The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  Smeaton’s gifts for engineering weren’t, of course, applied only to improving waterpower; an abbreviated list of his achievements include the Calder navigational canal, the Perth Bridge, the Forth & Clyde canal (near the Carron ironworks of John Roebuck, for whom he worked as consultant, building boring mills and furnaces), and Aberdeen harbor. He made dramatic improvements in the original Newcomen design for the steam engine, and enough of a contribution to the Watt separate condenser engine that Watt & Boulton offered him the royalties on one of their installed engines as a thank-you.

  But Smeaton’s greatest contribution was methodological and, in a critical sense, social. His example showed a generation of other engineers17 how to approach a problem by systematically varying parameters through experimentation and so improve a technique, or a mechanism, even if they didn’t fully grasp the underlying theory. He also explicitly linked the scientific perspective of Isaac Newton with his own world of engineering: “In comparing different experiments,18 as some fall short, and others exceed the maxim … we may, according to the laws of reasoning by induction* conclude the maxim true.” More significant than his writings, however, were his readers. Smeaton was, as much as Watt, a hero to the worker bees of the Industrial Revolution. When the first engineering society in the world first met, in 1771 London, Smeaton was sitting at the head of the table, and after his death in 1792, the Society of Civil Engineers—Smeaton’s own term, by which he meant not the modern designer of public works, but engineering that was not military—renamed itself the Smeatonian Society. The widespread imitation of Smeaton’s systematic technique and professional standards dramatically increased the population of Britons who were competent to evaluate one another’s innovations.

  The result, in Britain, was not so much a dramatic increase in the number of inventive insights; the example of Watt, and others, provided that. What Smeaton bequeathed to his nation was a process by which those inventions could be experimentally tested, and a large number of engineers who were competent to do so. Their ability to identify the best inventions, and reject the worst, might even have made creative innovation subject to the same forces that cause species to adapt over time: evolution by natural selection.

  THE APPLICATION OF THE Darwinian model to everything from dating strategies to cultural history is sometimes dismissed as “secondary” or “pop” Darwinism, to distinguish it from the genuine article, and the habit has become promiscuous. However, this doesn’t mean that the Darwinian model is useful only in biology; consider, for example, whether the same sort of circumstances—random variation with selection pressure—preserved the “fittest” of inventions as well.

  As far back as the 1960s,19 the term “blind variation and selective retention” was being used to describe creative innovation without foresight, and advocates for the BVSR model remain so entranced by the potential for mapping creative behavior onto a Darwinian map that they refer to innovations as “ideational mutations.”20 A more modest, and jargon-free, application of Darwinism simply argues that technological progress is proportional to population in the same way as evolutionary change: Unless a population is large enough, the evolutionary changes that occur are not progressive but random, the phenomenon known as genetic drift.

  It is, needless to say, pretty difficult to identify “progressive change” over time for cognitive abilities like those exhibited by inventors. A brave attempt has been made by James Flynn, the intelligence researcher from New Zealand who first documented, in 1984, what is now known as the Flynn Effect: the phenomenon that the current generation in dozens of different countries scores higher on general intelligence tests than previous generations. Not a little higher: a lot. The bottom 10 percent of today’s families are somehow scoring at the same level as the top 10 percent did fifty years ago. The phenomenon is datable to the Industrial Revolution, which exposed an ever larger population to stimulation of their abilities to reason abstractly and concretely simultaneously. The “self-perpetuating feedback loops”21 (Flynn’s term) resulted in the exercise, and therefore the growth, of potential abilities that mattered a lot more to mechanics and artisans than to farmers, or to hunter-gatherers.

  Most investigations of the relationship between evolutionary theory and industrialization seem likely to be little more than an entertaining academic parlor game for centuries to come.* One area, however, recalls that the most important inspiration for the original theory of evolution by natural selection was Charles Darwin’s observation of evolution by unnatural selection: the deliberate breeding of animals to reinforce desirable traits, most vividly in Darwin’s recognition of the work of pigeon fanciers. Reversing the process, a number of economists have wondered whether it is possible to “breed” inventors: to create circumstances in which more inventive activity occurs (and, by inference, to discover whether those same circumstances obtained in eighteenth-century Britain).

  This was one of the many areas that attracted the attention of the Austrian American economist Fritz Machlup, who, forty years ago, approached the question in a slightly different way: Is it possible to expand the inventive work force? Can labor be diverted into the business of invention? Can an educational or training system emphasize invention?

  Machlup—who first popularized the idea of a “knowledge economy”—spent decades collecting data on innovation in everything from advertising to typewriter manufacture—by one estimate, on nearly a third of the entire U.S. economy—and concluded with suggesting the counterintuitive possibility that higher rates of compensation actually lower the quality of labor. Machlup argued that the person who prefers to do something other than inventing and does so only under the seductive lure of more money is likely to be less gifted than one who doesn’t. This is the “vocation” argument dressed up in econometric equations; at some point, the recruits are going to reduce22 the average quality of the inventing “army.” This is true at some point; doctors who cure only for money may be less successful than those who have a true calling. The trick is figuring out what point. There will indeed always be amateur inventors (in the original meaning: those who invent out of love), and they may well spend as much time mastering their inventive skills as any professional. But they will also always be fairly thin on the ground compared to the population as a whole.

  He also examined the behavior of inventors as an element of what economists call input-output analysis. Input-output analysis creates snapshots of entire economies by showing how the output of one economic activity is the input of another: farmers selling wheat to bakers who sell bread to blacksmiths who sell plows back to the farmers. Harvesting, baking, and forging, respectively, are “production functions”: the lines on a graph that represent one person adding value and selling it to another. In Machlup’s exercise,23 the supply of inventors (or inventive labor) was the key input; the production function was the transformation of such labor into a commercially useful invention; and the supply of inventions was the output. As always, the equation included a simplifying assumption, and in this case, it was a doozy: that one man’s labor is worth roughly the same as another’s. This particular assumption gets distorted pretty quickly even in traditional input-output analysis, but it leaps right through the looking glass when applied to the business of inventing, a fact of which Machlup was keenly aware: “a statement that five hours of Mr. Doakes’ time24 [is] equivalent to one hour of Mr. Edison’s or two hours of Mr. Bessemer’s would sound preposterous.”

  The invention business is no more immune to the principle of diminishing returns than any other, and in any economic system, diminishing returns result anytime a crucial input stays fixed when another one increases. In the case of inventiveness, anytime the store of scientific knowledge (and the number of problems capable of tempting an inventor) isn’t increasing, more and more time and resources are required to produce a useful invention. Only the once-in-human-history event known as the Industrial Revolution, because it began the era of continuous invention, had a temporary reprieve from it.r />
  But input-output analysis misses the most important factor of all, which might be called the genius of the system. You only get the one hour of Mr. Edison’s time during which he figures out how to make a practical incandescent lightbulb if you also get Mr. Doakes plugging away for five hours at refining the carbonized bamboo filament inside it.

  The reason why is actually at the heart of the thing. Mr. Doakes didn’t spend those hours because of a simple economic calculus, given the time needed to actually pursue all the variables in all possible frames; Watt’s notebooks record months of trying every material under the sun to seal the first boiler of the separate condenser engine. The return on improving even the inventions of antiquity, given the hours, days, and months required and the other demands on the inventor’s time, must have been poor indeed. Mr. Doakes spent the time playing the game because he dreamed of winning it.

  Which brings us back to James Watt’s famous walk on Glasgow Green. The quotation from Watt that opened this chapter appears (not always in the same words) in not only virtually every biography of Watt, but in just about every history of mechanical invention itself, including that of A. P. Usher. Only rarely noted, however, is the fact that Watt’s reminiscence first appeared nearly forty years after his death—and was the recollection of two men who heard it from Watt nearly fifty years after the famous walk.

  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 man25 who ever lived.” So when the elderly James Watt entered their shop, sometime in 1813, he was welcomed with adoration, and a barrage of questions about the great events of his life, rather like Michael Jordan beset by fans asking for a play-by-play account of the 1989 NBA playoffs. Watt’s recollection of the Sunday stroll down Glasgow Green in 1765 comes entirely from this episode. In short, it is not the sort of memory that a skeptic would regard as completely reliable in all its details.

  This is to suggest not that Watt’s account is inaccurate, but rather that it says something far more significant about the nature of invention. The research emerging from the fields of information theory and neuroscience on the nature of creative insights offer intriguing ideas about what is happening in an individual inventor’s brain at the moment of inspiration. Theories about the aSTG, or cerebellum, or anything else, do not, however, explain much about the notable differences between the nature of invention in the eighteenth century and in the eighth; the structure of the individual brain has not, so far as is known, changed in millennia.

  On the other hand, the number of brains producing inventive insights has increased. A lot.

  This is why 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, soldiers, 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 1825 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.

  * A member of the embarrassingly overachieving clan of Hungarian Jews that included Michael’s brother, Karl, the economist and author of The Great Transformation, a history of the modern market state (one built on “an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production,” i.e., the Industrial Revolution), and his son, John, the 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

  * A remarkable number of discoveries about the function of brain structures have been preceded by an improbable bit of head trauma.

  * In addition to his status as a cheerleader for entrepreneurism—his most famous phrase is undoubtedly the one about the “perennial gale of creative destruction”—Schumpeter was also legendarily hostile to the importance of institutions, particularly laws, and especially patent law.

  * When the original finally wore out, in 1879, a replica, using many of the same granite stones (and Smeaton’s innovative marble dowels and dovetails), was rebuilt in Plymouth in honor of Smeaton.

  * This is an explicit reference to Newton’s fourth rule of reasoning from Book III of the Principia Mathematica; Smeaton was himself something of an astronomer, and entered the Newtonian world through its calculations of celestial motions.

  * The evidence that invention has a Darwinian character is easier to find using the tools of demography than of microbiology, but while the landscape of evolution is large populations, its raw materials are the tiny bits of coded proteins called genes. Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, has documented an intriguing discontinuity in the evolutionary history of two genes—microcephalin and abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated (ASPM)—which, when damaged, are complicit in some fairly onerous genetic disorders affecting intelligence (including big reductions in the size of cerebellums). That history shows substantial changes that can be dated to roughly 37,000 years ago and 5,800 years ago, which are approximately the dates of language acquisition and the discovery of agriculture. This is the first hard evidence that arguably the two biggest social changes in human history are associated with changes in brain size, and presumably function. No such changes dating from the birth of industrialization have been found, or even suspected.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MASTER OF THEM ALL

  concerning differences among Europe’s monastic brotherhoods; the unlikely contribution of the brewing of beer to the forging of iron; the geometry of crystals; and an old furnace made new

  THE RUINS OF RIEVAULX Abbey sit on a plain surrounded by gently rolling moors not far from the River Wye in the northeast of England. In the years between its founding in 1132 and dissolution in 1536, the abbey’s monks farmed more than five thousand acres of productive cropland. In addition to the main building, now a popular tourist stop, Rievaulx included more than seventy outbuildings, spread across a hundred square miles of Yorkshire. Some were granges: satellite farms. Others were cottage factories. And half a dozen were iron foundries, which is why Rievaulx Abbey stands squarely astride one of the half-dozen or so parallel roads that led to the steam revolution, and eventually to Rocket. The reason is the monastic brotherhood that founded Rievaulx Abbey, and not at all coincidentally, dominated ironworking (and a dozen other economic activities) in Europe and Britain throughout the medieval period: the Cistercians.

  During the eleventh century, the richest and most imitated monastery in Europe was the Benedictine community at Cluny, in Burgundy. The Cluniacs, like all monastic orders, subscribed, in theory anyway, to the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, an extremely detailed manual for a simple life of prayer and penance. In fact, they were “simple” in much the same way that the Vanderbilt mansions in Newport were “cottages.” A Cluniac monk was far likelier to be clothed in silk vestments than in the “woolen cowl for winter1 and a thin or worn one for summer” prescribed by the Rule. More important for the monastery of Molesme, near Dijon, was the Cluniac tendency to pick and choose pieces of Benedictine doctrine, and to apply more enthusiasm and discipline to their prayers than to their labors.

  This was a significant departure from the order’s de facto founder, Saint Benedict, who defined labor as one of th
e highest virtues, and he wasn’t referring to the kind of work involved in constructing a clever logical argument. So widespread was his influence that virtually all the technological progress of the medieval period was fueled by monasticism. The monks of St. Victor’s Abbey2 in Paris even included mechanica—the skills of an artisan—in their curriculum. In the twelfth century a German Benedictine and metalworker named Theophilus Presbyter wrote an encyclopedia of machinery entitled Di diversis artibus; Roger Bacon, the grandfather of experimental science, was a Franciscan, a member of the order founded by Saint Francis of Assisi in part to restore the primacy of humility and hard work.

  The Benedictines of Cluny, however, prospered not because of their hard work but because of direct subsidies from secular powers including the kings of France and England and numerous lesser aristocrats. And so, in 1098, the monks of Molesme cleared out, determined to live a purer life by following Benedict’s call for ora et labora: prayer and (especially) work. The order, now established at “the desert of Cîteaux” (the reference is obscure), whence they took the name “Cistercians,” was devoted to the virtues of hard work; and not just hard, but organized. The distinction was the work3 of one of the order’s first leaders, an English monk named Stephen Harding, a remarkably skillful executive who instinctively seemed to have understood how to balance the virtues of flexibility and innovation with those of centralization; by instituting twice-yearly convocations of dozens (later hundreds) of the abbots who ran local Cistercian monasteries all over Europe, he was able to promote regular sharing of what a twenty-first-century management consultant would call “best practices”—in everything from the cultivation of grapes to the cutting of stone—while retaining direct supervision of both process and doctrine. The result was amazing organizational sophistication, a flexible yet disciplined structure that spread from the Elbe to the Atlantic.