For all of human history until the 1820s, nobody went faster than the speed of a galloping horse. Then within a generation it became routine to travel at speeds three times that fast, and for hours at a time. Has there ever been an innovation as tangible and dramatic as this? I have lived, by contrast, in an era when speed of transport has not... See more

According to one estimate, per unit of power, coal kills nearly 2,000 times as many people as nuclear; bioenergy fifty times; gas forty times; hydro fifteen times; solar five times (people fall off roofs installing panels) and even wind power kills nearly twice as many as nuclear. These numbers include the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima.... See more

man-made technologies evolve from previous man-made technologies, and are not invented from scratch. This is a key characteristic of evolutionary systems: the move to the ‘adjacent possible’ step.

The astonishing safety record of the modern airline industry has been achieved, quite literally, by trial and error.

Most innovation is a gradual process. The modern obsession with disruptive innovation, a phrase coined by the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in 1995, is misleading.

Again and again, simultaneous invention marks the progress of technology as if there is something ripe about the moment. It does not necessarily imply plagiarism.

the Wrights had done everything right. As experienced bicycle makers and diligent craftsmen, they had systematically worked step by step through the challenges necessary to solve the problem of powered flight.

The West may be slowly forgetting to allow this to happen through bureaucratic strangulation, but China will surely stifle it through political authoritarianism.

Edison’s approach worked: within six years he had registered 400 patents. He remained relentlessly focused on finding out what the world needed and then inventing ways of meeting the needs, rather than the other way around. The method of invention was always trial and error. In developing the nickel-iron battery his employees undertook 50,000... See more