Let’s start with the invention of air conditioning. This is only one of approximately a zillion topics addressed by the science writer Steven Johnson during the course of lunch at an Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan; some of the others include Darwinian evolution, the creation of YouTube, the curiously perfect population density of the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the French Revolution, the London cholera epidemic of 1854, the first computer, The Wire, and why 9/11 wasn’t prevented.

But air conditioning provides a useful way to introduce Johnson’s current overarching obsession – the mysterious question of where good ideas come from – because it encapsulates how we generally like to think about inventors and inventions. One night in 1902, an ambitious young American engineer named Willis Carrier was waiting for a train, watching fog roll in across the platform, when he had a sudden flash of insight: he could exploit the principle of fog to cool buildings. He patented the idea, protected it fiercely, put his new invention into production, and made a fortune. In 2007, the still-surviving Carrier Corporation generated sales worth $15bn.

For Johnson, though, what’s really interesting about that story is how unusual it is: although the eureka moment is such a cliche, big new ideas almost never get born like that. “It’s weird, but innovation is one of those cases where the defining image, all the rhetoric and all the assumptions about how it happens, turn out to be completely backward. It’s very, very rare to find cases where somebody on their own, working alone, in a moment of sudden clarity has a great breakthrough that changes the world. And yet there seems to be this bizarre desire to tell the story that way.”

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Chris Brennan }

ideas | November 12th, 2010