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The history of innovation isn’t a straight line,
but a squiggly, winding path. In How
We Got To Now, my book and PBS documentary series, I
highlight some of the creative mistakes that helped shape our world.
By Steven
Johnson
Like most history, the narratives of innovation
tend to be written by — and about — the victors. The traditional timeline of
historic breakthroughs will almost surely include the Wright Brothers and the
invention of the airplane in 1903 and Tim Berners-Lee and the advent of the
World Wide Web in 1989. But the history of invention is filled with just as
many heroic mistakes and creative failures. Here are a few of my favorite
missteps and lessons:
Invention: The Phonautograph.
Inventor’s
mistake: A glaring blind spot in their field of vision. In
the early 1850s, the French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented
the first device capable of recording sound waves, more than 20 years before
Edison invented the phonograph. So why did Edison get all the fame? Because
Scott failed to include one key feature in his device: playback. There
was no way to listen to the audio that had been recorded; you could just look
at the sound waves etched on a sheet of paper. And the amazing thing about
Scott’s phonautograph is that he wasn’t even trying to incorporate playback
into his device; the idea simply never even occurred to him. Just a few years
ago, a team of sound historians named
David Giovannoni, Patrick Feaster, Meagan Hennessey and Richard Martin
discovered a trove of Scott’s phonautographs in the Academy of Sciences in
Paris, including one from April 1860 that had been marvelously preserved.
Giovannoni and his colleagues scanned the faint, erratic lines and converted
the image into a digital waveform. They played it back through computer
speakers. At first, they thought they were hearing a woman’s voice, singing the
French folk song “Au clair de la lune,” but later they realized they had been
playing back the audio at double its recorded speed. When they dropped it down
to the right tempo, a man’s voice appeared out of the crackle and hiss: Martinville himself
warbling from the grave.
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An 1859
model of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph.
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Invention: The Phonograph.
Inventor’s
mistake: Creating a device that changes the world, but for completely
different reasons than they themselves imagined. Thomas
Edison managed to complete Scott’s project and add audio playback with the
invention of the phonograph in 1877. But he almost entirely misunderstood how
the device would be used. In a famous essay published in the North American
Review in 1878, he outlined a dozen different uses. “The main utility of the
phonograph,” he argued, would be “the purpose of letter-writing and other forms
of dictation.” In other words, people would dictate letters onto wax cylinders,
and send them to friends or business colleagues through the post — a more
literal form of voicemail. He also imagined the phonograph being used for audio
books, talking clocks, and recording the dying words of family members. He did
briefly mention what would become the dominant function for his invention —
listening to music — but most of the other 11 uses he imagined turned out to be
almost entirely irrelevant.
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Patent
drawing for Edison’s phonograph, ca. 1880.
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Invention: The Audion.
Inventor’s mistake:
Failing to understand the basic mechanics of their invention. In
the first years of the 20th century, American inventor Lee de Forest began a
series of experiments with a spark-gap transmitter, a device that created a
bright, monotone pulse of electromagnetic energy that could be detected by
antennae miles away. It was perfect for sending Morse code. One night, while de
Forest was triggering a series of pulses, he noticed something strange
happening across the room: every time he created a spark, the flame in his gas
lamp turned white and increased in size. De Forest thought that the
electromagnetic pulse was intensifying the flame. That flickering gaslight
planted a seed in his head: maybe gas could be used to amplify weak radio
reception, making it strong enough to carry the more information-rich signal of
spoken words, or even music. The device that de Forest built based on this
insight — the Audion — would prove to be a spectacular financial flop. Accused
of defrauding his investors, de Forest sold the patent to Bell Labs for a small
sum to cover his mounting legal bills. When the researchers at Bell Labs took
over, they discovered something extraordinary: from the very beginning, de
Forest had been flat-out wrong about what he was inventing. The increase in the
gas flame had nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation; it was caused by
sound waves from the loud noise of the spark. Over the next decade, engineers
at Bell Labs and elsewhere modified his basic three-electrode design, removing
the gas from the bulb so that it sealed a perfect vacuum, transforming it into
both a transmitter and a receiver. The result was the vacuum tube, the first
great breakthrough of the electronics revolution.
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Patent
drawing for de Forest’s Audion, ca. 1907.
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Invention: Ice Shipping.
Inventor’s
mistake: Failing to anticipate the response of the market. The
19th-century entrepreneur Frederic Tudor had a vision as a young man of
shipping blocks of ice from frozen New England lakes to tropical areas, where
they could be sold at a staggering markup. Tudor hit upon a technique to keep
the ice blocks from melting during the voyage — in initial test shipments from
Boston to Martinique, the ice survived the journey in remarkably good shape.
But there was a problem that Tudor had never contemplated: the residents of
Martinique had no interest in his exotic frozen bounty. They simply had no idea
what to do with it. In 1800, the overwhelming majority of people living in
equatorial climates would have never experienced anything truly cold. The idea
of frozen water would have been as fanciful to them as an iPhone. Tudor assumed
that the novelty of ice would be a point in his favor that his blocks would
“out-do” all the other luxuries. Instead, the ice received blank stares. He
posted handbills around town that included instructions on how to carry and
preserve the ice, but found few takers. He did make some ice cream, impressing
a few locals who believed the delicacy couldn’t be created so close to the
equator, but the trip was ultimately a failure. In his diary, he estimated that
he had lost nearly $4,000. Eventually, Tudor persuaded customers that there was
value in ice; before his death, he assembled a vast shipping networking that
delivered ice from New England to Rio and Bombay. For a stretch of the
19th-century, ice was the second biggest American export, behind cotton. And
before long, inspired by Tudor’s success, other entrepreneurs set out to create
artificial cold through mechanical means.
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Ice
Harvesting in Massachusetts, early 1850s.
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Learn about many more
creative failures in Johnson’s book, How
We Got To Now, and in his PBS
series of the same name. A
companion site with news about modern innovations can be found at HowWeGetToNext.com.
Originally published in Ideas.Ted.com
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