An history of inventorsthe anglo-saxon trail

Hervé Legenvre

hlegenvre@hotmail.com

This presentation was developped as an easy to read e-book capturing the mainlessons from my Ph. D thesisYou can send your feedback at the e-mail adress underneath, I am currently planning to publish a book on this topic

Who changed our world?

PoliticiansArmy GeneralsThinkers

Or Inventors?Source: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/HistSciTech/

Inventors…

History of inventions: a timeline

From machines….

to large scale systems….

… and deep into the matter

Attention

Expérimentation

PersuasionA: AttentivenessGrab and gather ideas, information, knowledge

E: ExperimentationCreate new ideas, information, knowledge, artefact

P: PersuasionSell your ideas and invention

The cradle of creativity

Alexander Fleming-attentiveness

"When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer, but I guess that was exactly what I did."

Fleming

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.

Wilbur Wright (1867-1912)

Wright brothers- experimentation

Semmelweis - persuasion

Semmelweis was his own worst enemy:• He delayed publishing and presenting

his observations. • He had an inferiority complex and

became paranoid• He was lacking the pedigree lineage

and language mastery to convince his peers

The cradle of creativity in Perspective

Attentiveness

Experimentation

Persuasion

Lucky observations

Trial and error

Glibness

Scouting for information

AnalogiyMeans-end

analysis

Partenaires visibles

Systematicsearch

TheorySimulationCalculus

Established facts

Unknown Known

The age of the machines

England, late 18th century

A passion for experimentation

“One day when Miss Cunegund went to take a walk in a little neighboring wood which was called a park, she saw, through the bushes, the sage Doctor Pangloss giving a lecture in experimental philosophy to her mother’s chambermaid, a little brown wench, very pretty, and very tractable. As Miss Cunegund had a great disposition for the sciences, she observed with the utmost attention the experiments, which were repeated before her eyes; she perfectly well understood the force of the doctor’s reasoning upon causes and effects. She retired greatly flurried, quite pensive and filled with the desire of knowledge, imagining that she might be a sufficing reason for young Candide, and he for her.”

Voltaire, Candid

Experimentation and Entertainment

700 Monks electrifiedAt french court

Balloons everywhereThe age of hope

Experiments represented onpaintings

Religion, experimentation, invention

“Truth about God’s creation was to be found through experimental practices”

Collaboration : the Lunar society

•Boulton•Darwin•Whitehurst•Galton•Small•Edgeworth•Day•Watt•Keir•Wedgwood

Arkwright

A: Chating in pubs – stealing ideas…E: Tinkering with machinesP: Fashionning oneself as a great man

Wedgwood

A: Scouting for ideas in the streets of LondonE: A laboratory in a kitchenP: The patronage of the queen

Watt

A: Observation and friends

E: Developing the concept of the ‘perfect engine’ to measure how far you are from an ideal

P: Using models and associates to convince people you are on the right track

The age of the system

United States, 19th century

Stephenson - Rail

From England to The United States

Networks of inventors - Rail

A Giant experiment

Machine shop culture

Network of machinists/inventors who owned the patent

Strong informal relationships with railroad companies

Ad hoc experiments

Inventive hierarchy - rail

Re-assignment of patents to railroad companies

Challenge from suppliers

Quality control needed

Corporate departments staffed with professional engineers

Standardisation – cost reduction

Systematic experiments

Bell

A: family and Boston

E: Analogy of the piano; cross fertilization systematic debugging

P: Partners, public demonstration, eloquence

Edison

A: Systematic search

E: First modern laboratory

P: The wizard of Menlo park... Prophet of his time

Sperry

A: Understanding when to enter a specific field of activity

E: Managing breakthrough innovation and fine tuning in parralel

P: Courting the rich and governement

The age of the predictive science

United States, 20th century

The rise of industrial laboratories

•General Electric (G.E.), •American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (A.T.T.), E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. (DuPont) •Eastman Kodak (Kodak), •General Chemical •Dow •Standard Oil of Indiana •Goodyear•American Cyanamid

Attentiveness-Experimentation-Persuasionin industrial laboratories

But Early 20th century

Midgley (G.M.)

A: His company brought him the problems

E: The power of the periodic table of elements

P: Contributing to public disinformation

Coolidge (G.E)

A: continuous search for information and skills outside of the firm

E: serendipity and systematic analysis of design parameters

P: The house of Magic

Carothers (DuPont)

A: Picking the ripe fruits of science

E: Theory and practice as friends

P: building the case for Pure science

Science the endless frontier

"New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life."

-Franklin D. RooseveltNovember 17, 1944

From a passion for basic science…

American R&D expenditures were multiplied by more than three between 1945 and 1955

In 1952 two thirds of the Nation’s R&D expenditures were spent in the private industry while being funded by the government

…To myopia

Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove(1964).

Ivory tower

Loss of connection with reality, the users and other technical fields

New winnersDevelopment teams in specialised firms

Attentive to the customer &market needs and to technical developments

Engineers focus on practical challenge such as the ability to deliver defect free products

Engineers need to persuade customers that they can deliver the technical performance they promise

And to the networks of the Silicon valley

“The Apple I and II were designed strictly on a hobby, for-fun basis, not to be a product for a company. They were meant to bring down to the club and put on the table during the random access period and demonstrate: Look at this, it uses very few chips. It's got a video screen. You can type stuff on it. (...) There was a lot of showing off to other members of the club. Schematics of the Apple I were passed around freely, and I'd even go over to people's houses and help them build their own”

SteveWozniak about the Homebrew club

Some conclusions

An ecosystem of inventive organisations

Unknown Known

Networksof independantinventors

Developmentteams

InventiveHierarchy

Research lab

User

Questions aheadIs the american dominance at stake?More or less predictive science ahead of us?Is science and its impacts too complex to understand forsociety?