When you change the world and no one notices(collaborativefund.com)

491 pointsby waqasaday10 anni fa174 comments

When you change the world and no one notices

http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/when-you-change-the-world-and-no-one-notices/

179 comments

The other thing is that these kinds of "misunderstood heroic ignored genius" tales are complete bollocks. In reality there was always an existing idea out there before these "revolutionary innovations".

For example, people had been imagining flying for millennia before the Wright brothers. Leonard da Vinci had drawn hang-gliders and helicopters hundreds of years before and there was the myth of Icarus thousands of years before that. Our distant ancestors even "flew" through the trees. People also have flying dreams, before they've even flown in reality and they probably had flying dreams thousands of years ago too. It's not a new idea so no wonder people weren't that amazed when the Wright brothers flew. There are never any truly new ideas, only remixes and hybrids of existing ones, e.g. Relativity was Einstein's synthesis of ideas from (among others) Poincaré and Lorentz and you can trace their ideas back too.

pipio2110 anni fa

In my opinion, it is wrong to believe in the two extremes: That there were no revolutionary innovators or to ignore previous work in some areas.

When Wright brothers did their test, planes were already flying thanks to the innovation of lots of other people.

But planes could fly without control and crashed. A solution was needed and the Wright brothers provided it expending very little money: flexing the wings.

The fact that they could come with the first valid solution provides a lot of value for society, in the same way of solving the nuclear problem by slowing the neutrons with heavy water(a crazy idea from a single guy) gave America an advance over the Germans.

The same could be said about the problems yet to solve: who will make the first viable fusion nuclear reactor?

It has to be noted that while the Wright brothers invented flexing the wings, they did not invented ailerons, but a twisting mechanism that was not practical, but they were awarded a patent anyway on them for several reasons ( American protectionism being one of them).

Those patents make America aviation industry lag behind other nations and forced the Government to act.

koonsolo10 anni fa

Having an idea or theory is one thing, but putting it into practice is something completely different.

It's not hard to imagine going to Mars and live there, or even have a bunch of theories on how this would be possible in practice. Doing it however, takes a lot more than that.

I can't imagine current media completely ignoring this when it would actually take place, which basically did happen with the Wright brothers.

Ideas and theories only prove their worth when something practical is done with them.

hsdkfsdkfjh10 anni fa

Not so. Having an idea isn't easy. Relativity was "just" an idea long before there was any practical application of it, and it was "just an idea" that took a lot of work. It's simply not true that ideas are easy but practical application is hard. Actually the reverse can be true, sometimes an idea can take a lifetime to develop while the practical applications are trivial by comparison. Nor is it true that "Ideas and theories only prove their worth when something practical is done with them". This one really sends me actually! There's currently no application for theories of black holes, but those theories are worthwhile in their own right, for if there's anything that makes humans worthwhile, it's their ability to conceive of such ideas as black holes. Physics and mathematics, art and music are valuable in themselves regardless of practical application because they are edifying, beautiful, they are something we can be proud of amidst all our failings as a species. So if we wipe ourselves out, by nuclear weapons or some such stupidity, or if we are wiped-out by an asteroid, even if we never reach Mars, future intelligences may find our writings and movies and learn that we dreamed of going to Mars.

koonsolo10 anni fa

First of all sorry you got downvoted, because this is actually a pretty good response.

You are indeed correct that not all ideas (or theories) are easy. I think in the case of flight the practicality dominates the theories because they have to be combined just right to actually work.

Whereas your example of relativity, it's indeed the theory that is the hardest part (and Einstein got the proper recognition for that, not the one who practically applied it).

Going to make a weird comparison here, but it's basically like a chicken coming out of an egg. We only see an egg at one moment, and the next there is a chicken coming out. We don't really notice there has been a lot of stuff going on within the egg a long time before it came out. Seems the same as with innovations or discoveries. Suddenly it seems to be there.

But I stand corrected that it's not always the practical application that dominates, sometimes it's indeed the theory that is the biggest achievement.

Mz10 anni fa

You are kind of contradicting yourself: Nothing is really new! Except the theory of relativity, proving ideas are hard!

hsdkfsdkfjh10 anni fa

I didn't say developing an existing idea was easy, I just said it wasn't entirely original; that all ideas are the result of breeding between existing ideas is no measure of how hard are to develop!

NKCSS10 anni fa

Not always true; the iPhone went through all those stages very quick and created a new reality. The iPad did the same, in a smaller way. While one may argue these are mere improvements, they were major enough to change the entire social dimension in only a few short years.

kragen10 anni fa

The article's timeline of flight goes like this:

1903. First flight, ignored.

1904. Nameless hot-air-balloon-flying count dismisses possibility of flying machines.

1905. People see Wrights flying around Dayton.

1906. Passing mention of Wrights in NYT.

1908. Reporters sent to observe Wrights, credence given.

1930s. NYC LAX: 17 hours.

1950. NYC LAX: 6 hours.

This story is a lie. I don't mean that it contains anything actually false (as far as I know, it doesn't) but it is actively and intentionally misleading by its selective omission of facts. Although the rumors were eagerly repeated, people generally didn't believe the Wrights had built a flying machine because the Wrights refused to demonstrate it. Then, when other people started building airplanes, they started suing them. Consequently, the US lost its leadership in aviation to France (and Brazil!) for over a decade, which would have been a longer period of time if France hadn't been devastated by the Great War.

Here are some of the omitted events from the timeline.

1896. People fly in Octave Chanute's biplane hang glider.

1900. Wrights begin glider experiments at Kitty Hawk at Chanute's suggestion.

1901. Wrights lecture in Chicago on their glider experiments, and in particular wing-warping control, at the invitation of Chanute, who lives there.

1902. Wrights continue glider experiments, visited by Chanute.

1903. Wrights apply for wing-warping patent.

1903. Wrights' first four flights, of 12 to 59 seconds. Airplane irreparably damaged immediately post-flight. Several newspapers report the event, inaccurately, from a leak by a telegraph operator. Dayton Daily News disbelieves tall tale, doesn't report.

1904. Wrights issue public statement, build new airplane, invite reporters to first flight attempt on the condition that no photos be taken. Attempt fails. Further dozens of test flights are undertaken in strict secrecy, except for eyewitness accounts published in a beekeeping magazine. Longest flight exceeds five minutes. Airplane destroyed.

1905. Wrights continue tests witnessed by a small circle of friends. Longest flight is 38 minutes. Scientific American doubts the alleged experiments happened. Dayton Daily News reports "The Flight of a Flying Machine." Wrights end experiments, refuse to fly any more without some buyer signing a contract to buy an airplane. Governments of US, Britain, France, and Germany (!) refuse to sign contracts without a demonstration.

1905. Aéro-Club de France and other organizations federate in the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

1906. Paris edition of New York Herald asks of Wrights, "FLYERS OR LIARS?"

1906. Santos-Dumont makes a powered heavier-than-air flight in Bagatelle Field in Paris, certified by Aéro-Club de France and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

1906. Wrights make 0 flights.

1906. Wrights receive patent on wing-warping control techniques they derived from Chanute's work.

1907. Wrights make 0 flights.

1908. The Clement-Bayard company in Paris starts a production run of airplanes of Santos-Dumont's design; 100 planned, 50 built, 15 sold.

1908. Wrights finally sign a contract. Make first public demonstration in Le Mans, France. Make first passenger flight. Airplane destroyed in crash. Wilbur emerges from wreckage with cut on nose.

1908. Glenn Curtiss starts making airplanes with ailerons to avoid the Wrights' wing-warping patent.

1909. Curtiss sells an aileron plane; Wrights begin suing him and basically everything that moves, including foreign aviators who visit the US.

1909. Clement-Bayard planes are sold with a choice of Clement or Wright engines.

1909. Wrights form the Wright Company.

1910. German court rules Wrights' patent invalid due to their disclosure of wing-warping in 1901.

1910. Wrights stop working on airplane design and switch to working full-time on suing other airplane designers.

1910. Octave Chanute publicly deplores Wrights' secrecy and litigiousness. Dies.

1912. Wilbur Wright dies of typhoid.

1913. Wrights win lawsuit against Curtiss.

1915. Orville Wright quits the company.

1917. US enters World War I, has no domestically produced airplanes of acceptable quality due to Wright-initiated patent battles; US forces fly French airplanes. US government forces aircraft companies to enter a cross-licensing cartel.

Kids, don't be like the Wright Brothers. Be like Chanute. Be like Santos-Dumont. Change the world, don't try to own it.

swampthinker10 anni fa

Drones had a very similar adoption curve, and really only got past the "toy" perception when DJI's Phantom came out.

RC Planes and helicopter POV footage was great to enjoy on YouTube, but the learning curve was so immense that it kept the mainstream market away.

david92710 anni fa

Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.

For true innovation to happen, what we need are brave investors.

Noseshine10 anni fa

What makes you so sure? See my previous comment here (with a link to the source) above in reply to "Silicon Valley" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12435177).

Basically, it all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt. SV and all its firms stand on foundations laid by (very) big and (very) generous government.

Investors ant at least statistical certainty, meaning while they of course account for most of their venture companies to fail they want to at least be certain for them all as a group. They won't finance a "business" that is just experimental with no advance idea what the whole thing is even about. Because such basic research isn't a business.

I once worked for a startup that was eventually sold for a few hundred million (no I did not benefit from that). We got funded (by the tens of millions) - by Silicon Valley venture capital - because we were #2 in a market where the #1 just had an incredible IPO. We did exactly the same as the #1, and #1 also didn't actually do anything innovative, just a different version of what had already been in this world for decades, technology not all that superior to existing things, the changes were in the business model mostly. "Predictable" innovation.

Here's an example:

Imagine someone would try to get venture capital for a human-computer interface right into the brain. I'm taking about something out of a sci-fi movie, not based on the extremely basic steps we've thus far taken. Would they get funding? Never. It's tens of billions of investment and it's completely uncertain if it would take 10 or 100 years. This isn't a well-defined research project, this is very broad.

Now imagine a serious threat to the United States - war, and not just one of those little ones abroad. Would the US government fund such a crazy idea? Sure, just like they've done many times. They will throw (non-existing) billions at this and at many other crazy ideas without asking for potential monetary return.

While an investor wants a statistical chance that the overall portfolio has a positive monetary return, the government (at war) wants a statistical chance for a positive result - non-financial, not caring, actually expecting, that costs will by far exceed returns. If the stuff created in such an effort eventually creates businesses that's nice but not even part of the motivation. When they paid for the Manhattan project, the Norden bomb sight, or electronics and computing R&D they didn't stop to think about if that would ever create a financial return.

jabo10 anni fa

Also investors who think "generationally":

> When innovation is measured generationally, results shouldn’t be measured quarterly.

cyberferret10 anni fa

An interesting article, but I would say this is one that is better showcased to, say, a primary school audience rather than the HN crowd perhaps? The writing style and concepts were a little too simplistic and lacked the depth I would expect from the publications I normally see linked on here.

Note: But even for a younger audience, I would do some serious editing of the text (e.g. misuse of "concurred" instead of "conquered" etc.) before publication.

bochengkor10 anni fa

I noticed the simplistic language used too. But I found it refreshing as the author is able to cite more external material while keeping the reader's (or at least, my) attention to the core message. No distracting jargon or flowery language were employed. But it could also be how my simple mind functions too..

apsec11210 anni fa

"Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even 20 miles per hour. (...)"

This quote is a well-known hoax: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp

RealityVoid10 anni fa

Heh, that quite stood out to me, partly, not because it is so wrong but because it is so right. The part about "The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action" seems like such contemporary issues I would have been amazed if someone would have foretold their importance back then.

peter42210 anni fa

The vast majority of products that people don't understand and believe to be useless are in fact useless.

The first time I used Google I knew it was amazing and never used altavista again. When Facebook came to my campus it spread like wildfire.

These stories are quite interesting but at the same time what are they suggesting? An investor wants you to spend your whole life chasing a dream because they don't care if it fails and get paid if it succeeds. If you love doing something, do it regardless of what people think. But don't let an investor convince you to waste years working on something that nobody wants because that is what all successful entrepreneurs do. In a few cases it works out but the vast majority of the time it doesn't.

AndrewKemendo10 anni fa

I think you are missing the point, as the author states the same thing halfway in:

Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.

It's not that every huge shift is also accompanied by a lengthy doldrums. Uu chose clear outliers-and yes while VC is predicated on outliers this post is actually a counter balance to what VC mostly decide on which is traction. So I'm not so cynical about this post because it's not saying " do what sales" and all the other typical VC tropes which are more in line with what you describe. Most successful entrepreneurs do something incremental so I think your analysis is wrong there as well.

The only problem I see with this post is that more than likely, they don't actually invest on this ethos so it's giving entrepreneurs with vision a false hope.

bambax10 anni fa

> Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.

But that doesn't apply to Google. Although there were many, many search engines when Google first appeared, none worked like it -- in fact, none worked, at all.

Google worked from day 1 and everyone who used it, saw it very clearly.

boomlinde10 anni fa

On a technical level that might be true, but to the average user I think the edge google had over its competitors was that its product was vastly superior. How they built better search results was a matter of implementation, while the end product didn't stray far fom the public idea of a search engine.

vidarh10 anni fa

What was different about Google eventually made it popular, but it also got a lot of people to avoid them over the lack of control of the query. It was not nearly as clear cut initially.

Google was initially much better on simple queries, but not competitive with "expert" users who knew how to use Altavista's query operators properly, or who were familiar with metasearch engines when looking for very specific material.

Google succeeded because they were similar enough that it was easy to try them, but met resistance because they were different enough that for a portion of the user base it was not clear that the advantages they had on simple queries was worth it.

The superiority of their approach first became "universally" clear as the number of pages exploded and tweaking your queries became an exercise in frustration, coupled with the explosion of users not familiar with how to compose a more specific query.

I know a lot of people - myself included - who took a long time to switch to Google from the first time we tried it because other search engines worked better for us at the time.

This too is a common pattern: Early adopters get so caught up in specifics of early products that when an evolution of the concept arrives that has profound impact on usability, it gets met with a shrug or dismissed because it doesn't fit into the usage patterns those early adopters have learnt in order to overcome the limitations of earlier products.

Often something will look like a step back for the expert users making up the bulk of users of its predecessors (because you either become an expert user, or give up), and first gains traction by expanding the market to users for whom the features who look like flaws to the former group is what makes the product usable to them at all.

E.g. I remember early PDA adopters being dismissive of the iPhone on-screen keyboard, because it was "pointless": Grafitti worked so much better on a small screen.... for those of us who had spent a couple of years or more learning how to write fast with it. For everyone else, the iPhone keyboard made it usable in ways Palm devices weren't.

AndrewKemendo10 anni fa

Disagree. Google looked like an incremental improvement - not a sea change in the same way the transistor, airplane etc... did

I certainly switched at the time but I thought it's first results were comparable to dogpile, which was my go-to search at the time.

_nedR10 anni fa

The point is people understood what Google was from the get-go, because they had used similar products to serve their needs before. On the other hand, the invention of the internet was not immediately popular because it was so different that people couldn't relate it to their prior experiences.

brianmcconnell10 anni fa

Oh yes, sort of like the Internet was an obvious instant hit! IIRC the Internet/web/etc slow cooked in a Crockpot for several decades before it became commercially viable. Somebody please correct me if I am missing something.

IANAD10 anni fa

> “Zen-like patience” isn’t a typical trait associated with entrepreneurs.

Or investors.

tyre10 anni fa

Really depends. Investors can drag out meetings for months until they are ready. They'll wait you out if you're not able to exert leverage.

mahyarm10 anni fa

A lot of the adoption curve comes from the economics too. The same thing 10 times cheaper is a revolution itself.

We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot cheaper only in the past ~5 years.

1870 PV cells were a pretty piss poor energy source, the real revolution happened in the last 10 years when they started to become an economic competitor.

bsder10 anni fa

> We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot cheaper only in the past ~5 years.

Unfortunately, SLA-based printers mostly suck and, unlike most software things, can't actually evolve to get better due to material constraints.

However, now that the SLS patents have expired, we're starting to see useful 3D printers at useful price points. Being able to print a robust plastic (nylon) and not having to worry about creating supports for narrow parts are big deals. Of course, SLS is a little less hobbyist friendly because of the powder handling.

PietdeVries10 anni fa

I think the article is complaining too much... True, it takes 30 years for an idea to grow to something useful, but that is not because nobody cares (or think you are nuts) - the idea just hasn't gotten to a final, usable form. Carter can put solar cells on the Whitehouse, but to no use. The cells will, compared to today's solar cells, hardly generate any power and cost way too much. Same for the car, the personal computer, the mobile phone and the plane: there was simply no market and no use for the average Joe to actually buy it...

digi_owl10 anni fa

Pretty much. It seems more like someone complaining that their VC driven, get rich quick, startup scheme petered out before they could cash in. And is looking for external scapegoats rather than asking if the scheme really had a chance in the first place.

bayofpigs10 anni fa

That's right. The main reason for the drop in 3D printer prices is a key patent expiring in 2009. That's when the revolution began for those not already in manufacturing.

paulrouget10 anni fa

It's true that innovation process used to take a long time. See the story of the telegraph for example, which was clearly a breakthrough, but took half a century to be adopted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet).

Nowadays, the process might take a lot lot less time than before though (http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...)

And also - let's remember that it's not because something goes through the first steps of this seven-step path that it will become a breakthrough.

roywiggins10 anni fa

They were sending images by telegraph in the 1860s but it didn't catch on. Admittedly the ye olde faxes had to be specially prepared, it couldn't reproduce a printed image directly. But still, amazing how long it took images to routinely travel electronically.

mirimir10 anni fa

FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph

Houshalter10 anni fa

What I don't understand about the telegraph, is why it never evolved further. Surely a primitive machine could tap out morse code (or something like it), and decode it, much faster than a human operator? And surely there was demand for this, given the very high costs of sending telegraphs. So high they were inaccessible to the average person.

And then once you have a machine that can do this, well you can start to consider routing, and telegraphing straight into homes, and having telegraph services that store information that can be access remotely...

It took until the telephone to reach the average person's home. And telephones are much more sophisticated than just sending blips over a wire. They had much higher bandwidth. And there was much greater complexity involved in wiring up everyone's house, then a crude automated routing telegraph machine would require, I think.

paulrouget10 anni fa

It did evolve quite a bit. There were machines to automatically encode/decode messages. You could even plug a keyboard to it. Some people (Morse himself) had such a device at home.

Routing was a thing, but there were some limitations of how many communications could happen at the same time on the same wire (Baud was the one who actually worked on that), making scaling difficult.

The important thing to understand is at the end of the century, as bandwidth, infrastructure scaling, reliability were all getting better, the phone happened, as a logical next step. The telegraph never made is as a personal device because the infrastructure and the science of the telegraph reached a point where phones were possible.

Morse for original mechanism, Baud for scaling, Bell to use voice instead of beeps.

minikites10 anni fa

I don't disagree with the thesis of the article for inventions that were destined to be successful but I think it exhibits a strong sense of surviorship bias in predicting anything contemporary to be in the same league. I think transformative inventions like airplanes or index funds can by definition only be defined in retrospect and the odds that anything contemporary can be predicted to turn out the same way are slim. I wonder what a good order of magnitude would be for failed inventions vs successful ones, maybe 10000:1?

simbalion10 anni fa

The 7 step process shows us how the majority of people are "dumb". And by dumb, I mean they lack the creative ability to look forward and imagine how a technology can change the world.

Those of us who are not suffering that disability should not feel guilty for our capabilities, but we should recognize that we are intellectually superior, because we should be ruling the world from every corner, not them. Sadly, many of them are the ones running governments and giant corporations.

All men may be created equal, but through different educational and parental environments, all men do not arrive at adulthood as equals.

Bakary10 anni fa

What do you mean by "should" be ruling the world? There is only what you can enforce.

dsjoerg10 anni fa

Great inventions may be ignored. However, many ignored inventions are just sucky pieces of garbage.

pseudointellect10 anni fa

The article's subtle implication that we are all changing the world but it'll take time for that change to be realized is truly arrogant and delusional.

sidcool10 anni fa

Of all the possible conclusions that could have been drawn, this one is the farthest from truth.

supercoder10 anni fa

Finally validates that my ideas that everyone has been saying are terrible, confusing and useless are infact world changing just as I have thought they are.

NamTaf10 anni fa

I don't like his Vanguard example. He's pointing to exponential growth and saying that for two hand-picked points, it appears as if nothing had changed.

That's sort of how exponential growth works. The growth in the most recent period makes all the other growth before it look trivial. I bet if he could zoom in on the '75 to '95 period he could plot the arrows in the same place and draw the same conclusion.

rwallace10 anni fa

Okay, suppose we grant this at least for the sake of argument.

What's your 'watch this space'? What technologies currently in prototype stage do you think have a bright future?

[deleted]10 anni fa

hacksonx10 anni fa

Invisibility cloaks.

nradov10 anni fa

augmented reality

Artoemius10 anni fa

Artificial intelligence.

dkarapetyan10 anni fa

This is one reason I dislike the silicon valley and sf culture of "innovation". A lot of it is a variation on a well-known theme and the model is predicated on unsustainable hypergrowth followed by surviving until acquisition. Basically chasing fads and trends instead of doing anything truly innovative because the venture model can't follow through something that requires a decade of incubation.

Noseshine10 anni fa

What opened my eyes to where the true innovative roots of SV were planted was a lecture from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (CA): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

TL;DW: It all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...).

digi_owl10 anni fa

Similarly, antibiotics languished until WW2 because it a right pain to mass produce. But with the war came effectively bottomless budgets, and so the needed R&D for mass production was bootstrapped.

botterworkshop10 anni fa

This was a fascinating video! Thanks for sharing! Love Steve Blank

sunstone10 anni fa

'concurred the sky'? Sure, typos happen to everyone but this is definitely of the highest order.

asimjalis10 anni fa

The problem is that while great innovations frequently go unnoticed, going unnoticed does not automatically imply greatness.

Bakary10 anni fa

The article is certainly interesting but it has the same trait as too many pop science books: it relies on selective anecdotal evidence to support their specific point.

truth_sentinell10 anni fa

And what would be a proper "evidence" to rely on?

yiyus10 anni fa

Statistical evidence.

truth_sentinell10 anni fa

I have a problem with this. I don't know if is ignorance by me or what is it. But AFAIK, most "truths" on diferent sciences are based purely on statistic evidence of a sample. Let's suppose that they do an study on why people cheat. They pick 100 random people on an university and do whatever they have to do to test them. Let's say 90 out of 100 cheat because they get bored. Then these scientist draw a conclusion and say "people cheat because they get bored". That's a very broad term.. and again, afaik is the same with other studies.

Is this just one way to do it or is it what every scientist do? How can you possibly englobe everybody to a cause for certain trait based on studying 100,1000, or even 100,000? I can't get my mind atound this.

truth_sentinell10 anni fa

ky73810 anni fa

Nobody noticed cause Santos Dumont did it first :D

moron4hire10 anni fa

>> no mention of the men who concurred (sic) the sky for the first time in human history.

Maybe that was the problem. They weren't the first to conquer the sky. People had been flying in hot air balloons for 120 years by that point. By 1903, getting people up into the sky was old-hat. Sure, they did it in a different way, but what they demonstrated was--strictly speaking--inferior to the technology that was already available. If you wanted to get up into the clouds in 1903, you weren't going to use a Wright Brothers machine that would only let you skip along the ground for a few minutes at a time, you'd use a hot air balloon and stick around for a while. Can people really be blamed for missing the fact that heavier-than-air flight would be able to travel much faster and farther than balloons?

robertkrahn0110 anni fa

New vs. News https://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=15m23s

blazespin10 anni fa

The time between invention and practical application is shortening (Internet plays a huge part) which is why the pace of innovation is accelerating.

cperciva10 anni fa

The Wrights' first flight didn't change the world. Nor did photovoltaic cells in 1876; nor did 3D printing in 1989. And none of these inventions could change the world at the time, because they were little more than proofs of principle: They showed that something was possible, but they were not in fact usable.

Photovoltaic cells aren't becoming popular now because people are suddenly realizing that they exist; they're becoming popular because the technology has reached the point where the cells are cheap enough and efficient enough to be practical. The same goes for 3D printing, and the same went for the Wrights' aircraft: They received plenty of attention once they moved from the realm of curiosities to being useful inventions.

The title of this article should be "when you don't change the world and no one notices".

flashman10 anni fa

It's almost like saying the birth of Hitler changed the world. No it didn't, it was what he did later.

_nedR10 anni fa

I may be wrong but i thought that the main thing holding up the 3d printing revolution, was the long wait for the relevant patents to expire.

cperciva10 anni fa

That may be one factor, but it seems like there's new technology for 3d printing announced every few months; I'm sure there is innovation happening and it's not just people sitting on their hands and waiting for the patents to expire.

_nedR10 anni fa

Again i am not intimately familiar with 3d printing technology, but the timing of at least some of those announcements might be due to expiration of relevant patents, rather than the invention of new technology.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/15/how-expiring-patents-are-u...

nhebb10 anni fa

> It happened with the index fund – easily the most important financial innovation of the last half-century. John Bogle launched the first index fund in 1975. No one paid much attention to for next two decades.

That's in part because everyone was googly-eyed over managed funds thanks to Peter Lynch's 29% average annual return for the Magellan Fund from '77 to '90. Index funds didn't beat that dude.

chaostheory10 anni fa

After he retired, Peter Lynch was one of the people who pushed index funds in his books. He may be one reason they're so popular today.

ilaksh10 anni fa

A more general related concept is the difference between merit and popularity. Some people actually forget that they are not the same thing.

conqrr10 anni fa

A quote by Gandhi comes to mind when reading those seven steps. "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

mwfunk10 anni fa

Unfortunately people always haul this quote out as proof that because they're being ignored and ridiculed, they must be onto something and about to "win".

It's supposed to be an inspirational quote to keep you motivated when it feels like the whole world is against you, but whenever I see it used (on online forums at least) it's always by someone who seems to think that it not only has predictive power, but it somehow illustrates the inevitability of the total dominance of desktop Linux (or whatever they're insisting is inevitable).

I've seen that quote so preposterously misused over the last 20 years, over and over and over again as a form of argumentation, that I fear it's lost all meaning at this point. :(

hueving10 anni fa

Or you lose. But the people who experienced that outcome obviously weren't worth quoting.

jfoutz10 anni fa

The three gates are implicit in success. Perhaps you can pass gate 2, perhaps not. The insight is recognizing and passing the gates.

Fricken10 anni fa

The irony is that, while the Wright Brothers are the only household names from the pioneering days of flight, essential contributions were made long before Kitty Hawk, and many came after them to make their planes useful.

The Work of the Wright brothers was just one link in a causal chain with beginnings preceding them by over 250 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Primitiv...

rb80810 anni fa

Richard Pearse was the first person to fly a plane, was before the Wright Brothers.

Which is a good related issue to the original point. Publicity, branding and PR is more important than being a good inventor.

JoeAltmaier10 anni fa

Which is why the Wright Brothers are credited with 'controlled flight' which Pearse never achieved.

sytelus10 anni fa

ummm... no. Ofcourse, no innovation gets built on its own in modern age, you are at very least taking advantage of the fact that someone else invented wheel, fire and steel :). However Wrights had very novel contribution. If you read through history, you will see that 1900s were absolute breeding ground for new flying machines and theories. People were trying out crazy stuff like flipping bird wings. It was Wrights who figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft. They actually did this scientifically by their own wind tunnel experiments (a very first). I would say this was very original and not thought out before. In fact, if they had told this idea to someone else without demonstration they would have been laughed off. Sure, rest of innovations in aviation didn't belonged to Wrights.

chriscool10 anni fa

In https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation there are the following:

* Sir George Cayley was first called the "father of the aeroplane" in 1846... Among his many achievements, his most important contributions to aeronautics include:

Conducting scientific aerodynamic experiments demonstrating drag and streamlining, movement of the centre of pressure, and the increase in lift from curving the wing surface.

* In 1871 Wenham and Browning made the first wind tunnel.

So no the Wrights didn't figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft and no it was not a first to use wind tunnel experiments.

Noseshine10 anni fa

Just one example of many: Otto Lilienthal - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal

Under "Legacy":

[quote]

Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted.

— Wilbur Wright [21]

In September 1909, Orville Wright was in Germany making demonstration flights at Tempelhof aerodrome. He paid a call to Lilienthal's widow and, on behalf of himself and Wilbur, paid tribute to Lilienthal for his influence on aviation and on their own initial experiments in 1899.

[/quote]

You should also read about airfoil history: http://adg.stanford.edu/aa241/airfoils/airfoilhistory.html

Incidentally - I was not really intending on pointing to Lilienthal again, there are too many others, and the design later changed because it wasn't actually the best:

    > Airfoils used by the Wright Brothers closely resembled Lilienthal's 
    > sections: thin and highly cambered.

pbhjpbhj10 anni fa

>It was Wrights who figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft. (sytelus, above) //

Or maybe not?

>“In his Codex on the Flight of Birds, da Vinci discusses the relationship between the centre of gravity and the centre of lifting pressure on a bird’s wing. He explains the behaviour of birds as they ascend against the wind, foreshadowing the modern concept of a stall,” says Jakab. “He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the relationship between a curved wing section and lift. He grasps the concept of air as a fluid, a foundation of the science of aerodynamics. Leonardo makes insightful observations of gliding flight by birds and the way in which they balance themselves with their wings and tail, just as the Wright brothers would do as they evolved their first aeronautical designs." (http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2016/01/leonardo-da-vinci-l...) //

Lerc10 anni fa

It's also worth keeping in mind the Saganism

    But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not 
    imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They 
    laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed 
    at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the 
    Clown.

We can see what is currently being laughed at. Bitcoin stands out as a good example. History will decide if they were geniuses or clowns. All we have at the moment are opinions.

On the other hand there is a particular form of sneering dismissiveness that I see from a few people that I use as a guide. In the Bitcoin case all the right people were panning it so I grabbed a few for $11 each, that worked out well.

whack10 anni fa

Sorry to hijack your comment, but Columbus was actually a clown. People in his day already knew that the world was spherical, and that if you traveled west long enough, you would get to India. However, their (accurate) calculations showed that the distance you would have to travel in order to get to India from the west, were so long, that such an expedition was bound to fail.

Columbus on the other hand, came up with his own calculations showing that the distance needed to get to India was actually manageable and that he could do it. His calculations were a joke, and off by an order of magnitude. Luckily for him, there happened to be an entirely unanticipated continent in between Europe and Asia, which he was able to land on. If not for that fortuitous stroke of luck, Columbus would have died on his expedition as a nobody, exactly as everyone has predicted.

random_rr10 anni fa

"Columbus was actually a clown"

Come on man. He was much less clown-like than many, many, many of his contemporaries. He did something novel and pushed the world forward. Sorry he didn't do it in the manner you would have preferred.

bbctol10 anni fa

He was a hell of a lot more clown-like than his contemporaries, who had accurate measurements of the size of the Earth and the length of Eurasia. Columbus didn't trust maps not made by Christians, and refused to believe China wasn't as large as Marco Polo had believed. He did something daring, brave, and incredibly stupid, and got luckier than anyone else in history.

jogjayr10 anni fa

Leaving aside the "Columbus got lucky" argument, he was a woefully incompetent administrator of the Spanish colonies he was put in charge of, in addition to being a tyrant. You have to do something special to fall out of favor within 5 years of discovering the New World.

> By [1499], accusations of tyranny and incompetence on the part of Columbus had also reached the Court. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand responded by removing Columbus from power and replacing him with Francisco de Bobadilla, a member of the Order of Calatrava. Bobadilla, who ruled as governor from 1500 until his death in a storm in 1502, had also been tasked by the Court with investigating the accusations of brutality made against Columbus. Arriving in Santo Domingo while Columbus was away in the explorations of his third voyage, Bobadilla was immediately met with complaints about all three Columbus brothers: Christopher, Bartolomé, and Diego. A recently discovered report by Bobadilla alleges that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola. The 48-page report, found in 2006 in the state archive in the Spanish city of Valladolid, contains testimonies from 23 people, including both enemies and supporters of Columbus, about the treatment of colonial subjects by Columbus and his brothers during his seven-year rule...Because of their gross mismanagement of governance, Columbus and his brothers were arrested and imprisoned upon their return to Spain from the third voyage. They lingered in jail for six weeks before busy King Ferdinand ordered their release. Not long after, the king and queen summoned the Columbus brothers to the Alhambra palace in Granada. There the royal couple heard the brothers' pleas; restored their freedom and wealth; and, after much persuasion, agreed to fund Columbus's fourth voyage. But the door was firmly shut on Columbus's role as governor. Henceforth Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres was to be the new governor of the West Indies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Accusatio...

triplesec10 anni fa

Columbus was also not a very nice man, to say the least of it: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/14/8-myths...

grosbisou10 anni fa

He acted on what he believed. That fact doesn't make him a clown to me.

The dude sailed boats in the unknown to give humanity new horizons. Who cares if he was wrong at the start.

yardie10 anni fa

This is a very Eurocentric view of the new world. Asia had already settled in the Americas by South Pacific Islanders and the north by baring land bridge. And the northeast had Viking settlements.

This evidence is new in the same way that Steve jobs invented the point and click GUI

huherto10 anni fa

It is not who got here first. It is who stayed and changed the world.

The (re)discovery of America in 1492 is arguably the most important discovery in history. It changed everything in very deep ways. Europe started looking outwards while Asia stayed looking inwards.

jessaustin10 anni fa

If the voyages of the South Pacific Islanders and the Vikings were admirable, then surely so was that of Columbus? It's not as though they had better maps than he did.

kesselvon10 anni fa

Columbus's success wasn't based on any of his own maps or projections, he basically stumbled upon success out of sheer luck.

This is like winning the lottery and thinking you're a visionary businessman.

wavefunction10 anni fa

I like Sagan but wasn't Bozo's whole raison d'etre to be laughed at? Sounds like a success!

ohashi10 anni fa

So you're saying my Beanie Baby investment has a chance?

digi_owl10 anni fa

Nah, bitcoin has all manner of practical issues. A core element of it is that it closely emulates gold. And gold has been found to be impractical for day to day consumer trades. Even back with the Romans, even while they had gold and silver coins, used copper coins for most of their daily exchanges. Or even just made agreements about paying in produce once the corps were harvested.

kamaal10 anni fa

>>But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Surely people have no clue how hard it is to make people laugh.

Humor and entertainment are very creative activities.

[deleted]10 anni fa

username310 anni fa

Trump, genius?

[deleted]10 anni fa

noobermin10 anni fa

One minor note. The warning about horseless carriages is fake[0].

[0] http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp

SpeakMouthWords10 anni fa

I had a hunch that was the case. I can't imagine the people of the time being concerned about the air being polluted.

snowwrestler10 anni fa

Not in the popular sentiment, but the first known scientific prediction of potential global warming was by Svante Arrhenius at the end of the 19th century.

aweisman10 anni fa

I think the wording kind of gives it away. I don't think cars or other vehicles would be described as "horseless carriages", but rather "gas-powered carriages" or something that suggests what replaces the horse.

kragen10 anni fa

"Horseless carriage" was actually a common term from about 1895: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=horseless+carr...

pmontra10 anni fa

Thanks.

Reason07710 anni fa

Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even 20 miles per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action.

Congress were actually rather insightful in these predictions. Millions now die every year from motor vehicle accidents and air pollution.

noobermin10 anni fa

Also posted in my comment below:

http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp

[deleted]10 anni fa

LeonB10 anni fa

logged in to say, "this process can take decades."

...try millennia!

The aeolipile, regarded as a curious novelty (a 'temple wonder'), created by Heron of Alexander in 1st century AD was the first steam turbine... the eventual mastery of which led to the industrial revolution.

sytelus10 anni fa

The author have got many facts downright wrong: Wrights were actually very secretive and they were reluctant to publish anything before they got the patent. They were so adamant about the patent that they didn't do any public demonstration of flight for years until they were literally forced by competing claims. In those times people making claims for "heavier than air" flights were numerous and it was hard to take anyone seriously unless they do demonstration. They not only chose not to do so until they got patent but also did almost nothing to enhance their technology meanwhile. Their contribution except for first flight is very marginal and their rest of the lives are dominated by nothing but patent worries, bringing massive lawsuits on others and getting royalties. They also made a very generic patent claim essentially asserting that any system that produces lift is covered by it. This produced a lot of friction in bringing new innovations to market leaving USA significantly behind of Europe.

I admire Wrights thoroughly for their vision, hard work and making miracle happen through their miger resources but saying that no one would have noticed if they saw first airplane in air is bogus.

Reference: https://www.amazon.com/Wilbur-Orville-Biography-Brothers-Tra...

simo710 anni fa

On top of all these mistakes...there is also the very American mistake of believing Ford invented the car.

When I've read it I knew I had to take all the rest with a big grain of salt :|

masklinn10 anni fa

> there is also the very American mistake of believing Ford invented the car.

I don't quite see that since the author dates the quote to 20 years before Ford's popularisation of automobiles, he obviously couldn't have been the inventor of something being investigated by a congressional committee long before his age.

Then again, the "report" is an anachronistic piece of fiction: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp

simo710 anni fa

I am referring to "Twenty years before Henry Ford convinced the world he was onto something".

No need to convince anybody since Ford started manufacturing and commercializing cars roughly 10 years after his peers in Europe.

pbhjpbhj10 anni fa

The thing Ford was on to was one-job production lines (where each worker does one job-atom and the work moves to the next stage) wasn't it? IIRC Ford's project was to make the car affordable to those of more modest means, so "everyone" could have a car.

If you look at the quote then this interpretation makes more sense IMO - the quote clearly considers the position that cars were being made commercially 20 years before Ford.

TL;DR the Ford point is he democratised car use in the face of congress's earlier consideration that such widespread use would kill agriculture and people. (Mind you the congress memo quote seems pretty right on).

masklinn10 anni fa

> The thing Ford was on to was one-job production lines (where each worker does one job-atom and the work moves to the next stage) wasn't it?

IIRC Olds already had a one-job production line, but the line was static and workers had to move around between assemblies. Ford's innovation was to make the workers "static" (with well laid out workspaces) and move the assembly between the jobs.

pbhjpbhj10 anni fa

I think you're right: I toyed with adding "static" but then needed to emphasise it was the workers who were static, then it was getting too wordy.

simo710 anni fa

It's a far-reaching interpretation in my opinion.

The author is talking about product innovation, all the examples are on people who invented famous products.

When he says : "Twenty years before Henry Ford convinced..".

Well the congress's statement is from 1875, 20 years later the first cars appeared. Ford came 10 years later. The event he's referring to is clearly the car invention

It's quite obvious that he's presenting Ford as the inventor of the car.

masklinn10 anni fa

> No need to convince anybody since Ford started manufacturing and commercializing cars 10 years after his peers in Europe.

Closer to 20 and he was neither pioneer of production-line manufacturing (that was Olds) nor of US car manufacturing (that's Duryea followed by Studebaker). The something he was on to was the moving assembly line (where the posts are fixed and the assembly moves around), inspired by slaughterhouse butchery lines.

koder201610 anni fa

When you have only so much history, you need to take whatever you can.

Asooka10 anni fa

And note that the memo talks about horseless carriages propelled by gasoline. At the time, steam-powered cars were already on the roads and people expected steam to be how the car would be powered.

HerpDerpLerp10 anni fa

Ford's wife drove an electric car!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Electric

I am sure you are right about steam being the expected winner, but gosh the past is a complex place!

simonh10 anni fa

The history of early flight and car technologies reminds me very much of the early computer industry. In each case every other product was some crazy one-off custom job. With flight you had different approaches to control surfaces. With cars just for power you had steam (the assumed winner because people were so familiar with steam locomotives), gasoline, diesel, electric. On top of that there were flywheel powered and balanced cars, three wheelers and all sorts of crazy control systems. With computers there was also very little standardization with Apple, Tandy, Atari, Acorn, Sinclair and many others selling mutually incompatible devices. BASIC was pretty common but there were many variations and I remember one home micro coming with Forth.

I wonder if there are any other good examples of technologies that had explosions in different technical approaches to the problem before becoming more standardised?

sillysaurus310 anni fa

Another (completely unrelated) tidbit from that time in history: There were two competing schools of thought regarding flight. One was the modern school of thought: that pilots should be given control. The other was inherent stability, the idea that planes could be made to balance themselves in the air with no input from a pilot.

I just think it's interesting how difficult it is to see good ideas when they haven't been invented yet. And how easy it is to relentlessly pursue bad ideas.

geon10 anni fa

Planes do balance themselves. Stability was traditionally achieved with a carefully placed center of gravity.

Modern fighter planes are unstable, but are stabilized by computers, not the pilot.

danbmil9910 anni fa

> Their contribution except for first flight is very marginal

Absolutely untrue. The Wright Brothers brought their breakthrough into the market in a big way, becoming a (not the only) major manufacturer of commercially available, working, reliable aircraft.

True, they fought patent battles, and in the end their reliance on wing warping (covered well by their patents) held them back when it became clear that ailerons were the way foreward - but they certainly were more than just experimental researchers. They truly did usher in the age of practical, heavier-than-air flight.

chaostheory10 anni fa

If they didn't focus mainly on patents and secrecy, maybe they could have seen that ailerons were the future. If the US didn't enter WWI, the US aircraft industry could have stagnated under the Wrights. They just weren't building and innovating anymore. They were just suing everyone.

JD55710 anni fa

> Wrights were actually very secretive and they were reluctant to publish anything before they got the patent.

I believe that this was not true for Santos-Dumont[1] though. I wonder if he had more media coverage at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont

masklinn10 anni fa

It's not true of most other aviation pioneers, because they were either independently wealthy or well-funded. The Wright brothers were self-funded but not really wealthy, their flyers were their path to wealth so the secrecy was understandable.

restalis10 anni fa

"most other aviation pioneers, because they were either independently wealthy or well-funded"

Wrong! One of them was Traian Vuia, struggling with financial difficulties which significantly delayed both the plane development and its final public demonstration in Paris! Other not so wealthy pioneers are Percy Pilcher, Lawrence Hargrave, Samuel Franklin Cody, Otto Lilienthal, Aurel Vlaicu, and many others.

jayjay7110 anni fa

This is fascinating. I can't believe I never knew this.

raverbashing10 anni fa

The Wright brothers kept their experiment a secret purposefully, so it's not surprising that they didn't show up on the news

FuNe10 anni fa

I understand the votes - that piece is like being written especially for HN BUT it's only just that. It tries to extrapolate a moral story from a few convenient incidents and ignores all the rest. I.e. its method is really unscientific but it poses like such.

Some inventions seem to take long to gain traction - yes. Others though (how many compared to the first set?) gain traction immediately (e.g. lots of inventions in medicine or lots of inventions in -ehm- IT). Others still don't get on ever.

There is no easy moral here. We could derive some statistics if we had all data or some teachings per story. How your invention will be treated by the near or far future is not just a matter of newspapers and general public interest.

PS: Also -as I read in commends here- the main point seems bogus too as Wrights themselves were extra secretive about their experiments.

mgamache10 anni fa

If I remember correctly the Wright Brothers were secretive. They were trying to perfect the Flyer to get a military contract and didn't want to publicize the advances they were making. They didn't invite anyone to see the initial test flights. At the time, the French were getting much more/better press for doing less. Without the press reports no one believed they were actually flying.

Wilbur and Orville Wright made their historic first powered flight on December 17, 1903, from Kill Devil Hill in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The longest of four flights that day lasted 59 seconds and covered a distance of 852 feet. There were few witnesses to the flights and no reporters

http://www.wifcon.com/anal/analwright.htm

aidos10 anni fa

There's a Kiwi inventor most people never heard of called Richard Pearse who was also working on flight (along with people all over the world, I'm sure).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

>> It is claimed Pearse flew and landed a powered heavier-than-air machine on 31 March 1903, some nine months before the Wright brothers flew their aircraft. The documentary evidence to support such a claim remains open to interpretation, and Pearse did not develop his aircraft to the same degree as the Wright brothers, who achieved sustained controlled flight. Pearse himself never made such claims, and in an interview he gave to the Timaru Post in 1909 only claimed he did not "attempt anything practical ... until 1904".

marcosdumay10 anni fa

A few months before that "very very very very far future" quote, Santos Dumont had already flied around the Eiffel tower. That was anything but secretive.

People just do not notice things. If you want, try asking some non geek if people ever landed a robot on a comet or asteroid.

restalis10 anni fa

"the Wright Brothers were secretive. They were trying to perfect the Flyer to get a military contract and didn't want to publicize the advances they were making"

This alone makes one wonder if they deserve the recognition they get. Many people made great personal sacrifices to publicly make a point related to flight or something else. Whereas the Wright brothers played their secret mission game, Traian Vuia carried his plane all over the Europe from Lugoj to Paris (using the transport infrastructure of that time, mind you) only to publicly show and test it. That obviously happened long after the incremental development of the plane itself, considering the repeated postpones due to financial constraints (as all the required expenses were pretty much his own).

Animats10 anni fa

That's because the 1903 Wright Flyer was barely able to fly a few hundred feet. It was just a proof of concept for stability. The 1904 Flyer II was able to circle and fly for about five minutes. The 1905 Flyer III crashed a few times, and then they reworked the controls and were able to fly 24 miles.

At last, they had a minimum viable product. In 1907 they came out with the Wright Model A, which was the production version of the improved Flyer III. This had a range of 125 miles, and was the first production aircraft.

chriscool10 anni fa

In https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation there is:

"Santos-Dumont later added ailerons, between the wings in an effort to gain more lateral stability. His final design, first flown in 1907, was the series of Demoiselle monoplanes (Nos. 19 to 22). The Demoiselle No 19 could be constructed in only 15 days and became the world's first series production aircraft."

So it looks like the Wright Model A was not the first production aircraft.

megablast10 anni fa

> Wilbur and Orville Wright conquered flight on December 17th, 1903. Few inventions were as transformational over the next century. It took four days to travel from New York to Los Angeles in 1900, by train. By the 1930s it could be done in 17 hours, by air. By 1950, six hours.

And by 2016, 6 hours still.

http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/new-york/to/los-ang...

ktRolster10 anni fa

The innovation in commercial flight since 1950 has been in reducing prices. It's ridiculously cheap to fly anywhere these days, and wonderfully cheap.

soufron10 anni fa

The author has a good intuition but he forgets patents and secrets. 3D printing was a success in the industrial world through the 90s. It became a public success when its patents ended around 2004. Why would people talk about something they can't use anyway?

soufron10 anni fa

Also, the author is wrong on the first flight which was not the wrights but clement ader... in 1890. Nice fail. He should be more modest and avoid giving les sons to journalists and industrialists when he does not now his own history, even 140 years later and with the Hell of the internet and Wikipedia. He should be more self-aware that being right about innovation is indeed difficult.

For those interested in clement ader : https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ole_(avion)

tzs10 anni fa

Plenty of people, including Ader, got into the air before the Wrights, but their flight was not controlled flight. The Wrights were the first to get the whole package of powered, controlled, heavier than air flight to work.

jedmeyers10 anni fa

To me this piece feels like an ad for index funds, riddled with false facts and generalizations.

z3t410 anni fa

First they will ignore you. Then they will laugh at you. Then they will work against you. Then you win.

cmarschner10 anni fa

The mechanics of innovation adoption have been extensively studied (e.g. [1]). It takes the innovators (which are often shrewd introverts) to create new things and early adopters (well-connected extroverts) to spread the word to the next group. As adoption continues, maturity increases and prices go down. At the same time, more and more people are using the product, which convinces more rosk-averse people to have a look. At best the result is a chain reaction, but it always follows a sigmoid curve. And due to more efficient means of communication, the adoption curves are still accelerating. It took decades until telephones or TVs were established. Today we got smartphones, HackerNews and the Twitter firehose. Suffice it to say that, yes, innovators are always a fringe part of a group, and they better don't care too much what others are saying. I would say this property is to some extent scale free, as one finds the same patterns within research communities which, as one would expect, should _all_ consist of innovators.

[1] Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm

marceloboeira10 anni fa

Such an American mistake to think that the Wrights invented the airplane...

chaostheory10 anni fa

imo It's a common mistake for people to think that something was made by one team or person, when in reality things like the lightbulb were incrementally improved and evolved by many different people working separately. It's a harder story to remember and 'sell'...

lx074110 anni fa

Don't forget the existing and we'll established businesses who will fight for their lives any threatening 'idea'

gonvaled10 anni fa

> The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action.

That was quite prescient! Unfortunately we didn't do that, and cars took over the streets, caused millions of deaths and injuries, and indeed poisoned our atmosphere.

pmontra10 anni fa

And more

> The cost of producing gasoline is far beyond the financial capacity of private industry…

Check the history of subsidies to the oil industry http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-en...

> In addition the development of this new power may displace the use of horses,

Obviously.

> which would wreck our agriculture.

Probably this was wrong. Instead it got transformed and made more efficient. They didn't foresee the tractor, the tresher, etc.

This is a lesson about the impossibility of thinking in advance about even the major consequences of new technologies. You get some, you miss others, so it's difficult to decide if you'll be better off.

Edit: the report turned out to be fake (see noobermin's comments). It was written in 1950 as satire, when it was spot on but too late to stop cars. A lesson about checking sources.

roel_v10 anni fa

To compare the 3D printing of the 1980's with that of today is a stretch, at best, both in quality and price. And people who care have been '3D printing' (high quality, like with laser sintering, not Makerbot crap) for years.

It's disingenuous to suggest that the very first moment something has been shown in a proof of concept should be the moment that everyone starts rejoicing and flocking to it en masse. Many technologies need years or decades to get mature enough for wide spread use (which the author seems to equate with 'getting recognition').

makomk10 anni fa

Not only that, there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for 3D printing early on. It just took the expiry of the key patents for that enthusiasm to turn into something ordinary people had access to.

y04nn10 anni fa

Not a word about Gustave Whitehead, who may have been the first to successfully flight?

aaron69510 anni fa

This article is just plain wrong.

Every point is incorrect / misleading and the 'point' is the direct opposite of reality.

People latch onto new amazing we'll change the world ideas to easily.

Real change happens from hard work and gradual change is the real reality.

coldtea10 anni fa

>Real change happens from hard work and gradual change is the real reality.

Real change has also happened from "spur of the moment" ideas and inventions. There's no "system" the world operates on. Sometimes it takes hard work, sometimes it's a random neuron firing....

JohnStrange10 anni fa

I think that inventions are similar to bars; nobody can really tell you which ones become popular and which won't. Neither the barkeeper nor the inventor can really control their fate.

I'm still waiting for the ridiculously cheap, extremely high density write-once laser storage on adhesive transparent Tesa film. There was a working prototype already more than a decade ago, they funded a spin-off company, and since then nothing seems to have happened.

Extremely bendable e-ink-like displays at throwaway-pricing were also promised to me more than ten years ago.

My personal explanation is that many good inventions are bought by the competition and then quickly hidden in the drawers, because not every technology that is better than before allows the company who owns it to also make more money than before. Or many of these inventions are just bogus marketing speech to attract investors and they really don't work.

tbarbugli10 anni fa

It's funny and saddening at the same time to see how often the first entry on HN is a worthless/incorrect/inaccurate/ article .

chx10 anni fa

> It takes 30 years for a new idea to seep into the culture.

From Altair to IBM PC, 7 years, Mac, only 10. From IBM Simon to the iPhone fueled boom in 2008 only 14 years passed.

avh0210 anni fa

the iPhone was not a new idea, though it was quite an evolutionary leap.

creadee10 anni fa

I got curious as to how true it was that the Wright's first flight was hardly reported, so searched New Zealand's Papers Past. Maybe not front page news, but not ignored, either...

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers?items_per_page=...

jondubois10 anni fa

If you want to make money, you should never invent new things - Just copy existing things and improve upon them.

That's why our society has such a short-term focus.

The brightest software engineers these days are writing essentially the same software over and over again (with very slight modifications).

I think the same can be said of almost any industry - All our intelligence and energy is spent on competing with each other and then using marketing/advertising to leverage tiny advantages in a product/service in order to win over disproportionate amounts of customers.

I think the reason why it takes years for disruptive innovations to get noticed is because marketing (and by extension, the media) is paid for by 'today money'.

Marketers don't take bets based on future prospects - They don't need to because there is so much financial incentive for them to stay in the present.

mseebach10 anni fa

I think you're rather short-selling incremental improvements. Very few of the things that makes our lives so much better than those of our ancestors, are nearly infinitely long strings of incremental improvements.

A present-day smartphone is obviously very, very different from Bell's first telephone, but on the other hand, there wasn't really a clear disruptive discontinuity anywhere along the string.

Retric10 anni fa

Uhh, hand-off between cell sites is clearly disruptive discontinuity. You can link this to the invention of radio well after telegraphs / telephones. But, radio is very much it's own thing.

What makes it seem like a smooth transition is the length of time it takes to get to consumer products plus the need to seem like prior products. Internal combustion engines where around for a log time before being refined enough for portable power. But, heat engines are very much their own thing. Similarly battery's and capacitors are their own things. However, when you get a car it's got a huge range of such disruptions packaged into one thing.

kragen10 anni fa

Radio, cellular handoff, NCP, TCP/IP, Mosaic, the Hiptop, and the iPhone were all clear disruptive discontinuities.

nine_k10 anni fa

This makes some sense. An exciting new thing that sort of works has a limited appeal. A highly polished and optimized thing that works flawlessly and is cheap to produce can and likely will have hundreds of millions of happy users. Figure where the most money is.

johngalt10 anni fa

"Inventing new things" usually is a series of incremental changes. The Wrights didn't just sit down and build an aircraft. They built large kites, then unmanned gliders, then manned gliders, then added power.

zardo10 anni fa

But those incremental changes are moving outside the design space of currently viable products.

mkagenius10 anni fa

An alternate positive view can be that innovation finds its way no matter how much it gets neglected.

jondubois10 anni fa

That's true, it's motivating in an idealistic way but not in a financial sense. You could have made so much money doing other stuff during that time.

d--b10 anni fa

"It happened with index funds"

Wait, what? index funds invention on par with flying?

Oh, "collaborativefund.com" ...

grabcocque10 anni fa

The Alexander Graham Bell/Western Union story is a fabrication.

http://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2011/01/the-greatest...

tmcbride2310 anni fa

I'm an inventor, I have experienced this exact thing I have a sever cabinet that powers it self and a anti gavity machine but no one cares!! I've aplied to the YC 16 winter for acritic nails that change colors with your phone or you can load a gif I hope they go for it so I can make cars fly.

Mz10 anni fa

If any of that is true, they not only do not care, they are calling you crazy.

Best.

digi_owl10 anni fa

And until a world war made the military sit up and spend massively into their development, they were a rich man's novelty.

Never mind that so many had made claims about flight before the Wrights, that having the press be less than interested was to be expected.

dgudkov10 anni fa

What I read from this story is that it's crucial for an invention to reach the stage when it really starts delivering practical advantage. No one noticed early success of the Wright because what they had achieved so far didn't have any practical application. So no reason to blame people for shortsightedness -- it's rational behavior.