How Innovation Really Works
Five Lessons from the Telegraph
The romantic scientists did us a massive favour. Science is creative. But they left us burdened with two related, nonsensical ideas. The first is that science and innovation are lone pursuits. The second is that ideas arrive, fully formed, in Eureka-like moments. This is nonsense and the story of the telegraph, which dropped recently, put those two myths to bed by teaching us five things about innovation.
Five things about innovation:
Innovation is gradual.
Innovation is about recombining what already exists.
Innovation is a team sport.
Innovation is the cost of serendipity.
Eureka moments are bullshit.
Innovation is gradual
Historians mislead us when they say the battery is a part of the telegraph. The telegraph grew out of the battery like the optic nerve, after billions of years of evolution, grew out of the brain. The telegraph is, after all, a long wire growing away from the battery. The wire has a convertor on the end that transforms an electrical signal into marks on a bit of paper.
Stuart Kauffman, a scientist specialising in biology and systems, came up with the concept of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible, like the edge of a map, is what might come next. Volta started with two disks, a bit of salt water and a frog’s leg. What was adjacent to that? His tongue. What was adjacent to that? His eye. What was adjacent to that? A convertor that took an electrical signal as an input and created a mark on a bit of paper as its output - but Volta did not find that one.
Morse found that next adjacent possibility three decades after the Volta invented the battery, which means he did not invent the telegraph from scratch but instead stuck a converter on the end of a wire.
Morse did, however, dig the relay, a little bit of mechanical genius, out of the adjacent possibile. The relay, a simple circuit, repeated the electrical signal coming into it and thus allowed the telegraph to work long-distance with strategically placed relays along the line. Ted Vail later repeated this trick with the vacuum tube.
Innovation is about recombining what already exists
All innovations are made of constituent parts. The hardware of the telegraph grew out of the battery. That’s incremental change or evolution. Morse, though, did something else. He married electromagnetism to an ancient technology. Language.
Humans are seriously limited in how much they can say and hear at any one moment. We communicate at roughly 39 bits per second—about 1,400 times slower than a 56K modem, and they were slow. Humans evolved a massive brain to allow them to mentalise, to effectively intuit what a person is thinking and feeling, and this means that just a few choice words are enough to bring forth terabytes of information in the recipient.
The telegraph is thus the child of electromagnetism and language. This explains why, despite the hardware being not much more sophisticated than a battery, the telegraph shattered the world as humans knew it. Humanity waited over a century to feel that similar disorientation again, which it did after the atom was split in the most horrific way imaginable.
Innovation is a team sport
Morse needed Gale and Vail. Wheatstone needed Cooke. Both needed patent attorneys and the help of their governments. Innovation is a team sport but so too is invention. Listen to the podcast if you want to learn more. Cross-functional teams are a recurring theme of Visionaries, Rebels and Machines.
Innovation is the cost of serendipity
I don’t know where I first heard it but since at the very latest, 2014, I have been telling my team that innovation is the cost of serendipity. (A quick Google search says that I invented the expression, ‘innovation is the cost of serendipity’. If Google says it’s true, it must be.)
My colleague at Container Solutions, way back in 2014, experimented with Apache Mesos frameworks. We had no idea what would come of those frameworks. After a few months, and one or two blogs, the company Mesosphere got a call from Cisco who needed help with some Mesos frameworks. Mesosphere was overwhelmed and in any case they are a product company - they are called D2IQ nowadays. However, Mesosphere, in San Francisco, and Container Solutions, in Amsterdam, were in touch. Mesosphere turned Cisco onto us. Cisco became our first really big client. Messing around with those frameworks, otherwise known as research and development, was the price we paid for that serendipitous moment.
Morse experienced something similar. Returning from Paris on the steamer, Sully, a defeated painter, Morse became acquainted with Dr. Charles Jackson. After Jackson explained electricity to Morse, he went onto the deck of the Sully, and the telegraph appeared fully formed in his mind. The price of his ticket and messing around in France was the cost of his serendipity.
Eureka moments are bullshit
Half of that last paragraph was a lie. Morse had the idea, after speaking about electricity and witnessing optical telegraphs in France, for an electrical telegraph on the deck of the Sully. That may be true. But if, as he later pretended, the idea hit him like a bolt of lightning, why did he do absolutely nothing for the next five years? It benefitted him to retell history like that and Morse got away with it, not least because humans love a good Eureka story, but it was not true.
You know what else is not true? The stories of Archimedes, who did not shout Eureka and the story of Newton, who did not come up with the theory of gravity after an apple fell on his head.
Let me tell you one more, to hammer home this point, by bringing you back to those ever faithful martyrs of science, the frogs.
Otto Loewi dreamed about an experiment of two beating frogs’ hearts in a saline solution. He stimulated the vagus nerve in one frog, causing its heart to slow down, and then scooped up some of the saline solution and poured it into the next heart, which also slowed down. Something in that ‘soup’ sent a message to the second frog’s heart. That something was a neurotransmitter. Therefore, Loewi worked out that electrical stimulation in a body causes a neurotransmitter to travel which in turn affects the heart (and in the brain affects other neurons arranged as networks). This soup of neurotransmitters is why humans cannot think as fast as machines; we are slowed down by the chemical part of our physiology.
Loewi’s story is often given as proof that breakthrough ideas arrive fully formed. Yes, the insight came in a dream—quickly, in a flash. But he’d been working with frogs and mulling over chemical communication in organisms for 17 years. That’s not exactly a Eureka moment, is it?
Wrap up
The telegraph teaches us that innovation is gradual, collaborative, expensive, and built from existing pieces. The story of the telegraph, in other words, teaches all the ‘rules’ for innovation, which remains a mysterious process but nevertheless contains patterns.
To learn more, give the telegraph episode a listen or check out the third inventor, another term I might have invented, which proved popular last week when it came out.
Next up, one for the nerds: what the telegraph teaches us about compression algorithms.
The Third Inventor and the Nature of Technology Innovation
Who invents a technology? The person who invents the breakthrough component, like when Elisha Gray came up with the key component that made the telephone work? The person who organises the components into a system that works, like when Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse rearranged the voltaic battery, Morse’s code, relays and sounders into the telegraph?
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Battery That Started It All
I cannot tell you how much chaos the battery caused, both philosophically and scientifically. A device you can build in your kitchen - and I know because I built one in my kitchen - brought into question what humanity thought it knew about the soul.