Why great ideas come in waves
We like the idea of the lone genius, but it is more common for lots of people to come up with world-changing inventions simultaneously. It’s all about timing, says Tom Whipple
It was the start of a new millennium, and the world’s biggest technology company was presenting the device that it thought would define the era’s computing. The gadget was the size of a book and, on the front, almost entirely a screen. It was, Alexandra Loeb, one of the developers, explained, a “tablet”.
The market for this premium product, initially, would be businessmen and women on the go. But the same kind of device in miniature, which she called a “smartphone”, would make its way into everyone’s pockets. The year was 2000, and we now know that Loeb’s vision was more than fulfilled. Just not by Loeb.
Loeb’s employer was Microsoft, and its foray with a Tablet PC seemed, for almost a decade, to be a technological flight of fancy — a folly like that of Sir Clive Sinclair and his silly idea that people would whizz around cities on electric scooters. Then the iPad and the iPhone arrived. Not to mention the electric scooter.
Was Loeb, like Sinclair, simply unlucky? Perhaps. She would have cause to think so. Viewed through the lens of history there’s a different argument, made in a new book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture by Andreas Wagner. It argues that there is nothing remotely unusual about her ill fortune.
Innovations, whether in human technology or nature, tend to come in batches. So Loeb should have anticipated that she wouldn’t be alone — and that her version of a tablet had no right to be the one that triumphed.
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In biology, caffeine evolved in five plants independently. In human history, agriculture came about separately in China, the Middle East and Central America. And if you don’t buy this argument, there’s one final clincher proving its validity: the odd patterns that happen in pricey consumer goods for early adopters.
Sometimes when reviewing technology products I happen across apparent coincidences. The same products appear, solving the same problem — whether it is keeping your coffee warm or bending your laptop screen — at almost exactly the same time.
Multiple inventions feel not an aberration but the norm. There is, as it happens, a name for the phenomenon, “Merton’s multiples”. In 1961 the sociologist Robert Merton argued that the really unusual advances in science and technology were those that happened singly. From the Higgs boson that was posited six times (only once by Higgs) to the tablet computer that was — depending on definitions — first posited in 1956, most advances have many authors.
This can feel disappointing. We like the idea of genius, of lone inventors seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Normally, though, in truth, there are a lot of people racing to climb that human pyramid of giants, all aiming for the same shoulder.
Occasionally, not acknowledging that gets us into trouble. Consider the invention of radar. Still today we in Britain tend to remember the genius of the men and women who built our radar defences, just in time for the Battle of Britain. What we don’t know so well is that Germany had radar too — it had its own geniuses, and their radar came earlier and was in many ways better than ours. Before the war there were, in fact, versions of radar being independently developed in at least eight countries.
Catastrophically, Britain could not accept that the Germans had radar. So embedded was the idea of our lone inventive pluck that it took two years of war — and many downed aircraft — for the RAF to acknowledge the reason that the Luftwaffe were so good at finding their bombers. This was despite the fact that, before the war, Luftwaffe officers had literally told the British that they had radar.
Later in the war, Britain and Germany developed a devastating countermeasure to radar — they realised it could be blocked by chucking little strips of foil out of a plane. Crucially both sides decided not to do this for a while because both sides assumed that they alone had invented it and didn’t want to give the enemy the idea.
So why — outside of war — does one idea take off when others flounder? Why the Apple iPad but not the Microsoft Tablet? Victor Hugo famously said that nothing in the world “is so powerful as an idea whose time has come”. The “time has come” part of that quote is as important as the “idea”.
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Since at least the time of The Jetsons we have dreamt of the idea of an air taxi. Soon we will have one. In Bristol a company called Vertical Aerospace is this year trialling its prototype. And they’re not only in Bristol, but in Germany, the US and in Brazil. After decades of disappointment for futurists there are now half a dozen serious air taxi companies at a similar stage of developing cheap vertical take-off and landing craft. Why now?
• The flying taxi that’s about to hit the skies
The boring answer? Because we can. We could, as with the Microsoft Tablet, have had a go 20 years ago. Like the tablet, with enough expenditure it would have sort of worked — but not quite. And today? Motors, composite materials, avionics and most of all batteries — all boring, all crucial — have progressed to the level where they can easily hold a six-seater craft aloft.
The idea, then, is the easy bit. It is waiting for its time to come that holds things up. Or, as Thomas Macaulay, the 19th-century Whig politician, put it, in a reliably Whiggish take: “The sun illuminates the hills while it is still below the horizon, and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to the multitude.”
Merton’s multiples are, in other words, the natural and expected way of things. So much so, in fact, that in an admirably honest bit of follow-up research Merton discovered that he was at least the 19th person to have come up with the concept.
