How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines [Hardcover]

For a while, I was a member of SHOT, the Society for the History of Technology. Although I found a few things of interest, the overwhelming view I gained was of earnest left wing intellecutuals trying to deconstruct everything into nothing. Here is a book that can meet the academic muster but contains more of substance than warmed over social theory.

The basic structure of the book is based on the development of...... the book itself, starting from Gutenberg and moving to the mass produced book of today. Along the way two main ideas are explored. First, that necessity is not the mother of invention, desire is the mother of invention. This point is well argued and sensibly made. Second, that every invention is a concantenation of inventions that led to the tipping point when something reached a critical point in which it became the recognizable thing of history. At that tipping point is found the famous or named inventor whose role should neither be slighted or exaggerated.

In making these two points as well as developing an approach to the statistics of inventional progress, Lienhard digresses from bookmaking to steam engines, railroads, the role of women and the development of schools. All these digressions are perfectly entertaining and thoughtful.

All in all, I fully recommend the book. For my personal taste I would have liked more math in it, like the little bit in the notes at the back that explains why we can blow both cold and hot with our breath. The book is wonderfully illustrated with many illustrations from historic texts.

This is a very attractive book to pick up, because it's richly illustrated with period illustrations (mostly engravings and patent diagrams) of old inventions. And reading it offers many moments of interest, especially in Part I of the book, where John Lienhard (JL) discusses the ambiguous notion of priority of inventorship, i.e., who was the first to invent something. But the whole doesn't quite stick together.

The book was written when JL was already an emeritus professor. The choice of topics jumps around -- the priority theme is shifted somewhat in part II, which focuses on "steam and speed", then gets blurred even more in Part III, on the rise of texts and scientific illustration, before returning in the last chapter. This structure, together with JL's many personal reminiscences, makes it feels like a rather relaxed amble through miscellaneous topics and themes that intrugued JL during the years, rather than a tightly-structured argument. Not that some of the ambles and rambles aren't interesting -- I especially enjoyed learning about early flying machines and how the Wright Brothers pitched their propellers, and an anecdote JL tells in the last chapter about dropping a glass rod makes a very nice practical point about the relationship between mathematical models and reality.

However, I was frustrated by some other aspects of the book. Most of the historical topics, such as the history of printing technology and its social impact, are far better-treated in other books. A three-page mini-history of computing (@159-162) lapsed into the same teleological narrative that JL is at pains to criticize elsewhere in the book; e.g., he claims that the idea of "creating a machine to execute a string of instructions ... appeared not to have crossed anyone's mind until Charles Babbage proposed it in 1834" (@159), thereby ignoring centuries of music boxes and other automata dating back to the time of Archimedes.

Also, some of the scientific explanations, especially in Part II, were so rushed-through that I found them hard to understand even when I had some familiarity with the subject. Lots of diagrams, such as of Watt's steam engine, are labelled with letters indicating their components, but JL almost never refers to these, leaving it to the reader to figure out which thingamajig most looks like what JL is describing. Or consider this passage, from a description of the connection between atoms and thermodynamics (making the point that the 18th Century's phlogiston theory wasn't so crazy):

"Every molecule is held together by powerful electronic forces. It requires energy to pull those atoms apart. If we burn carbon in oxygen, we dismantle the O2 molecules to form two atoms of oxygen. Then those two atoms combine with one carbon atom to form carbon dioxide, CO2. Since it takes more energy to pull CO2 apart than it does O2, the net effect of burning carbon in oxygen is to *release* energy." (@75; emphasis in the original.)

I re-read this several times before I realized that JL skipped mentioning that the combination of a carbon atom with 2 oxygen atoms to make CO2 releases energy -- and specifically, more energy than what's needed for breaking up oxygen molecules. But that fact is an empirical one, not a matter of logical necessity; omitting to mention it just leaves the attentive reader scratching his or her head in puzzlement.

All told, the book feels midway between an agglomeration and a synthesis, like a cake that needs about another 20 minutes in the oven. I'd have liked JL to have followed up on some his most intriguing observations, e.g. the implications for the patent system of his comments about fuzzy priority, and the notion of "invented qualities", which appears only in a throwaway remark at the end of a chapter (@115; JL mentions speed, efficiency and accuracy as examples). Maybe this is too much to expect. But a proper bibliography is not. The book exemplifies an unfortunate trend of discourtesy to readers (perhaps on the part of the Oxford U Press, not JL) by including only footnotes but no comprehensive list of references. For this I deduct an additional 1/4-star from the 4 stars for the rest of book, net 3.75 stars.

Very well written summary of the arc of invention that leads to significant advances. Mr. Lienhard discusses many of the contributing refinements that lead to the development of flight, steam engines, printing, education, libraries and other significant advancements. His premise is that no invention is developed in a vacuum. Many actors contribute to the eventual creation of an invention. Those actors have different motivation and endure considerable hardships on their way to participating in the discovery. These inventors seem to share an underlying theme or notion which Mr. Lienhard identifies with this quote:

Inventing means violating some status quo. If we do not exert some freedom from rebellion we do not invent. It might be freedom from external proscription, or it might e freedom from chains forged in our own minds. Al the great inventive epochs of the world have been marked by climates of increased personal liberty.

This book is a wonderful read.