The Third Inventor and the Nature of Technology Innovation

Why Technologies are Solutions Looking for Problems

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?

Both are needed but on their own are not enough. There is a third inventor.

The third inventor maps a new technology to an often unarticulated and unknown user need. This final stage of invention requires creativity that is different to the creativity needed for rearranging components into a system, which is in turn different from the creativity involved in the continuous improvements needed to bring a component to life. This brings us neatly to a recurring theme in the history of technology, namely that:

Technologies are often solutions looking for problems.

Which in turn points to a related theme:

The destiny of a general-purpose technology lies not in the hands of its creator but its users, who seek out applications that were previously unimaginable.

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Volta’s Battery

This week, we continue to discuss famous inventors and their inventions, focussing on the place where it all began, on the workbenches of Alessandro Volta, an Italian professor who worked smack bang in the middle of the second scientific revolution which, unlike the mechanistic and rational times of Newton, were typified by a ‘reckless, personal commitment to discovery’ (Holmes, 2008).

Volta, in a now infamous attempt to win an argument, tried to create an electric current. He became hopelessly stuck until an Englishman threw him a lifeline. Nicholson said that the cells in fish’s electrical organs, although not powerful on their own, would, when fired together, produce a charge. Nicholson said the organs looked like a stack of coins.

Nicholson sent Volta in a new direction. Volta now stacked his disks up in a row. Following a trial and error method - what other process could he follow? - Volta experimented with different configurations with paper insulating the disks because, he believed, that the cells in the fish were also insulated. Nothing happened. Volta then soaked the paper in salt water, a highly conductive solution called an electrolyte. The charge on his straw electrometer went through the roof. Volta had discovered, but did not understand, a source of electricity that had no external source and at first glance looked self-sustaining.

Later someone said Volta’s ‘cells’ looked like a battery of cannons firing in sync. The name stuck. What did Volta end up using his battery for? In the second scientific revolution, scientists used new, active instruments of inquiry, as opposed to passive instruments like telescopes, and that’s what the battery became, an instrument of science. Decades passed before the third inventors arrived and came up with a practical use for the battery.

The Third Inventor

The inventors of the telegraph, Cooke and Wheatstone in England and Morse and Vail in the United States, found a practical use for the voltaic battery. This made them the battery’s third inventors and the telegraph’s first inventors. The founders of Western Union and the Associated Press later found practical uses for the telegraph, making them its third inventor.

A more contemporary example of a third inventor arrived in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to help physicists share research papers (and because looking his colleagues up in the paper phone book annoyed the shit out of him). In doing so, he became one of the third inventors of the internet, whose creators had pieced it together so that governments could keep communicating if they, most likely by accident, dropped nuclear bombs on each other. (The internet of course evolved from the telegraph.)

The pattern repeated again when Bezos built Amazon on top of the web, making him one of its third inventors, and again about ten years later when his team accidentally invented cloud computing. In turn, their cloud’s early adopters became its third inventors when they found uses for it that its inventors did not envision.

I think by now you get the picture? The first inventor of a present ‘thing’ is often the third inventor of the last ‘thing’. This explains, if you pay careful attention, which I did when I drove myself mad writing Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, why there is an unbroken link between Volta’s battery and the systems of artificial intelligence that are with us today. Bezos told his shareholders in 1997 that it was day one for the internet. This was not true. But 1799’s invention of the battery really was day one for the world in which we live today.

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Third inventors at work

On a smaller scale, third inventors work every day in technology companies. Many years ago, I found a use for .Net’s Dictionary class that allowed me to retire tens of thousands of lines of code. More recently, Container Solutions helped create a component called External Secrets Operator (ESO), casting us in the role of component inventor. Later, we became third inventors too, mainly by putting ESO into users’ hands. ESO and more recently our Continuous Compliance Framework did not come out of nowhere. They instead came out of our highly creative walls which themselves were built on top of two management rules of thumb.

The Management Rules of Thumb

So what the fuckity fuck does Volta and the third inventors of the battery really teach us?

Well, the first lesson is simple enough. Since the third inventor cannot match a non-existent technology to a user’s needs, the first rule of management is that you must let creators create. If my old boss, at that company where I used .Net’s Dictionary class, asked me to produce a plan for that work, if he in other words paralysed me and therefore the company with needless analysis, the work would never have started and that in turn would have brought the relay race of progress to an end. We did not bother with plans but, like Volta, we built and learned.

The second lesson is the worst kept but most ignored secret in technology: you have to get your creations into users’ hands. Volta could not predict Morse’s use of the battery. Morse did not foresee trains, news wires, and money transfers. He definitely did not imagine that a bumbling, Scottish man-baby would invent / steal a component that changed sound waves into an electrical signal that transformed the telegraph into the harmonic telegraph. We call the harmonic telegraph the telephone. Tim Berners-Lee had not idea that Jeff Bezos, channelling Max Zorin, would change the browser into an online book store just before he changed it into the cloud.

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In all cases, the technology had to exist before users found applications.

The relay race is too logical and tidy be a good metaphor for technological innovation but it helps in one important regard, giving us maybe a third lesson:

A third inventor cannot run with the baton if a manager stops the first inventor building it.

Without the first inventor, the third inventor cannot find the use cases that so often dictate a technology’s destiny.

Kierkegaard

As I do once or twice in the book, I am going to let Søren Kierkegaard have the second to last word.

Kierkegaard said life has to be lived forward but understood backward. The same is true for technologies - we invent them before we know what to do with them.

The final words though I am keeping to myself. If you’re a busy manager, if you don’t give two hoots for philosophy, or even less for the management claptrap of Edmondson, then stick to the two rules of thumb:

1. Create an environment that builds things.

2. Get those things into users’ hands.

Your job is not to create imaginary business cases for technologies you have not yet grokked or invented. Your job is instead to let your Voltas do their thing so your Morses can do theirs.

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This is the second post about Volta and the process of innovation. The first came out a few days ago and discusses trial and error failure. Read that here. Follow the links below to listen to the podcast which contains a much deeper dive into Volta and how he invented the battery. And stayed tuned as we continue to build the technology timeline from the past to the present and beyond.

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Further reading

The Voltaic Pile: How Alessandro Volta Built the World’s First Battery

Episode 1

Apple