Let’s innovate. Innovation is wonderful; it produces wealth and creates jobs and pushes the economy to new heights.
Innovation: A Janus Proposition
Not so fast. Innovation brings medical advances, saves lives, generates jobs, and more. But the process of innovation is not totally positive. That is why I call it a Janus proposition; Janus was the Greek two-headed god who could look both ways. Innovation is also two-headed; it is neutral; how we use it adds or takes away value. Innovations can be created in order to cause pain; the unintended consequences of innovations can cause huge problems. I cannot tell the whole history of innovation, but I can tell some snippets from history.
A school child in the United States learns about the history of innovation by 8th grade. Gutenberg, in a drunken stupor, put together the elements of the wine press and paper, and invented the first printing press. Besides being a painter, Leonardo da Vinci invented many gadgets including a helicopter, other instruments of war, and was generally way ahead of his time. Fulton designed a steam ship, Elias Howe a sewing machine, and Jonas Salk penicillin. Henry Ford innovated automobile production with the assembly line. The Wright brothers, smart bicycle mechanics, invented an airplane at Kitty Hawk in 1908. (Of course, because of lack of space, books fail to mention that the Wright brothers were unsuccessful getting off the ground 47 times before they succeeded.) The Curies invented radiation and both died of cancer. Surely you can expand this list.
The Combine
If only we could cut our wheat and thresh it at the same time. That was the imperative behind the development of the combine, which ranks as one of the most labor-saving inventions in agricultural history. The first successful combine, named after its combined functions of reaping and threshing, appeared in the 1830s, patented by a man named Hiram Moore. It was not until the 20th century, though, that the machine became practical enough to warrant widespread use. Moore’s combine and others like it could harvest 25 acres a day by the mid-19th century, but they required teams of 16 or more horses and multiple farmhands to run. When gasoline-powered tractors arrived after the turn of the century, things became much easier and smaller, and nimbler combines began to proliferate. In the 1940s, self-propelled combines enabled just one man to harvest an entire crop, bringing about the modern age of agriculture.