How many light bulbs does it take to change the world?Matt Ridley
Let me begin with a paradox. It concerns the light bulb, that clichéd metaphor for innovation, which was itself an innovation in the 1870s.
The paradox is this. Nobody saw the light bulb coming. Nobody predicted its invention. Yet the closer you look at the story of the light bulb, the more inevitable it seems that it was invented when it was.
Robert Friedel has concluded that there are 21 different people who can lay claim to having invented the light bulb more or less independently in the years leading up to its debut. Given that two of them had crucial assistants who did half the work, I call it 23.
There’s Thomas Edison, of course, who filed his patent in November 1879. But there’s also Joseph Swan, who demonstrated to an audience of 700 people at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle on 3 February 1879 that he could illuminate a room – for his lecture – with an evacuated glass bulb containing a carbon filament, through which a current passed.
Then there is William Grove, Fredrick de Moleyns and Warren de la Rue also in Britain, and Marcellin Jobard in Belgium, and Alexander Lodygin in Russia, and Heinrich Gobel in Germany, and Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin in France, and Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans in Canada, and Hiram Maxim and John Starr in America. And so on.
Every single one of these people produced, published or patented the idea of a glowing electric filament in a bulb of glass, sometimes containing a vacuum, sometimes nitrogen, and all before Edison, and they did so more or less independently of each other.
This is a very common phenomenon, called simultaneous invention. Almost every invention or discovery results in a dispute about who got there first.
The truth is that the story of the light bulb, far from illustrating the importance of the heroic inventor, turns out to tell the opposite story: of innovation as a gradual, incremental, collective yet inescapably inevitable process. The light bulb emerged inexorably from the combined technologies of the day. It was bound to appear when it did, given the progress of other technologies. It was ripe. Yet still nobody saw it coming. How can innovation be both inevitable and unpredictable?
Take a more recent example: the search engine. This is perhaps the most useful new tool of my lifetime. I use it pretty well every day. I cannot imagine life without it. I get frustrated when it’s not available, as for example when I tried to find a book on my shelves that I wanted to re-read when preparing this lecture. In the end I gave up and bought the book again on to my Kindle.
But did I, or anybody else, foresee the immense importance of search in the era of the internet? Did we sit around in the 1980s saying ‘if only we could have search engines’? No – no more than people sat around in the 1600s saying ‘if only we could have steam engines, we could have an industrial revolution’.
Yet if Sergey Brin had never met Larry Page, we’d still have search engines. There were lots of rivals to Google. The inventors of the search engine, like the inventors of the light bulb, are all entirely dispensable individuals. Re-run the tape of history without all of them and somebody else would have done it.
It is my contention that innovation is the most important unsolved problem in all of human society. We rely on it, but we do not fully understand it, we cannot predict it and we cannot direct it.
It’s worth at this point distinguishing between invention, development and commercialisation, but I am taking the word innovation to cover all three stages.
What has this to do with Friedrich Hayek? Quite a lot, I think. In his famous essay on the uses of knowledge in society, Hayek makes the argument that the knowledge required to make society function is dispersed among ordinary people, rather than available centrally and in concentrated form to experts. Towards the end of that essay, he takes to task Joseph Schumpeter, the famous champion of innovation. He’s talking about the facts we need to know to determine how best to solve an economic need (Hayek 1945):
The problem is thus in no way solved if we can show that all the facts, if they were known to a single mind … would uniquely determine the solution; instead we must show how a solution is produced by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge.
Hayek was also fascinated by evolution. Here he is describing the paradox I have just referred to, in regard to evolution rather than economics (Hayek 1973):
If it were possible to ascertain the particular facts of the past which operated on the selection of the particular forms that emerged, it would provide a complete explanation of the structure of the existing organisms; and similarly, if it were possible to ascertain all the particular facts which will operate on them during some future period, it ought to enable us to predict future development. But, of course, we will never be able to do either.
Technological innovation, like evolution, is a bottom-up phenomenon that emerges by trial and error among the ideas of ordinary people, not a deus ex machina that descends upon a few brilliant minds.
We’re too creationist about this. We’ve been telling it wrong for a very long time. We’ve singled out heroes, and told stories about moments of inspiration that are thoroughly misleading: people jumping out of baths, people being hit on the head by apples, people watching the lids of kettles jump, and so on.
Who invented the computer? The closer you look into it, the harder it is to answer that question and decide between the claims of John von Neumann, Alan Turing, John Mauchly, Presper Eckert, Herman Goldstine, John Vincent Atanasoff, Howard Aiken, Grace Hopper, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, to name just a few. In a real sense, the computer evolved, emerged and invented itself.
Who invented the internet? Everybody and nobody. It evolved. It’s the same with the English language: nobody invented it and nobody is in charge. Yet it’s certainly man-made. As the philosopher Adam Ferguson said in 1767, there are things that are the result of human action but not the execution of any human design.
Mostly innovation happens by a sort of recombination among ideas, very like the way genetic change happens through recombination of genetic sequences in evolution. As Brian Arthur has argued, every technology is a combination of other technologies, every idea a combination of other ideas. The pill camera came about after a conversation over a garden fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.
This incidentally is why the notion that we will run out of ideas or resources, or growth, is so wrong. As I put it in The Rational Optimist (Ridley 2011):
The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions. This is the biggest cause for my optimism of all. It is a beautiful feature of information systems that they are far vaster than physical systems: the combinatorial vastness of the universe of possible ideas dwarfs the puny universe of physical things. As Paul Romer puts it, the number of different software programs that can be put on one-gigabyte hard disks is 27 million times greater than the number of atoms in the universe.
It follows that innovation is mostly about perspiration, not inspiration, as Edison said. He and his team tried 6,000 different plant materials for the filament of a light bulb before settling on bamboo. To put it another way, turning a discovery or an invention into a workable innovation is far harder than having a new idea in the first place.
Perhaps this explains another regularity in the history of technology: that we overestimate the impact of an innovation in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run. This is known as Amara’s law after a 1960s’ computer pioneer.
As with all evolutionary systems, you cannot easily hurry innovation. We cannot invent things before they are ready to be invented. Bad l...
