonia source.
However, Haber Bosch was only the most economically successful of many types of nitrogen fixing technology. Birkelande Eyde, Frank Caro, nitrophosphate, Norwegian saltpeter, Chilean saltpeter are just the most prominent of the many industrially used methods to produce nitrogen fertilizers, all before Haber Bosch won out.
And even then, it was likely World War 1 and the German cutoff from Chilean nitrates that forced Haber Bosch to the fore - due to the need for nitric acid to make explosives with. The end of that war left a massive industrial infrastructure with no market except agriculture...
In this context - the driver was clearly a market need: for nitrogen fertilizers and explosives.
I personally think it is very hard to envision invention without a driver - only in those rare instances like Tesla's work, can it really be said that truly unexpected invention occurs.
Nikola, not Musk, I presume ?
yep
A friend of mine visited the US in the summer of 1983. I proudly demonstrated my Apple II. His response: "Fantastic, but it has to be connected to a network." He was a pioneer of Container Shipping and of Information based Ports.
It's not so much the device as how the device is integrated into existing structure which it can then transform.
Could you take a look at the invention of printing in Europe and Corea? I think that multiple
inventions are typical for the period after ca 1650 and that this has to do with the rise of scientific communities, journals etc. Before that it was a one man show (Gutenberg, Da Vinci …)
Another aspect of all this is the context that drives people to invent a certain thing. A great example: in 1870, the Great Horse Flu swept the world. It was an influenza pandemic that infect horses, but not people. It did not kill many horses, but it would incapacitate them for a few weeks. There were many cases where a city's industry would be shut down for a couple of months because the horses could not drag around the city's carts. About 1/3 of Boston burned down because the horse-drawn firefighter carts were not available.
Now, think about how many people worked on "horseless carriages" in the 1870s through the 1890s. It's right there in the name!
From what I have read, Bell's target market was people who were afraid of being buried alive, and wanted to have a handset installed in their grave, inside the casket. The idea was the switchboard would be in the cryptkeeper's office, with people waking up and hollering in panic.
Really excellent, thank you.