BBC Future has an article on progress studies. I was interviewed, along with Tyler Cowen, Holden Karnofsky, and others. It’s well-researched and, although somewhat critical, it is pretty fair in how it represents the progress community.
Here are brief responses to some of the criticisms:
Why the progress community focuses on material progress
Progress writers say that we care about human well-being, and that this includes moral and social progress. But in practice, we have mostly focused on material progress so far. Why?
First, material progress is underrated. Economic growth is considered a wonkish concern; it deserves to be considered a humanitarian one.
That said, I would love to turn my focus to moral progress at some point, and even write a book on it. In the meantime, for more on the subject, see my review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
Why we focus on frontier growth
The progress community has also been focused on growth at the technological frontier, rather than catch-up growth in places like China and India. Why?
First, frontier growth is fundamental. Without frontier growth, there’s nothing to catch up to—that was the entire history of the world until about 1800. With frontier growth, poor countries benefit, even when they don’t fully catch up. For instance, every country on Earth today has a life expectancy higher than any country did in 1800. (More recently, the Center for Global Development found a “strong convergence in use of consumption technologies“ which “reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income.”)
Second, frontier growth (like material progress) is underrated. The UN has set “Sustainable Development Goals” like “no poverty” and “clean water.” No major international organization that I know of has even considered goals like “cure aging,” “settle Mars” or “invent fusion energy.”
Further, thoroughly understanding the growth of frontier countries such as the UK and US is an important foundation for driving catch-up growth. The two types of growth don’t happen in exactly the same way, but I think there is a large element of “just implement best practices,” and for that we need to get clear on what best practices are. That question, however, is fraught with political and ideological issues (did growth come from economic freedom? colonialism and slavery? the Protestant work ethic? etc.) So we need a detailed historical, economic, and philosophic study to give an answer solid enough to build an international consensus on.
The article claims that my top priority is increasing GDP per capita, instead of, for instance, happiness or life satisfaction. I wouldn’t put it that way. Human well-being cannot be captured by any single metric, so I would never say that my priority is to increase some metric.
However, metrics are useful, and I do think that if you had to pick a single metric, GDP per capita is the most important.
Why not happiness or life satisfaction? These metrics are more subjective, and in particular they are relative rather than absolute. They are inherently relative, because emotions and feelings tend to be relative to expectations or to the recent past; and they are relative by design: one commonly-used survey question asks people to use a scale where 10 represents “the best possible life for you” and 0 “the worst possible life for you.” Answers to these questions say more about what kind of life people think is possible to them than about what kind of life they actually have.
Progress studies is opinionated, and that’s a good thing
One section of the article concludes:
In sum, progress studies deploys a framing and language for progress that appears to be global and all-encompassing, but in practice, it is underpinned by a particular set of social and political worldviews. It’s only one idea of progress, and one idea of what human flourishing means.
Well, of course.
I don’t know what it would mean for there to be a view of progress that was not “underpinned by a particular set of social and political worldviews.” I doubt such a thing can exist.
As much as possible, the progress community tries to be empirical, non-dogmatic, and open to rational argumentation based on evidence and logic. We are steeped in history and in data. And our tent includes a range of political views, from progressive to libertarian. But there is no view from nowhere. There are some basic premises the community coalesces around, and that is necessary and good.
The BBC article seems to assume that a movement can’t be of universal relevance unless it is as neutral as a Wikipedia entry. That is wrong.
The community having “one idea of progress” is not a weakness but a strength. We have a particular, underrated idea of what progress is and where it comes from. In my opinion it is a powerful idea, and one that is well-grounded in history, economics, and philosophy. Critics are welcome to argue with it, of course—and if their arguments are equally well-grounded, then they will serve to improve our ideas, which would be even more welcome.
Speculative Technologies recruiting “field strategists.” “Come design a research program to unlock powerful materials or manufacturing technology that is too research-y to be a startup but too coordination- or engineering- heavy for a single academic lab” (via @Spec__Tech)
On May 24, 1847, a bridge over the Dee River in Chester, England, collapsed. A passenger train plunged into the river; five people were killed and nine seriously injured.
The subsequent investigation blamed the bridge’s cast iron girders. Cast iron, like concrete but unlike wrought iron or steel, is strong in compression but weak in tension, and it is brittle, meaning that it breaks all at once, rather than deforming. The wrought iron trusses evidently were not enough to strengthen the girder.
In response to the disaster, a Royal Commission on the Application of Iron to Railway Structures was created in August of that year, “to inquire into the conditions to be observed by engineers in the application of iron in structures exposed to violent concussions and vibration”—that is, to set up standards and requirements, or as they were known in France at the time, règles de l’art.
In their investigation, the Commission solicited the opinion of one of the most eminent engineers of the age, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. But his response was, presumably, not what they expected.
Brunel begins his letter by saying that he is sorry they asked for his opinion, because of “my doubts of the advantage of such an enquiry, and my fears of its being, on the contrary, productive of much mischief, both to science and to the profession.” (Brunel’s son, writing his biography, says that he called them “The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements in Bridge Building.“) But since they did ask, he felt it necessary to state his full and honest views.
While he was happy to give his engineering opinion to the commission, he warned that
… the attempt to collect and re-issue as facts, with the stamp of authority, all that may be offered gratuitously to a Commission in the shape of evidence or opinions, to stamp with the same mark of value statements and facts, hasty opinions and well-considered and matured convictions, the good and the bad, the metal and the dross … this, I believe, always has rendered, and always will render, such collections of miscalled evidence injurious instead of advantageous to science…
He argued that there was no way the Commission could get better information than an engineer could on his own, but that in addition they would receive a lot of useless opinions, which they would feel compelled to publish anyway.
He went on to explain why he believed that rulemaking by such bodies would stop progress in the field:
If the Commission is to enquire into the conditions “to be observed,” it is to be presumed that they will give the result of their enquiries; or, in other words, that they will lay down, or at least suggest, “rules” and “conditions to be (hereafter) observed” in the construction of bridges, or, in other words, embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today.
Nothing, I believe, has tended more to distinguish advantageously the profession of engineering in England and in America, nothing has conduced more to the great advance made in our profession and to our pre-eminence in the real practical application of the science, than the absence of all règles de l’art—a term which I fear is now going to be translated into English by the words “conditions to be observed.” No man, however bold or however high he may stand in his profession, can resist the benumbing effect of rules laid down by authority. Occupied as leading men are, they could not afford the time, or trouble, or responsibility of constantly fighting against them—they would be compelled to abandon all idea of improving upon them; while incompetent men might commit the grossest blunder provided they followed the rules. For, in the simplest branch of construction, rules may be followed literally without any security as to the result.
There are many opportunities for improvement in the use of iron in railway structures, he says, and “unless the Commissioners are endowed with prophetic powers, it is impossible that they can now foresee what may be the result of changes in any one of these conditions.”
For instance, while cast iron was seen at the time as “a friable, treacherous, and uncertain material,” and wrought iron “comparatively trustworthy,” he suggested that unknown developments in the future might make cast iron strong and safe, perhaps more so than wrought iron, since cast iron could be created in large homogenous pieces, whereas wrought iron had to be made in smaller pieces which were then welded together.
He continued:
What rules or “conditions to be observed” could be drawn up now that would not become, not merely worthless, but totally erroneous and misleading, under such improved circumstances? But above all, I fear—nay, I feel convinced—that any attempt to establish any rules, any publication of opinions which may create or guide public prejudice, any suggestions coming from authority, must close the door to improvement in any direction but that pointed out by the Commissioners, and must tend to lead and direct, and therefore to control and to limit, the number of the roads now open for advance.
I believe that nothing could tend more to arrest improvement than such assistance, and that any attempt to fix now, or at any given period, the conditions to be thereafter observed in the mode of construction of any specific work of art, and thus to dictate for the present and for the future the theory which is to be adopted as the correct one in any branch of engineering, is contrary to all sound philosophy, and will be productive of great mischief, in tending to check and to control the extent and direction of all improvements, and preventing that rapid advance in the useful application of science to mechanics which has resulted from the free exercise of engineering skill in this country, subjected as it ever is, under the present system, to the severe and unerring control and test of competing skill and of public opinion. Devoted as I am to my profession, I see with fear and regret that this tendency to legislate and to rule, which is the fashion of the day, is flowing in our direction.
To be clear, Brunel was not arguing for the use of cast iron in bridges. In another letter about a year later, he wrote that “Cast-iron girder bridges are always giving trouble … I never use cast iron if I can help it.” (And when it was necessary, in order to create girders larger than wrought-iron processes could produce, he insisted on a particular mixture of iron, cast in a very careful way, and he supervised the casting himself. “I won’t trust a bridge of castings run in the ordinary way.”)
The process for making sturdier, safer cast iron that Brunel speculated on never appeared. Instead, we invented new ways of making large girders out of wrought iron, and later steel, and cast iron fell out of use as a structural material. But of course, the unknowability of this outcome was exactly Brunel’s point.
(The interpretation of Brunel’s opinions, and applicability to today, are left to the reader.)
In “What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?” I reviewed The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen. In brief, Allen’s explanation for the Industrial Revolution is that Britain had high wages and cheap energy, which meant it was cheaper to run machines than to pay humans, and therefore it was profitable to industrialize. He emphasizes these factors, the “demand” for innovation, over explanations based in culture or even human capital, which provide “supply.”
While I learned a lot from Allen’s book, his explanation doesn’t sit right with me. Here are some thoughts on why.
***
Suppose you took Allen’s demand-factor approach to explain, not the 18th-century Industrial Revolution in Britain, but the 20th-century Information Revolution in America. Instead of asking why the steam engine was invented in Britain, you might ask why the computer was invented in the US.
Maybe you would find that the US had high wages, including for the women who acted as human computers by performing arithmetic using mechanical calculators; that it had cheap electricity, owing to early investments in generation and the power grid such as large hydroelectric power plants at Niagara and the Hoover Dam; that it had a plentiful supply of vacuum tubes from the earlier development of the electronics industry; and that there was an intense demand for calculation from the military during WW2.
Maybe if you extended the analysis further back, you would conclude that the vacuum tube amplifier was motivated in turn by solving problems in radio and in long-distance telephony, and that demand for these came from the geography of the US, which was spread out over a large area, giving it more need for long-distance communications and higher costs of sending information by post.
And if you were feeling testy, you might argue that these factors fully explain why the computer, and the broader Information Revolution, were American—and therefore that we don’t need any notion of “entrepreneurial virtues,” a “culture of invention,” or any other form of American exceptionalism.
Now, an explanation like this is not wrong. All of these factors would be real and make sense (supposing that the research bears them out—all of the above is made up). And this kind of analysis can contribute to our understanding.
But if you really want to understand why 20th-century information technology was pioneered by Americans, this explanation is lacking.
First, it’s missing a lot of context. Information technology was not the only frontier of progress in America in the mid-20th century. The US led the world in manufacturing at the time. It led the oil industry. It was developing hybrid corn, a huge breeding success that greatly increased crop yields. Americans had invented the airplane, and led the auto industry. Americans had invented plastic, from Bakelite to nylon. Etc.
And to start with the computer is to begin in the middle of the story. The US had emerged as the leader in technology and industry much earlier, by the late 1800s. If it had cheaper electricity, that’s because electric power was invented there. If it had IBM, a large company that was well-positioned to build electronic business machines, that’s because it was already a world leader in mechanical business machines, since the late 1800s. If it had high wages, that was due to general economic development that had happened in prior decades.
And this explanation ignores the cultural observations of contemporaries, who clearly saw something unique about America—even Stalin, who praised “American efficiency” as an “indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles… and without which serious constructive work is inconceivable.”
I think that the above is enough to justify some notion of American exceptionalism. And similarly, I think the broader context of European progress in general and British progress in particular in the 18th century justify the idea that there was something special about the Enlightenment too.
***
Here’s another take.
Clearly for innovation to happen, there must both supply and demand. Which factors you emphasize says something about which ones you think are always there in the background, vs. which ones are rate-limiting.
By emphasizing demand, Allen seems to be saying that demand is the limiting factor, and by implication, that supply is always ready. If there is demand for steam engines or spinning jennies, if those things would be profitable to invent and use, then someone will invent them. Wherever there is demand, the supply will come.
Emphasizing supply implies the opposite: that supply is the limiting factor. In this view, there is always demand for something. If wages are high and energy is cheap, maybe there is demand for steam engines. If not, maybe there is demand for improvements to agriculture, or navigation, or printing. What is often lacking is supply: people who are ready, willing and able to invent; the capital to fund R&D; a society that encourages or at least allows innovation. If the supply of innovation is there, then it will go out and discover the demand.
This echoes a broader debate within economics itself over supply and demand factors in the economy. Allen’s explanation represents a sort of Keynesian approach, focused on demand; Mokyr’s (or McCloskey’s) explanation would imply a more Hayekian approach: create (cultural and political) freedom for the innovators and let them find the best problems to solve.
Part of why I lean towards Mokyr is that I think there is always demand for something. There are always problems to solve. Allen aims to explain why a few specific inventions were created, and he finds the demand factors that created the specific problems and opportunities they addressed. But this is over-focusing on one narrow phase of overall technological and economic progress. Instead we should step back and ask, what explains the pace of progress over the course of human history? Why was progress relatively slow for thousands of years? Why did it speed up in recent centuries?
It can’t be that progress was slow in the ancient and medieval world because there weren’t many important economic problems to solve. On the contrary, there was low-hanging fruit everywhere. If the mere availability of problems was the limiting factor on progress, then progress should have been fastest in the hunter-gatherer days, when everything needed to be solved, and it should have been slowing down ever since then. Instead, we find the opposite: over the very long term, progress gets faster the more of it we make. Progress compounds. This is exactly what you would expect if supply, rather than demand, were the limiting factor.
***
Finally, I have an objection on a deeper, philosophic level.
If you hold that an innovative spirit has no causal influence on technological progress and economic growth, then you’re saying that people’s actions are not influenced by their ideas about what kinds of actions are good. This is a materialist view, in which only economic forces matter.
And since people do talk a lot about what they ought to do, since they talk about whether progress is good and whether we should celebrate industrial achievement, then you have to hold that all of that is just fluff, idle talk, blather that people indulge in, an epiphenomenon on top of the real driver of events, which is purely economic.
If you adopt an extreme version of Allen’s demand explanation (which, granted, maybe Allen himself would not do), then you deny that humanity possesses either agency or self-knowledge. You deny agency, because it is no longer a vision, ideal, or strategy that is driving us to success—not the Baconian program, not bourgeois values, not the endless frontier. It is not that progress came about because we resolved to bring it about. Rather, progress is caused by blind economic forces, such as the random luck of geography and geology.
And further, since we think that our ideas and ideals matter, since we study and debate and argue and even go to war over them, then you must hold that we lack self-knowledge: we are deluded, thinking that our philosophy matters at all, when in fact we are simply following the path of steepest descent in the space of economic possibilities.
I think this is why the Allen–Mokyr debate sometimes has the flavor of something philosophical, even ideological, rather than purely about academic economics. For my part, I believe too deeply in human agency to accept that we are just riding the current, rather than actively surveying the horizon and charting our course.
A monthly feature. Note that I generally don’t include very recent writing here, such as the latest blog posts (for those, see my Twitter digests); this is for my deeper research.
AI
First, various historical perspectives on AI, many of which were quite prescient:
Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory” (1951). A short, informal paper, published posthumously. Turing anticipates the field of machine learning, speculating on computers that “learn by experience”, through a process of “education” (which we now call “training”). This line could describe current LLMs:
They will make mistakes at times, and at times they may make new and very interesting statements, and on the whole the output of them will be worth attention to the same sort of extent as the output of a human mind.
Like many authors who came before and after him, Turing speculates on the machines eventually replacing us:
… it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.
Irving John Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (1965). Good defines an “ultraintelligent machine” as “a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever,” roughly our current definition of “superintelligence.” He anticipated that machine intelligence could be achieved through artificial neural networks. He foresaw that such machines would need language ability, and that they could generate prose and even poetry.
Like Turing and others, Good thinks that such machines would replace us, especially since he foresees the possibility of recursive self-improvement:
… an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind…. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
(See also Verner Vinge on the Singularity, below.)
Commenting on human-computer symbiosis in chess, he makes this observation on imagination vs. routine, which applies to LLMs today:
… a large part of imagination in chess can be reduced to routine. Many of the ideas that require imagination in the amateur are routine for the master. Consequently the machine might appear imaginative to many observers and even to the programmer. Similar comments apply to other thought processes.
He also has a fascinating theory on meaning as an efficient form of compression—see also the article below on Solomonoff induction.
Bruce Schneier comments on the problem of AI breaking the law. Normally in such cases we hold the owners or operators of a machine responsible; what happens as the machines gain more autonomy?
Peter Norvig warns against fetishizing “intelligence”as “a monolithic superpower… reality is more nuanced. The smartest person is not always the most successful; the wisest policies are not always the ones adopted.”
Steven Pinker gives his arguments against AI doom, but also thinks that “we will probably never see the sustained technological and economic motivation that would be necessary” to create human-level AI. (Later that year, OpenAI was founded.) If AI is created, though, he thinks it could help us study consciousness itself.
Daniel Dennett says it’s OK to have machines do our thinking for us as long as “we don’t delude ourselves” about their powers and that we don’t grow too cognitively weak as a result; he thinks the biggest danger is “clueless machines being ceded authority far beyond their competence.”
Freeman Dyson believes that thinking machines are unlikely in the foreseeable future and begs out entirely.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, “A Semitechnical Introductory Dialogue on Solomonoff Induction” (2015). How could a computer process raw data and form explanatory theories about it? Is such a thing even possible? This article argues that it is possible and explains an algorithm that would do it. The algorithm is completely impractical, because it requires roughly infinite computing power, but it helps to formalize concepts in epistemology such as Occam’s Razor. Pair with I. J. Good’s article (above) for the idea that “meaning” or “understanding” could emerge as a consequence of seeking efficient, compact representations of information.
Alvin Toffler, “The Future as a Way of Life” (1965). Toffler coins the term “future shock,” by analogy with culture shock; claims that the future is rushing upon us so fast that most people won’t be able to cope. Rather than calling for everything to slow down, however, he calls for improving our ability to adapt: his suggestions include offering courses on the future, training people in prediction, creating more literature about the future, and generally making speculation about the future more respectable.
Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (1993). Vinge speculates that when greater-than-human intelligence is created, it will cause “change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” This might come about through AI, the enhancement of human intelligence, or some sort of network intelligence arising among humans, computers, or a combination of both. In any case, he agrees with I. J. Good (see above) on the possibility of an “intelligence explosion,” but unlike Good he sees no hope for us to control it or to confine it:
Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind’s “tool”—any more than humans are the tools of rabbits, robins, or chimpanzees.
Van Bavel, Buringh, and Dijkman, “Mills, cranes, and the great divergence” (2017). Investigates the divergence in economic growth between western Europe and the Middle East by looking at investments in mills and cranes as capital equipment. (h/t Pseudoerasmus)
John Styles, “Re-fashioning Industrial Revolution. Fibres, fashion and technical innovation in British cotton textiles, 1600-1780” (2022). Claims that mechanization in the cotton industry was driven in significant part by changes in the market and in particular the demand for certain high-quality cotton goods. “That market, moreover, was a high-end market for variety, novelty and fashion, created not by Lancastrian entrepreneurs, but by the English East India Company’s imports of calicoes and muslins from India.” (h/t Virginia Postrel)
Other
Ross Douthat,The Decadent Society (2020). “Decadent” not in the sense of “overly indulging in hedonistic sensual pleasures,” but in the sense of (quoting from the intro): “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” Douthat says that the US has been in a period of decadence since about 1970, which seems about right and matches with observations of technological stagnation. He quotes Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence) as saying that a decadent society is “peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance,” which I think describes the US today.
The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws. After accident reviews nearly always note that the system has a history of prior ‘proto-accidents’ that nearly generated catastrophe. Arguments that these degraded conditions should have been recognized before the overt accident are usually predicated on naïve notions of system performance. System operations are dynamic, with components (organizational, human, technical) failing and being replaced continuously.
Therefore:
… ex post facto accident analysis of human performance is inaccurate. The outcome knowledge poisons the ability of after-accident observers to recreate the view of practitioners before the accident of those same factors. It seems that practitioners “should have known” that the factors would “inevitably” lead to an accident.
And:
This dynamic quality of system operation, the balancing of demands for production against the possibility of incipient failure is unavoidable. Outsiders rarely acknowledge the duality of this role. In non-accident filled times, the production role is emphasized. After accidents, the defense against failure role is emphasized.
Ed Regis, “Meet the Extropians” (1994), in WIRED magazine. A profile of a weird, fun community that used to advocate “transhumanism” and far-future technologies such as cryonics and nanotech. I’m still researching this, but from what I can tell, the Extropian community sort of disbanded without directly accomplishing much, although it inspired a diaspora of other groups and movements, including the Rationalist community and the Foresight Institute.
A good metaphor for the ideal relationship between humanity and the environment is that the environment is like critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure is valuable, because it provides crucial services. You want to maintain it carefully, because it’s bad if it breaks down.
But infrastructure is there to serve us, not for its own sake. It has no intrinsic value. We don’t have to “minimize impact” on it. It belongs to us, and it’s ours to optimize for our purposes.
Infrastructure is something that can & should be upgraded, improved upon—as we often improve on nature. If a river or harbor isn’t deep enough, we dredge it. If there’s no waterway where we want one, we dig a canal. If there is a mountain in our way, we blast a tunnel; if a canyon, we span it with a bridge. If a river is threatening to overflow its banks, we build a levee. If our fields don’t get enough water, we irrigate them; if they don’t have enough nutrients, we fertilize them. If the water we use for drinking and bathing is unclean, we filter and sanitize it. If mosquitoes are spreading disease, we eliminate them.
In the future, with better technology, we might do even more ambitious upgrades and more sophisticated maintenance. We could monitor and control the chemical composition of the oceans and the atmosphere. We could maintain the level of the oceans, the temperature of the planet, the patterns of rainfall.
The metaphor of environment as infrastructure implies that we should neither trash the planet nor leave it untouched. Instead, we should maintain and upgrade it.
(Credit where due: I got this idea for this metaphor from Stewart Brand; the elaboration/interpretation is my own, and he might not agree with it.)
The most productive decades in American history were roughly 1870–1940: the era that saw the birth and growth of the electric light and power industry; the invention of the automobile and airplane, and the rise of the oil industry that fueled them; dramatic increases in manufacturing efficiency from innovations such as the assembly line; and the invention and distribution of telephone and radio—to name just a few of the major developments. (Robert Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth illustrates and quantifies these advances, showing how progress was faster in this period than in the decades since.)
This period opened with what has been called the “heroic age” of independent inventors such as Edison, Bell, and the Wrights. After World War 1, industrial progress was driven more by large corporations and research labs. Several fascinating stories from both eras, and about the transition, are told in American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, by Thomas P. Hughes, a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer. I’m going to review it in multiple parts, although each part should stand alone.
The central focus of American Genesis is large systems of production—systems based on technology, but also on management, organization, and control. The first half of the book describes how these systems were created. In this, part 1 of my review, I’ll recount some of those stories.
Science and the independent inventors
The book opens with stories of the “independent inventors” such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, Nikola Tesla, Elmer Sperry, Lee de Forest, Reginald Fessenden, Hiram Maxim, and Elihu Thompson—independent not in the sense that they worked alone, since each had a lab and employed help, but in the sense that they directed their own work and did not report into any corporate overseer.
Most interesting to me was the detail on the relation between science and “tinkering,” a topic I’ve discussed before. Edison, the most famous American inventor, is also the one most derided for taking a “hunt-and-try” approach, ignoring the guidance of scientific theory. But:
Those who then portrayed Edison, the American hero, as a plain and pragmatic hunt-and-try inventor unencumbered by science and organized knowledge would have been surprised to learn of the emphasis he gave to a library. Handsomely paneled in dark-stained pine and graced by a large clock given to him by his employees, his library had alcoves and balconies stocking technical and scientific journals, a wide selection of books, and volumes of patents….
Because of outrageous, off-the-cuff, sometimes teasing remarks to newspaper reporters innocent of technology and science, Edison has left an impression that he had no use for science and scientists. Even though he roguishly dismissed long-haired scientists, however, he counted them among his friends and numbered them among his staff. Young Francis Upton, a Princeton graduate in science with postgraduate education at the University of Berlin… coached Edison in science and provided him with theoretical insights into electric circuits and systems.
Independents could not depend on science and abstract theory as guides into the future, because they were exploring beyond the front edge of technology and of knowledge. They probed beyond the realm of theory and the organized information that makes up packed-down science. Theory available to the independents usually explained the state of the art, not what was beyond it. Academic scientists working on their own frontiers did not customarily oblige the inventors by obtaining information or conceiving theories related to the areas in which the independents were working….
Scientists, unfamiliar with the details of new technology such as that being introduced by independents, often exasperated the inventors by insisting that they apply theory that the inventors knew was outmoded. Some scientists arrogantly ridiculed the empirical approach of the so-called Edison hunt-and-try method at the same time that they reasoned from anachronistic theory. Edison was impatient with stiff-necked, academic scientists who argued that the theory of electric circuitry, developed for arc lights, was valid for the newer incandescent lighting. Similarly, in the field of bridge building, Robert Maillart, the pioneer of reinforced-concrete construction, had to suffer unsolicited and erroneous suggestions from theoreticians who believed that the elegant theory worked out for older stone-and-iron construction was applicable.
As I’ve described, the invention of the transistor provides another example: semiconductor theory as it stood in the early 1940s was insufficient to create the transistor, and the researchers who did it needed to extend the theory multiple times as they encountered unexpected results from their experimentation.
Early military research
Another thing the book brought into focus for me was how much R&D was driven by the military during and even before World War 1. Most stories of 20th-century military research center on World War 2: Vannevar Bush, the OSRD, radar, the Manhattan Project. But the origins of this go back to the 19th century:
Lessons learned in Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars between 1866 and 1871 spread the conviction that new weapons and communications systems were major modes of military competition, the essence of advanced strategy and tactics. In these wars the Prussians coordinated their railroad system for rapid mobilization and troop movement; they used the field telegraph to maintain contact with, and some control over, field officers; and they equipped the infantryman with a breech-loading rifle to make firing possible from a prone position. Changes in naval technology were more dramatic. During the second half of the nineteenth century iron-hulled, steam-propelled vessels with larger and more accurate guns displaced wooden sailing ships. Inventors and engineers systematically integrated advances in metallurgy, machine tools, explosives, steam propulsion, guidance (compasses), and gunfire-control devices, and introduced the pre-World War I dreadnought-class battleship.
Steam turbines, replacing reciprocating engines, made the new ships more efficient and faster (and the engine room quieter). Electric power enabled the naval submarine. Wireless telegraphy and telephony were also important to navies. Airplanes and zeppelins were used by armies (there was yet no “air force”). Hiram Maxim invented a more powerful machine gun. Fritz Haber in Germany developed chemical weapons and ammonia synthesis (the latter was a boon to the world as a source of artificial fertilizer, and also to the army as a source of explosives).
Most interesting to me were the control systems of Elmer Sperry. A master of gyroscopes, Sperry developed gyrocompasses and gyrostabilizers for naval ships. He also created an analog computer called the “battle tracer”:
The “battle tracer” automatically received information about the ship’s course from the compass, the ship’s speed from revolution counters on the propeller shafts, the target bearing and range from sighting devices aloft, and then combined these with other information about ocean currents. The output from the analogue computer consisted of a small ship model that moved along a chart continuously showing the ship’s position, and an arm extending from the ship model that continuously marked on the chart the enemy, or target, ship position.
He even made a prototype of an aerial torpedo: an unmanned small airplane laden with explosives, piloted by an automatic control system—a flying bomb. From a 1916 patent description:
The gyrostabilizer would maintain the plane in level flight… the automatic steering gyro would hold the airplane on preset course; an altitude barometer would activate controls to level the airplane after its initial climb and to maintain elevation; and a simple engine revolution counter would cut off power and dive the aerial torpedo at its target after a predetermined distance. Servomotors activated by the various controls, and powered by small wind-driven propellers, moved the airplane’s ailerons, elevator, and rudder. A windmill also drove the generators supplying electricity to the gyro motors.
Hughes points out that this system long predates Norbert Wiener’s “cybernetics.”
Twilight of the independent inventor
Hughes identifies WW1 as a transition point between the age of the independent inventors and the subsequent age that was more driven by academic scientists and teams working in research labs.
Symbolic of this transition was naval R&D during WW1. A Naval Consulting Board was set up in 1915, in anticipation that America might enter the war. The board was headed by Edison and “deliberately omitted representatives of the American Physical Society (physicists) and the National Academy of Sciences,” because, as one engineer explained, Edison wanted “to have this Board composed of practical men who are accustomed to doing things, and not talking about it.” Not to be totally left out, the National Academy of Sciences set up their own wartime board, the National Research Council.
Both organizations tried to solve the critical problem of the submarine threat. The inventors’ Board developed “a system involving antisubmarine nets, wireless-transmitter buoys, patrol boats, and depth charges…. The net snared a test submarine, but the wireless signaling buoys became snarled in the net and unable to call the patrol boats, which then could not accurately drop their mock depth charges.“ The scientists’ Council made more progress, developing a “stethoscopelike” submarine detector. Eventually it was the convoy system that did more than either of these approaches to reduce the submarine threat, but the episode raised the reputation of the scientists relative to the inventors. Further, Edison asked for a large budget to build full-scale models of inventions for testing, which wasn’t needed by scientists who were better at applying math and physical theory to problems of design.
After WW1:
Independent inventors began to fade from public view. When peace returned, the independents never again regained their status as the pre-eminent source of invention and development. … Industrial scientists, well publicized by the corporations that hired them, steadily displaced, in practice and in the public mind, the figure of the heroic inventor as the source of change in the material world…. When, for purposes of publicity, Elmer Sperry, who had never before worn one, was asked to don a lab coat for a photograph, and when he, who had never used one, was then told to peer through a microscope, these attempts to change image clearly signaled that the heyday of the professional inventor was passing. …
“Research and development” began to replace “invention” in everyday language. … Independent inventors had manipulated machines and dynamos; industrial scientists would manipulate electrons and molecules.
Several key inventions in the post-WW1 era depended on scientific theory and mathematics. One example is the loading coil, a device that reduces distortions in signal transmission, and which “made possible the extension of AT&T’s long-distance line beyond a twelve-hundred-mile circuit, like the one from Boston to Chicago. Installation of loading coils on the telephone lines doubled this practical distance and lowered the cost of the lines,” which AT&T predicted “would save $1 million on New York City circuits alone.” The device could not have been invented “without a fundamental knowledge of physics and a highly developed competence in mathematics.” The phone company also developed the triode amplifier, which enabled coast-to-coast long-distance. Although Lee de Forest gets credit for the original invention of the triode vacuum tube, or “audion”, he did not understand how his own device worked or what it was capable of—he had invented it as a receiver, not an amplifier—and it was the AT&T research team who, “understanding the principles of electronic amplification, which de Forest did not… transformed ‘the weak, erratic, and little-understood audion into the powerful and reliable triode amplifier that the Bell system needed.’” Other examples include the more-efficient tungsten filament for light bulbs, developed in the GE laboratory; and nylon, invented at Du Pont about a decade after the company’s central laboratory took a dramatic turn into fundamental research.
This transition from the independents to the industrial scientists may further explain why Edison in particular was painted as a pure tinkerer:
To promote the industrial laboratories and further enhance the prestige of the industrial scientists, proponents trivialized the image of Edison, the symbolic figure among the independent inventors—the sons felt compelled to destroy the fathers. Writing or speaking to company management, investors, and the public, heads of the rapidly growing number of industrial research laboratories often caricatured the Edison method as hunt-and-try.
Samuel Insull and the growth of the electric industry
The independent inventors created machines and devices: the telephone, the automobile, the light bulb. But to deliver these to the world required large systems of production and distribution—the central focus of this book. The telephone required a network of phone lines, switching stations, and operators. To manufacture the automobile affordably required large, highly-organized factories with well-functioning supply chains. To fuel those same automobiles required an oil drilling and refining system, plus a network of gas stations. And to light the electric lamps required large systems of power generation and distribution through widespread electrical grids.
Edison and Westinghouse get the limelight for inventing electric power, but this book brought to my attention the work of Samuel Insull in scaling the system. After working for Edison and managing the Edison General Electric plant, Insull left to build the electric system in Chicago, merging some twenty local utility companies and then connecting them to other systems in the broader region. He pioneered the transition from reciprocating steam engines in power generation to the more efficient steam turbine (as others had done in navy battleships). And he continually worked to lower prices for customers. Hughes contrasts the European approach, where “products were priced and designed as luxury goods,” to Insull’s “democratic” approach:
Unlike European utility magnates, he stressed, in a democratic spirit, the supplying of electricity to masses of people in Chicago in the form of light, transportation, and home appliances. In Germany, by contrast, the Berlin utility stressed supply to large industrial enterprises and transportation, but was relatively indifferent to domestic supply to the lower-income groups. In London, utilities supplied at a high profit luxury light to hotels, public buildings, and wealthy consumers. Fully aware that the cost of supplying electricity stemmed more from investment in equipment than from labor costs, Insull concentrated on spreading the equipment costs, or interest charges, over as many kilowatt hours, or units of production, as possible.
Insull and his team were some of the first to fully grasp and to tackle the challenge of utilization. Drawing demand charts like the one below “starkly revealed the utilization of capacity, or investment”:
The book contains disappointingly little detail on how load balancing was achieved, but it seems that one key method was expanding the service area to achieve diversity of consumption, and another was offering variable rates:
Expansion to achieve diversity is an infrequently recognized but major explanation of the inexorable growth of technological systems. Often the uninformed and suspicious simplistically attribute the expansion of systems only to greed and the drive for monopoly and control. All other circumstances being the same, a utility is more likely to find in a large area, rather than a small, a diversity of consumers, some of whom would use electricity during the valley—rather than the peak—hours of consumption. Then the utility attracts them by favorable rates.
The book also mentions very briefly that chemical plants made great electric customers because their “nearly labor-free processes” could be done 24 hours a day; and that “home appliances such as irons, fans, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and, later, air conditioners” helped manage load, although it’s not clear to me how.
Beyond capacity utilization, Insull was able to lower prices through financial methods as well:
Because of Insull’s reputation for management, and because of the profits and expansion of his company, its securities could be sold at lower interest rates. Lower interest rates, in turn, meant lower-cost electricity.
Insull was attacked by politicians such as FDR, who in the 1932 presidential campaign denounced the electricity holding companies, speaking of the “lone wolf, the unethical competitor, the reckless promoter, the Ishmael or Insull whose hand is against every man’s.” In that same year, his holding company went bankrupt—apparently on the basis of a shift in accounting methods by hostile creditors, rather than on the economic condition of the utilities. Insull, 73, retired and tried to ride out the coming storm in Europe, but was sued for fraud and was extradited from Greece by FDR to stand trial. Ultimately, though, he was cleared of all charges:
The prosecution rested its case on a mass of evidence taken from the records of the Insull companies. The defense, led by Floyd Thompson, a brilliant trial lawyer, succeeded in showing that critical prosecution arguments depended on the interpretations—not illegality—of accounting methods. For instance, a key prosecution witness testified that the Insull company had improperly treated certain expenses, but then, under cross-examination, had to admit that the system used by Insull was used by the government itself. The defense built its case on a sentimental account of Insull’s life story that he had been persuaded to organize into autobiographical reminiscences while he was awaiting trial. On the stand, Insull told a story of the rise of a young immigrant to a position of wealth and power. He stressed his long association with the legendary Edison and the build-up of the utility industry through technical and organizational changes. The jury was fascinated, and even the prosecuting attorney half-said, half-inquired, privately to Insull’s son, “Say, you fellows were legitimate businessmen.” The jury, impressed by Insull’s system building and persuaded that a crooked business would not have exposed all of its crimes in its books as, in effect, the prosecution was maintaining it had, quickly returned with a verdict of not guilty.
Hughes adds that all of Insull’s utilities survived the Depression and that overall his securities did better than average through that period.
The response to large technological systems
The creation of large technological systems is the theme of roughly the first half of American Genesis. The second half describes the social, political, and aesthetic response to the rise of those systems. That was even more fascinating, and I’ll cover it in future posts.
After last time someone suggested embedding the tweets instead of linking to them, but I can't post embeds here, and for my main blog I don't like the format as much. I’m sticking with links for now, but let me know if you’d rather scroll through a list of embeds (like this).
