FOSTERING INVENTION
Talk at The MIT Club of New Mexico
Santa Fe, NM, December 7, 2002
By Lawrence B. Kilham
Imagination is more important than knowledge
- Albert Einstein
Whenever civilization was bogged down and the good life seemed over, it seems that major innovations provided a rebirth giving people more efficiency, variety, and, importantly, hope. Ever since I worked in MIT's famous building 20 in the 60's as a graduate student researching artificial intelligence and other neat stuff, I have wondered about the process of innovation as it happens and how it relates to history. Building 20, incidentally, was a WW II temporary building that was a hotbed of innovation among other reasons because due to its cheap and forgettable construction, you could drill holes anywhere, pull piping and wires, set up machinery with no fear of recrimination and with the hope of a potential breakthrough. The building of course was torn down and replaced, one suspects, by virtual labs.
Point 1 - There must be a variety of resources to draw upon and synthesize from
Many centuries ago, before recorded history, mankind sought solutions to major problems by migration. They crisscrossed the Mideast deserts; they moved from cave to cave in Europe; they crossed the Aleutian land bridge from Asia to the New World. In this area, the Anasazi built villages, lived in them for a few hundred years, and then moved on. Every few thousand years, a peoples would invent something of basic importance like pottery or bronze casting.
We know from the early peoples' mythology and paintings that they were not dumb nor unable to think creatively. They didn't invent much because they didn't yet have the disparate elements of prior invention involving, ceramics, metallurgy, chemistry, mechanics and so forth to produce useful new products. Also, they may not have had the free time for contemplation and experimentation.
In pre-Christian times, the Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were inventive in such areas as pottery, metallurgy, war machines, and mechanical devices. Continuing evolution from this simple industrial base lead to the relatively comfortable and prosperous life for the merchant princes and their consorts of the Renaissance. (Our analysis will now follow the Western world, although important inventive developments were taking place in China, the Moslem empire and elsewhere).
Point 2 - There must be an agony and an ecstasy. Creation is an emotional experience. This may be why so many super creative people are manic depressives.
As the name Renaissance implies there was an explosion of creativity in art, music and invention among other endeavors. As Orson Welles said in The Third Man "The Borgias presided over bloodshed and the Renaissance, but in Switzerland they had 500 years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." The many inventions of Leonardo da Vinci bubbled up out of the Borgia caldron.
In the cradle of the Renaissance, Michelangelo released the statues from stone "breaking the marble spell" revealing images from his mind. The sculptors spoke of the hand of God working in the mind of the artist. I saw a Pueblo Indian woman sculptor on Public Television saying essentially the same thing: that she breaks the mold revealing a sculpture already created by a higher being. A brilliant computer programmer said that in his most ecstatic moments his software emerged the same way (Why Invent, MSN).
In the 80's I myself was groping for a way to see microscopic imperfections called "gels" in molten plastic. I was the president of a small plastic machinery company and realized that these gels started all kinds of problems from runs in stockings to leaks in plastic milk jugs. Everyone despaired in finding a solution to catching these when the plastic was first produced as a raw material. One day I chanced to see dewdrops glittering at dawn on a spider's web. It sparkled like a chandelier. Furthermore, the vibration of the dewdrops made them shimmer and glitter so that they stood out even more from their background. This shimmering insight would be key to a successful product.
The effect of the simple spider web was replicated by racks of video equipment, bundles of special fiber optics, and all kinds of special optics. About $2 million of investment and several years later I had an instrument that my new company sold to DuPont, Exxon and Dow and many other major polymer producers worldwide. Our biggest application was making better Lycra Spandex. My vision was propelled by the revelation of a novel idea. Of course, that was the fun part. Months of sweat equity were invested after that designing and perfecting the product. It eventually produced three patents and an IR 100 award.
Point 3 - There must be a free-will environment where the would-be inventor can successfully resist conformity and take risks instead.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was an explosion of inventions aimed at better living through an industrial society. This prolonged the British Empire and launched what might be called the American Empire. In terms of resources there was "mad money" investment capital to support inventors and fledgling industries, and there was a very large assortment of technical resources to draw upon. Steam power. Gas chemistry. Industrialized fiber spinning. Electricity. Structural steel. Precision machining. Mass production.
But perhaps most important was that in England, United States, France, Italy and other countries was an exciting creative environment epitomized by the eccentric English inventor: someone not hemmed in by a deterministic society, a non-conformist with a free-will and inquiring mind, yet an intellectually trained and self-disciplined achiever who kept persisting in achieving an inventive goal until it was reached. Victorian society, while apparently straight-laced, I think was charmed by these eccentric creative types, and through a variety of mechanisms ranging from family trusts to intellectual societies supported and encouraged them. In Japan, on the other hand, you must fit in to a very deterministic society or you are no one, and consequently that country was not a major creative contributor to the industrial revolution.
Point 4 - For Project Inventions there must be a commitment of similar minds working together with an intellectual ferment guided by a charismatic technical leader.
From the beginning of the 2nd World War through to the present there yet another element has been added to the invention formula: this is "The Lab" in the form of an ad hoc affiliation of engineers and scientists loosely collaborating to solve a specific problem. MIT pioneered this with the Radiation Lab which pioneered much of the radar development during WW II. As an electrical engineer I find their lab notes published in the "Radiation Lab Series" still useful, for example in the derivation of optimum filters. Another MIT on-demand creation was the Instrumentation Lab which developed servo systems and inertial guidance systems so critical for the important national efforts of the cold war ranging from guided missiles to lunar probes. And of course there was Los Alamos National Labs, while not a brain child of MIT, still doing the leader's work in nuclear weapons and related areas.
A key part of the MIT Lab formula, as I will call it, was having a collection of people working on the problem, starting with a charismatic scientific leader such as Vannevar Bush or Robert Oppenheimer, stirring in a university president and industrialist type board, and staffing with essentially ad-hoc scientists and engineers. Shirtsleeve experimentation always was important.
In the 60's I was part of an Arthur D. Little and Bell Labs team working under Navy direction to develop and deploy a worldwide system to detect, identify and track enemy submarines. We succeeded, and the project code named SOSUS was first publicly mentioned in the book and movie Red October. Like one of the MIT labs, we had a scientist leader, an eclectic collection of support engineers and scientists, and a high ferment creative environment. Anyone, however lowly, could volunteer an idea. People would dash off tennis courts to scribble down concepts. The really important classified stuff wasn't determined by the ominous degree-of-secrecy labels on your filing cabinets; it was determined by an informal almost secret society of intellectual buddies. As the project became institutionalized, with a management bureaucracy taking over, the old gang including myself drifted off to seek new challenges.
IBM, Xerox, Bell Labs and Arthur D. Little were among the industrial companies at that time that were caldrons of intellectual yet productive brew.
Point 5 - A new way of thinking about the why and wherefore of invention is in order.
Now it is said that we live in a knowledge-based economy. The gurus are selling "data mining" to squeeze something more out of our data collections. The complexity theorists say that invention is merely a Darwinian chance event. After n inventions and trial and error, an improved society will crawl forward like an improved insect. (I will be burned at Fiesta as a heretic in cyber complexity Santa Fe). Some children live in the endless fascination of the Internet and others are doped off on video games.
Maybe we are ending civilization as we have known it from earliest recorded times. Man has always been the measure of all things even if there was an overall cosmic guidance. Anything could be sacrificed or expended to improve the lot of at least important men and women. Also, at least on earth, man has been considered the supreme intellect.
Now we have an emerging recognition that a natural and stable ecosystem may be the ultimate measure of all things. At the same time there is a growing feeling that some sort of man-computer megabrain is the intellectual engine of the near future. Something more productive than Hal the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I think what we remnants of a previous age can do is to encourage the new generation to get mesmerized by something better than buddy cops and bad guys. There is still a chance that someone we know could become a Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry. He hit upon that goal at 5 years old when his parents read him a Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon." He never stopped imagining and experimenting even when he wound up in our own Roswell!
I think by universal acclaim we can safely say that Albert Einstein was one of the great minds of all time. Not very well known is that the young Einstein read that popular refrigerators of the day occasionally exploded. So he and Leo Szilard invented a refrigerator that solved the problem by a better compressor, and they collected $10,000 in royalties from Electrolux. Szilard, a visionary physicist, received several patents for nuclear reactors including one involving the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator pump.
Of course, not everybody has the stuff to be Einstein or Thomas Edison. But inventions and improvements to inventions can be made at various technical and intellectual levels. There should be more encouragement of the students in technical, engineering, business schools and the like to look at careers in innovative product development instead of preparing for supposedly "safe" jobs in the technocracy. My company, which is based on continual innovation, lost no jobs as a result of 9/11, the dotcom crash, Enron debacle, etc.( Indeed, we are doing more product development than ever before while our competition is moping around in a no-risk paralysis mode.) The stimulation of careers in the satisfactions and adventures of innovation could go back to preschool reading such as Robert Goddard hearing Jules Verne's story.
So we need to foster, and encourage more inventors up to the scale of Einstein and Szilard to tackle the challenges of vanishing resources, alternate energy, efficient food production and so on. It's time for a new initiative like those for winning WW II and bringing in the atomic era to employ the best in brains, vision, creativity and project management.
I'll wind up by trying to sell Hope, that glimmer that was slipped into Pandora's box. I close with a provocative and stimulating quote from naturalist Jane Goodall:
Without hope, all we can do is eat and drink the last of our resources as we watch our planet slowly die. Let us have faith in ourselves, in our intellect, in our staunch spirit.
Suggested Reading
Conant, Jennet, Tuxedo Park, Simon & Schuster, 2002
The biography of Alfred L. Loomis. A lively description of radar and other developments at MIT and elsewhere during WW II. As told his granddaughter.
Kilham, Lawrence B., Great Idea to a Great Company: Making Inventions Pay,
Xlibris, 2001 (purchase through Amazon.com).
The author's practical ideas on how to develop inventions and build successful business based on three generations of his family's businesses.
Segre Gino, A Matter of Degrees, Viking, 2002
A description and history of thermal measurement with many fascinating accounts about scientist inventors. By a noted physicist and astronomer.
© Lawrence B. Kilham 2002