Inventors Past and Present

Abstract

T NVENTION, defined as activity directed toward the discovery of new and useful knowledge about products and processes, is one of the most important phases of the growth of civilization. Yet it is one of the least understood. Who engages in an inventive activity, why, when, and how? Only in recent years has serious research been undertaken on these problems, and even now the amount of work being done to ferret out the answers is lamentably small. The low level of genuine knowledge in the field has permitted the propagation of views sufficiently at variance with the facts as to raise doubts concerning the soundness of existing policies, public and private, designed to foster invention. Most of us believe the independent inventor is dead and buried. Most of us believe, too, that invention today has become the exclusive stamping ground of the salaried Ph.D. working in the laboratories of large corporations, surrounded by mysterious instrument panels, electronic brains, and other Ph.D.s. The prevailing view was well expressed by Professor Galbraith when he wrote, There is no more pleasant fiction than that technical change is the product of the matchless ingenuity of the small man forced by competition to employ his wits to better his neighbor. Unhappily, it is a fiction. Technical development has long since become the reserve of the scientist and engineer. ' Similarly, M.I.T.'s famous mathematician-inventor, Norbert Wiener, recently wrote, Invention came to mean, not the gadget-insight of a shopworker, but the result of a careful, comprehensive search by a team of competent scientists. 2 This belief is substantially reflected in official attitudes at the highest levels. Thus, in a recent 99-page report of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council to the Mutual Security Agency on Applied Research in the United States, team research in organized laboratories alone receives attention.3 The activities of independent inventors, and even those of hired inventors whose main function is not invention but the guidance of existing processes, are ignored. The prevailing view has a factual basis in the great and well-advertised increase in industrial research laboratories since World War I, and more especially since World War II. Well-advertised is italicized, for it is probably mainly because business managements have been shouting their own progressiveness from the transmitting antenna-tops that these ideas are so popular. It makes a difference whether the widely held view is true or false. If false, continued public belief in it will help make it true. Potential independent inventors will be dissuaded from inventing and thereby help make true what had only been believed to be true all along. The fundamental argument of this article is that the prevailing view has magnified an important characteristic of modern invention into a universal one, and that in doing so a serious distortion of reality has occurred.