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"The creators of the TikTok Watchband, left, and the Elevation Dock have raised far more money on Kickstarter than they initially sought." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Kickstarter is a "crowd-funding" site. It's a place for creative people to get enough start-up money to get their projects off the ground. The categories include music, film, art, design, food, publishing and technology. The projects seeking support might be recording a CD, putting on a play, producing a short film or developing a cool new tech product.

Suppose you're the one who needs money. You describe your project with a video, a description and a target dollar amount. Listing your project is free.

If the citizens of the Web pledge enough money to meet your target by the deadline you set, then you get your money and (p. B7) you proceed with your project. At that point, Kickstarter takes 5 percent, and you pay 3 to 5 percent to Amazon.com's credit card service.

If you don't raise the money by the deadline, the deal is off. Your contributors keep their money, and Kickstarter takes nothing.

But here's the part I had trouble understanding: These are not investments. If you make a pledge, you'll never see your money again, even if the play, movie or gadget becomes a huge hit. You do get some little memento of your financial involvement -- a T-shirt or a CD, for example, or a chance to preorder the gadget being developed -- but nothing else tangible. Not even a tax deduction.

Furthermore, you have no guarantee that the project will even see the light of day. All kinds of things happen between inspiration and production. People lose interest, get married, move away, have trouble lining up a factory. The whole thing dies, and it was all for nothing.

So why, I kept wondering, does anybody participate? Who would give money for so little in return?

. . .

I started reading about . . . projects. The one that seemed to be drumming up the most interest lately is called the Elevation Dock. It's just a charging stand for the iPhone, but wow, what a stand. It's exquisitely milled from solid, Applesque aluminum. You don't have to take your iPhone (or iPod Touch) out of its case to insert it into this dock. And the dock is solid enough that you can yank the phone out of it with one hand. The dock stays on the desk.

. . .

Other projects seeking your support: Jaja, a drawing stylus for iPad and Android tablets that's pressure-sensitive (makes fatter lines when you bear down harder); LED Side Glow Hats (baseball caps with illuminated brims for working in dark places); Eye3 (an inexpensive flying drone for aerial photography); and so on.

Not all of them will reach their financing goals (only 44 percent do). Even fewer will wind up on store shelves.

But in dark economic times, Kickstarter offers aspirational voyeurism: you can read about the big dreams of the little people. And you can give the worthy artists a small financial vote of confidence -- and enjoy the ride with them.

For the full story, see:

DAVID POGUE. "STATE OF THE ART; Embracing the Mothers of Invention." The New York Times (Thurs., January 26, 2012): B1 & B7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article was dated January 25, 2012.)

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The Replicator 3-D printer. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Back in 2005 technology "visionary" Neil Gershenfeld predicted the soon to be seen day when personal fabricators would follow the path of computers which progressed from mainframes costing millions to mini-computers costing hundreds of thousands to personal computers costing a couple of thousand. Well apparently that day is here.

Now we will see if the implications are as far-reaching as Gershenfeld predicted.

(p. B7) By now you may have heard about the Replicator, a $1,750 3-D printer made by the Brooklyn start-up MakerBot, due next month. If not, the significance of the Replicator is that it is the first 3-D printer to break the $2,000 barrier. Here's more about what the Replicator can and can't do.

Q. What does a 3-D printer use?
A: Spools of coiled A.B.S. (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) plastic that costs about $45 each per kilogram. This is the same materials that is used to make Lego blocks. It is strong, safe and comes in many colors. One spool can make about 176 chess pieces.

For the full story, see:

WARREN BUCKLEITNER. "Gadgetwise; A 3-D Printer for Under $2,000: What Can It Do?" The New York Times (Thurs., January 26, 2012): B7.

(Note: bold in original.)

(Note: the online version of the article was dated January 23, 2012, and had the title "3-D Printing for the Masses: MakerBot's Replicator." The online version differs in several places from the print version. Where they differ, I quote the print version.)

The Gershenfeld book discussed above is:

Gershenfeld, Neil. Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

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Norman Krim holding some early transistors. He first put transistors into hearing aids. Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B11) Mr. Krim, who made several breakthroughs in a long career with the Raytheon Company and who had an early hand in the growth of the RadioShack chain, did not invent the transistor. (Three scientists did, in 1947, at Bell Laboratories.)

But he saw the device's potential and persuaded his company to begin manufacturing it on a mass scale, particularly for use in miniaturized hearing aids that he had designed. Like the old tube, a transistor amplifies audio signals.

As Time magazine wrote in 1953: "This little device, a single speck of germanium, is smaller than a paper clip and works perfectly at one-tenth the power needed by the smallest vacuum tube. Today, much of Raytheon's transistor output goes to America's hearing aid industry." (Germanium, a relatively rare metal, was the predecessor to silicon in transistors.)

. . .

Thousands of hearing-disabled people benefited from Mr. Krim's initial use of the transistor in compact hearing aids. But not every transistor Raytheon made was suitable for them, he found.

"When transistors were first being manufactured by Raytheon on a commercial scale, there was a batch called CK722s that were too noisy for use in hearing aids," said Harry Goldstein, an editor at IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

So Mr. Krim contacted editors at magazines like Popular Science and Radio Electronics and began marketing the CK722s to hobbyists.

"The result was that a whole generation of aspiring engineers -- kids, really, working in their garages and basements -- got to make all kinds of electronic projects," Mr. Goldstein said, among them transistor radios, guitar amplifiers, code oscillators, Geiger counters and metal detectors. "A lot of them went on to become engineers."

Mr. Ward called Mr. Krim "the father of the CK722."

For the full obituary, see:

DENNIS HEVESI. "Norman Krim, 98, Dies; Championed the Transistor." The New York Times (Weds, December 21, 2011): B11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated December 20, 2011 and has the title "Norman Krim, Who Championed the Transistor, Dies at 98.")

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"M. Kenneth Oshman" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. 19) M. Kenneth Oshman, who helped create one of the early successful technology start-up firms in Silicon Valley, one that embodied the informal management style that came to set the Valley apart from corporate America, died on Saturday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 71.

. . .

In the 1970s and '80s, Rolm was the best example of an emerging Silicon Valley management style that effectively broke down the barrier between work and play. Setting out to recruit the most talented technical minds, Rolm became known as a great place to work, so much so that it was nicknamed "G.P.W."

Early on as chief executive, Mr. Oshman took funds normally used for company Christmas parties and used them to help construct a company recreational center, consisting of swimming pools, racquetball courts, exercise rooms and other amenities to attract new employees and underline the image that Rolm was a fun place to work.

But there was a tradeoff, said Keith Raffel, who left a staff position on Capitol Hill to become an assistant to Mr. Oshman at Rolm before starting his own company.

"The quid pro quo was you would be driven and work really hard," he said.

With a gentle, understated style, Mr. Oshman stood apart from other well-known leaders in Silicon Valley, many of whom were seen as capricious and even tyrannical. He was a mentor to a generation of Silicon Valley technologists and able to inspire a kind of loyalty in his employees not frequently seen in high-tech industries.

For the full obituary, see:

JOHN MARKOFF. "M. Kenneth Oshman, Silicon Valley Mentor, Dies at 71." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., August 10, 2011): A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated August 10, 2011 and has the title "M. Kenneth Oshman, Who Brought Fun to Silicon Valley, Dies at 71.")

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"At Citrix Systems, Berkley Reynolds, left, uses his Alienware laptop, and Alan Meridian, his MacBook Pro, paid for with stipends." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO -- Throughout the information age, the corporate I.T. department has stood at the chokepoint of office technology with a firm hand on what equipment and software employees use in the workplace.

They are now in retreat. Employees are bringing in the technology they use at home and demanding the I.T. department accommodate them. The I.T. department often complies.

Some companies have even surrendered to what is being called the consumerization of I.T. At Kraft Foods, the I.T. department's involvement in choosing technology for employees is limited to handing out a stipend. Employees use the money to buy whatever laptop they want from Best Buy, Amazon.com or the local Apple store.

"We heard from people saying, 'How come I have better equipment at home?' " said Mike Cunningham, chief technology officer for Kraft Foods. "We said, hey, we can address that."

Encouraging employees to buy their own laptops, or bring their mobile phones and iPads from home, is gaining traction in the workplace. A survey published on Thursday by Forrester Research found that 48 percent of information workers buy smartphones for work without considering what their I.T. department supports. By being more flexible, companies are hoping that workers will be more comfortable with their devices and therefore more productive.

"Bring your own device" policies, as they are called, are also shifting the balance of power among electronics makers. Manufacturers good at selling to consumers are increasingly gaining the upper hand, while those focused on bulk corporate sales are slipping.

. . .

(p. B6) Letting workers bring their iPhones and iPads to work can . . . save companies money. In some cases, employees pay for equipment themselves and seek tech help from store staff rather than their company's I.T. department. "You can basically outsource your I.T. department to Apple," said Ben Reitzes, an analyst with Barclays Capital.

A similar B.Y.O.D. program at Citrix Systems, a software maker that also helps its clients implement such programs, saves the company about 20 percent on each laptop over three years. Of the 1,000 or so employees in Citrix's program, 46 percent have bought Mac computers, according to Paul Martine, Citrix's chief information officer. "That was a little bit of a surprise."

For the full story, see:

VERNE G. KOPYTOFF. "More Offices Let Workers Choose Their Own Devices." The New York Times (Fri., September 23, 2011): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 22, 2011.)

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"Fairchild Semiconductor's founders in 1988. Victor Grinich (left), Jay Last, Jean Hoerni, Julius Blank, Eugene Kleiner, Sheldon Roberts, Robert N. Noyce (seated, left,) and Gordon E. Moore." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B14) Julius Blank, a mechanical engineer who helped start a computer chip company in the 1950s that became a prototype for high-tech start-ups and a training ground for a generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, died on Saturday in Palo Alto, Calif.. He was 86.

. . .

Mr. Blank and his partners -- who included Robert N. Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, the future founders of the Intel Corporation -- began their venture as scientist-entrepreneurs in the wake of a mutiny of sorts against their common previous employer, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist William B. Shockley.

Dr. Shockley, . . . , had recruited the eight scientists from around the country in 1956 to work in his own semiconductor lab in nearby Mountain View, Calif.

The group left en masse the next year because of what its members described as Dr. Shockley's authoritarian management style and their differences with him over his scientific approach. Dr. Shockley called it a betrayal.

Fairchild's founders came to be branded in the lore of Silicon Valley as the "Traitorous Eight." How that happened remains something of a mystery.

. . .

When he left Fairchild in 1969 -- he was the last of the eight founding partners to depart -- Mr. Blank became an investor and consultant to start-up companies and helped found the technology firm Xicor, which was sold in 2004 for $529 million to Intersil.

His former partners, in addition to founding Intel, had started Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor. Mr. Kleiner had founded a venture capital firm that became an early investor in hundreds of technology companies, including Amazon.com, Google and AOL. Still, the greatest pleasure of his working life, Mr. Blank said in a 2008 interview for the archives of the Computer History Museum, a project in Silicon Valley, came with the uncertainty and camaraderie of "the early years, building something from nothing."

Mr. Blank described a moment in the first days of Fairchild, just before production began in its factory built from nothing, when the ducts and plumbing and air-conditioning were set, and the new crystal growers and one-of-a-kind chip making machines were ready to be installed.

"I remember the day we finally got the floor tile laid," he said. "And that night, Noyce and the rest of the guys came out and got barefoot and rolled their pants up and were swabbing the floors. I wish I had a picture of that."

For the full obituary, see:

PAUL VITELLO. "Julius Blank, 86, Dies; Built First Chip Maker." The New York Times (Fri., September 23, 2011): B14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated September 22, 2011 and had the title "Julius Blank, Who Built First Chip Maker, Dies at 86.")

May 2011 photo of Julius Blank. Source of photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited above.

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(p. 448) Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century - socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb. Mr Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval - a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old - and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anaesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawnmowers.

It is almost impossible to conceive just how much radical day-to-day change people were exposed to in the nineteenth century, particularly in the second half. Even something as elemental as the weekend was brand new.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak uses the voice feature on his new Apple iPhone 4S at the Apple Store in Los Gatos, Calif., on Friday. Wozniak, who created Apple with Steve Jobs in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, waited 20 hours in line to be the first customer at the store to buy the new iPhone." Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article cited below.

What a classy and wonderfully symbolic way to pay tribute to his friend and the values they shared.

Source of photo and caption:

AP. "Even Wozniak stood in line for new iPhone." Omaha World-Herald (Saturday October 15, 2011): 9A.

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From archive of the Joy Cardin show:

Wednesday 6/8/2011 7:00 AM

Joy Cardin - 110608B After seven, Joy Cardin asks her guests a weather-related Big Question: "Do we rely too much on air-conditioning?"

Guests:
- Stan Cox, Senior Scientist, The Land Institute. Author, "Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World" Author's blog: http://losingourcool.wordpress.com
- Arthur Diamond, Professor of Economics, University of Nebraska at Omaha. Author, conference paper, "Keeping Our Cool: In Defense of Air Conditioning" (http://artdiamond.com/)

Link to streaming version of debate between Art Diamond and Stan Cox (author Losing Our Cool) on whether air conditioning is good (Diamond) or bad (Cox). Broadcast on Joy Cardin Show on the Wisconsin Public Radio network on Weds., June 8, 2011, from about 7:00 - 7:50 AM: http://wpr.org/webcasting/play-wma.cfm?FileName=jca110608b.wma&pagename=/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm

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Bill Bryson tells how much we learned from the remains of a man from the neolithic age, who has been called Ötzi:

(p. 377) His equipment employed eighteen different types of wood - a remarkable variety. The most surprising of all his tools was the axe. It was copper-bladed and of a type known as a Remedello axe, after a site in Italy where they were first found. But Ötzi's axe was hundreds of years older than the oldest Remedello axe. 'It was,' in the words of one observer, 'as if the tomb of a medieval warrior had yielded a modern rifle.' The axe changed the timeframe for the copper age in Europe by no less than a thousand years.

But the real revelation and excitement were the clothes. Before Ötzi we had no idea - or, to be more precise, nothing but ideas - of how stone age people dressed. Such materials as survived existed only as fragments. Here was a complete outfit and it was full of surprises. His clothes were made from the skins and furs of an impressive range of animals - red deer, bear, chamois, goat and cattle. He also had with him a woven grass rectangle that was three feet long. This might have been a kind of rain cape, but it might equally have been a sleeping mat. Again, nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined.

Ötzi wore fur leggings held up with leather strips attached to a waist strap that made them look uncannily - almost comically - like the kind of nylon stockings and garter sets that Hollywood pin-ups wore in the Second World War. Nobody had remotely foreseen such a get-up. He wore a loincloth of goatskin and a hat made from the fur of a brown bear - probably a kind of hunting trophy. It would have been very warm and covetably stylish. The rest of his outfit was mostly made from the skin and fur of red deer. Hardly any came from domesticated animals, the opposite of what was expected.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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Source of book image: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/intheplex.jpg

On C-SPAN's book TV I saw the last part of an interesting and entertaining interview with Steven Levy that was originally recorded at the Computer History Museum on April 6, 2011. Levy is the author of of In the Plex which I have not read, but which is now on my to-read list.

At the end of the interview, Levy read a passage from his book about how Larry Page is obsessed with reducing latency, which is a technical term for how long we have to wait for something to happen on a computer.

Isn't it wonderful that Larry Page is on a crusade to save us from wasted time?

Book discussed above:

Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

(Note: "latency" appears on the following pages of Steven Levy's book: 93, 184, 185, 186, 187, 207, 262, and 398.)

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Steve Jobs died yesterday (Weds., October 5, 2011).

Jobs was an innovator of my favorite kind, what I call a "project entrepreneur." He showed us what excitement and progress is possible if we preserve the institutions that allow entrepreneurial capitalism to exist.

When he was recruiting John Sculley to leave Pepsi and join Apple, Jobs asked him: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" (p. 90).

Steve Jobs wanted to change the world. He got the job done.

Source of quote of Jobs' question to Sculley:

Sculley, John, and John A. Byrne. Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple. paperback ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1988.

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(p. A1) Now that the last space shuttle has landed back on Earth, a new generation of space entrepreneurs would like to whip up excitement about the prospect of returning to the Moon.

. . .

(p. A3) "It's probably the biggest wealth creation opportunity in modern history," said Barney Pell, a former NASA computer scientist turned entrepreneur and now a co-founder of Moon Express. While Moon Express might initially make money by sending small payloads, the big fortune would come from bringing back platinum and other rare metals, Dr. Pell said.

"Long term, the market is massive, no doubt," he said. "This is not a question of if. It's a question of who and when. We hope it's us and soon."

Like the aviation prizes that jump-started airplane technology a century ago, the Google Lunar X Prize is meant to rally technologists and entrepreneurs. It is administered by the X Prize Foundation, which handed out $10 million in 2004 to the first private team to build a spacecraft that could carry people 60 miles above the Earth's surface. (The winner, SpaceShipOne, was built by the aerospace designer Burt Rutan with backing from Paul Allen, the software magnate.)

For the full story, see:

KENNETH CHANG. "In a Private Race to the Moon, Flights of Fancy Are in the Air." The New York Times (Fri., July 22, 2011): A1 & A3.

(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 21, 2011 and has the title "Race to the Moon Heats Up for Private Firms.")

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"ALL ABOARD: The Wasp magazine in 1881 lampooned railroad moguls as having regulators in the palms of their hands." Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) Mr. Klein has written thoroughly researched and scrupulously objective biographies of the previously much maligned Jay Gould and E.H. Harriman, remaking their public images by presenting them in full. Now he has published the third and final volume of his magisterial history of the Union Pacific railroad, taking the company from 1969 to the present day.

Union Pacific--the only one of the transcontinentals to remain in business under its original name--is now a flourishing business. Thanks to a series of mergers, it is one of the largest railroads in the world, with more than 37,000 miles of track across most of the American West. Thanks to its investment in new technology, it is also among the most efficient.

In 1969, though, the future of American railroading was in doubt as the industry struggled against competition from airplanes, automobiles and trucks--all of which were in effect heavily subsidized through the government's support for airports and the Interstate Highway System.

Another major factor in the decline of the railroads had been the stultifying hand of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC had come into existence in the late 19th century to limit the often high-handed ways of the railroads as they wrestled with the difficult economics of an industry that has very high fixed costs. ( . . . .) But the ICC soon evolved into a cartel mechanism that discouraged innovation and wrapped the railroad industry in a cocoon of stultifying rules.

Mr. Klein notes that in 1975 he wrote a gloomy article about the sad state of an industry with a colorful past: "Unlike many other historical romances," he wrote back then, "the ending did not promise to be a happy one."

Fortunately, a deregulation movement that began under the Carter administration--yes, the Carter administration--limited the power of the ICC and then abolished it altogether. As Mr. Klein shows in the well-written "Union Pacific," the reduction of government interference left capitalism to work its magic and produce--with the help of dedicated and skillful management--the modern, efficient and profitable railroad that is the Union Pacific.

For the full review, see:

JOHN STEELE GORDON. "Tracks Across America." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JUNE 11, 2011): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed in the part of the review quoted above:

Klein, Maury. Union Pacific: The Reconfiguration: America's Greatest Railroad from 1969 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.

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(p. A3) A European study involving nearly 1,000 participants has found no link between cellular-phone use and brain tumors in children and adolescents, a group that may be particularly sensitive to phone emissions.

The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was prompted by concerns that the brains of younger users may be more vulnerable to adverse health effects--such as cancer--from cellphones.

For the full story, see:

GAUTAM NAIK. "Study Sees No Cellphone-Cancer Ties." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., July 28, 2011): A3.

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"Maj. Arthur Murray in 1954." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) "I begin to feel weightless, and I'm flying so fast my instruments can't keep up -- they show what happened two miles ago. I'm climbing so steeply I can't see the ground, and I feel confused. I have a sense of falling and I want to grab something for support."

It was May 28, 1954, and Maj. Arthur Murray, test pilot, would wrestle for the next 15 terrifying seconds with a rocket plane racing over 1,400 miles an hour and spinning wildly, supersonically out of control. In the turmoil, he would fly higher than any human being had ever been, 90,440 feet over the earth.

Finally, Major Murray's plane, a Bell X-1A, sank back into heavier air, and he had time to look at the dark blue sky and dazzling sunlight. He became the first human to see the curvature of the earth. At the time, he was called America's first space pilot.

Arthur Murray, known as Kit, died on July 25, in a nursing home in the town of West in Texas, his family said. He was 92. He requested that his ashes be scattered over the Mojave Desert, where some of his fellow test pilots crashed and died.

Tom Wolfe marveled at the test pilots of Edwards Air Force Base in his 1979 book "The Right Stuff" exclaiming, "My God -- to be part of Edwards in the late forties and early fifties!"

For the full obituary, see:

DOUGLAS MARTIN. "Arthur Murray, Test Pilot, Is Dead at 92." The New York Times (Fri., August 5, 2011): A18.

(Note: the online version of the story is dated August 4, 2011.)

The wonderful Tom Wolfe book mentioned is:

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1979.

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(p. 133) Something of the prevailing ambivalence was demonstrated by Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, who went to a costume ball dressed as an electric light to celebrate the installation of electricity in her Fifth Avenue home in New York, but then had the whole system taken out when it was suspected of being the source of a small fire. Others detected more insidious threats. One authority named S. F. Murphy identified a whole host of electrically induced maladies - eyestrain, headaches, general unhealthiness and possibly even 'the premature exhaustion of life'. One architect was certain electric light caused freckles.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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Source of image: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 3) Two years ago, the technology blogger John Gruber presented a talk, "The Auteur Theory of Design," at the Macworld Expo. Mr. Gruber suggested how filmmaking could be a helpful model in guiding creative collaboration in other realms, like software.

The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. "What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions," Mr. Gruber said. "And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art."

"The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge," Mr. Gruber pointed out.

Two years after he outlined his theory, it is still a touchstone in design circles for discussing Apple and its rivals.

Garry Tan, designer in residence and a venture partner at Y Combinator, an investor in start-ups, says: "Steve Jobs is not always right--MobileMe would be an example. But we do know that all major design decisions have to pass his muster. That is what an auteur does."

Mr. Jobs has acquired a reputation as a great designer, Mr. Tan says, not because he personally makes the designs but because "he's got the eye." He has also hired classically trained designers like Jonathan Ive. "Design excellence also attracts design talent," Mr. Tan explains.

For the full story, see:

RANDALL STROSS. "DIGITAL DOMAIN; The Auteur vs. the Committee." The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., July 24, 2011): 3.

(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 23, 2011.)

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(p. 131) Where Edison truly excelled was as an organizer of systems. The invention of the light bulb was a wondrous thing but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into. Edison and his tireless workers had to design and build the entire system from scratch, from power stations to cheap and reliable wiring, to lampstands and switches. Within months Edison had set up no fewer than 334 small electrical plants all over the world; (p. 132) within a year or so his plants were powering thirteen thousand light bulbs. Cannily he put them in places where they would be sure to make maximum impact: on the New York Stock Exchange, in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, La Scala opera house in Milan, the dining room of the House of Commons in London. Swan, meanwhile, was still doing much of his manufacturing in his own home. He didn't, in short, have a lot of vision. Indeed, he didn't even file for a patent. Edison took out patents everywhere, including in Britain in November 1879, and so secured his preeminence.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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In the passage quoted below, Bill Bryson is strongly critical of Thomas Edison. It's been many years since I last read a full biography of Edison, but my impression is that Bryson is not being fair to Edison.

I like Bryson and I like Edison, so I was bothered enough to dig out the online "Notes" that Bryson posted to go with his book. On the passage critical of Edison, he cites p. 83 of Linda Simon's Dark Light book.

It turns out that Simon is a literature professor whose book is mainly about the early fears that superstitious people had about electricity. Many of her sources are literary. The book is a long way from a focused, balanced biography of Edison.

On page 83, she makes a casual and unjustifiedly snide comment on Morgan, Vanderbilt, and especially Gould, and then criticizes Edison by associating him with them. She also criticizes Edison because others sometimes challenged his patents. (Just because lawsuits were brought against Edison, does not imply his patent claims were unsound---anyone can file a lawsuit who is willing to hire a lawyer.)

The "bribe" is apparently that Edison gave some reporters stock, or "suppers or songfests" who had reported favorably. To judge such claims, we would like more evidence and more context. (Today, many institutions hire former reporters to do public relations work. Universities often provide free meals to those whose favor they seek; even book publishers send out free books in the hope that they will be reviewed favorably. Do we count all of these as "bribes"? Are all "rewards" ipso facto "bribes"?)

My view is that if we are going to strongly malign the character of one who brought us so much good (Edison), we should do so based on stronger evidence than the brief casual opinions of Linda Simon.

On my "to do" list is to read a biography or two on Edison. When I do so, I will comment again on this issue.

(p. 130) By 1877, when he started his quest to make a commercially successful light, Edison was already well on his way to becoming known as 'the Wizard of Menlo Park'. Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn't scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favourable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had 'a vacuum where his conscience ought to be'. But he was enterprising and hard-working and a peerless organizer.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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(p. 130) . . . in the early 1870s Hermann Sprengel, a German chemist working in London, invented a device that came to be called the Sprengel mercury pump. This was the crucial invention that actually made household illumination possible. Unfortunately, only one person in history thought Hermann Sprengel deserved to be better known: Hermann Sprengel. Sprengel's pump could reduce the amount of air in a glass chamber to one-millionth of its normal volume, which would enable a filament to glow for hundreds of hours. All that was necessary now was to find a suitable material for the filament.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. 123) Gas was particularly popular in America and Britain. By 1850 it was available in most large cities in both countries. Gas remained, however, a (p. 124) middle-class indulgence. The poor couldn't afford it and the rich tended to disdain it, partly because of the cost and disruption of installing it and partly because of the damage it did to paintings and precious fabrics, and partly because when you have servants to do everything for you already there isn't the same urgency to invest in further conveniences. The ironic upshot, as Mark Girouard has noted, is that not only middle-class homes but institutions like lunatic asylums and prisons tended to be better lit - and, come to that, better warmed - long before England's stateliest homes were.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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"David Deutsch." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. 16) David Deutsch's "Beginning of Infinity" is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It's about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.

. . .

The thought to which Deutsch's conversation most often returns is that the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.

. . .

(p. 17) Deutsch's enthusiasm for the scientific and technological transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it a radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and cultural relativism, and even procedural democracy -- and this is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these pieties, with spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-­minded and cowardly and boring. The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or life-­support system, he writes, "is quite perverse. . . . To the extent that we are on a 'spaceship,' we have never merely been its passengers, nor (as is often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials." But it's hard to get to the end of this book without feeling that Deutsch is too little moved by actual contemporary human suffering. What moves him is the grand Darwinian competition among ideas. What he adores, what he is convinced contains the salvation of the world, is, in every sense of the word, The Market.

For the full review, see:

DAVID ALBERT. "Explaining it All: David Deutsch Offers Views on Everything from Subatomic Particles to the Shaping of the Universe Itself." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., August 14, 2011): 16-17.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis in Deutsch quote in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review is dated August 12, 2011 and has the title "Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe.")

Book under review:

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. New York: Viking Adult, 2011.

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(p. 112) We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle - a good candle - provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt light bulb. Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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Source of book image: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/covers/all/5/5/9780670022755H.jpg

Horgan is well-known for writing a pessimistic book about the future of science. For him to write such a positive review of a book that reaches the opposite conclusion, is impressive (both about him and the book he is reviewing).

From Horgan's review and the reviews on Amazon as of 8/7/11, I view the Deutsch book as potentially important and profound. (I will write more when I have read it.)

(p. 17) . . . Mr. Deutsch knocks my 1996 book, "The End of Science," for proposing that the glory days of science--especially pure science, the effort to map out and understand reality--may be over. Mr. Deutsch equates my thesis with "dogmatism, stagnation and tyranny," all of which, for the record, I oppose. But he makes the case for infinite progress with such passion, imagination and quirky brilliance that I couldn't help enjoying his argument. More often than not I found myself agreeing with him--or at least hoping that he is right.

. . .

If we acknowledge our imperfections, Mr. Deutsch observes, then, paradoxically, there is no problem that we cannot tackle. Death, for instance. Or the apparent incompatibility between the two pillars of modern physics, quantum theory and general relativity. Or global warming, which Mr. Deutsch believes we can overcome through innovation rather than drastic cutbacks in consumption. He gores the sacred cow of "sustainability": Societies are healthiest, he declares, not when they achieve equilibrium but when they are rapidly evolving.

For the full review, see:

JOHN HORGAN. "BOOKSHELF; To Err Is Progress; How to foster the growth of scientific knowledge: accept that it is limited no matter how definitive it may seem." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., JULY 20, 2011): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Source information on book under review:

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. New York: Viking Adult, 2011.

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(p. 74) In 1859 an American named John Landis Mason solved the challenge that the Frenchman François (or Nicolas) Appert had not quite mastered the better part of a century before. Mason patented the threaded glass jar with a metal screw-on lid. This provided a perfect seal and made it possible to preserve all kinds of foods that would previously spoil. The Mason jar became a huge hit everywhere, though Mason himself scarcely benefited from it. He sold the rights in it for a modest sum, then turned his attention to other inventions - a folding life raft, a case for keeping cigars fresh, a selfdraining soap dish - that he assumed would make him rich, but his other inventions not only weren't successful, they weren't even very good. As one after another failed, Mason withdrew into a semidemented poverty. He died alone and forgotten in a New York City tenement house in 1902.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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Source of the "murder" quote is from:

J.D. Miles, reporter. "Elderly Woman Dies From Heat After A/C Stolen." Dallas, CBS 11 News, August 5, 2011.

(Note: this report is the source of the "murder" quote which was stated by Mrs. Grissom's neighbor Caroline Ware.)

(Note: Another version of the report with the "murder" quote has the title: "Texas Heat Wave." CBS 11 News, August 5, 2011.)

Another report on the incident is:

Source:

Ed Lavandera, reporter. "Woman Dies After Air Conditioner Stolen." CNN American Morning, August 5, 2011.

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(p. 59) . . . , not everyone was happy with the loss of open hearths. Many people missed the drifting smoke and were convinced they had been healthier when kept "well kippered in wood smoke," as one observer put it. As late as 1577, a William Harrison insisted that in the days of open fires our heads did never ake." Smoke in the roof space discouraged nesting birds and was believed to strengthen timbers. Above all, people complained that they weren't nearly as warm as before, which was true. Because fireplaces were so inefficient, they were constantly enlarged. Some became so enormous that they were built with benches in them, letting people sit inside the fireplace, almost the only place in the house where they could be really warm.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"The profile page of Mark Zuckerberg on Google+, a service created to compete with Facebook." Source of caption and image: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Any guesses as to who is the most popular person on Google+, the company's new social networking service? Ashton Kutcher, perhaps? Or Lady Gaga?

Actually, that title is currently held by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook -- the very service that Google+ was meant to challenge.

As of Tuesday evening, Mr. Zuckerberg had nearly 35,000 people following his updates on the service, more than anyone else in a broad survey of Google+ profiles by Social Statistics, an outside service. His fan base exceeds that of Larry Page, one of the founders of Google and its recently appointed chief executive, who had only 24,000 people following him.

Google+ is less than a week old and is still not yet widely available to the public. But access to the service, which lets people share photos, links, status updates and video chats with groups of friends, is already in high demand among early adopters who are eager to play with its (p. B8) features. That includes Mr. Zuckerberg, who apparently signed up to keep tabs on his new adversary.

For the full story, see:

JENNA WORTHAM. "Zuckerberg Finds Fans on Google+." The New York Times (Weds., July 5, 2011): B1 & B8.

(Note: the online version of the story is dated July 6, 2011.)

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"Volunteers have built a wireless Internet around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, from off-the-shelf electronics and ordinary materials." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The main point of the passages quoted below is to illustrate how, with the right technology, we can dance around tyrants in order to enable human freedom.

(But as a minor aside, note in the large, top-of-front-page photo above, that Apple once again is visibly the instrument of human betterment---somewhere, before turning to his next challenge, one imagines a fleeting smile on the face of entrepreneur Steve Jobs.)

(p. 1) The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy "shadow" Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype "Internet in a suitcase."

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

For the full story, see:

JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF. "U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors." The New York Times, First Section (Sun., June 12, 2011): 1 & 8.

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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Marc Andreessen. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 13) After hearing a story about Foursquare's co-founder, Dennis Crowley, walking into a press event in athletic wear and eating a banana, I developed a theory that bubbles might be predicted by fashion: when tech founders can't be bothered to appear businesslike, the power has shifted too much in their favor.

Believe it or not, this goes deep into the interior mentality of the engineer, which is very truth-oriented. When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are. So engineers not only don't care about the surface appearance, but they view attempts to kind of be fake on the surface as fundamentally dishonest.

That reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg's criticism of ''The Social Network.'' He said that ''filmmakers can't get their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.''

Aaron Sorkin was completely unable to understand the actual psychology of Mark or of Facebook. He can't conceive of a world where social status or getting laid or, for that matter, doing drugs, is not the most important thing.

For the full interview, see:

ANDREW GOLDMAN. "TALK; Bubble? What Bubble? Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley's biggest venture capitalists, has no fear." The New York Times Magazine (Sun., July 10, 2011): 13.

(Note: bold in original, indicating comments/questions by interviewer Andrew Goldman.)

(Note: the online version of the interview is dated July 7, 2011 (sic).)

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) At the tail end of the 1990s dot-com boom, Douglas Edwards took a gamble: He left his marketing job at an old-media company, taking a $25,000 salary cut to start work at a small, little-known Internet concern in its second year of operation. That his new employer was losing money and burning through venture capital went without saying. But unlike the footloose 20-somethings who usually populated Silicon Valley start-ups, Mr. Edwards had little margin to bet wrong; he was 41, with a mortgage, three children and a worried wife. He hoped he could get his old job back if the company ran out of money.

. . .

Mr. Edwards came to his job as a subscriber to the conventional wisdom. In an early presentation to cofounder Larry Page and others, Mr. Edwards unwisely declared that only marketing, not technology, could set Google apart. "In a world where all search engines are equal," he asserted, "we'll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from our competitors."

The room became quiet. Then Mr. Page spoke up. "If we can't win on quality," he said, "we shouldn't win at all."

For the full review, see:

DAVID A. PRICE. "BOOKSHELF; How Google Got Going; Branding, shmanding, a marketer was told. 'If we can't win on quality,' Larry Page said, 'we shouldn't win at all.'" The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 12, 2011): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book being reviewed:

Edwards, Douglas. I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2011.

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(p. 36) . . . if people didn't settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea--or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don't know if any of them are right. According to the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place. One theory, evidently seriously suggested (Jane Jacobs cites It In her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities), was that "fortuitous showers" of cosmic rays caused mutations in grasses that made them suddenly attractive as a food source. The short answer is that no one knows why agriculture developed as it did.

Making food out of plants is hard work. The conversion of wheat, rice, corn, millet, barley, and other grasses into staple foodstuffs is one of the great achievements of human history, but also one of the more unexpected ones.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)

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"Former colleagues describe Larry Page, center, as strong-willed and sometimes impolite. He is said to admire Apple CEO Steve Jobs." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Larry Page's PageRank algorithm was the basis for Google Inc.'s search engine. As Google's new chief executive, Mr. Page will face the challenge of leading a company that has grown far beyond that algorithm and must compete with agile Web upstarts such as Facebook Inc. and Groupon Inc.

On Friday, a day after being named to replace outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt in April, Mr. Page gave little hint of how he planned to tackle such challenges. The 38-year-old Google co-founder didn't immediately address employees in an all-hands note or meeting, said a person familiar with the matter, though the company has a weekly Friday meeting that Mr. Page was expected to attend.

But several of Mr. Page's former colleagues describe him as having similarities to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whom Mr. Page has said he admired. Both men are strong willed, sometimes impolite and push engineers hard to execute their ambitious projects.

Some former colleagues said Mr. Page is likely to try to pierce through the sometimes "paralyzing" bureaucracy that product managers and engineers have faced when trying to launch some Google products in recent years.

On Thursday, Messrs. Page and Schmidt said some top-level decision-making had gotten slower and the management change would improve that. Also, the company has said it is trying to allow more projects to operate like start-ups inside of Google in order to speed up innovation.

For the full story, see:

AMIR EFRATI and SCOTT MORRISON. "TECHNOLOGY; Chief Seeks More Agile Google; As CEO, Larry Page Must Pierce Bureaucracy, Compete With Nimble Upstarts." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., January 22, 2011): B1 & B4.

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(p. 22) . . . when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder. Nearly all the American machines did things that the world earnestly wished machines to do--stamp out nails, cut stone, mold candles--but with a neatness, dispatch, and tireless reliability that left other nations blinking. Elias Howe's sewing machine dazzled the ladies and held out the impossible promise that one of the great drudge pastimes of domestic life could actually be made exciting and fun. Cyrus McCormick displayed a reaper that could do the work of forty men--a claim so improbably bold that almost no one believed it until the reaper (p. 23) was taken out to a farm in the Home Counties and shown to do all that it promised it could. Most exciting of all was Samuel Colt's repeat-action revolver, which was not only marvelously lethal but made from inter-changeable parts, a method of manufacture so distinctive that it became known as "the American system." Only one homegrown creation could match these virtuoso qualities of novelty, utility, and machine-age precision--Paxton's great hall itself, and that was to disappear when the show was over. For many Europeans this was the first unsettling hint that those tobacco-chewing rustics across the water were quietly creating the next industrial colossus--a transformation so improbable that most wouldn't believe it even as It was happening.

The most popular feature at the Great Exhibition was not an exhibition at all, but rather the elegant "retiring rooms," where visitors could relieve themselves in comfort, an offer taken up with gratitude and enthusiasm by 827,000 people--11,000 of them on a single day. Public facilities in London were woefully lacking in 1851. At the British Museum, up to 30,000 daily visitors had to share just two outside privies. At the Crystal Palace the toilets actually flushed, enchanting visitors so much that It started a vogue for installing flushing toilets at home-- . . .

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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"Steve Jobs's presence at the unveiling seemed to reassure investors." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Innovative entrepreneurs can have several different motives. I think Steve Jobs is mainly a "project entrepreneur"---his main motive is to envision a project and to accomplish it.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO -- Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, interrupted his medical leave on Wednesday to introduce the company's much-anticipated new iPad, a thinner, faster and lighter version of its popular tablet computer that will sell at the same prices as the original models.

Mr. Jobs alluded to his leave but neither commented on his health nor said whether he planned to return to the company in the near future.

"We've been working on this product for a while and I just didn't want to miss today," he said.

For the full story, see:

MIGUEL HELFT. "Jobs Returns to Introduce a New iPad." The New York Times (Thurs., March 3, 2011): B1 & B6.

(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated March 2, 2011 and has the title "Jobs Returns to Introduce a New iPad.")

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"Steve Jobs, after returning to Apple in 1999. Would Apple be what it is today had he never left?" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 5) Suppose Mr. Jobs had not left in 1985. Suppose he had convinced the Apple board to oust his nemesis, John Sculley, then chief executive and president. Under Mr. Jobs's uninterrupted direction, would Apple have arrived at the pinnacle it has reached today, but 12 years earlier?

It's hard to see how anything like that would have transpired. The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader -- precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company profitable.

"I am convinced that he would not have been as successful after his return at Apple if he hadn't gone through his wilderness experience at Next," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a technology consulting company.

. . .

Mr. Jobs's lieutenants tried to warn him away from certain disaster, but he was not receptive. In 1992-93, seven of nine Next vice presidents were shown the door or left on their own.

In this period, Mr. Jobs did not do much delegating. Almost every aspect of the machine -- including the finish on interior screws -- was his domain. The interior furnishings of Next's offices, a stunning design showplace, were Mr. Jobs's concern, too. While the company's strategy begged to be re-examined, Mr. Jobs attended to other matters. I spoke with many current and former Next employees for my 1993 book, "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing." According to one of them, while a delegation of visiting Businessland executives waited on the sidewalk, Mr. Jobs spent 20 minutes directing the landscaping crew on the exact placement of the sprinkler heads.

Next's computer hardware and software were filled with innovations that drew a small, but devoted, following. Mr. Jobs had created the first easy-to-use Unix machine, but the mainstream marketplace shrugged. He had already helped bring to market an easy-to-use machine, the Mac, so the Next couldn't differentiate itself enough -- and certainly not at the price the company charged.

. . .

And he had always been able to attract great talent. What he hadn't learned before returning to Apple, however, was the necessity of retaining it. He has now done so. One of the unremarked aspects of Apple's recent story is the stability of the executive team -- no curb filled with dumped managers.

Kevin Compton, who was a senior executive at Businessland during the Next years, described Mr. Jobs after returning to Apple: "He's the same Steve in his passion for excellence, but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision." Mr. Jobs had learned from Next not to try to do everything himself, Mr. Compton said.

For the full commentary, see:

RANDALL STROSS. "DIGITAL DOMAIN; What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness." The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., October 3, 2010): 5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated October 2, 2010.)

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(p. 11) Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to make, and really hard to make well, which is why for so much of its history it was a luxury Item. Happily, two recent technological breakthroughs had changed that. First, the French invented plate glass--so called because the molten glass was spread across tables known as plates. This allowed for the first time the creation of really large panes of glass, which made shop windows possible. Plate glass, however, had to be cooled for ten days after being rolled out, which meant that each table was unproductively occupied most of the time, and then each sheet required a lot of grinding and polishing. This naturally made it expensive. In 1838, a cheaper refinement was developed--sheet glass. This had most of the virtues of plate glass, but ¡t cooled faster and needed less polishing, and so could be made much more cheaply. Suddenly glass of a good size could be produced economically In limitless volumes.

Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes: the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing that (p. 12) people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of man period
buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like windows. (It Is sometimes rather a shame that they aren't still.) The tax, sorely resented as "a tax on air and light," meant that many servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live In airless rooms.

Source:

Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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"Ken Olsen, the pioneering founder of DEC, in 1996." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

I believe in The Road Ahead, Bill Gates describes Ken Olsen as one of his boyhood heroes for having created a computer that could compete with the IBM mainframe. His hero failed to prosper when the next big thing came along, the PC. Gates was determined that he would avoid his hero's fate, and so he threw his efforts toward the internet when the internet became the next big thing.

Christensen sometimes uses the fall of minicomputers, like Olsen's Dec, to PCs as a prime example of disruptive innovation, e.g., in his lectures on disruptive innovation available online through Harvard. A nice intro lecture is viewable (but only using Internet Explorer) at: http://gsb.hbs.edu/fss/previews/christensen/start.html

(p. A22) Ken Olsen, who helped reshape the computer industry as a founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, at one time the world's second-largest computer company, died on Sunday. He was 84.

. . .

Mr. Olsen, who was proclaimed "America's most successful entrepreneur" by Fortune magazine in 1986, built Digital on $70,000 in seed money, founding it with a partner in 1957 in the small Boston suburb of Maynard, Mass. With Mr. Olsen as its chief executive, it grew to employ more than 120,000 people at operations in more than 95 countries, surpassed in size only by I.B.M.

At its peak, in the late 1980s, Digital had $14 billion in sales and ranked among the most profitable companies in the nation.

But its fortunes soon declined after Digital began missing out on some critical market shifts, particularly toward the personal computer. Mr. Olsen was criticized as autocratic and resistant to new trends. "The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business," he said at one point. And in July 1992, the company's board forced him to resign.

For the full obituary, see:

GLENN RIFKIN. "Ken Olsen, Founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, Dies at 84." The New York Times (Tues., February 8, 2011): A22.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story is dated February 7, 2011 and has the title "Ken Olsen, Who Built DEC Into a Power, Dies at 84.")

Gates writes in autobiographical mode in the first few chapters of:

Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.

Christensen's mature account of disruptive innovation is best elaborated in:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

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Paul Baran. Source of photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. A23) In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called "message blocks." The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as "packet switching."

Mr. Baran's idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another.

Mr. Baran's invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and refused.

. . .

Mr. Baran was also an entrepreneur. He started seven companies, five of which eventually went public.

In recent years, the origins of the Internet have been subject to claims and counterclaims of precedence, and Mr. Baran was an outspoken proponent of distributing credit widely.

"The Internet is really the work of a thousand people," he said in an interview in 2001.

"The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral," he said in an interview in 1990. "Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, 'I built a cathedral.'

"Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, 'Well, who built the cathedral?' Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else."

For the full obituary, see:

KATIE HAFNER. "Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84." The New York Times (Mon., MARCH 28, 2011): A23.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated March 27, 2011.)

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(p. 16) Two generations ago in the United States,most families lacked a car; by our parents' generation, most families had one car while the two-car lifestyle was a much-sought ideal; today a third of America's families own three cars or more. The United States now contains just shy of one automobile per licensed driver, and is on track to having more cars than licensed drivers. Cars are a mixed blessing, as a future chapter will detail: But there is no doubt they represent convenience, freedom, and, for women, personal security, when compared to standing on street corners waiting for buses or lingering on dark subway platforms. Cars would not he so infuriatingly popular if the did not make our lives easier. Today all but the bottom-most fraction of the impoverished in the United States do most of their routine traveling by car: 100 auto trips in the United States for every one trip on a bus or the subway, according to the American Public Transit Association. The portion of routine trips made in private cars is rising toward overwhelming in the European Union, too. Two generations ago, people dreamed of possessing their own cars. Now almost everyone in the Western world who desires a car has one--and vehicles that are more comfortable, better-equipped, lower-polluting, and much safer than those available only a short time ago.

Source:

Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. Paperback ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

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Source of book image: http://www.jetagebook.com/

(p. 30) "Jet Age" is ostensibly about the race between two companies and nations to commercialize a military technology and define a new era of air travel. There's Boeing with its back to the wall and its military contracts drying up, betting everything on passenger jets, pitted against de Havilland and the government-subsidized project meant to reclaim some of Britain's lost glory. . . .

. . .

But the book is really about the risk-taking essential for making any extreme endeavor common­place. "Jet Age" celebrates the managers, pilots, engineers, flight attendants and, yes, even passengers (for without passengers there is no business) who gambled everything so that we might cross oceans and continents in hours rather than days.

It is easy to forget, in this time of overcrowded flights, demoralizing security checks, embattled flight attendants and dwindling service, that risk was once embraced as a necessary, even desirable, part of flying. Quoted in the book, the celebrated aviator Lord Brabazon summed it up in post-accident testimony: "You know, and I know, the cause of this accident. It is due to the adventurous, pioneering spirit of our race. It has been like that in the past, it is like that in the present, and I hope it will be in the future."

For the full review, see:

MICHAEL BELFIORE. "Fatal Flaws." The New York Times Book Review (Sun., February 6, 2011): 30.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 4, 2011.)

The book under review is:

Verhovek, Sam Howe. Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World. New York: Avery, 2010.

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William Rosen quotes a key passage from Abraham Lincoln's speech on "Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements":

(p. 323) The advantageous use of Steam-power is, unquestionably, a modern discovery. And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt. What appears strange is that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as a toy. . . . . . . in the days before Edward Coke's original Statute on Monopolies, any man could instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. . . . The (p. 324) patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery of new and useful things.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics and ellipses in original.)

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(p. 322) Lincoln, the only American president ever awarded a patent, had a long and passionate love for things mechanical. He made his living for many years as a railroad lawyer and appears to have absorbed something of the fascination with machines, and with steam, of the engineers with whom he worked. . . .     . . . , in 1859, after his loss in the Illinois senatorial race against Stephen Douglas, he was much in demand for a speech entitled "Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements" that he gave at agricultural fairs, schools, and self-improvement societies.

The speech--decidedly not one of Lincoln's best--nonetheless revealed an enthusiasm for mechanical innovation that resonates (p. 323) powerfully even today. "Man," Lincoln said, "is not the only animal who labors, but he is the only one who improves his workmanship . . . by Discoveries and Inventions."

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics and last ellipsis in original; other ellipses added.)

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Source of book image: http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/

(p. A13) What, exactly, is information? Prior to Shannon, Mr. Gleick notes, the term seemed as hopelessly subjective as "beauty" or "truth." But in 1948 Shannon, then working for Bell Laboratories, gave information an almost magically precise, quantitative definition: The information in a message is inversely proportional to its probability. Random "noise" is quite uniform; the more surprising a message, the more information it contains. Shannon reduced information to a basic unit called a "bit," short for binary digit. A bit is a message that represents one of two choices: yes or no, heads or tails, one or zero.

For the full review, see:

JOHN HORGAN. "Little Bits Go a Long Way; The more surprising a message, the more information it contains." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., March 1, 2011): A13.

Book being reviewed:

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

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Stephenson's steam locomotive, called "Rocket," won the Rainhill Trials in 1829. Rosen uses this as the culminating event in his history of the development of steam power.

(p. 310) The reason for ending with Stephenson's triumph . . . seems persuasive. Rainhill was a victory not merely for George and Robert Stephenson, but for Thomas Saverv and Thomas Newcomen, for James Watt and Matthew Boulton, for Oliver Evans and Richard Trevithick. It was a triumph for the iron mongers of the Severn Valley, the weavers of Lancashire, the colliers of Newcastle, and the miners of Cornwall. It was even a triumph for John Locke and Edward Coke, whose ideas ignited the Rocket just as much as its firebox did.

When the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson met Stephenson in 1847, he remarked, "he had the lives of many men in him."

Perhaps that's what he meant.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)

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(p. 300) The other weight problem was the one that licked Trevithick at Penydarren: The tracks on which the locomotive ran were just not able to survive the tonnage traveling over them. Driving a five-ton steam locomotive over rails designed for horse-drawn carts was only slightly more sensible than driving a school bus over a bridge made of wet ice cubes. In both cases, it's a close call whether the vehicle will skid before or after the surface collapses.

. . .

(p. 301) Two years later, Stephenson, in collaboration with the ironmonger William Losh of Newcastle, produced, and in September 1816 jointly patented, a series of' improvements in wheels, suspension, and--most important--the method by which the rails and "chairs" connected one piece of track to another. Stephenson's rails seem mundane next to better-known eureka moments, but as much as any other innovation of the day they underline the importance of such micro-inventions in the making of a revolution. For it was the rails that finally made the entire network of devices--engine, linkage, wheel, and track--work.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"In Cairo, Egyptian youths used laptops to post video they had shot earlier Tuesday in Tahir Square. The group has been collecting accounts of the demonstrations and voices of the protesters, putting them on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The photo above was at the top of the first page of the New York Times on Weds., Feb. 9, 2011. You have a group of lively, engaged, young people intoxicated with the idea that they may be helping to bring their country freedom. And in the center of the dark picture, amidst the conversations, is one youth looking with concentration at an Apple laptop, the sole source of color and illumination.

If I was Steve Jobs, I would value this one photo at more than a whole hour's worth of Superbowl ads.

The photo above was placed above the following story on the front page of the NYT:

DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK. "As Egypt Protest Swells, U.S. Sends Specific Demands." The New York Times (Weds., February 9, 2011): A1 & A12.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 8, 2011.)

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(p. 243) The stockingers began in the town of Arnold, where weaving frames were being used to make cut-ups and, even worse, were being operated by weavers who had not yet completed the seven-year apprenticeship that the law required. They moved next to Nottingham and the weaver-heavy villages surrounding it, attacking virtually every night for weeks, a few dozen men carrying torches and using prybars and hammers to turn wooden frames--and any doors, walls, or windows that surrounded them--into kindling. None of the perpetrators were arrested, much less convicted and punished.

The attacks continued throughout the spring of' 1811, and after a brief summertime lull started up again in the fall, by which time nearly one thousand weaving frames had been destroyed (out of the 25.000 to 29,000 then in Nottingham, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire), resulting in damages of between £6,000 and £10.000. That November, a commander using the nom de sabotage of Ned Ludd (sometimes Lud)--the name was supposedly derived from an apprentice to a Leicester stockinger named Ned Ludham whose reaction to a reprimand was to hammer the nearest stocking frame to splinters--led a series of increasingly daring attacks throughout the Midlands. On November 13, a letter to the Home Office demanded action against the "2000 men, many of them armed, [who] were riotously traversing the County of Nottingham."

By December 1811, rioters appeared in the cotton manufacturing capital of Manchester, where Luddites smashed both weaving and spinning machinery. Because Manchester was further down the path to industrialization, and therefore housed such machines in large factories as opposed to small shops, the destruction demanded larger, and better organized, mobs.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics and bracketed word in original.)

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) In "Hyping Health Risks," Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist himself, shows how activists, regulators and scientists distort or magnify minuscule environmental risks. He duly notes the accomplishments of epidemiology, such as uncovering the risks of tobacco smoking and the dangers of exposure to vinyl chloride and asbestos. And he acknowledges that industry has attempted to manipulate science. But he is concerned about a less reported problem: "The highly charged climate surrounding environmental health risks can create powerful pressure for scientists to conform and to fall into line with a particular position."

Mr. Kabat looks at four claims -- those trying to link cancer to man-made chemicals, electromagnetic fields and radon and to link cancer and heart disease to passive smoking. In each, he finds more bias than biology -- until further research, years later, corrects exaggeration or error.

. . .

I know whereof Mr. Kabat speaks. In 1992, as the producer of a PBS program, I interviewed an epidemiologist who was on the EPA's passive-smoking scientific advisory board. He admitted to me that the EPA had put its thumb on the evidentiary scales to come to its conclusion. He had lent his name to this process because, he said, he wanted "to remain relevant to the policy process." Naturally, he didn't want to appear on TV contradicting the EPA.

For the full review, see:

RONALD BAILEY. "Bookshelf; Scared Senseless." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., AUGUST 11, 2008): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the first paragraph quoted above has slightly different wording in the online version than the print version; the second paragraph quoted is the same in both.)

The book under review is:

Kabat, Geoffrey C. Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

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(p. 240) Not only was Richard Hargreaves's original spinningjenny destroyed in 1767, but so also was his new and improved version in 1769.

Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. Machine breaking in France was at least as frequent. and probably even more consequential, though it can be hard to tease out whether the phenomenon contributed to, or was a symptom of, some of the uglier aspects of the French Revolution. Normandy in particular, which was not only close to England but the most "English" region of France, was the site of dozens of incidents in 1789 alone. In July, hundreds of spinnigjennys were destroyed, along with a French version of Arkwright's water frame. In October, an attorney in Rouen applauded the destruction of "the machines used in cotton-spinning that have deprived many workers of their jobs." In Troyes, spinners rioted, killing the mayor and mutilating his body because he had favored machines." The carders of Lille destroyed machines in 1790; in 1791, the spinning jennies of Roanne were hacked up and burned. By 1796, administrators in the Department of the Somme were complaining, it turns out presciently, that the prejudice against machinery has led the commercial classes . . . to abandon their interest in the cotton industry.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: ellipsis in original.)

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(p. 239) Cartwright constructed twenty looms using his design and put them to work in a weaving "shed" in Doncaster. He further agreed to license the design to a cotton manufacturer named Robert Grimshaw, who started building five hundred Cartwright looms at a new mill in Manchester in the spring of 1792. By summertime, only a few dozen had been built and installed, but that was enough to provoke Manchester's weavers, who accurately saw the threat they represented. Whether their anger flamed hot enough to burn down Grimshaw's mill remains unknown, but something certainly did: In March 1792, after a series of anonymous threats, the mill was destroyed.

Cartwright's power looms were not the first textile machines to be attacked, and they would not be the last.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

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William Rosen gives us a thought-provoking anecdote about Edmund Cartwright, the inventor of the first power loom:

(p. 238) He was also, apparently, convinced of the practicality of such a machine by the success of the "Mechanical Turk," a supposed chess-playing robot that had mystified all of Europe and which had not yet been revealed as one of the era's great hoaxes: a hollow figurine concealing a human operator. Inventors are sometimes beneficiaries of their own ignorance.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

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(p. 236) The greatest hero-worshipper of them all, Thomas Carlyle. described Arkwright as

A plain, almost gross, bag-checked, potbellied, much enduring, much inventing man and barber... . French Revolutions were a-brewing: to resist the same in any measure, imperial Kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth of England, and it was this man that had to give England the power of cotton.... It is said ideas produce revolutions, and truly they do; not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical. In this clanging clashing universal Sword-dance which the European world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one choragus [leader of a movement, from the old Greek word for the sponsor of a chorus] where Richard Arkwright is another.

. . .

Arkwright was not a great inven-(p. 237)tor, but he was a visionary, who saw, better than any man alive, how to convert useful knowledge into cotton apparel and ultimately into wealth: for himself, and for Britain.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: internal ellipses in original; ellipsis between paragraphs added.)

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"Steven P. Jobs has played a significant role in a string of successful products at Apple, including the iPad, shown above, which was introduced last year." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Shortly before the iPad tablet went on sale last year, Steven P. Jobs showed off Apple's latest creation to a small group of journalists. One asked what consumer and market research Apple had done to guide the development of the new product.

"None," Mr. Jobs replied. "It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want."

For years, and across a career, knowing what consumers want has been the self-appointed task of Mr. Jobs, Apple's charismatic co-founder. Though he has not always been right, his string of successes at Apple is uncanny. His biggest user-pleasing hits include the Macintosh, the iMac, iBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

But as he takes a medical leave of absence, announced on Monday, the question is: Without him at the helm, can Apple continue its streak of innovation, particularly in an industry where rapid-fire product cycles can make today's leader tomorrow's laggard?

. . .

(p. B4) With the iPad tablet, Apple jump-started a product category. But with the iPod (a music and media player) and iPhone (smartphone), Apple moved into markets with many millions of users using rival products, but he gave consumers a much improved experience.

"These are seeing-around-the-corner innovations," said John Kao, an innovation consultant to corporations and governments. "Steve Jobs is totally tuned into what consumers want. But these are not the kind of breakthroughs that market research, where you are asking people's opinions, really help you make."

Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley investor and marketing consultant, said employees at Apple stores provide the company with a powerful window into user habits and needs, even if it is not conventional market research.

"Steve visits the Apple store in Palo Alto frequently," said Mr. McKenna, a former consultant to Apple.

. . .

In a conversation years ago, Mr. Jobs said he was disturbed when he heard young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley use the term "exit strategy" -- a quick, lucrative sale of a start-up. It was a small ambition, Mr. Jobs said, instead of trying to build companies that last for decades, if not a century or more.

That was a sentiment, Mr. Jobs said, that he shared with his sometime luncheon companion, Andrew S. Grove, then the chief executive of Intel.

"There are builders and traders," Mr. Grove said on Tuesday. "Steve Jobs is a builder."

For the full story, see:

STEVE LOHR. "The Missing Tastemaker?" The New York Times (Weds., JANUARY 19, 2011): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated January 18, 2011 and has the title "Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?.")

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(p. 180) Anyone who has ever supervised a talented subordinate with a tendency to set his own priorities will find Watt's letters familiar: "I wish William could be brought to do as we do, to mind the business in hand, and let such as Symington [William Symington, the builder of the Charlotte Dundas, one of the world's first steam-engine boats] and Sadler [James Sadler, balloonist and inventor of a table steam engine] throw away their time and money, hunting shadows."

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics and bracketed words in original.)

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"The Facebook friendship map, created by Paul Butler." Source of caption and map: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B7) The contrast between Facebook's spreading global network of users and its effective absence from China is starkly illustrated by a map, produced by a Facebook intern and flagged on the Economist's website earlier this month, that has lately become a point of fascination of the Chinese Internet.

Described by its creator Paul Butler as "a social graph of 500 million people," the map represents the worldwide volume of Facebook friendships across geographic locations using lines of varying intensity. Butler's methodology is interesting in its own right, but what appeared to most interest China's netizens was how China appears on the map. Or, rather, how it doesn't.

. . .

Since Facebook is blocked in China, the number Facebook friendship lines flowing in and out of the country is essentially negligible, making China almost impossible to see."

For the full story, see:

Josh Chin. "Facebook Gets Back Into China (Sort of...)." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 21, 2010): B7.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the title "Facebook Gets Back Into China (Sort of...)" and includes paragraphs at the end that were not in the print version.)

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(p. 138) . . . , the Cistercians' proven ability to produce substantial quantities of high-quality iron not only fails to prove that they were about to ignite an Industrial Revolution when they were suppressed in the early sixteenth century, it actually demonstrates the opposite--and for two reasons. First, the iron of Laskill and Fontenoy was evidence not of industrialization, but of industriousness. The Cistercians owed their factories' efficiency to their disciplined and cheap workforce rather than any technological innovation; there's nothing like a monastic brotherhood that labors twelve hours a day for bread and water to keep costs down. The sixteenth-century monks were still using thirteenth-century technology, and they neither embraced, nor contributed to, the Scientific Revolution of Galileo and Descartes.

The second reason is even more telling: For centuries, the Cistercian monasteries (and other ironmakers; the Cistercians were leaders of medieval iron manufacturing, but they scarcely monopolized it) had been able to supply all the high-quality iron that anyone could use, but all that iron still failed to ignite a technological revolution. Until something happened to increase demand for iron, smelters and forges, like the waterpower that drove them, sounded a lot like one hand clapping. It would sound like nothing else for--what else?--two hundred years.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. C12) When Robert J. Samuelson published a Newsweek column last month arguing that high-speed rail is "a perfect example of wasteful spending masquerading as a respectable social cause," he cited cost figures and potential ridership to demonstrate that even the rosiest scenarios wouldn't justify the investment. He made a good, rational case--only to have it completely undermined by the evocative photograph the magazine chose to accompany the article.

The picture showed a sleek train bursting through blurred lines of track and scenery, the embodiment of elegant, effortless speed. It was the kind of image that creates longing, the kind of image a bunch of numbers cannot refute. It was beautiful, manipulative and deeply glamorous.

. . .

The problems come, of course, in the things glamour omits, including all those annoyingly practical concerns the policy wonks insist on debating. Neither trains nor wind farms are as effortlessly liberating as their photos suggest. Neither really offers an escape from the world of compromises and constraints. The same is true, of course, of evening gowns, dream kitchens and tropical vacations. But at least the people who enjoy that sort of glamour pay their own way.

For the full commentary, see:

VIRGINIA POSTREL. "COMMERCE & CULTURE; The Allure of Techno-Glamour." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., NOVEMBER 20, 2010): C12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. 133) Robert and John Hart were two Glasgow engineers and merchants who regarded James Watt with the sort of awe usually reserved for pop musicians, film stars, or star athletes. Or even more: They regarded him as "the greatest and most useful man who ever lived." . . .

. . .

(p. 134) . . . the hero worship of the brothers Hart is more enlightening about the explosion of inventive activity that started in eighteenth-century Britain than their reminiscences. For virtually all of human history, statues had been built to honor kings, solders, and religious figures; the Harts lived in the first era that built them to honor builders and inventors. James Watt was an inventor inspired in every way possible, right down to the neurons in his Scottish skull; but he was also, and just as significantly, the inspiration for thousands of other inventors, during his lifetime and beyond. The inscription on the statue of Watt that stood in Westminster Abbey from 125 until it was moved in 1960 reminded visitors that it was made "Not to perpetuate a name which must endure while the peaceful arts flourish, but to shew that mankind have learned to know those who best deserve their gratitude" (emphasis added).

A nation's heroes reveal its ideals, and the Watt memorial carries an impressive weight of symbolism. However, it must be said that the statue, sculpted by Sir Francis Chantrey in marble, might bear that weight more appropriately if it had been made out of the trademark material of the Industrial Revolution: iron.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

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(p. 123) [A] . . . study . . . conducted in 1962, compared the results of psychometric tests given to inventors and noninventors (the former defined by behaviors such as application for or receipt of a patent) in similar professions, such as engineers, chemists, architects, psychologists, and science teachers. Some of the results (p. 124) were about what one might expect: inventors are significantly more thing-oriented than people-oriented, more detail-oriented than holistic. They are also likely to come from poorer families than noninventors in the same professions. . . .

. . . , the 1962 study also revealed that independent inventors scored far lower on general intelligence tests than did research scientists, architects, or even graduate students. There's less to this than meets the eye: The intelligence test that was given to the subjects subtracted wrong answers from right answers, and though the inventors consistently got as many answers correct as did the research scientists, they answered far more questions, thereby incurring a ton of deductions. While the study was too small a sample to prove that inventors fear wrong answers less than noninventors, it suggested just that. In the words of the study's authors, "The more inventive an independent inventor is, the more disposed he will be--and this indeed to a marked degree--to try anything that might work."

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: word in brackets and ellipses added.)

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(p. 103) Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that the most important invention of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

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Source of graphs: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) Economists Roberto Rigobon and Alberto Cavallo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management have come up with a method to scour the Internet for online prices on millions of items and then use them to calculate inflation statistics for a dozen countries on a daily basis. The two have been collecting data for the project for more than three years, but only made their results public this week.

. . .

In countries where the apparatus for collecting prices is limited, or where officials have manipulated inflation data, the economists' indexes might give a clearer view. In Argentina, for example, the government has been widely accused of massaging price figures to let it pay less interest to holders of inflation-indexed bonds. President Cristina Fernández has defended the government data. For September, the government's measure of prices rose 11.1% from a year earlier. The economists' measure in that period: up 19.7%.

For the full story, see:

JUSTIN LAHART. "A Way, Day by Day, of Gauging Prices." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., NOVEMBER 11, 2010): A5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated NOVEMBER 10, 2010.)

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(p. 101) Nothing is more common in the history of science than independent discovery of the same phenomenon, unless it is a fight over priority. To this day, historians debate how much prior awareness of the theory of latent heat was in Watt's possession, but they miss Black's real contribution, which anyone can see by examining the columns of neat script that attest to Watt's careful recording of experimental results. Watt didn't discover the existence of latent heat from Black, at least not directly; but he rediscovered it entirely through exposure to the diligent experimental habits of professors such as Black, John Robison, and Robert Dick.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

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(p. 67) The great scientist and engineer William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, made his reputation on discoveries in basic physics. electricity, and thermodynamics, but he may be remembered just as well for his talent for aphorism. Among the best known of Kelvin's quotations is the assertion that "all science is either physics or stamp collecting (while one probably best forgotten is the confident "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible"). But the most relevant for a history of the Industrial Revolution is this: "the steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine."

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

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"When Britain Ruled The Skies: A De Havilland Comet under construction in Belfast in 1954." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) Frank Whittle, the brilliant British military pilot and engineer who began patenting jet designs in 1930, struggled for years to get funding and time to pursue his idea. Even after World War II, when a competing Nazi design showed what fighter jets could achieve in battle, U.S. airlines were slow to see jets' potential for passenger travel.

It took another Brit, airplane designer Geoffrey de Havilland, to awaken postwar America's aviation behemoths. While Lockheed and Douglas were still churning out rumbling, low-flying propeller planes, De Havilland's jet-powered Comet began breaking records in 1952. Only after seeing Comets scorch the stratosphere at 500 miles an hour did Howard Hughes want jetliners for TWA and Juan Trippe get interested for Pan Am.

Among American plane makers, it was a military contractor that had struggled in the prewar passenger-plane market--Boeing--that first took up the jetliner challenge. In retrospect, the outcome seems obvious. The Boeing 707 inspired the term "jet set." Boeing's iconic 747 "Jumbo Jet" opened jet-setting to the masses.

But in 1952, that outcome was far from obvious. Mr. Verhovek zeroes in on the mid-1950s, when Comets first seemed to own the world and then started plunging from the sky in pieces. The Comet's fatal design flaw--the result of an insufficient appreciation of the danger of metal fatigue--holds resonance today as both Boeing and Airbus struggle to master the next generation of jetliner materials, composites of carbon fiber and plastic.

. . .

Although "Jet Age" inevitably centers on technology, Mr. Verhovek wisely focuses as well on the outsize personalities behind world-changing innovations. There's Mr. De Havilland, a manic depressive who was so dedicated to aviation that he kept going after two of his three sons died testing his planes. Mr. Whittle, we learn, sniffed Benzedrine to stay awake, popped tranquilizers to sleep and shriveled to just 127 pounds while developing the jet engine. And Boeing chief executive Bill Allen, a meticulous lawyer, bet the company on passenger jets when not a single U.S. airline wanted one.

For the full review, see:

DANIEL MICHAELS. "Shrinking the World; How jetliners commercialized air travel--stewardesses and all." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., October 9, 2010): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book under review is:

Verhovek, Sam Howe. Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World. New York: Avery, 2010.

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William Rosen discusses the genesis and significance of the world's first patent law:

(p. 52) The Statute became law in 1624. The immediate impact was barely noticeable, like a pebble rolling down a gradual slope at the top of a snow-covered mountain. For decades, fewer than six patents were awarded annually, though still more in Britain than anywhere else. It was seventy-five years after the Statute was first drafted, on Monday, July 25, 1698, before an anonymous clerk in the employ of the Great Seal Patent Office on Southampton Row, three blocks from the present--day site of the British Museum, granted patent number 356: Thomas Savery's "new Invention for Raiseing of Water and occasioning Motion to all Sorts of Mill Work by the lmpellent Force of Fire."

Both the case law and the legislation under which the application was granted had been written by Edward Coke. Both were imperfect, as indeed was Savery's own engine. The law was vague enough (and Savery's grant wide-ranging enough; it essentially covered all ways for "Raiseing of Water" by fire) that Thomas Newcomen was compelled to form a partnership with a man whose machine scarcely resembled his own. But it is not too much to claim that Coke's pen had as decisive an impact on the evolution of steam power as any of Newcomen's tools. Though he spent most of his life as something of a sycophant to Elizabeth and James, Coke's philosophical and temperamental affinity for ordinary Englishmen, particularly the nation's artisans, compelled him to act, time and again, in their interests even when, as with his advocacy of the 1628 Petition of Right (an inspiration for the U.S. Bill of Rights) it landed him in the King's prisons. He became the greatest advocate for England's craftsmen, secure in the belief that they, not her landed gentry or her merchants, were the nation's source of prosperity. By understanding that it was England's duty, and--perhaps even more important--in England's interest, to promote the creative labors of her creative laborers, he anticipated an economic philosophy far more modern than he probably understood, and if he grew rich in the service of the nation, he also, with his creation of the world's first durable patent law, returned the favor.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics in original.)

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(p. 50) . . . Coke, who had . . . been made Lord Chief Justice of' England, drafted the 1623 "Act concerning Monopolies and Dispensations with penall Lawes and the Forfeyture thereof," or, as it has become known, the Statute on Monopolies. The Act was designed to promote the interests of artisans, and eliminate all traces of monopolies.

With a single, and critical, exception. Section 6 of the Statute, which forbade every other form of monopoly, carved out one area in which an exclusive franchise could still be granted: Patents could still be awarded to the person who introduced the invention to the realm--to the "first and true inventor."

This was a very big deal indeed, though not because it represented the first time inventors received patents. The Venetian Republic was offering some form of patent protection by 1471, and in 1593, the Netherlands' States-General awarded a patent to Mathys Siverts, for a new (and unnamed) navigational instrument. And, of course, Englishmen like John of Utynam had been receiving patents for inventions ever since Henry VI. The difference between Coke's statute and the customs in place before and elsewhere is that it was a law, with all that implied for its durability and its enforceability. Once only inventors could receive patents, the world started to change.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics in original; ellipses added.)

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(p. 36) For centuries, certainly ever since Immanuel Kant called the hand the window on the mind," philosophers have been pondering the very complex way in which the human hand is related to the human mind. Modern neuroscience and evolutionary biology have confirmed the existence of what the Scottish physician and theologian Charles Bell called the intelligent hand. Stephen Pinker of Harvard even argues that early humans' intelligence increased partly because they were equipped with levers of influence on the world. namely the grippers found at the end of their two arms. We now know that the literally incredible amount of sensitivity and articulation of the human hand, which has increased at roughly the same pace as has the complexity of the human brain, is not merely a product of the pressures of natural selection, butt an initiator of it: The hand has led the brain to evolve just as much as the brain has led the hand. The hands of a pianist, or a painter, or a sushi chef, or even, as with Thomas New-(p. 37)comen, hands that could use a hammer to shape soft iron, are truly, in any functional sense, "intelligent."

This sort of tactile intelligence was not emphasized in A. P. Usher's theory of invention, the components of which he filtered through the early twentieth-century school of psychology known as Gestalt theory, which was preeminently a theory of visual behavior. The most important precepts of Gestalt theory (to Usher, anyway, who was utterly taken with their explanatory power) are that the patterns we perceive visually appear all at once, rather than by examining components one at a time, and that a principle of parsimony organizes visual perceptions into their simplest form. Or forms; one of the most famous Gestalt images is the one that can look like either a goblet or two facing profiles. Usher's enthusiasm for Gestalt psychology explains why, despite his unshakable belief in the inventive talents of ordinary individuals, he devotes an entire chapter of his magnum opus to perhaps the most extraordinary individual in the history of invention: Leonardo da Vinci.

Certainly, Leonardo would deserve a large place in any book on the history of mechanical invention, not only because of his fanciful helicopters and submarines. hut for his very real screw cutting engine, needle making machine, centrifugal pumps, and hundreds more. And Usher found Leonardo an extraordinarily useful symbol in marking the transition in mechanics from pure intuition to the application of science and mathematics.

But the real fascination for Usher was Leonardo's straddling of two worlds of creativity, the artistic and the inventive. No one, before or since, more clearly demonstrated the importance to invention of what we might call "spatial intelligence"; Leonardo was not an abstract thinker of any great achievement, nor were his mathematical skills, which he taught himself late in life, remarkable. (p. 38) His perceptual skills, on the other hand, developed primarily for his painting, were extraordinary, but they were so extraordinary that Usher could write, "It is only with Leonardo that the process of invention is lifted decisively into the field of the imagination. . . . "

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

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(p. 33) Newcomen and Calley had, in broad strokes, the design for a working engine. They had enjoyed some luck, though it was anything but dumb luck. This didn't seem to convince the self-named (p. 34) experimental philosopher J. T. Desaguliers, a Huguenot refugee Like Papin, who became one of Isaac Newton's assistants and (later) a priest in the Church of England. Desaguliers wrote, just before his death in 1744, that the two men had made their engine work, but "not being either philosophers to understand the reason, or mathematicians enough to calculate the powers and to proportion the parts, very luckily by accident found what they sought for."

The notion of' Newcomen's scientific ignorance persists to this day. One of its expressions is the legend that the original engine was made to cycle automatically by the insight of a boy named Humphrey Potter, who built a mazelike network of catches and strings from the plug rod to open the valves and close them. It is almost as if a Dartmouth ironmonger simply had to have an inordinate amount of luck to succeed where so many had failed.

The discovery of the power of injected water was luck; understanding and exploiting it was anything but. Newcomen and CalIey replaced the accidental hole in the cylinder with an injection valve, and, ingeniously, attached it to the piston itself. When the piston reached the bottom of the cylinder, it automatically closed the injection valve and opened another valve, permitting the water to flow out.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics in original.)

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(p. 8) Florence, in the year 1641, had been essentially the private fief of the Medici family for two centuries. The city, ground zero for both the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, was also where Galileo Galilei had chosen to live out the sentence imposed by the Inquisition for his heretical writings that argued that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo was seventy years old and living in a villa in Arcetri, in the hills above the city, (p. 9) when he read a book on the physics of movement titled De motu (sometimes Trattato del Moto) and summoned its author, Evangelista Torricelli, a mathematician then living in Rome. Torricelli, whose admiration for Galileo was practically without limit, decamped in time not only to spend the last three months of the great man's life at his side, but to succeed him as professor of mathematics at the Florentine Academy.

. . .

(p. 9) . . . , Torricelli used a tool even more powerful than his well--cultivated talent for mathematical logic: He did experiments. At the behest of one of his patrons, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose engineers were unable to build a sufficiently powerful pump, Torricelli designed a series of apparatuses to test the limits of the action of contemporary water pumps. In spring of 1644, Torricelli filled a narrow, four-foot-long glass tube with mercury--a far heavier fluid than water--inverted it in a basin of mercury, sealing the tube's top. and documented that while the mercury did not pour out, it did leave a space at the closed top of the tube. He reasoned that since nothing could have slipped past the mercury in the tube, what occupied the top of the tube must, therefore, be nothing: a vacuum.

. . .

(p. 10) Torricelli was not, even by the standards of his day, a terribly ambitious inventor. When faced with hostility from religious authorities and other traditionalists who believed, correctly, that his discovery was a direct shot at the Aristotelian world, he happily returned to his beloved cycloids, the latest traveler to find himself on the wrong side of the boundary line between science and technology

But by then it no longer mattered if Torricelli was willing to leave the messiness of physics for the perfection of mathematics: vacuum would keep mercury in the bottle, hut the genie was already out. Nature might have found vacuum repugnant for two thousand years, but Europe was about to embrace it.

Source:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

(Note: italics in original; ellipses added.)

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Source of book image: http://ffbsccn.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/the-most-powerful-idea-in-the-world.jpg

The range of William Rosen's fascinating and useful book is very broad indeed. He is interested in THE question: why did the singular improvement in living standards known as the industrial revolution happen where and when it did?

The question is not just of historical interest---if we can figure out what caused the improvement then and there, we have a better shot at continuing to improve in the here and now.

I especially enjoyed and learned from William Rosen's discussion, examples and quotations on the difficult issue of whether patents are on balance a good or bad institution.

Deirdre McCloskey taught me that the most important part of a sentence is the last word, and the most important part of a paragraph is the last sentence, and the most important part of a chapter is the last paragraph.

Here are the last couple of sentences of Rosen's book:

(p. 324) Incised in the stone over the Herbert C. Hoover Building's north entrance is the legend that, with Lincoln's characteristic brevity, sums up the single most important idea in the world:

THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED

THE FUEL OF INTEREST

TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS

In the next few weeks I will occasionally quote a few of the more illuminating passages from Rosen's well-written account.

Book discussed:

Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

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Evan Williams, Twitter CEO. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 9) I GREW up on a farm in Nebraska, where we grew mostly corn and soybeans. During the summers I was responsible for making sure the crops were irrigated.

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working. I moved to Florida, where I did some freelance copywriting. After that I moved to Texas and stayed with my older sister while I figured out what to do next. In 1994, I returned to Nebraska and started my first company with my dad.

We didn't know anything about the Internet, but I thought it was going to be a big deal. We produced CD-ROMs and a video on how to use the Internet, and we did some Web hosting. I recruited some friends and we tossed around some ideas, but none of us knew how to write software and we didn't have much money. We watched what entrepreneurs in California were doing and tried to play along.

. . .

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee. I've been able to pay my father back, which is nice, and my mother doesn't worry about me as much since I got married a year and a half ago.

For the full story, see:

EVAN WILLIAMS. "The Boss; For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents." The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., March 8, 2009): 9.

(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 7, 2009.)

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In the passage quoted below, Severgnini captures something of the truth. Americans, at their best, have sought to control nature in order to make life longer and happier.

But Severgnini does not see that there is a difference between seeking to control nature and seeking to control other people. At its best, America excels at the former, and refrains from the latter.

(p. W9) A few years ago, Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini recounted his adventures in the U.S. in the book "Ciao, America!" in which he offered up humorous musings on many of the standard European complaints about the American way of living. Mr. Severgnini allows that he rather admires the Yankee "urge to control the outside world," whether that means sending planes off an aircraft carrier or sending out technicians from Carrier.

He notes that the refusal to suffer the sweaty indignity of equatorial heat is "the antithesis of passive resignation," and thus a perfect expression of the can-do American character. "In America, air-conditioning is not simply a way of cooling down a room," Mr. Severgnini writes. "It is an affirmation of supremacy."

For the full commentary, see:

ERIC FELTEN. "DE GUSTIBUS; The Big Chill: Giving AC the Cold Shoulder." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 23, 2010): W9.

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(p. 299) If you're as lucky as I've been, then you'll get to live in a time when you're young just as a revolution is about to take off. Just like Henry Ford was there for the automotive industry, I was there to see and build the first personal computers.

Back in the mid-1990s when I was teaching school, I thought one time to myself, Wow, I wish I could be twelve now, look at the things I could do with what's out there now.

(p. 300) But then I realized I was lucky. I got to see the before, the during, and the after of some of those changes in life. I got to be one of those few people who could effect some of those changes.

Excellence came to me from not having much money, and also from having good building skills but not having done these products before.

I hope you'll be as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.

Source:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

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(p. 293) But there was one exception. Right around 1980, Steve and a bunch of us from Apple got to tour the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) facility, which is one of Xerox's research and development labs.

Inside, for the first time ever, we saw real video displays--computer monitors--and they were showing something entirely new They were showing the first graphical user interface (GUI)--art interface that lets you interact with icons and menus to control a program.

(p. 294) Up to this point, everything had been text-based. That's going to sound odd to all the people who don't remember it, but that's how everything worked back then. A computer user had to actually type in text commands--long, complicated ones--to make something happen.

But this experimental Xerox computer had windows popping up all over the place. And they were using this funny-looking device everyone now knows as a mouse, clicking on words and small pictures, the icons, to make things happen.

The minute I saw this interface, I knew it was the future. There wasn't a doubt in my mind. It was like a one-way door to the future--and once you went through it, you could never turn back. It was such a huge improvement in using computers. The GUI meant you could get a computer to do the same things it could normally do, but with much less physical and mental effort. It meant that nontechnical people could do some pretty powerful things with computers without having to sit there and learn how to type in long commands. Also, it let several different programs run in separate windows at the same time. That was powerful!

A few years later, Apple designed the Lisa computer, and later the Macintosh, around this concept. And Microsoft did it a couple years after that with Microsoft Windows. And now, more than twenty-five years after we saw that experimental computer in the Xerox PARC lab, all computers work like this.

It's so rare to be able to see the future like that. I can't promise it'll happen to you. But when you see it, you know it. If this ever happens to you, leap at the chance to get involved. Trust your instincts. It isn't often that the future lets you in like that.

Source:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

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"The National Federation of the Blind operates a science camp to inspire young blind students, such as the girl above [Addison Hugen]. The organization is working with Virginia Tech on a vehicle equipped with sensors for blind drivers." Source of photo: online version of the article quoted and cited below. Source of caption: print version of the article quoted and cited below. [Bracketed name from online version of caption.]

(p. 3A) WASHINGTON (AP) - Could a blind person drive a car? Researchers are trying to make that far-fetched notion a reality.

The National Federation of the Blind and Virginia Tech plan to demonstrate a prototype vehicle next year equipped with technology that helps a blind person drive a car independently.

The technology, called "nonvisual interfaces," uses sensors to let a blind driver maneuver a car based on information transmitted to him about his surroundings: whether another car or object is nearby, in front of him or in a neighboring lane.

Advocates for the blind consider it a "moon shot," a goal similar to President John F. Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon. For many blind people, driving a car long has been considered impossible. But researchers hope the project could revolutionize mobility and challenge long-held assumptions about limitations.

"We're exploring areas that have previously been regarded as unexplorable," said Dr. Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind.

For the full story, see:

KEN THOMAS . "Blind Drivers Goal of High-Tech Car Project." Omaha World-Herald (Saturday, July 3, 2010): 3A.

(Note: the online version of the article has the title: "Driving while blind? Maybe, with new high-tech car.")

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"Two visitors from Wikipedia, Liam Wyatt, left, and Joseph Seddon, at the British Museum." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) The British Museum has begun an unusual collaboration with Wikipedia, the online, volunteer-written encyclopedia, to help ensure that the museum's expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference's pages.

About 40 Wikipedia contributors in the London area spent Friday with a "backstage pass" to the museum, meeting with curators and taking photographs of the collection. And in a curious reversal in status, curators were invited to review Wikipedia's treatment of the museum's collection and make a case that important pieces were missing or given short shrift.

Among those wandering the galleries was the museum's first Wikipedian in residence, Liam Wyatt, who will spend five weeks in the museum's offices to build a relationship between the two organizations, one founded in 1753, the other in 2001.

"I looked at how many Rosetta Stone page views there were at Wikipedia," said Matthew Cock, who is in charge of the museum's Web site and is supervising the collaboration with Wikipedia. "That is perhaps our iconic object, and five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article as to ours."

In other words, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Once criticized as amateurism run amok, Wikipedia has become ingrained in the online world: it is consulted by millions of users when there is breaking news; its articles are frequently the first result when a search engine is used.

. . .

(p. C6) Getting permission to work with Wikipedia was not as hard a sell as he expected, Mr. Cock said. "Everyone assumed everyone else hated it and that I shouldn't recommend it to the directorate," he said. "I laid it out, put a paper together. I won't say I was surprised, but I was very pleased it was very well received."

He said he had enthusiastic support from four departments, including Greek and Roman antiquity and prints and drawings. "I don't think it is just the young curators," he added.

For the full story, see:

NOAM COHEN. "Venerable British Museum Enlists in the Wikipedia Revolution." The New York Times (Sat., June 5, 2010): C1 & C6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated June 4, 2010.)

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"The Droid X is the latest "best Android phone on the market."" Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) You think technology moves too fast now? You think your camera, camcorder and computer become obsolete quickly?

Try buying an app phone. In this business, the state of the art changes as often as Lady Gaga changes outfits.

Suppose, for example, that you want one of the increasingly popular phones that run Google's Android software.

Last November, you might have been tempted by the Motorola Droid, "the best Android phone on the market." A month later, the HTC Hero was "the best Android phone on the market." By January, "the best Android phone yet" was the Nexus One. In April, "the best Android device that you can purchase" was the HTC Incredible. In May, "the best Android phone on the market" was the Sprint Evo.

Either "the best Android phone on the market" is a tech critic's tic, or we're witnessing one seriously crazy game of leapfrog.

The latest buzz is about the Motorola Droid X, which Verizon will offer in mid-July for $200.

. . .

(p. B8) . . . , it's thrilling to see the array of excellent app phones that the original iPhone begat. If you who crave power, speed, flexibility, dropless calls an almost-Imax screen and Verizon's network (as opposed to Sprint and its similar Evo), the Droid X is a big, beautiful contender for the "best Android phone on the market" crown.

This month's crown, anyway.

For the full story, see:

DAVID POGUE. "State of the Art; Big Phone, Big Screen, Big Pleasure." The New York Times (Thurs., July 1, 2010): B1 & B8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated June 30, 2010.)

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(p. A22) Smarter computing technology, experts say, ought to make the most skilled workers -- in science, the arts and business -- even more productive and prosperous by freeing them from routine tasks. Their prosperity translates to spending that creates jobs in stores, schools, gyms, construction and elsewhere.

Artificial intelligence, experts say, should also generate new jobs even as it displaces others. The smart machines of the future will need programming, servicing and upgrading -- work done, perhaps, by a new class of digital technicians. The intelligent machines, experts add, will be specialists in a field, like the medical assistant project at Microsoft. They must be tailored with specialized software, perhaps igniting a new industry for artificial intelligence applications.

Of course, no one really knows just what artificial intelligence will mean for jobs and the economy, but the technology is marching ahead. "Its potential is far greater than simply substituting technology for human labor," said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the M.I.T Sloan School of Management.

For the full story, see:

STEVE LOHR. "Jobs Created and Displaced." The New York Times (Fri., June 25, 2010): A22.

(Note: the date of the online version of the article was June 24, 2010.)

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Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

The MediaTek example briefly mentioned below, seems a promising fit with Christensen's theory of disruptive innovators.

(p. B7) TAIPEI--A little-known Taiwanese chip-design company is making waves in the cellphone business, grabbing market share from larger U.S. rivals and helping drive down phone prices for consumers.

. . .

While MediaTek isn't known for cutting-edge innovation, it has been able to apply the nimble, cost-cutting approach of Taiwan's contract manufacturers to the business of designing semiconductors, in which engineers use advanced software to lay out the microscopic circuits that make gadgets like cellphones function.

"MediaTek has brought down the cost significantly," says Jessica Chang, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG, who says mobile-phone makers are increasingly drawn to MediaTek's products because of their functionality and low cost.

For the full story, see

TING-I TSAI. "Taiwan Chip Firm Shakes Up Cellphone Business." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., APRIL 19, 2010): B7.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

On Christensen's theories, see:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

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"Mun Seong-hwi, a North Korean defector, speaking to someone in North Korea to gather information at his office in Seoul." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

I have long believed, but cannot prove, that on balance technology improves human freedom more than it endangers it.

The case of cellphones in North Korea supports my belief.

(p. A1) SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea, one of the world's most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat: networks of its own citizens feeding information about life there to South Korea and its Western allies.

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment -- or death.

For the full story, see

CHOE SANG-HUN. "North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets." The New York Times (Mon., March 29, 2010): A1 & A10.

(Note: the online version of the article is dated March 28, 2010.)

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(p. 155) It was as if my whole life had been leading up to this point. I'd done my minicomputer redesigns. I'd done data on--screen with Pong and Breakout., and I'd already done a TV terminal. From the Cream Soda Computer and others, I knew how to connect memory and make a working system. I realized that all I needed was this Canadian processor or another processor like it and (p. 156) some memory chips. Then I'd have the computer I'd always wanted!

Oh my god. I could build my own computer, a computer I could own and design to do any neat things I wanted to do with it for the rest of my life.

I didn't need to spend $400 to get an Altair--which really was just a glorified bunch of chips with a metal frame around it and some lights. That was the same as my take-home salary, I mean, come on. And to make the Altair do anything interesting, I'd have to spend way, way more than that. Probably hundreds, even thousands of dollars. And besides, I'd already been there with the Cream Soda Computer. I was bored with it then. You never go back. You go forward. And now, the Cream Soda Computer could be my jumping-off point.

No way was I going to do that. I decided then and there I had the opportunity to build the complete computer I'd always wanted. I just needed any microprocessor, and I could build an extremely small computer I could write programs on. Programs like games, and the simulation programs I wrote at work. The possibilities went on and on. And I wouldn't have to buy an Altair to do it. I would design it. all by myself.

That night, the night of that first meeting, this whole vision of a kind of personal computer just popped into my head. All at once. Just like that.

Source:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

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(p. 127) I think most people with day jobs like to do something totally different when they get home. Some people like to come home and watch TV. But my thing was electronics projects. It was my passion and it was my pastime.

Working on projects was something I did on my own time to reward myself, even though I wasn't getting rewarded on the outside, with money or other visible signs of success.

Source:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

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(p. 120) I'd been a slide rule whiz in high school, so when I saw the calculator, it was just amazing. A slide rule was kind of like a ruler-- you had to look at it precisely to read the values. The most accurate number you could get was only three digits long, however, and even that result was always questionable. With a calculator, you could punch in precisely the digits you wanted. You didn't have to line up a slider. You could type in your numbers exactly, hit a button, and get an answer immediately. You could get that number all the way out to ten digits. For example, the real answer might be 3.158723623. An answer like that was much more precise than anything engineers had ever gotten before.

Well, the HP 35 was the first scientific calculator, and It was the first in history that you could actually hold in your hand. It could calculate sines and cosines and tangents, all the trigonometric and exponential/logarithmic functions engineers use to calculate and to do their jobs. This was 1973, and back then cal-(p. 121)culators--especially handheld calculators--were a very, very big deal.

. . .

There was no doubt in my mind that calculators were going to put slide rules out of business. (In fact, two years later you couldn't even buy a slide rule. It was extinct.) And now all of a sudden I'd gotten a job helping to design the next generation of these scientific calculators. It was like getting to be a part of history.

Source:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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Wozniak went on to invent the personal computer.

This example would probably fit with some of what Malcolm Gladwell claims in his bestseller Outliers.

(p. 15) I have to point out here that at no time did my dad make a big deal about my progress in electronics. He taught me stuff, sure, but he always acted as if it was just normal for me. By the sixth grade, I was really advanced in math and science, everyone knew it, and I'd been tested for IQ and they told us it was 200-plus. But my dad never acted like this was something he should push me along with. He pulled out a blackboard from time to time, a tiny little blackboard we had in our house on Edmonton Avenue, and when I asked, he would answer anything and make diagrams for it. I remember how he showed me what happened if you put a plus voltage into a transistor and got a minus voltage out the other end of the transistor. There must have been an inverter, a type of logic gate. And he even physically taught me how to make an AND gate and an OR gate out of parts he got--parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of one gate to the input of the other.

(p. 16) To this very moment, that is the way every single digital device on the planet works at its most basic level.

He took the time--a lot of time--to show me those few little things. They were little things to him, even though Fairchild and Texas Instruments had just developed the transistor only a decade earlier.

It's amazing, really, to think that my dad taught me about transistors back when almost no one saw anything but vacuum tubes. So he was at the top of the state of the art, probably because his secret job put him in touch with such advanced technology. So I ended up being at the state of the art, too.

The way my dad taught me, though, was not to rote-memorize how parts are connected to form a gate, but to learn where the electrons flowed to make the gate do its job. To truly internalize and understand what is going on, not just read stuff off some blueprint or out of some book.

Those lessons he taught me still drive my intelligence and my methods for all the computer designs I do today.

Source:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

The reference to the Gladwell book is:

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.

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(p. 12) . . . my dad taught me . . . a lot about electronics. Boy, do I owe a lot to him for this. He first started telling me things and explaining things about electronics when I was really, really young--before I was even four years old. This is before he had that top secret job at Lockheed, when he worked at Electronic Data Systems in the Los Angeles area. One of my first memories is his taking me to his workplace on a weekend and showing me a few electronic parts, putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them and look at them. I can still picture him standing there working on some kind of equipment. I don't know if he was soldering or what, but I do remember him hooking something up to something else that looked like a little TV set. I now know it was an oscilloscope. And he told me he was trying to get something done, trying to get the picture on the screen with a line (it was a waveform) stable-looking so he could show his boss that his design worked.

And I remember sitting there and being so little, and thinking: Wow, what a great, great world he's living in. I mean, that's all I (p. 13) thought: Wow. For people who know how to do this stuff--how to take these little parts and make them work together to do something--well, these people must be the smartest people hi the world. That was really what went through my head, way back then.

Now, I was, of course, too young at that point to decide that I wanted to be an engineer. That came a few years later. I hadn't even been exposed to science fiction or books about inventors yet, but just then, at that moment, I could see right before my eyes that whatever my dad was doing, whatever it was, it was important and good.

Source:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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Source of book image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_TwOg8fVl5Og/SkXmn7MyaxI/AAAAAAAAAug/G-klN-KQHis/s1600/iWoz.jpg

iWoz is a fun read, with wild fluctuations in the significance of what is written. When Wozniak writes about the ingredients of inventiveness, it is significant. When he talks about his pranks, or his obsessions with certain number combinations, it is strange. (Maybe I just haven't figured out the significance of Wozniak's quirks---I once heard George Stigler say that even the mistakes of a great mind were worth pondering.)

In the next few weeks I'll be quoting a few of the more significant passages.

An over-riding lesson from the book, is the extent to which both Wozniak and Jobs were necessary for the Apple achievement. Wozniak was a genius inventor, but he did not have the drive or the skills, or the judgment of the entrepreneur.

Schumpeter famously distinguished invention from innovation. Wozniak was the inventor, and Jobs was the innovator (aka, the entrepreneur).

Book discussed:

Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

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"Early Homo sapiens created these symbolic objects between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago. Using natural materials and creativity, they combined animal and human features into fantastical creatures and fashioned instruments for making music. "Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

The sort of artifacts displayed above have been used to argue that homo sapiens had essentially reached their modern capabilities at least by 40,000 years ago.

The handaxes below are fascinating, in that they clearly display progress, and they clearly display how slow that progress was.

(p. D13) The mysterious Ice Age extinction of the Neanderthals, losers in the competition against modern humans, still fires the popular imagination. So it's startling to learn that as recently as 70,000 years ago, at least four human species coexisted, including tenacious, long-lived Homo erectus and diminutive, hobbit-like Homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia in 2003.

The sensational 1974 discovery in Ethiopia of "Lucy," resembling an ape but walking upright, located human origins 3.2 million years in the past. Those same fossil deposits have recently yielded even more-ancient ancestors, who stood on their own two feet as far back as six million years ago.

Paleoanthropology is thriving, and human fossil finds--more than 6,000 and counting--regularly force revisions of old timelines and theories. Our species, Homo sapiens, turns out to have had an abundance of long-lost cousins, though scientists are still arguing about the closeness of those relationships. The new David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, whose opening marked the museum's centennial, provides a formidable overview of this still-developing story.

. . .

It's long been accepted that different human species were adapted to thrive in specific climatic niches. Neanderthals had short, compact bodies to conserve heat and large nasal passages to warm frigid air, while some of our African forebears had long, skinny frames suited to hotter climes. But this exhibition contends that the evolutionary concomitant of incessant climate change was human resilience--the flexibility to make it almost anywhere, thanks to large, sophisticated brains and social networks.

Versatility apparently characterized even our oldest relatives. The ability to walk upright through the drier, more open grasslands did not immediately divest them of their penchant for climbing trees in the shrinking woodlands. A diorama of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) depicts her with one foot on the ground and another on a tree limb, symbolizing her straddling of two environments.

For the full review, see:

JULIA M. KLEIN. "Natural History; Our Species Rediscovers Its Cousins." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 11, 2010): D13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

"Handaxes -- multipurpose tools used to chop wood, butcher animals, and make other tools -- dominated early human technology for more than a million years. Left to right: Africa (1.6 million years old), Asia (1.1 million years old), and Europe (250,000 years old)." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

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"Eric P. Jones demonstrating his new prosthetic fingers. They have helped him master movements other people take for granted, like pouring soda into a cup." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) ERIC JONES sat in a middle seat on a recent flight from the New York area to Florida, but he wasn't complaining. Instead, he was quietly enjoying actions that many other people might take for granted, like taking a cup of coffee from the flight attendant or changing the channel on his video monitor.

These simple movements were lost to Mr. Jones when the fingers and thumb on his right hand were amputated three years ago. But now he has a prosthetic replacement: a set of motorized digits that can clasp cans, flimsy plastic water bottles or even thin slips of paper.

"Pouring a can of soda into a cup -- that is a mundane daily action for most people, but to me it is a very big deal," said Mr. Jones, who lives with his family in Mamaroneck, N.Y. "I slip my bionic fingers on like a glove, and then I have five moveable fingers to grasp things. It's wonderful to have regained these functions."

Mr. Jones's prosthesis, called ProDigits, is made by Touch Bionics in Livingston, Scotland. The device can replace any or all fingers on a hand; each replacement digit has a tiny motor and gear box mounted at the base. Movement is controlled by a computer chip in the prosthesis.

For the full story, see:

ANNE EISENBERG. "Novelties; Grabbing Gracefully, With Replacement Fingers." The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., April 9, 2010): 4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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"A Missouri corn and soybean farmer with a sample of BioTech seed corn." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) The report is described as the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of genetically modified crops on American farmers, who have rapidly adopted them since their introduction in 1996. The study was issued by the National Research Council, which is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences and provides advice to the nation under a Congressional charter.

The report found that the crops allowed farmers to either reduce chemical spraying or to use less harmful chemicals. The crops also had lower production costs, higher output or extra convenience, benefits that generally outweighed the higher costs of the engineered seeds.

"That's a long and impressive list of benefits these crops can provide, and have provided to adopting farmers," David E. Ervin, the chairman of the committee that wrote the report, said on Tuesday during a webcast news conference from Washington.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW POLLACK. "Study Finds Benefits of Genetically Modified Crops But Warns of Overuse." The New York Times (Thurs., April 14, 2010): B3.

(Note: the online version of the article was dated April 13, 2010 and has the very different title "Study Says Overuse Threatens Gains From Modified Crops.")

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"GAME CHANGER? After months of anticipation, Apple unveiled its iPad tablet computer last week." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) The more, the better. That's the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the "wisdom of the crowd" and "open innovation." Assemble all the contributions in the digital suggestion box, we're told in books and academic research, and the result will be collective intelligence.

Yet Apple, a creativity factory meticulously built by Steven P. Jobs since he returned to the company in 1997, suggests another innovation formula -- one more elitist and individual.

This approach is reflected in the company's latest potentially game-changing gadget, the iPad tablet, unveiled last week. It may succeed or stumble but it clearly carries the taste and perspective of Mr. Jobs and seems stamped by the company's earlier marketing motto: Think Different.

. . .

(p. 6) Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of "taste." And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of "trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing."

His is not a product-design philosophy steered by committee or determined by market research. The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct. He gets deeply involved in hardware and software design choices, which await his personal nod or veto. Mr. Jobs, of course, is one member of a large team at Apple, even if he is the leader. Indeed, he has often described his role as a team leader. In choosing key members of his team, he looks for the multiplier factor of excellence. Truly outstanding designers, engineers and managers, he says, are not just 10 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent better than merely very good ones, but 10 times better. Their contributions, he adds, are the raw material of "aha" products, which make users rethink their notions of, say, a music player or cellphone.

"Real innovation in technology involves a leap ahead, anticipating needs that no one really knew they had and then delivering capabilities that redefine product categories," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's what Steve Jobs has done."

For the full commentary, see:

STEVE LOHR. "The Apple in His Eye." The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., MARCH 4, 2010): 1 & 6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated January 29, 2010 and had the title "Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism.")

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". . . apparently a photo that was snapped from the iPhone as Ballmer brandished it above his head." Source of caption and photo: http://www.gearfuse.com/ballmer-lashes-out-at-microsoft-employed-iphone-user-threatens-to-smash-iphone/

(p. A1) REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft Corp. employees are passionate users of the latest tech toys. But there is one gadget love that many at the company dare not name: the iPhone.

The iPhone is made, of course, by Microsoft's longtime rival, Apple Inc. The device's success is a nagging reminder for Microsoft executives of how the company's own efforts to compete in the mobile business have fallen short in recent years. What is especially painful is that many of Microsoft's own employees are nuts for the device.

The perils of being an iPhone user at Microsoft were on display last September. At an all- company meeting in a Seattle sports stadium, one hapless employee used his iPhone to snap photos of Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. Mr. Ballmer snatched the iPhone out of the employee's hands, placed it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it in front of thousands of Microsoft workers, according to people present.

. . .

Nearly 10,000 iPhone users were accessing the Microsoft employee email system last year, say two people who heard the estimates from senior Microsoft executives. That figure equals about 10% of the company's glo-(p. A10)bal work force.

Employees at Apple, in contrast, appear to be more devoted to the company's own mobile phone. Several people who work at the company or deal regularly with employees there say they can't recall seeing Apple workers with mobile phones other than the iPhone in recent memory.

For the full story, see:

NICK WINGFIELD. "Forbidden Fruit: Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones; Steve Ballmer Sours on Apple Product; Work for Ford, Drive a Ford." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 13, 2010): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article had the date MARCH 12, 2010.)

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"Nathan Myhrvold, chief of Intellectual Ventures, says patent holders are being treated unfairly." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

When Nathan Myhrvold was at Microsoft, he helped Bill Gates write The Road Ahead, a well-written book full of realistically optimistic speculation, forecast and analysis.

Besides his main initiative, discussed below, he has recently been in the news due to his bold and controversial suggestion for how to cheaply solve global warming.

(p. B1) BELLEVUE, Wash. -- Nathan Myhrvold wants to shake up the marketplace for ideas. His mission and the activities of the company he heads, Intellectual Ventures, a secretive $5 billion investment firm that has scooped up 30,000 patents, inspire admiration and angst.

Admirers of Mr. Myhrvold, the scientist who led Microsoft's technology development in the 1990s, see an innovator seeking to elevate the economic role and financial rewards for inventors whose patented ideas are often used without compensation by big technology companies. His detractors see a cynical operator deploying his bulging patent trove as a powerful bargaining chip, along with the implied threat of costly litigation, to prod high-tech companies to pay him lucrative fees. They call his company "Intellectual Vultures."

White hat or black hat, Intellectual Ventures is growing rapidly and becoming a major force in the marketplace for intellectual capital. Its rise comes as Congress is considering legislation, championed by large technology companies, that would make it more difficult for patent holders to win large damage awards in court -- changes that Mr. Myhrvold has opposed in Congressional testimony and that his company has lobbied against.

. . .

(p. B10) The issues surrounding Intellectual Ventures, viewed broadly, are the ground rules and incentives for innovation. "How this plays out will be crucial to the American economy," said Josh Lerner, an economist and patent expert at the Harvard Business School.

Mr. Myhrvold certainly thinks so. He says he is trying to build a robust, efficient market for "invention capital," much as private equity and venture capital developed in recent decades. "They started from nothing, were deeply misunderstood and were trashed by people threatened by new business models," he said in his offices here.

Mr. Myhrvold presents his case at length in a 7,000-word article published on Thursday in the Harvard Business Review. "If we and firms like us succeed," he writes, "the invention capital system will turbocharge technological progress, create many more new businesses, and change the world for the better."

In the article and in conversation, Mr. Myhrvold describes the patent world as a vastly underdeveloped market, starved for private capital and too dependent on federal financing for universities and government agencies, which is mainly aimed at scientific discovery anyway. Eventually, he foresees patents being valued as a separate asset class, like real estate or securities.

His antagonists, he says, are the "cozy oligarchy" of big technology companies like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and others that typically reach cross-licensing agreements with each other, and then refuse to deal with or acknowledge the work of inventors or smaller companies.

. . .

Mr. Myhrvold personifies the term polymath. He is a prolific patent producer himself, with more than 100 held or applied for. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton and did postdoctorate research on quantum field theory under Stephen Hawking, before founding a start-up that Microsoft acquired.

He is an accomplished French chef, who has also won a national barbecue contest in Tennessee. He is an avid wildlife photographer, and he has dabbled in paleontology, working on research projects digging for dinosaur remains in the Rockies.

For the full story, see:

STEVE LOHR. "Turning Patents Into 'Invention Capital'." The New York Times (Thur., February 18, 2010): B1 & B10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2010.)

The Bill Gates book is:

Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.

Myhrvold's Harvard Business Review essay is:

Myhrvold, Nathan. "The Big Idea: Funding Eureka!" Harvard Business Review 88, no. 2 (March 2010): 40-50.

"Nathan Myhrvold with a machine that freeze-dries food. Intellectual Ventures so far has paid $315 million to individual inventors." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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(p. B10) . . . , the tech industry's innovation engine is in idle. The annual Mobile World Congress here -- traditionally a place to introduce products that blend computer and phone functions in novel ways -- has featured tweaks on existing designs.

"It's like with evolution, where you have a mutation and then a great explosion of diversity," said Scott A. McGregor, the chief executive of Broadcom, which makes chips that go into a wide range of consumer electronics. "Then, you have a period where you see which creatures can survive the big change."

For the full story, see:

ASHLEE VANCE. "At Tech Conference, the Industry Tweaks and Bets on Survivors." The New York Times (Thur., February 18, 2010): B10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 17, 2010 and has the title "Tech Industry Catches Its Breath.")

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"Mice seem to reap cognitive benefits from cellphone electromagnetism." Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) Alzheimer's and Cell Phones: Radiation associated with long-term cellphone use appears to protect against and reverse Alzheimer's-like symptoms in mice, according to a study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. Mice genetically engineered to develop brain impairments similar to Alzheimer's in humans were divided into two groups. One group was exposed twice daily to hour-long electromagnetic fields akin to those created during cellphone use. Mice in the other group were not exposed to the radiation. After seven months, young mice in the first group fared significantly better on cognitive tests than their unexposed littermates. Older mice, which had already developed symptoms of Alzheimer's, exposed to the radiation for eight months in a subsequent experiment also performed better than older nonexposed mice. Mice, younger and older, not engineered to develop Alzheimer's also appeared to benefit from the radiation. Biopsies suggested such exposure might fight Alzheimer's by inhibiting the buildup of certain protein plaques in the brain, the researchers said.

For the full story, see:

JEREMY SINGER-VINE. "RESEARCH REPORT; NEW MEDICAL FINDINGS; Cellphone Radiation Aids Sick Mice." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., JANUARY 12, 2010): D4.

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(p. 265) On the snowy morning of January 13, 1976, . . . , there was unusual traffic on Rogers Street. Outside the gray one-story buildings with their clouded tilt-out windows, vans from various television channels maneuvered to park. A man from the National Federation of the Blind struggled over a snow bank onto the sidewalk and began tapping earnestly to get his bearings. A dark-haired young man set our on a three-block trek to the nearest vendor of coffee and donuts for the gathering media. In the room at number 68, two engineers poked at a gray box that looked like a mimeograph machine sprouting wires to a Digital Equipment Corporation computer. Several intense young men in their early twenties debated when to begin a demonstration of the device. The short, curly-haired leader of the group, twenty-seven-year-old Raymond Kurzweil, refused to start until the arrival of a reporter from The New York Times.

The event was a press conference announcing the first breakthrough product in the field of artificial intelligence: a reader for the blind. Described as an "omnifont character recognition device" linked to a synthetic voice, the machine could read nearly any kind of book or document laid face down on its glass lens. With a learning faculty that improved the device's performance as it proceeded through blurred, faded, or otherwise illegible print, the machine solved problems of pattern recognition and synthesis that had long confounded IBM, Xerox, and the Japanese conglomerates, as well as thousands of university researchers.

. . .

(p. 266) Stevie Wonder, the great blind musician, called. He had heard about the device after its appearance on the "Today Show" and it seemed a lifelong dream come true. He headed up to Cambridge to meet with Kurzweil.

. . .

As Kurzweil remembers, "He was very excited about it and wanted (p. 267) one right away, so we actually turned the factory upside down and produced a unit that day. We showed him how to hook it up himself. He left with it practically under his arm. I understand he took it straight to his hotel room, set it up. and read all night." As Wonder said, the technology has been "a brother and a friend . . . . without question, another sunshine of my life." Wonder stayed in touch with Kurzweil over the years and would play a key role in conceiving and launching a second major Kurzweil product.

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

(Note: italics in original; all ellipses added except the ellipsis internal to the last paragraph, which was in the original.)

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"Members of the public watched the first test flight of the Boeing 787 on Tuesday in Everett, Wash." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

In their stimulating business best-seller Built to Last Collins and Porrus have a chapter in which they argue that one way to attract and retain the best employees is to give them a difficult but important project to work on. They call such projects "BHAGs," which stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Among their main examples (e.g., p. 104) of BHAGs were Boeing's development of the 707 and 747.

Boeing's latest BHAG is the 787 Dreamliner.

(p. A25) EVERETT, Wash. -- The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner lifted into the gray skies here for the first time on Tuesday morning, more than two years behind schedule and burdened with restoring Boeing's pre-eminence in global commercial aviation.

"Engines, engines, engines, engines!" shouted April Seixeiro, 37, when the glossy twin-engine plane began warming up across from where spectators had informally gathered at Paine Field. Ms. Seixeiro was among scores of local residents and self-described "aviation geeks" who came to watch the first flight.

Moments after the plane took off at 10:27 a.m., Mrs. Seixeiro was wiping tears from her eyes. A friend, Katie Bailey, 34, cried, too.

"That was so beautiful," Ms. Bailey said.

For the full story, see:

WILLIAM YARDLEY. "As 787 Takes Flight, Seattle Wonders About Boeing's Future." The New York Times (Weds., December 16, 2009): A25.

(Note: the online version of the article has the title "A Takeoff, and Hope, for Boeing Dreamliner" and is dated December 15, 2009.)

The reference for the Collins and Porras book is:

Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. New York: HarperBusiness, 1994.

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Source of map: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4A) ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Global warming has melted so much Arctic ice that a telecommunication group is moving forward with a project that was unthinkable just a few years ago: laying underwater fiber optic cable between Tokyo and London by way of the Northwest Passage.

The proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Asia, said Walt Ebell, CEO of Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co. The route is the shortest underwater path between Tokyo and London.

The quicker transmission time is important in the financial world where milliseconds can count in executing profitable trades and transactions. "Speed is the crux," Ebell said. "You're cutting the delay from 140 milliseconds to 88 milliseconds."

. . .

"It will provide the domestic market an alternative route not only to Europe - there's lots of cable across the Atlantic - but it will provide the East Coast with an alternative, faster route to Asia as well," he said.

The cable would pass mostly through U.S., Canadian international waters and avoid possible trouble spots along the way.

"You're not susceptible to 'events,' I should say, that you might run into with a cable that runs across Russia or the cables that run down around Asia and go up through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea. You're getting away from those choke points."

For the full story, see:

DAN JOLING, Associated Press Writer. "Loss of Arctic Ice Opens Up New Cable Route." Omaha World-Herald (Fri., January 22, 2010): 4A.

(Note: the online version of the article had the title: Global warming opens up Arctic for undersea cable" and was dated January 21, 2010.)

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. 188) For the next two years, Conway coordinated her efforts under Sutherland at PARC with Mead's ongoing work at Caltech. But she was frustrated with the pace of progress. There was no shortage of innovative design ideas; computerized design tools had advanced dramatically since Mead's first efforts several years before. Yet the industry as a whole continued in the old rut. As Conway put it later, the problem was "How can you take methods that are new, methods that are not in common use and therefore perhaps considered unsound methods, and turn them into sound methods?" [Conway's italics].

She saw the challenge in the terms described in Thomas Kuhn's popular book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. it was the problem that took Boltzmann to his grave. It was the problem of innovation depicted by economist Joseph Schumpeter in his essays on entrepreneurship: new systems lay waste to the systems of the past. Creativity is a solution for the creator and the new ventures he launches. But it wreaks dissolution--"creative destruction," in Schumpeter's words-- for the defenders of old methods. In fact, no matter how persuasive the advocates of change, it is very rare that an entrenched establishment will reform its ways. Establishments die or retire or fall in revolution; they only rarely transform themselves.

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

(Note: italics in original.)

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"The Bose QuietComfort 15 has refined circuitry and redesigned earcaps." Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) . . . , if your sales are getting eaten alive by cheaper rivals, and you don't want to play the price game, you have only one option: play leapfrog. Make your gadget so much better than the me-toos that people will be willing to pay your premium once again.

That's the idea behind Bose's new QuietComfort 15 model ($300), which replaces the QuietComfort 2.

. . .

First, the QC15 model really, truly does advance the art of noise cancellation -- big time. The QC 2 headphones and my Panasonics cut the airplane roar by half. But the 15 reduced it by, say, 85 percent, leaving only a distant, whispery whoosh to remind you that you're in an aluminum tube 39,000 feet up in the air. Taking them off after a while, as you'll want to do because your ears get sweaty, is like walking into a rock concert when you've been outside the building.

For the full story, see:

DAVID POGUE. "State of the Art; Ho Ho Ho? You Won't Hear a Thing." The New York Times (Thurs., December 3, 2009): B1 & B8.

(Note: the online version of the article is "State of the Art; Bose's Latest Headphones Can Quell the Clangor" and is dated December 2, 2009.)

(Note: ellipses added.)

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(p. 137) No one will deny that Japan's triumph in semiconductors depended on American inventions. But many analysts rush on to a further theory that the Japanese remained far behind the United States until the mid- 1970s and caught up only through a massive government program of industrial targeting of American inventions by MITI.

Perhaps the leading expert on the subject is Makoto Kikuchi, a twenty-six-year veteran of MITI laboratories, now director of the Sony Research Center. The creator of the first transistor made in Japan, he readily acknowledges the key role of American successes in fueling the advances in his own country: "Replicating someone else's experiment, no matter how much painful effort it might take, is nothing compared with the sweat and anguish of the men who first made the discovery."

Kikuchi explains: "No matter how many failures I had, I knew that somewhere in the world people had already succeeded in making a transistor. The first discoverers . . . had to continue their work, their long succession of failures, face-to-face with the despairing possibility that in the end they might never succeed. . . . As I fought my own battle with the transistor, I felt this lesson in my very bones." Working at MITI's labs, Kikuchi was deeply grateful for the technological targets offered by American inventors.

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

(Note: ellipses in original.)

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(p. 113) Firms that win by the curve of mind often abandon it when they establish themselves in the world of matter. They fight to preserve the value of their material investments in plant and equipment that embody the ideas and experience of their early years of success. They begin to exalt expertise and old knowledge, rights and reputation, over the constant learning and experience of innovative capitalism. They get fat.

A fat cat drifting off the curve, however, is a sitting duck for new nations and companies getting on it. The curve of mind thus tends to favor outsiders over establishments of all kinds. At the capitalist ball, the blood is seldom blue or the money rarely seasoned. Microcosmic technologies are no exception. Capitalism's most lavish display, the microcosm, is no respecter of persons.

The United States did not enter the microcosm through the portals of the Ivy League, with Brooks Brothers suits, gentleman Cs, and warbling society wives. Few people who think they are in already can summon the energies to break in. From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beer-bellied, the tacky and uptight, and sometimes weird, the born again and born yesterday, with Adam's apples bobbing, psyches (p. 114) throbbing, and acne galore, the fraternity of the pizza breakfast, the Ferrari dream, the silicon truth, the midnight modem, and the seventy-hour week, from dirt farms and redneck shanties, trailer parks and Levittowns, in a rainbow parade of all colors and wavelengths, of the hyperneat and the sty high, the crewcut and khaki, the pony-tailed and punk, accented from Britain and Madras, from Israel and Malaya, from Paris and Parris Island, from Iowa and Havana, from Brooklyn and Boise and Belgrade and Vienna and Vietnam, from the coarse fanaticism and desperation, ambition and hunger, genius and sweat of the outsider, the downtrodden, the banished, and the bullied come most of the progress in the world and in Silicon Valley.

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

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The incident recounted below is from the story of the development of the 4004 microprocessor (which was the first commercially available microprocessor). Hoff and Shima played important roles in the development of the chip.

I am not sure that the main "lesson" from the incident is about the importance of details. (After all, many entrepreneurs, including Simplot, embark on big projects without a clear idea of how to accomplish the details.) A bigger and sounder lesson may be the usefulness of resilience for successful inventors and entrepreneurs.

(p. 104) Hoff's counterpart at Busicom was a young Japanese named Masatoshi Shima who also had been thinking about problems of computer architecture. An equally formidable intellect, Shima came to the project through a series of accidents, beginning with a misbegotten effort to launch a small rocket using gunpowder he made by hand in his high school chemistry laboratory. As he carefully followed the formula, he claims to have had the mixture exactly right, except for some details that he overlooked. The mixture exploded, and as he pulled away his right hand, it seemed a bloody stump. At the local hospital (p. 105) a doctor with wide experience treating combat wounds felt lucky to save the boy's thumb alone,

This ordeal taught the teen-aged Shima that "details are very important." In the future he should "pay attention to all the details." But the loss of his fingers convinced his parents--and later several key Japanese companies--that the boy should not become a chemical engineer, even though he had won his degree in chemical engineering. Thus Shima ended up at Busicom chiefly because it was run by a friend of one of his professors.

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

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The steering wheel of the 1954 Packard Panther. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 11) The company may have started on a dare, according to "Packard: A History of the Motor Car and the Company," edited by Beverly Rae Kimes (Automobile Quarterly Publications, 2002).

After graduating from Lehigh University's engineering school and returning home to Warren, Ohio, James Ward Packard considered buying his first car, a Winton. When Packard asked for some special features, he got this response from Alexander Winton: "The Winton waggon (sic) as it stands is the ripened and perfected product of many years of lofty thought ... and could not be improved in any detail. If Mr. Packard wants any of his own cats and dogs worked into a waggon, he had better build it himself."

Despite the rude reply, Packard bought the car, but it broke down often. Commiserating over dinner with George Weiss, a friend (and Winton stockholder), Packard decided to take Winton's words seriously. It must have been an especially satisfying day for Packard on June 17, 1899, when Weiss sold his Winton stock and invested in Packard's new business, soon to be named the Ohio Automobile Company.

Although its first cars looked conventional, they had some unusual features. It was one of a few cars with an accelerator pedal, and its H-gate gearshift pattern, a Packard patent, was widely used in later years.

Packard's reputation for reliability and durability was established with its model A and B cars, but the company did not stop development there, even taking the lessons of early mishaps to improve subsequent vehicles.

During the summer of 1900, a model B swerved into a ditch after hitting a pothole -- a hazard on cars with tiller steering, as the impact could jerk the steering lever from the driver's grasp -- injuring the passenger and damaging the car. Packard started work on a solution; when the model C was introduced later that year, it featured the industry's first steering wheel.

. . .

After flirting with Nash in the early 1950s, Packard purchased Studebaker in 1954 (which explains why the Packard Predictor resides in the Studebaker Museum). Studebaker was larger but struggling. The merger hastened the end of both makes.

Still, Packard left its mark on the American auto industry.

For the full story, see:

ROBB MANDELBAUM. "Collecting; Packard's Visions of the Future, When It Still Had One ." The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., September 10, 2009): 11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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Source of book image: http://images.indiebound.com/923/705/9780671705923.jpg

Many years ago Telecosm was the first George Gilder book that I read; I enjoyed it for its over-the-top verbal exuberance in detailing, praising and predicting the progress of the then-new broadband technologies. I bought his earlier Microcosm at about the same time, but didn't get around to reading it because I assumed it would be a dated read, dealing in a similar manner with the earlier personal computer (PC) technology.

In the last year or so I have read Gilder's Wealth and Poverty and Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise. There is some interesting material in Gilder's famous Wealth and Poverty, which has sometimes been described as one of the main intellectual manifestos of the Reagan administration. But Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise has become my favorite Gilder book (so far).

In each chapter, the main modus operandi of that book is to present a case study of a recent entrepreneur, with plenty of interpretation of the lessons to be learned about why entrepreneurship is important to the economy, what sort of personal characteristics are common in entrepreneurs, and what government policies encourage or discourage entrepreneurs.

In that book I read that the original plan had been to include several chapters on the entrepreneurs who had built the personal computer revolution. But the original manuscript grew to unwieldy size, and so the personal computer chapters became the basis of the book Microcosm.

So Microcosm moved to the top of my "to-read" list, and turned out to be a much less-dated book than I had expected.

Microcosm does for the personal computer entrepreneurs what Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise did for a broader set of entrepreneurs.

In the next few weeks, I will occasionally quote a few especially important examples or thought-provoking observations from Microcosm.




Reference to Gilder's MIcrocosm:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

Other Gilder books mentioned:

Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992. (The first edition was called simply The Spirit of Enterprise, and appeared in 1984.)

Gilder, George. Telecosm: The World after Bandwidth Abundance. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 2002.

Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty. 3rd ed. New York: ICS Press, 1993.

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Studebakers were made mainly in South Bend, Indiana, where I was born and raised. (One of our early family cars was a Studebaker Scotsman, but, alas, it did not look much like the Studebaker Commander that was once pictured above.)

By the way, in the musings quoted below, my understanding is that O'Rourke is not entirely right about Henry Ford: I believe Ford bankrupted two auto companies before founding the one that made the Model T that was once pictured below.)

(p. W2) . . . cars didn't shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We're way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy's lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren't forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

. . .

I don't believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car.

. . .

American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool.

. . .

There are those of us who have had the good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives.

For the full commentary, see:

P.J. O'ROURKE. "The End of the Affair. The fate of Detroit isn't a matter of economics. It's a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O'Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MAY 30, 2009): W1-W2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: thanks to my mother for refreshing my faulty memory on which model of Studebaker we owned.)

For some interesting brief background on Ford, see:

Nye, John Vincent. "Lucky Fools and Cautious Businessmen: On Entrepreneurship and the Measurement of Entrepreneurial Failure." In The Vital One: Essays in Honour of Jonathan R. T. Hughes, edited by Joel Mokyr. Greenwich, Conn. and London: JAI Press, 1991, pp.131-52.

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Source of cartoon: online version of the NYT commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. A25) . . . the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon -- a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Because books are such an important part of the world's collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.

. . .

In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will "impress the necessity of something being done" to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection.

I hope such destruction never happens again, but history would suggest otherwise. More important, even if our cultural heritage stays intact in the world's foremost libraries, it is effectively lost if no one can access it easily. Many companies, libraries and organizations will play a role in saving and making available the works of the 20th century. Together, authors, publishers and Google are taking just one step toward this goal, but it's an important step. Let's not miss this opportunity.

For the full commentary, see:

SERGEY BRIN. "A Library to Last Forever." The New York Times (Fri., October 9, 2009): A25.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version is dated October 8th.)

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(p. A20) The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday's issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California's Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.

"Human influence is pretty pervasive," one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. "Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems" tens of thousands of years ago.

For the full story, see:

CORNELIA DEAN. "Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says." The New York Times (Fri., August 21, 2009): A20.

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(p. B6) Both Nissan and Mitsubishi have their own reasons for rushing out an all-electric car. Having invested little in hybrids, they hope to leapfrog straight to the next technology.

. . .

"You don't see many competing technologies survive in a key market for very long," said Mr. Shimizu, the Keio University professor.

And more often than not in the history of innovation, a change in the dominant technology means a change in the market leader.

"Electric cars are a disruptive technology, and Toyota knows that," Mr. Shimizu said. "I wouldn't say Toyota is killing the electric vehicle. Perhaps Toyota is scared."

For the full story, see:

HIROKO TABUCHI. "The Electric Slide." The New York Times (Thursday, August 20, 2009): B1 & B6.

(Note: The online version of the article had the title: "Toyota, Hybrid Innovator, Holds Back in Race to Go Electric.")

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. A13) Imagine if in the middle of the computer transformation the Reagan administration worried about the upheaval and tried to rescue this vital industry by making huge investments in leading mainframe companies. The purpose of such investments would have been to protect the viability of these companies. The effect, however, would have been to put the brakes on transformation and all but ensure that the U.S. would lose its leadership role.

The government's investment in General Motors might be directly helpful if the auto industry only had the recession to contend with. But that is not the case. The industry faces the confluence of a world-wide recession, rising fuel prices, environmental demands, globalization of manufacturing, and, most importantly, technological change involving the very nature of the automobile.

For the full commentary, see:

ANDREW S. GROVE. "What Detroit Can Learn From Silicon Valley; Vertically integrated production is a thing of the past. Will the auto industry's new overseers catch on?" Wall Street Journal (Mon., JULY 13, 2009): A13.

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(p. B5) Recognizing that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is increasingly used by the public as a news source, Google News began this month to include Wikipedia among the stable of publications it trawls to create the site.

A visit to the Google News home page on Wednesday evening, for example, found that four of the 30 or so articles summarized there had prominent links to Wikipedia articles, including ones covering the global swine flu outbreak and the Iranian election protests.

. . .

The move by Google News was news to Wikipedia itself. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, said he learned about it by reading an online item on the subject by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

"Google is recognizing that Wikipedia is becoming a source for very up-to-date information," he said, although "it is an encyclopedia at the end of the day."

For the full story, see:

NOAM COHEN. "Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site." The New York Times Company (Weds., June 22, 2009): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. 96) While science and enterprise open vast new panoramas of opportunity, our established experts flee in horror to all available caves and cages, like so many primitives, terrified by freedom and change.

Source:

Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. W8) There are technologies and then there are technologies. Some are trivial, such as Ziploc plastic bags. They're handy, to be sure, but they don't change the world. Some are extraordinarily simple but profound, such as the stirrup, which came along only after men had been riding horses for well over a thousand years. Nothing more than a ring of metal hung from a leather strap, the stirrup made cavalry the dominant force on the European battlefield and therefore made the mounted knight the dominant force in European society for several hundred years.

As Gavin Weightman's "The Industrial Revolutionaries" reminds us, inventions on the level of the stirrup's importance seemed to come every other month during the late 18th and 19th centuries -- what Mr. Weightman calls "the most remarkable period of practical inventiveness in world history."

When Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in the 17th century that the great majority of the population led lives that were "nasty, brutish and short," he was describing an agrarian society that was, in its essence, unchanged since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years earlier. Ownership of land was the basis of wealth. Hobbes had no reason to think that the situation would change any time soon. But it did: A rapidly accelerating development of world-transforming technologies, subsumed under the rubric of "the Industrial Revolution," began in Britain and within 100 years had molded the modern world.

. . .

The Industrial Revolution revolutionized more than just the global economy: It transformed politics and society. A world divided between a handful of aristocrats and millions of peasants was transformed into a world dominated by the middle class, where wealth is widely distributed and the franchise universal.

For the full review, see:

JOHN STEELE GORDON. "Books; Inventing a New World; The men who engineered the astonishing emergence of the modern age." Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 11, 2009): W8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book being reviewed, is:

Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914. New York: Grove Press, 2009.

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Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation predicts that incumbents will seldom survive a major disruption. So it is interesting that Durant and Studebaker, appear to have been exceptions, since they made the transition from producing carriages to producing cars. (Willie Durant founded General Motors in 1908.)

(p. 189) In 1900, fifty-seven surviving American automobile firms, out of hundreds of contenders, produced some 4,000 cars, three-quarters of which ran on steam or electricity. Companies famous for other products were entering the fray. Among them were the makers of the Pope bicycle, the Pierce birdcage, the Peerless wringer, the Buick bathtub, the White sewing machine, and the Briscoe garbage can. All vied for the market with stationary-engine makers, machine-tool manufacturers, and spinoffs of leading carriage firms, Durant and Studebaker. Among the less promising entrants seemed a lanky young engineer from Edison Illuminating Company named Henry Ford, whose Detroit Automobile Company produced twenty-five cars and failed in 1900.

. . .

(p. 191) Willie Durant, who knew all about production and selling from his carriage business, decided it was time to move into cars after several months of driving a prototype containing David Buick's valve-in-head engine--the most powerful in the world for its size--through rural Michigan in 1904. Within four years, Durant was to parlay his sturdy Buick vehicle into domination of the automobile industry, with a 25 percent share of the market in 1908, the year he founded General Motors.

Source:

Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Christensen's theory is most fully expressed in:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

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(p. A15) The Founders might have used quill pens, but they would roll their eyes at how, in this supposedly technology-minded era, we're undermining their intention to encourage innovation. The U.S. is stumbling in the transition from their Industrial Age to our Information Age, despite the charge in the Constitution that Congress "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

. . .

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, "Patent Failure," found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they think the system will protect.

These are shocking findings, but they point to the solution. New drugs require great specificity to earn a patent, whereas patents are often granted to broad, thus vague, innovations in software, communications and other technologies. Ironically, the aggregate value of these technology patents is then wiped out through litigation costs.

Our patent system for most innovations has become patently absurd. It's a disincentive at a time when we expect software and other technology companies to be the growth engine of the economy. Imagine how much more productive our information-driven economy would be if the patent system lived up to the intention of the Founders, by encouraging progress instead of suppressing it.

For the full commentary, see:

L. GORDON CROVITZ. "OPINION: INFORMATION AGE; Patent Gridlock Suppresses Innovation." Wall Street Journal (Mon., JULY 14, 2008): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"BOOK VALUE: Berkshire Hathaway's Charles Munger reads businesses well -- and, as a bibliophile, he goes through several books a week." Source of caricature and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

At a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting a few years ago, I remember hearing Warren Buffett say that he stays away from technology stocks because he does not know how to judge which technologies are likely to succeed in the long-run. So I was a bit puzzled by the news that Berkshire Hathaway was investing in BYD, a Chinese company producing an electric car.

The passages quoted below may partially solve the puzzle: the investment in BYD was pushed by Charlie Munger and David Sokol, and was based more on a judgment about the quality of BYD's management, than the prospects for BYD's technology.

(p. C1) Mr. Munger's views have pushed Berkshire into some surprising directions. Several years ago, Mr. Munger learned of an obscure Chinese maker of batteries and automobiles called BYD Inc., which hopes to create a cheap, functional electric car.

A Chinese tech company is nothing like the shoe and underwear makers Berkshire had been buying. But Mr. Munger was enthusiastic, less about the technology than about Wang Chuanfu, who runs BYD. Mr. Wang, Mr. Munger says, is "likely to be one of the most important business people who ever lived."

Mr. Buffett was skeptical at first. But Mr. Munger persisted. David Sokol, chairman of Berkshire utility MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., paid a visit to BYD's factory in China and agreed with Mr. Munger's assessment. Last year, MidAmerican paid $230 million for a 10% stake in BYD.

"BYD was Charlie's idea," Mr. Buffett said. "When he encounters genius and sees it operating in a practical way, he gets blown away."

For the full story, see:

SCOTT PATTERSON. "Here's the Story on Berkshire's Munger." Wall Street Journal (Fri., MAY 1, 2009): C1 & C3.

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(p. W12) The tower is so beloved that few today remember the storm of vitriol, mockery and lawsuits provoked by its selection as the startling centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. (One of the losing entries was a gigantic working guillotine!) Even as Eiffel was breaking ground by the Seine River in February 1887, 47 of France's greatest names decried in a letter to Le Temps the "odious column of bolted metal." What person of good taste, this flock of intellectuals asked, could endure the thought of this "dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass"? The revered painters Ernest Meissonier and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, composer Charles Gounod and architect Charles Garnier all signed this epistolary call to arms, stating that "the Eiffel Tower, which even commercial America would not have, is without a doubt the dishonor of Paris."

Gustave Eiffel, a self-made millionaire whose firm constructed much-admired bridges all over the world, happily twitted his critics: "They begin by declaring that my tower is not French. It is big enough and clumsy enough for the English or Americans, but it is not our style, they say. We are more occupied by little artistic bibelots. . . . Why should we not show the world what we can do in the way of great engineering projects?"

For the full commentary, see:

JILL JONNES. "MASTERPIECE; 'Odious Column' of Metal; The Eiffel Tower wasn't always a beloved icon." Wall Street Journal (Tues., MAY 9, 2009): W12.

(Note: ellipsis in original.)

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(p. 198) "All advances in science were proscribed as innovations." Jefferson is using the older, negative sense of the word "innovation" here: a new development that threatened the existing order in a detrimental way. (The change in the valence of the word over the next century is one measure of society's shifting relationship to progress.) But that regressive age was now over, and Priestley--the most forward-thinking mind of his generation--could now consider himself fully at home:

Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them: science and honesty are replaced on their high ground, and you, my dear Sir, as their great apostle, are on its pinnacle. It is with heartfelt satisfaction that in the first moments of my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our land, tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise and good like you, and disdain the legitimacy of that libel on legislation which under the form of a law was for some time placed among them.

Perhaps inspired by the legendary optimism of Priestley himself, Jefferson then added some of the most stirringly hopeful words that he ever put to paper:

(p. 199) As the storm is now subsiding, and the horizon becoming serene, it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon with attention. We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new. But the most pleasing novelty is, it's so quietly subsiding over such an extent of surface to its true level again. The order and good sense displayed in this recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which lately arose, really bespeak a strength of character in our nation which augurs well for the duration of our Republic; and I am much better satisfied now of it's stability than I was before it was tried.

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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An environment in which long-term hunches can be pursued, is important not just to science and invention. I speculate that it is also important to entrepreneurship.

(p. 74) If great ideas usually arrive in fragments, a partial cluster of neurons, then part of the secret to having great ideas lies in creating a working environment where those fragments are nurtured and sustained over time. This obviously poses some difficulty in modern work environments, with deadlines and quarterly reports and annual job reviews. (The typical middle manager doesn't respond favorably to news that an employee has a hunch about something that probably won't see results for twenty years.) But Priestley had created an environment for himself where those long-term hunches could thrive with almost no pressure, and his habit of simultaneously writing multiple documents (on multiple topics) kept the fragments alive in his mind over the decades. In the final pages of his memoirs, he mentions a lifelong habit of writing down "as soon as possible, every thing I wish not to forget."

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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(p. 69) This is a standard pattern in the history of science: when tools for measuring increase their precision by orders of magnitude, new paradigms often emerge, because the newfound accuracy reveals anomalies that had gone undetected. One of the crucial benefits of increasing the accuracy of scales is that it suddenly became possible to measure things that had almost no weight. Black's discovery of fixed air, and its perplexing mixture with common air, would have been impossible without the state-of-the-art scales he employed in his experiments. The whole inquiry had begun when Black heated a quantity of white magnesia, and discovered that it lost a minuscule amount of weight in the process--a difference that would have been imperceptible using older scales. The shift in weight suggested that something was escaping from the magnesia into the air. By then running comparable experiments, heating a wide array of substances, Black was able to accurately determine the weight of carbon dioxide, and consequently prove the existence of the gas. It weighs, therefore it is.

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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(p. 68) When we think of technological advances powering scientific discovery, the image that conventionally comes to mind is a specifically visual one: tools that expand the range of our vision, that let us literally see the object of study with new clarity, or peer into new levels of the very distant, the very small. Think of the impact that the telescope had on early physics, or the microscope on bacteriology. But new ways of seeing are not always crucial to discovery. The air pump didn't allow you to see the vacuum, because of course there was nothing to see: but it did allow you to see it indirectly, in the force that held the Magdeburg Sphere together despite all that horsepower.

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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(p. 49) With his wife running the household and tending to their four-year-old daughter, Sally, Priestley simply had more time on his hands to explore, invent, and write. Priestley was retracing a pattern that Franklin had originally carved two decades before, when he handed over day-to-day operation of his printing business to his foreman, David Hall, in 1748 and then spent the next three years transforming the science of electricity. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but most of the great inventors were blessed with something else: leisure time.

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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(p. 24) Within five years of his speculative note to Collinson, lightning rods had become a common sight on church steeples throughout Europe and America. Franklin's biographer Carl Van Doren aptly describes the astonishment that greeted these events around the world: "A man in Philadelphia in America, bred a tradesman, remote from the learned world, had hit upon a secret which enabled him, and other men, to catch and tame the lightning, so dread that it was still mythological."

Source:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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Source of book image: http://stevenberlinjohnson.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/10/invention_final_81908.jpg

Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, about the determined entrepreneurial detective work that uncovered the cause of cholera, is one of my all-time favorite books, so I am now in the mode of reading everything else that Steven Johnson has written, or will write.

The most recent book, The Invention of Air, is not as spectacular as The Ghost Map, but is well-written on a thought-provoking topic. It focuses on Joseph Priestley's role in the American Revolution. Priestley is best known as an early chemist, but Johnson paints him as a poly-math whose science was of a piece with his philosophy, politics and his religion.

Johnson's broader point is that for many of the founding fathers, science was not a compartment of their lives, but part of the whole cloth (hey, it's my blog, so I can mix as many metaphors as I want to).

And the neat bottom line is that Priestley's method of science (and polity) is the same broadly empirical/experimental/entrepreneurial method that usually leads to truth and progress.

Along the way, Johnson makes many amusing and thought-provoking observations, such as the paragraphs devoted to his coffee-house theory of the enlightenment. (You see, coffee makes for clearer thinking than beer.)

The book:

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) "Hello Everybody!" is at its most valuable when it chronicles the early regulatory fights over the new medium. In the days after World War I, the Navy pushed hard for control of all "wireless" facilities, which were then used primarily used for point-to-point messaging. If the admirals had succeeded in that grab, which was blocked by Congress, the advent of broadcast radio would no doubt have been delayed and the industry might have developed more along the lines of European radio, with a great deal of government control.

For the full review, see:

RANDALL BLOOMQUIST. ""Bookshelf; A Journey Across the Dial." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., OCTOBER 9, 2008): A15.

The reference to the book under review, is:

Rudel, Anthony. Hello, Everybody! Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008.

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Petra Moser's comments (see below) about inventors applying similar ideas to different industries seem complementary to Burke's emphasis on the importance of serendipitous "connections." An inventor exposing herself to many industries' problems and products, would be more likely to see additional applications for inventions originally developed for another industry.

(p. 3) By some logic, there is no earthly reason why bicycles should still exist.

They are a quaint, 19th-century invention, originally designed to get someone from point A to point B. Today there are much faster, far less labor-intensive modes of transportation. And yet hopeful children still beg for them for Christmas, healthful adults still ride them to work, and daring teenagers still vault them down courthouse steps. The bicycle industry has faced its share of disruptive technologies, and it has repeatedly risen from the ashes.

. . .

"Much of the history of the 'American system of manufacturing' is the story of inventors moving from a declining industry to a new expanding industry," says Petra Moser, an economic historian at Stanford who studies innovation. "Inventors take their skills with them."

Gun makers learned to make revolvers with interchangeable parts in the mid-19th century, Ms. Moser says. Then those companies (and some former employees, striking out on their own) applied those techniques to sewing machines when demand for guns slackened. Later, sewing machine manufacturers began making woodworking machinery, bicycles, cars and finally trucks.

. . .

Meanwhile, we've already seen some of the "destruction" half of Joseph Schumpeter's famous "creative destruction" paradigm, with many newspapers cutting staff and other production costs. Unfortunately for newspapers, historians say, the survivors in previous industries facing major technological challenges were usually individual companies that adapted, rather than an entire industry. So a bigger shakeout may yet come.

But perhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists -- or, for that matter, autoworkers -- will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.

For the full commentary, see:

CATHERINE RAMPELL. "Ideas & Trends; How Industries Survive Change. If They Do." The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., November 15, 2008): 3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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(p. R8) Innovation occurs almost constantly at the level of design and components, absorbing companies' attention as they look for ways to best their competitors. Platform innovations are less frequent. But when they do occur, they have the potential to transform markets, not just give an edge to one competitor.

One great danger to companies is to be so immersed in design and component innovation that they miss out on a platform innovation. For example, while Sony Corp. focused in the 1990s on improving its CRT television sets, a market it dominated, rival Samsung Electronics Co. invested heavily in flat-screen LCD TVs. As the market for LCD TVs grew, Sony fell behind its rivals and ended up entering into a joint venture with Samsung to build liquid-crystal displays.

Innovation's Messy Paths

Another mistake to avoid is to assume that all technologies follow a standard progression.

The conventional wisdom is that the performance of any technology is initially low, then improves rapidly after some breakthrough, and ultimately levels out in maturity. A new technology's performance supposedly starts below that of the established technology, surpasses it after the breakthrough is achieved, and then remains superior until the next big thing comes along. Literature on the subject has encouraged managers to embrace a new technology once it begins to show rapid improvement, and to abandon the old technology because it is destined to become obsolete.

However, our analysis of several markets shows that technological evolution is much messier than this simple pattern. For instance, new technologies sometimes enter the market with better performance than the existing technology, only to fall behind at some point before later regaining the lead. That's the case in the market for external lighting. When gas-discharge lighting, which is used in fluorescent tubes, was introduced around 1930, it was brighter per watt than the existing arc-discharge lighting, which is used in many street lamps, and it maintained that superiority for some 40 years, until improvements in arc-discharge lighting made it the brightest per watt again. Then, in 1980, gas discharge made its biggest jump in performance so far, again surpassing arc discharge in brightness per watt. Both technologies have gone through several long periods of stagnation followed by sharp improvements in performance.

When one technology is growing rapidly, it's easy to get caught up in the hype and overinvest in it. However, the unpredictability and impermanence that we found in this and other markets suggests that companies should consider investing in, or at least monitoring, a portfolio of technologies, so they aren't blindsided by a sudden improvement in one or another.

Consider the competition between ink-jet and laser technology in the printer market. When the two technologies were introduced in the mid-1980s, laser was far superior to ink-jet in resolution. Ink-jet quickly caught up, but didn't surpass laser's resolution. Then, in the mid-1990s, laser again took a significant lead. But ink-jet surpassed laser in resolution in 1997 and has maintained that edge. All the while, printer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. continued to sell both ink-jet and laser printers, putting itself in the best position to succeed in a shifting market

For the full story, see:

GERARD J. TELLIS and ASHISH SOOD. "Innovation; How to Back the Right Technology; When trying to decide where to place their bets, companies often make three fundamental mistakes." Wall Street Journal (Mon., DECEMBER 14, 2008): R8.

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The Palace of Discovery mentioned in the passage below was a part of the 1937 Paris Exposition.

(p. 206) The mastermind behind the Palace of Discovery, French Nobel Prize laureate Jean Perrin, wrote, "In spite of the wars and the revolutions, in spite of the economic crisis and unemployment, through our worries and anxieties, but also through our hopes, civilization's progress is going faster and faster, thanks to ever-more flexible and efficient techniques, to farther- and farther-reaching lengths. . . . Almost all of them have appeared in less than a century, and have developed or applied inventions now known by all, which seem to have fulfilled or even passed the desires expressed in our old fairy tales."

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

(Note: ellipsis in the title is added; ellipsis in the quoted passage is in the original.)

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The Palace of Discovery (aka Palais de la Decouverte) in Paris. Source of photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paris2e/2524827592/

Near the beginning of World War II, the 1937 Palace of Discovery in Paris, was a popular source of hope for the future:

(p. 206) An unexpectedly popular draw at the exposition was a relatively small hall hidden away behind the Grand Palais. The Palace of Discovery, as it was called, attracted more than 2 million visitors, five times the number that visited the modern art exhibit. They came for wonder and hope. The wonder was provided by exhibits including a huge electrostatic generator, like something from Dr. Frankenstein's lab, two enormous metal spheres thirteen feet apart, across which a 5-million-volt current threw a hissing, crackling bolt of electricity. The hope came from the very nature of science itself. Designed by a group of liberal French researchers, the Palace of Discovery was intended to be more a "people's university" than a stuffy museum, a place to hear inspiring lectures on the latest wonders of science, messages abut technological confidence and progress for the peoples of the world.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

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(p. 130) . . . , the major problem inhibiting England's industrial development was the state of the roads. So the introduction of waterborne transportation on the new canals triggered massive economic expansion because these waterways transported coal (and other raw materials) much faster and cheaper than by packhorse or wagon. In 1793 a surveyor called William Smith was taking the first measurements in preparation for a canal that was to be built in the English county of Somerset, when he noticed something odd. (p. 131) Certain types of rock seemed to lie in levels that reappeared, from time to time, as the rock layer dipped below the surface and then re-emerged across a stretch of countryside. During a journey to the north of England (to collect more information about canal-construction techniques), Smith saw this phenomenon happening everywhere. There were obviously regular layers of rock beneath the surface which were revealed as strata where a cliff face of a valley cut into them. In 1796 Smith discovered that the same strata always had the same fossils embedded in them. In 1815, after ten years of work, he compiled all that he had learned about stratification in the first proper colored geological map, showing twenty-one sedimentary layers. Smith's map galvanized the world of fossil-hunting.

Source:

Burke, James. The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible - and Other Journeys. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1997.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. 65) . . . Domagk's future would be determined not only by his desire to stop disease but also by his own ambition, his family needs, and the plans of a small group of businessmen he had never met. He probably had heard of their leader, however, one of the preeminent figures in German business, a man the London Times would later eulogize as "the greatest industrialist the world has yet had." His name was Carl Duisberg.

Duisberg was a German version of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller rolled into one. He had built an empire of science in Germany, leveraging the discoveries of dozens of chemists he employed into one of the most profitable businesses on earth. He knew how industrial science worked: He was himself a chemist. At least he had been long ago. Now, in the mid-1920s, in the twilight of his years, his fortunes made, his reputation assured, he often walked in his private park alone---still solidly built, with his shaved head and a bristling white mustache, still a commanding presence in his top hat and black overcoat---through acres of forest, fountains, classical statuary, around the pond in his full-scale Japanese garden by the lacquered teahouse, over his steams, and across his lawns.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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One of Domagk's predecessors, in goal and method, was Paul Ehrlich, who was a leader in the search for the Zuberkugeln (magic bullet) against disease causing organisms. He systematized the trial and error method, and pursued dyes as promising chemicals that might be modified to attach themselves to the intruders. But he never quite found a magic bullet:

(p. 82) Ehrlich announced to the world that he had found a cure for sleeping sickness. But he spoke too soon. Number 418, also, proved too toxic for general use. He and his chemists resumed the search.

Ehrlich said his method consisted basically of "examining and sweating"---and his coworkers joked that Ehrlich examined while they sweated. There was another motto attributed to Ehrlich's lab, the list of "Four Gs" needed for success: Geduld, Geschick, Glück, Geld---patience, skill, luck, and money.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

(Note: do not confuse the "Paul Ehrlich" discussed above, with the modern environmentalist "Paul Ehrlich" who is best known for losing his bet with Julian Simon.)

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I quoted a review of The Demon Under the Microscope in an entry from October 12, 2006. I finally managed to read the book, last month.

I don't always agree with Hager's interpretation of events, and his policy advice, but he writes well, and he has much to say of interest about how the first anti-bacterial antibiotic, sulfa, was developed.

In the coming weeks, I'll be highlighting a few key passages of special interest. In today's entry, below, Hager nicely summarizes the importance of the discovery of antibiotics for his (and my) baby boom generation.

(p. 3) I am part of that great demographic bulge, the World War II "Baby Boom" generation, which was the first in history to benefit from birth from the discovery of antibiotics. The impact of this discovery is difficult to overstate. If my parents came down with an ear infection as babies, they were treated with bed rest, painkillers, and sympathy. If I came down with an ear infection as a baby, I got antibiotics. If a cold turned into bronchitis, my parents got more bed rest and anxious vigilance; I got antibiotics. People in my parents' generation, as children, could and all too often did die from strep throats, infected cuts, scarlet fever, meningitis, pneumonia, or any number of infectious diseases. I and my classmates survived because of antibiotics. My parents as children, and their parents before them, lost friends and relatives, often at very early ages, to bacterial epidemics that swept through American cities every fall and winter, killing tens of thousands. The suddenness and inevitability of these epidemic deaths, facts of life before the 1930s, were for me historical curiosities, artifacts of another age. Antibiotics virtually eliminated them. In many cases, much-feared diseases of my grandparents' day---erysipelas, childbed fever, cellulitis---had become so rare they were nearly extinct. I never heard the names.

Source:

Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

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Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B5) A particularly stark view of age-related constraints on researchers' work comes from Benjamin Jones, an associate professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He examined biographical data over the past century for more than 700 Nobel laureates and renowned inventors.

His conclusion: "Innovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life cycle." In the early 20th century, he found, researchers at the times of their greatest contributions averaged slightly more than 36 years old. In recent decades, innovation before the age of 30 became increasing rare, with the peak age of contribution rising toward age 40. Meanwhile, the frequency of key contributions has consistently diminished by researchers in their early or mid-50s.

Occasionally, Mr. Jones says, booming new fields "permit easier access to the frontier, allowing people to make contributions at younger ages." That could account for the relative youth of Internet innovators, such as Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc Andreessen and Messrs. Page and Brin. But "when the revolution is over," Mr. Jones finds, "ages rise."

Unwilling to see researchers at peak productivity for only a small part of their careers, tech companies are fighting back in a variety of ways. At microchip maker Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, executives are pairing up recent college graduates and other fresh research hires with experienced mentors, called "craftsmen," for intensive training and coaching.

This system means that new design engineers can become fully effective in three or four years, instead of five to seven, says Taylor Efland, chief technologist for TI's analog chip business. Analog chips are used in power management, data conversion and amplification.

At Sun Microsystems Inc., teams of younger and older researchers are common. That can help everyone's productivity, says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for the Santa Clara, Calif., computer maker. Younger team members provide energy and optimism; veterans provide a savvier sense of what problems to tackle.

For the full story, see:

GEORGE ANDERS. "THEORY & PRACTICE; Companies Try to Extend Researchers' Productivity; Teams of Various Ages, Newer Hires Combat Short Spans of Inventing." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., AUGUST 18, 2008): B5.

A large literature exists on the relationship between age and scientific productivity. I am particularly fond of the following examples:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "Age and the Acceptance of Cliometrics." The Journal of Economic History 40, no. 4 (December 1980): 838-841.

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "An Economic Model of the Life-Cycle Research Productivity of Scientists." Scientometrics 6, no. 3 (1984): 189-196.

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "The Life-Cycle Research Productivity of Mathematicians and Scientists." The Journal of Gerontology 41, no. 4 (July 1986): 520-525.

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "An Optimal Control Model of the Life-Cycle Research Productivity of Scientists." Scientometrics 11, nos. 3-4 (1987): 247-249.

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "The Polywater Episode and the Appraisal of Theories." In A. Donovan, L. Laudan and R. Laudan, eds., Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific Change. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, 181-198.

Hull, David L., Peter D. Tessner and Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. "Planck's Principle: Do Younger Scientists Accept New Scientific Ideas with Greater Alacrity than Older Scientists?" Science 202 (November 17, 1978): 717-723.

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Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) In recent years Palm lost its way. Its share of the smartphone market has been halved to about 16.9 percent over the last two years. First, Research in Motion found the sweet spot of business users with its BlackBerry. More recently, Apple grabbed consumers' fancy with the iPhone.

Palm has tried to innovate beyond the five-year-old Treo with little effect. It announced with great fanfare last year that it would build the Foleo, a cross between a smartphone and notebook computer, only to cancel the project three months later. While cellphone makers like Samsung, LG and R.I.M. brought out products to compete with the iPhone, Palm has told Treo loyalists and investors to be patient. They will need to be. Palm's stock price is down 90 percent since its high in March 2000.

Mr. Rubinstein, the executive chairman, said he is convinced he can bring Palm back. "Everyone is trying to make an iPhone killer," he said. "We are trying to make a killer Palm product."

For the full story, see:

LAURA M. HOLSON. "Palm, Once a Leader, Seeks Path in Smartphone Jungle." The New York Times (Weds., August 20, 2008): C1 & C5.

"Ed Colligan, left, Palm's chief executive, and Jon Rubinstein, the executive chairman, who was hired to revive the company." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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A few years ago I presented a paper at the meetings of Society for Social Studies of Science in which I mentioned Nordhaus's wonderful paper in which he measures advances in technology that produce illumination. Some of the technologies represent leapfrog advances that are part of Schumpeter's process of creative destruction.

At the end of my presentation, a member of the audience gave me a reference to the new L.E.D. light technology that he suggested was the next leapfrog advance. (Alas, I do not remember his name.)

(p. C3) L.E.D. bulbs, with their brighter light and longer life, have already replaced standard bulbs in many of the nation's traffic lights. Indeed, the red, green and yellow signals are -- aside from the tiny blinking red light on a DVD player, a cellphone or another electronic device -- probably the most familiar application of the technology.

But it is showing up in more prominent spots. The ball that descends in Times Square on New Year's Eve is illuminated with L.E.D.'s. And the managers of the Empire State Building are considering a proposal to light it with L.E.D. fixtures, which would allow them to remotely change the building's colors to one of millions of variations.

. . .

The problem, though, is the price. A standard 60-watt incandescent usually costs less than $1. An equivalent compact fluorescent is about $2. But in Europe this September, Philips, the Dutch company dealing in consumer electronics, health care machines and lighting, is to introduce the Ledino, its first L.E.D. replacement for a standard incandescent. Priced at $107 a bulb, it is unlikely to have more than a few takers.

"L.E.D. performance is there, but the price is not," said Kevin Dowling, a Philips Lighting vice president . . .

. . .

"The Marcus Center lighting will require no maintenance for 15 years," Mr. Gregory said. "That's a dream for a lighting designer."

But he does not expect standard bulbs to disappear totally. Just as the invention of the light bulb did not completely kill the candle and kerosene lamp markets, Mr. Gregory said, "there will always be a need for incandescent bulbs. They will never totally go away."

"The way an incandescent bulb plays on the face on a Broadway makeup mirror," he said, "you can never duplicate that."

For the full story, see:

ERIC A. TAUB. "Fans of L.E.D.'s Say This Bulb's Time Has Come." The New York Times (Mon., July 28, 2008): C3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

The reference to the Nordhaus paper is:

Nordhaus, William D. "Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Light Suggests Not." In The Economics of New Goods, edited by Robert J. Gordon and Timothy F. Bresnahan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press for National Bureau of Economic Research, 1997, pp. 29-66.

"The full spectrum of color, design and programming available for the Times Square ball." Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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"Fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 B.C. It was found on a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1900, and its exact function still eludes scholars." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A12) After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism's concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, on Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. . . .

. . .

Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.

In the journal report, the team led by the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, in Cardiff, Wales, said the month names "are unexpectedly of Corinthian origin," which suggested "a heritage going back to Archimedes."

For the full story, see:

JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. "Discovering How Greeks Computed in 100 B.C." The New York Times (Thurs., July 31, 2008): A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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Here is a significant claim from "an elderly Chinese professor" (p. 76) who was talking to Robert Payne in 1943. Payne was "a writer and teacher who befriended Needham in China." The passage is quoted in an entertaining new book by Simon Winchester.

(p. 77) ". . .; we invented an airplane, and quite rightly executed the inventor; . . . "

Source:

Winchester, Simon. The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2008.

Winchester does not document his source for the quote, but it is presumably one of these two books by Payne, that are listed in Winchester's bibliography:

Payne, Robert. Chinese Diaries 1941-1946. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1945.

Payne, Robert. Chungking Diary. London: Weybright and Talley, 1945.

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"Hachette's audio department recently held a "funeral" for cassette tapes; an invitation is above." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The article quoted below mentions a feature of new "leapfrog" technologies that has received too little attention. The new product, overall, for most purposes, or for most important purposes, is better than the old product, but it may be that the new product lacks some features that the old product had, that had value. It is a step forward in most respects, but not in all respects.

I salute the observation in the last quoted paragraph below. When I am listening to a book, while walking Willy, some UPS truck often passes me, noisily making a sentence of two inaudible. If I'm listening to a cassette, I can back up a few sentences. If I'm listening to a CD, I have to back up at least a few minutes, and often many minutes (depending on how short the tracks are on the CD).

I remember an early word processor (can't remember its name, maybe it was Wordmarc), that allowed you to type in the page number of a long document and then go directly to that page. I am currently writing a book using Microsoft Word. And in the vast majority of respects it is better than the word processor of yore. But every time I have to scroll and and scroll and scroll, to get to a page, when I already know exactly which page I want, I irrationally curse Bill Gates.

Addendum posted 10/10/08:

Since this post was created on July 30, 2008, I have discovered that Word 2007 has the feature that I missed from Wordmarc, and I also learned that if I had invested more time in Word 2003, I might have discovered that by drilling down to an obscure option menu, it too could have been customized to have had the feature. (In Wordmarc the feature was real obvious.)

(p. C7) There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a "dear friend." Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with "Sail," a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

The funeral at Hachette -- an office party in the audio-book department -- mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)

. . .

Cassette tapes' tendency to hiss -- and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter -- turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN. "Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes." The New York Times Company (Mon., July 28, 2008): C7.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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"A grid in the monkey's brain carried signals from 100 neurons for the mechanical arm to grab and carry snacks to the mouth." Source of caption and photos: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.

The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys' brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

For the full story, see:

BENEDICT CAREY. "Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own." The New York Times (Thurs., May 29, 2008): A1 & A18.

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(p. 492) The long-standing trend away from value produced by manual labor and natural resources and toward the intangible value-added we associate with the digital econnomy can be expected to continue. Today it takes a lot less physical material to produce a unit of output than it did in generations past. Indeed, the physical amount of materials and fuels either consumed in the production of output or embodied in the output has increased very modestly over the past half century. The output of our economy is not quite literally lighter, but it is close.

Thin fiber-optic cable, for instance, has replaced huge tonnages of copper wire. New architectural, engineering, and materials technologies have enabled the construction of buildings enclosing the same space with far less physical material than was required fifty or one hundred years ago. Mobile phones have not only downsized but also morphed into multipurpose communication devices. The movement over the decades toward production of services that require little physical input has also been a major contributor to the marked rise in the ratio of constant dollars of GDP to tons of input.

Source:

Greenspan, Alan. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World Economic Flexibility. New York: Penguin Press, 2007.

(Note: italics in original.)

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"Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, left, and the venture capitalist John Doerr at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article cited below.

(p. C3) CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, is hoping to expand the iPhone's appeal by luring software developers to create programs for it.

John Doerr, the venture capitalist, is adding an incentive: his firm is putting up $100 million to invest in the work of those programmers.

At an event Thursday at Apple headquarters, Mr. Jobs announced a low-cost software development kit that outside programmers can use to create programs for the iPhone, much as they now write the vast majority of the programs created for the Macintosh. Until now, iPhones have officially been able to run only the limited assortment of applications that Apple includes. (Some buyers have modified the phones to add unauthorized software.)

"We're very excited about this," said Mr. Jobs, who also announced that the company was adding features to make the iPhone more appealing to business users. "We think a lot of people, after understanding where we are going, are going to want to become an iPhone developer."

Sharing the stage with Mr. Jobs, Mr. Doerr announced that his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, had established a $100 million venture capital fund for iPhone entrepreneurs. Called the iFund, it is the largest fund the company has created for a specific technology.

"The potential for iPhone is huge," Mr. Doerr said.

For the full story, see:

LAURIE J. FLYNN. "Apple to Encourage iPhone Programmers." The New York Times (Fri., March 07, 2008): C3.

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"Daniel Edelstein of I.B.M. Research is leading a team's work in the use of self-assembling nanotechnology." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) Until now, as chips became smaller, they also became faster in about the same proportion. It's still true for transistors, but it's no longer true for the wires used to connect transistors -- and that slows performance gains. Daniel Edelstein, a program manager and fellow at I.B.M. Research, says, "We're running out of steam."

Mr. Edelstein is leading a team of researchers from inside and outside I.B.M. in developing a new way to solve the problem: using "self assembling" nanotechnology to make better insulators, raising performance. In this case, self-assembly involves creating so-called airgaps, vacuums a few nanometers wide that keep the billions of tiny copper wires in a chip from touching one another, instead of putting down a layer of insulating material and trying to align it effectively at the nanoscale. It's more efficient, and it means that I.B.M. won't need to spend $50 million on photolithographic equipment.

. . . While the technique is not quite done being tested, John E. Kelly III, I.B.M.'s senior vice president for research, says that "there is no question in our minds this is going to work," and that I.B.M. will move to it by 2009, first for an existing high-end processor or a next-generation chip, then across its fabs.

Mr. Kelly says Mr. Edelstein has a "unique" ability to solve problems and work across the company to commercialize new technologies. In the last decade, he has led two other important breakthroughs, most notably the use of copper for the wires inside chips, replacing aluminum.

Each time, Mr. Edelstein has done it by working with a small group of two or three scientists to explore out-of-the-mainstream approaches to problems. He also goes beyond research, getting to know the manufacturing team to help him understand what it takes to get a novel technique into I.B.M.'s existing manufacturing process.

For the full story, see:

MICHAEL FITZGERALD. "PROTOTYPE; Trying to Put New Zip Into Moore's Law." The New York Times Company, SundayBusiness section (Sun., February 24, 2008): 4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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    Source of graph:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The article quoted below suggests that an important new "disruptive" memory technology may be on the horizon.  It sounds as though it would be what economists call a "general purpose technology" that would be useful in generating a large number of innovative applications. 

(My guess is that in Christensen's terminology, this technology would be more sustaining, than disruptive, since the technology seems as though it would be of immediate interest to the mainstream market.)

(p. C1)  SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The ability to cram more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

It shrank the mainframe computer to fit on the desktop, shrank it again to fit on our laps and again to fit into our shirt pockets.

. . .  

Mr. Parkin thinks he is poised to bring about another breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. If he proves successful in his quest, he will create a "universal" computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a "disk drive on a chip" possible.

. . .

(p. C8)  Mr. Parkin's new approach, referred to as "racetrack memory," could outpace both solid-state flash memory chips as well as computer hard disks, making it a technology that could transform not only the storage business but the entire computing industry.

"Finally, after all these years, we're reaching fundamental physics limits," he said. "Racetrack says we're going to break those scaling rules by going into the third dimension."

His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip -- hence the name racetrack -- and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.

. . .

Mr. Parkin said he had recently shifted his focus and now thought that his racetracks might be competitive with other storage technologies even if they were laid horizontally on a silicon chip.

I.B.M. executives are cautious about the timing of the commercial introduction of the technology. But ultimately, the technology may have even more dramatic implications than just smaller music players or wristwatch TVs, said Mark Dean, vice president for systems at I.B.M. Research.

"Something along these lines will be very disruptive," he said. "It will not only change the way we look at storage, but it could change the way we look at processing information. We're moving into a world that is more data-centric than computing-centric."

This is just a hint, but it suggests that I.B.M. may think that racetrack memory could blur the line between storage and computing, providing a key to a new way to search for data, as well as store and retrieve data.

And if it is, Mr. Parkin's experimental physics lab will have transformed the computing world yet again.

For the full story, see: 

JOHN MARKOFF.  "Redefining the Architecture of Memory."  The New York Times   (Tues., September 11, 2007):  C1 & C8.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

     Of the two photos at the bottom of the entry, the first is of Stuart S. P. Parkin's lab at I.B.M, and the second is of Parkin in the lab.  Source of photos:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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  Moving water is easier with the 20-gallon rolling drum.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3)  . . . , the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, . . . , is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.

Their creations, on display in the museum garden until Sept. 23, have a sort of forehead-thumping “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” quality.

. . .

Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty.  It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price.  Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

For the full story, see: 

DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.  "Design That Solves Problems for the World's Poor."  The New York Times  (Tues., May 29, 2007):  D3.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

   The photo on the left shows a woman safely drinking bacteria-laden water through a filter.  The photo on the right shows a "pot-in-pot cooler" that evaporates water from wet sand between the pots, in order to cool what is in the inner pot.  Source of photos:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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  Moving water is easier with the 20-gallon rolling drum.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3)  . . . , the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, . . . , is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.

Their creations, on display in the museum garden until Sept. 23, have a sort of forehead-thumping “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” quality.

. . .

Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty.  It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price.  Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

For the full story, see: 

DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.  "Design That Solves Problems for the World's Poor."  The New York Times  (Tues., May 29, 2007):  D3.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

   The photo on the left shows a woman safely drinking bacteria-laden water through a filter.  The photo on the right shows a "pot-in-pot cooler" that evaporates water from wet sand between the pots, in order to cool what is in the inner pot.  Source of photos:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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It is an enduring puzzle why the West has been so much more succesful than China in achieving economic growth over the past several centuries.  The puzzle arises because there is considerable evidence of early Chinese acheivements in technology.

One example would be the exploratory voyages of Zheng He.  The Chinese ships were much, much larger than those of Christopher Columbus.  But as Clayton Christensen has shown in a more modern context, size does not always matter as much as nimbleness and motivation. 

(And another part of the story involves culture and institutions.)

The most complete account of Christensen's thinking, so far, is his book with Raynor:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor.  The Innovator's Solution:  Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth.  Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

(Note:  I am grateful to Prof. Yu-sheng Lin for first informing me of the large difference in size between the ships.  I am also grateful to Prof. Salim Rashid, and Liberty Fund's Mr. Leonidas Zelmanovitz, for my having the opportunity to encounter Prof. Lin.)

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     "John Young, from the Apollo 16 crew, works on the lunar surface in April, 1972."  Source of caption and photo:  online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. B14)  When the Apollo 11 astronauts toured the world after their July 1969 moon landing, recalls Mike Collins, the pilot of the mission's command module, he heard the phrase "We did it" everywhere they went. The "we," he remembers in David Sington's documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon," didn't refer to Americans, or to any nationality, but to the human race. Millions around the world who had watched on television as men walked on the moon for the first time felt that they had participated in a great adventure that ennobled the species.

. . .

Threaded through the film are fragments of taped interviews with eight other Apollo astronauts: Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke, Jim Lovell, Edgar Mitchell, Harrison Schmitt, Dave Scott and John Young. These snippets appear almost randomly, in no particular order, and it is impossible to keep track of who's who. Cumulatively, however, they create a group portrait of explorers with "the right stuff": men with a much higher resistance to fear than average.

Mr. Collins remembers the intense physical sensations that he experienced during the Apollo 11 mission but that he never associated with panic. What could have been more terrifying than the moment when the module's computer was found to be overloaded, just as Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin were about to touch down? But Mr. Armstrong calmly went about improvising a solution.

If there was a lack of fear, there were a thousand little worries. Through every phase Mr. Collins fretted about the details that had to mesh fo