Amazon Aggregators: Breakdown Research

One unexpected emergent property of the technium is that most inventions and innovations are co-invented multiple times, simultaneously and independently. That is, more than one person will honestly invent the next new thing about the same time. This means that the popular image of the lone mad inventor or heroic scientist is just wrong. For insta

So let us perform an experiment on the data available on the history of innovation. Take roughly two hundred of the most important innovations and scientific breakthroughs from the past six hundred years, starting with Gutenberg’s press: everything from Einstein’s theory of relativity to the invention of air conditioning to the birth of the World W

When we think about other technologists selling consumer products, from Henry Ford (a close friend of Edison’s) to Steve Jobs, we see the model that has emerged. The lonely inventor is replaced by the team. The goal is not to make basic scientific discoveries but to apply science to products. The effort was closely related to the market, and the br

On January 12, 1908, The Washington Post ran a full-page spread headlined “America’s Thinking Men Forecast the Wonders of the Future.” Among the “thinking men” buried in the fine print was Thomas Edison. Edison had already changed the world at this point; he was the Steve Jobs of his time. The Post editors asked: “Is the age of invention passing?”

Edison wasn’t a grand planner. He was a prolific tinkerer, combining parts in ways he didn’t quite understand, confident that little discoveries along the way would be combined and leveraged into more meaningful inventions.

Edison’s genius lay in making new inventions work, or in making existing inventions work better than anyone had thought possible. But how they worked was to Edison less important.

And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”40 There was an essential truth to this, too—John Bardeen suddenly suggesting to the solid-state gr