TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 647 Invention: The Care and Feeding ofIdeas. By Norbert Wiener. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. Pp. xxiv+159; index. $19.95. This book is really a draft, previously unpublished—and it reads like a draft, rough in places, often repetitive, but with some of the excitement of ideas freshly scribbled. As Steve Heims relates in the introduction, Norbert Wiener abandoned this work in favor of a novel about Oliver Heaviside, apparently because he thought a novel would give him a better opportunity to express his ideas about invention. Wiener intended that Heaviside would be the hero and AT&T and Michael Pupin the villains: indeed, he saw Heaviside as a kind of Prometheus and Pupin as Dr. Faustus, who sold his soul to the corporation. Wiener discusses this case at length in Invention, and its moral illustrates the thrust of the book. According to Wiener, Heaviside first proposed that long-distance telephone and telegraph lines had too much capacity, not too little, and that it was necessary to add induction coils. After Heaviside’s patents had expired, Pupin filed for new patents that included an optimal spacing for the loading coils. AT&T promptly bought Pupin’s patents. The corporation also offered to pay Heaviside for his rights, but he insisted that he be labeled the inventor of the loaded line. According to Wiener, by accepting AT&T’s offer and thus the mantle of inventor, Pupin had sold his soul to the corporation. This story illustrates Wiener’s preference for the heroic, individual inventor or scientist over the one who works for a corporate laboratory. Businessmen “derive a very real satisfaction from the fact that the young engineers and scientists are flocking to their laboratories and leaving the universities and that the institutions of pure research are under staffed and dangerously weak. Those scientists who cannot talk in sums ofmoney less than a million dollars are his own men, and he encourages them, perhaps not to join his own country clubs, but to join country clubs of a slightly smaller prestige, and to buy, not Cadillacs, but the precise make of car that would show at the same time a proper deference for his own superiority and a proper worship of his ideas” (p. 35). Wiener blames Thomas Edison for establishing the idea of these “megabuck” laboratories and argues that they are likely to stifle original exploration. According to Wiener, “the scientist must have a conscience and a devotion, and the inner drive which will never permit him to be satisfied with less than the best work which he can perform by his own lights. This sense of mission may be very remote from any formal religion, but the stuff of religion is in it” (p. 126). This religious devotion to truth may seem almost antique to modern scholars who study technoscience. In fact, one can credit Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory with the development of one of Wiener’s favorite inventions, the carbon telephone transmitter. In the loading-coil case, AT&T’s “in-house” inventor, George Campbell, probably deserves more credit than either Pupin or Heaviside. 648 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE But Wiener’s views, while naive from a scholarly standpoint, may be exactly what is needed to inspire practitioners, especially since they are linked to a strong sense of moral responsibility. Wiener himselfrefused to participate in projects he thought might benefit the military. He felt that long-term investment in fundamental science and the absolute minimum of secrecy were the way to win conflicts like the Cold War and prepare for what lay beyond it: “our long-time chief antagonist will not be Russia, but is to be sought for among the continuing threats of hunger, thirst, over population, and perhaps the new dangers of the poisoning of the world in which we live by the radioactive by-products of an atomic age” (p. 143). One of Wiener’s most intriguing policy suggestions is that those responsible for adjudicating patent disputes be educated in the inven tion and discovery process. Those of us doing detailed work on the invention process would certainly agree. Wiener tells us a little about his own creative process; when he found the solution to one set...