Posts Tagged ‘innovation’
“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…
Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…
In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…
… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.
Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.
I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…
[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]
We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.
Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.
The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.
There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”
Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.
Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.
And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.
Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.
For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).
We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…
… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.
In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).
There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.
My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.
On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz
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As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.
“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going”*…
From Colin Gorrie, how our world also shapes our language– and in the example he uses, also our sense of duty…
Debt is old. It’s older than writing. The first writing system, Sumerian cuneiform, evolved out of marks used for accounting. From the beginning, writing was used to track who had what, and, crucially, who owed what to whom.
The influence of debt also extends to language more generally. In many languages, including English, the experiences of owing and being owed provided the blueprint for more abstract notions of duty, necessity, and obligation.
Words meaning ‘to owe’ developed into abstract expressions of obligation so often that it’s useful to have a name for the phenomenon. I call it the owe-to-ought pipeline, named after one of the clearest cases of this development. The word ought is, in fact, nothing but the old past tense form of owe.
This pipeline shows us something about how language changes and develops over time. First, it shows how easily words can slide from one meaning to another, although that’ll be no surprise to anyone who has watched the development of slang over a few decades.
The more important lesson owe-to-ought teaches us has to do with where grammar comes from. Wait, don’t run away! This isn’t a grammar lesson. What I want to show you is how languages create grammar — a collection of abstract meanings such as plurality and verb tense — out of the concrete realities of our shared human experience.
And what human experience is more common than debt?
This is the story of three families of words: owe, should, and the word debt itself. Understand these three families, and you’ll understand how the English language built its way of expressing duty, necessity, and obligation — not to mention guilt and sin — out of the raw materials of accounting…
A case study in how our vocabulary (and our sense of obligation) evolved: “How debt shaped the way we speak,” from @colingorrie.bsky.social.
* Rita Mae Brown
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As we acknowledge our antecedents, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Rose Marie Reid was granted one of her several patents, US2535018A. A swimwear designer and manufacturer, Reid has already been the first swimsuit designer to use inner brassieres, tummy-tuck panels, stay-down legs, elastic banding, brief skirts, and foundation garments in swimwear, and the first designer to introduce dress sizes in swimwear, designing swimwear for multiple sizes and types of bodies, rather than just producing one standard size. This patent was, in its way, even more revolutionary– it was for a one-piece bathing suit made of elastic fabric “embodying a novel construction for causing it to snugly fit the body of a wearer in a flattering manner [that would] shape and support portions of the body of the wearer in areas of the bust and abdomen in a flattering manner without discomfort or impedance to free movements of the body.” The elastic fabric and elastic securing bands were designed to enable the garment to be put on without having buttoned openings which would “detract from the appearance of the garment.”
Reid assigned her patent to her company and enjoyed huge sales success, in part due to her impact in Hollywood and the motion picture industry. Famous screen actresses (e,g, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, and Rhonda Fleming) wore her swimsuits. And her suits also appeared in several California beach party films from the late 1950s and the early 1960s, including Gidget, Muscle Beach Party, and Where the Boys Are.
“No one prospers without rendering benefit to others”*…
Revisiting a topic we last considered about six years ago: the modern zipper was invented (or, at least, first patented) in 1913. But, as Michael Knispel explains, story of the zipper-as-we-know-it began in Japan in 1934…
Here’s a test you can do right now. Look down at your jacket. Your jeans. Your bag. Find a zipper—any zipper—and check the pull tab. Three letters. YKK.
Try another. Your backpack. Your hoodie. Your tent, if you’ve got one nearby. YKK.
It’s everywhere. And once you start noticing, you can’t stop. It’s like discovering a secret language written into the fabric of modern life.
Those three letters stand for Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha—Yoshida Manufacturing Corporation. And they represent one of the most successful, least-known companies in the world.
YKK produces roughly half of all zippers made globally. Seven billion zippers a year. In some markets—Japan, for instance—their share approaches 90%. If you’ve ever zipped anything, there’s a better-than-even chance it was theirs.
But here’s what fascinates me: they didn’t get there through aggressive expansion or undercutting competitors. They got there by being better. By obsessing over a component most people never think about. By treating the humble zipper not as a commodity, but as a craft.
And after ninety years of that obsession, they’re not resting. They’re constantly evolving—pushing the zipper into territory it’s never been before.
Let me tell you the story…
[And tell it, he does: the company’s remarkable history, turning the to a survey of recent innovations…]
… For most of YKK’s history, innovation meant incremental improvement. Better corrosion resistance. Smoother sliders. More durable coils.
But in the past few years, something’s shifted.
YKK isn’t just refining the zipper anymore. They’re rethinking it entirely.
After ninety years of mastering the fundamentals, they’re finally asking: what else could a zipper be?..
[Knispel recouns recent developments– the “AiryString” (tapeless) zipper, the self-propelled zipper– concluding with “The Revived Collection”…]
… Here’s the most important innovation—and it’s not a single product. It’s a philosophy.
The YKK Revived Collection is a series of repair-focused components designed to keep zippers functional and maximize a product’s lifecycle. The goal is simple but radical: the zipper should never be the reason a product is thrown away.
YKK has developed three main components in the Revived series, each targeting a specific failure mode. Together, they represent a fundamental shift in how YKK thinks about their products—not just as components to be manufactured and sold, but as systems to be maintained and repaired.
Traditional center-front zippers—the kind you find on jackets and hoodies—have a problem. When the slider breaks or the pull tab snaps off, you’re stuck. The standard repair requires cutting off the top stop, that metal or plastic piece that keeps the slider from flying off the end, and replacing the entire slider. It’s destructive, time-consuming, and often requires specialized tools.
The Revived Top Stop changes that. It looks like a standard top stop, but with a zigzag groove pattern cut through it. That channel allows you to orient the slider through the stop and derail it, removing it without cutting anything…
[Knispel explains the ingenious fixes for regular zippers, pocket and accessory zippers, and bag zippers. Then he draws the wisdom they embody…]
… Here’s what ties the Revived Collection together: YKK is building repair infrastructure.
They’re not just selling replacement parts. They’re designing zippers to be repairable from the start, and they’re working with brands, warranty centers, third-party repair shops, and even consumers to make those repairs accessible.
“We’re targeting this for warranty and quality centers, third-party repair centers, potentially in-store retail repairs, and eventually consumer repairs,” says John Holiday, YKK’s Senior Product Development Manager. “We want to make sure the fastener or the zipper is not the reason a product is no longer in use or why it needs to be warrantied.”
That’s a shift. Traditionally, YKK sells zippers to manufacturers in bulk—cut zippers or chain-and-slider assemblies. The Revived components are sold as standalone parts, which means YKK is rethinking its distribution model to make replacement parts available outside traditional manufacturing channels.
I started this piece with a test: look at your zippers. Three letters. YKK.
Now you know why they’re there. Not because of aggressive marketing or locking out competitors. Because a man in 1934 Tokyo decided that if you make something genuinely better—more reliable, more consistent, more thoughtful—success follows naturally.
Ninety years later, YKK still operates on that philosophy. They’re still privately held. Still vertically integrated. Still obsessing over a component most people never think about.
And it looks like they’re not done. They’re constantly evolving…
“The Company That Zips the World | YKK’s Ninety-Year Obsession,” from @carryology.bsky.social.
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As we zip it, we might that on this date– Halloween– in 2005, Gary Estrada, met his goal to visit at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Haunted Mansion 999 times. Estrada had begun riding in January of that year and finished on Halloween in just ten months. Why 999 times? Because that is how many “happy haunts” are said to live there.
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'”*…
Like today’s large language models, some 16th-century humanists (like Erasmus) had techniques to automate writing. But as Hannah Katznelson explains, others (like Rabelais) called foul…
The Renaissance scholar and educator Erasmus of Rotterdam opens his polemical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) by describing the utterly dysfunctional writing process of a character named Nosoponus. The Ciceronianis structured as a dialogue, withtwo mature writers, Bulephorus and Hypologus, trying to talk Nosoponus out of his paralysing obsession with stylistic perfection. Nosoponus explains that it would take him weeks of fruitless writing and rewriting to produce a casual letter in which he asks a friend to return some borrowed books. He says that writing requires such intense concentration that he can do it only at night, when no one else is awake to distract him, and even then his perfectionism is so intense that a single sentence becomes a full night’s work. Nosoponus goes over what he’s written again and again, but remains so dissatisfied with the quality of his language that eventually he just gives up.
Nosoponus’s problem might resonate. Who has not spent too long going over the wording of a simple email, at some point or another? Today there is an easy fix: we have large language models (LLMs) to write our letters for us, helpfully proffering suggestions as to what we might say, and how we might phrase it. When I input Nosoponus’s intended request into GPT-4, it generated the following almost instantly:
Hey [Friend’s Name],
Hope you’re doing well! I just realised I never got those books back that I lent you a while ago. No rush, but whenever you get a chance, I’d love to get them back. Let me know what works for you! Thanks!
Nosoponus
But there was a solution in the 16th century, too. A humanist education on the Erasmian model could train its students to produce letters of any length, on any topic – quickly, easily and eloquently. The French humanist François Rabelais, a contemporary of Erasmus, appears to have understood these compositional techniques as automating the creating of text in a way that, retrospectively, looks a lot like how LLMs function. If we want to understand LLMs, and what they are and aren’t capable of, we can look at earlier versions of the same technology – like Erasmian humanism. We can also read authors like Rabelais, who is already thinking about automatic text-generation along these lines, as someone who appreciates the effectiveness of Erasmian generative technology, but at the same time sees it as vitiating the social force of language and, ultimately, ruining language as a tool for moral and political life…
[Katznelson recounts Erasmus’s efforts, Rabelais’s response, and unpacks the important differences between our own authentic speech language created to speak for us and their practical and moral implications…]
What lessons from the 16th century can tell us about AI and LLMs: “Methodical banality,” from @aeon.co.
* Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
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As we honor authenticity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that three U.S. patents were issued to Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Labs for “recording and reproducing speech and other sounds.” The Graphophone, was an improved (and the first practical) version of the Edison phonograph (from 1877), and became the foundation on which the speech recording (e.g., dictaphone) and recorded music (and spoken word) industries began to grow.
“The street finds its own uses for things”*…
Your correspondent is off again, this time across borders and for a little longer that my last few absences; regauler service should resume around April 19…
The estimable Matt Webb on an approach to thnking more comprhensively and creatively about the ultimate impacts of and given innovation…
… I recently learnt about twig, which is a biotech startup manufacturing industrial chemicals using custom bacteria.
The two examples they cite: palm oil which is used in lipstick but displaces rainforests; isoprene which is used to make tyres but comes from fossil fuels.
What if instead you could engineer a strain of bacteria to bulk produce these chemicals sustainably?
The capabilities are present in the metabolic pathways. So that’s what twig does. At scale, is the promise.
- I hadn’t realised this kind of biotech had gotten to commercialisation! And in London too. Good stuff.
- What Are The Civilian Applications?
What Are The Civilian Applications? is of course a Culture ship name, a GSV (General Systems Vehicle) from The Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.
It is also an oblique strategy we deployed regularly in design workshops back in the day at BERG, introduced (I think? Gang please correct me if I’m wrong) by long-time design leader and friend Matt Jones. That’s his project history. Go have a read.
Let me unpack.
Oblique Strategies (a history) by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, 1975: a deck of approx 100 cards, each of which is a prompt to bump you out of a creative hole.
For example:
Honor thy error as a hidden intentionOr:
Discard an axiomAnd so on.
In product invention, which is kinda what we did at BERG and kinda what I do now, it’s handy to carry your own toolkit of prompts. So I adopted What Are The Civilian Applications? into my personal deck of oblique strategies.
Therefore.
What would do you with engineered bacteria that can make palm oil or whatever, if it were cheap enough to play with, if the future were sufficiently distributed, if we all had it at home?
Like, it’s a good question to ask. What would civilians do with engineered bacteria?
Tomato soup.
Instead of buying tomato soup at the store, I’d have a little starter living in a jar. A bioreactor all of my own, and I’d fill it with intelligently designed bacteria that eat slop and excrete ersatz Heinz tomato soup.
I’m not 100% sure what “slop” is in this context. The food I mean. Maybe the bacteria just get energy from sunlight, fix carbon from the air, and I drop in a handful of vitamin gummies or fish flakes every Monday?
A second oblique strategy adopted into my personal deck over the years:
“
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam,” by Frederik Pohl. As previously discussed re a national drone network.Let’s say I can go to the store and buy a can of Perpetual Heinz, or however they brand it. A can with a sunroof on the top and a tap on the side that I keep in the garden and I can juice it for soup once a week for a year, or until the bacterial population diverges enough that I’m at risk of brewing neurotoxins or psychedelics or strange and wonderful new flavours or something.
Heinz is not going to like that, economically. They’ll require me to enrol in some kind of printer and printer ink business model where I have to subscribe to the special vitamin pills to keep (a) the soup colony alive and (b) their shareholders happy.
Which will end up being pricey, like the monthly cash we all pay out to mutually incompatible streaming services. Demand will arise for black market FMCGs on the dark web. Jars of illegal Infinite Coca Cola that only requires the cheap generic slop and it tastes just the same.
So I love to play with these strategies and imagine what the world might be like. Each step makes a sort of sense yet you end up somewhere fantastical – that’s the journey I want to take you on in text, too. Then the game, in product invention, is to take those second order possibilities and bring them back to today. (I’m giving away all my secrets now.)
But I prefer cosier, more everyday futures:
Grandma’s secret cake recipe, passed down generation to generation, could be literally passed down: a flat slab of beige ooze kept in a battered pan, DNA-spliced and perfected by guided evolution by her own deft and ancient hands, a roiling wet mass of engineered microbes that slowly scabs over with delicious sponge cake, a delectable crust to be sliced once a week and enjoyed still warm with cream and spoons of pirated jam.
A small jar of precious, proprietary cake ooze handed down parent to child, parent to child, together with a rack filled with the other family starter recipes, a special coming of age moment, a ceremony…
Thinking broadly and deeply about the implications of innovations: “What Are The Civilian Applications?” from @genmon.fyi.
(Image above: source)
* William Gibson
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As we ponder the particulars of progress, we might spare a thought for Francis Bacon– the English Renaissance philosopher, lawyer, linguist, composer, mathematician, geometer, musician, poet, painter, astronomer, classicist, philosopher, historian, theologian, architect, father of modern empirical science (The Baconian– aka The Scientific– Method), and patron of modern democracy, whom some allege was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I of England (and other’s, the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays). He died on this date in 1561… after (about a month earlier) he had stuffed a dressed chicken with snow to see how long the flesh could be preserved by the extreme cold. He caught a cold and perished from its complications.
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