How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines (review)

Invention, once a star subject in the history of technology, no longer shines as bright on academic horizons. This fall from grace was due in no small part to discontent with popular accounts of heroic invention and with what was once dubbed priority-itis––the romantic quest for canonical inventors. At the same time, the rise of sociological and contextual approaches left little room for individual inventors. But this restlessness has spread hardly at all in nonacademic domains, where the great majority of popular books, museum exhibitions, and historical sites still center on who invented what first, and seem quite contented to do so.

Indeed, one occasionally detects signs of popular irritation with academic revisionism. Consider this excerpt from an amazon.com "customer review" of John Lienhard's How Invention Begins:

For a while, I was a member of SHOT, the Society for the History of Technology. Although I found a few things of interest, the overwhelming view I gained was of earnest left wing intellectuals trying to deconstruct everything into nothing. Here is a book that can meet the academic muster but contains more of substance than warmed over social theory.

While perhaps a little cranky, such commentary exposes a significant disconnect between how academics and the public think about invention and inventors.

Lienhard, a graceful and perceptive writer, has produced a popular book that may well seduce the general public away from received hero myths without denigrating those myths. At the same time, his nuanced approach to the origins of invention offers useful ideas for specialists as well. In other words, he is in the business of building bridges.

How Invention Begins is one of three recent volumes growing out of Lienhard's long-syndicated public radio series with KUHF-FM in Houston. (Prior volumes include Inventing Modern: Growing up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins [2003] and The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture [2000].) Lienhard is a first-rate storyteller with a passion and talent for the byways of history. His stories build around two broad themes. The real motivation for invention, he argues, is not necessity but desire and pleasure. Second, taking aim at the "deeply ingrained, and often deceitful concept of priority" (p. 8), he asks us to heed the "echo of old voices" in new machines. By old voices, he means the incremental contributions of lesser-known visionaries, many of them anonymous. His arguments, which rely heavily on the concept of zeitgeist and include some mathematical models for invention, are clearly and enthusiastically argued.

But the real pleasure of How Invention Begins lies in the case studies, which are information-rich and embellished with colorful anecdote. Lienhard begins with the ultimate anonymous inventor—the 5,300-year-old man discovered in a melting Alpine glacier in 1991. He is fascinated by what "Ötzi" reveals about the state of invention. Traces of arsenic in his hair, for example, suggest copper smelting, thus redefining accepted chronological boundaries between the ages of stone and bronze. A mechanical engineer, Lienhard gravitates to stories about machines and related theoretical concepts: steam engines and thermodynamics, airplanes and aerodynamics, calculating machines and logarithms. He is especially good at providing intuitive descriptions of how things work. In explaining the thermodynamics of the steam engine, for instance, he asks us to blow on our hands, first with an open mouth and then through pursed lips. Which is hot and which is cold?

As an engineer coming of age after World War II, Lienhard learned not only equations but also the now-rare manual skill of drafting by emulating Albrecht Dürer's fonts. This led to a love for writing and printing and an abiding sense of the art in engineering. His chapters on the origins of the book and illustration are especially rich. Etymological tidbits flavor the narrative. We learn, for example, the origins of uppercase and...