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

John H. Lienhard is an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston, but he is far better known as the creator and voice of "Engines of Our Ingenuity," a regular public radio essay that describes invention and the inventive process, or tells a story from the history of science or technology. Lienhard's essays are wonderfully casual, but well-informed vignettes from history and they have doubtless won a large and faithful audience (the broadcasts began in early 1988 and number more than 2,200).

In How Invention Begins, Lienhard attempts to use some of these observations about science and invention to create an interpretation of the inventive process itself. The result is a mixture of interesting stories and observations, a few provocative or suggestive propositions, and a number of problematic assertions about technological creativity. His central points appear to be that inventions are never out of nothing, that all inventions have antecedents, and that claims of priority are always complicated and qualified. These are not themselves novel ideas, but Lienhard couches his argument in thoughtful and often entertaining terms.

The book's structure is a bit puzzling, for there are essentially two different works here. After introducing his notions about priority claims, antecedents, and continuity, he provides a fairly detailed discussion of the invention and development of steam power, leading from engines to thermodynamics and then key nineteenth-century transport inventions. In this, Lienhard follows in a well-established historical tradition as this is one of the most thoroughly studied subjects in the history of technology.

A second, rather distinct, work then ensues, with Lienhard focusing on the emergence of printing and related technologies, from the mid-fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. Connected to this discussion is an examination of the spread of popular education, from Jane Marcet's popular "Conversations" books of the early nineteenth century to the GI Bill. There are numerous entertaining discussions here, ranging from the art of Albrecht Düurer to the provenance of the author's own books, but none of this is well linked to the issues introduced earlier.

Lienhard has studied his history seriously, but there is never any doubt through this book that he is an engineer. This is most evident in his extended effort to make the pace of technological change fit patterns of measurable exponential growth. This is an old effort, represented perhaps most prominently several generations ago by William F. Ogburn's classic work, Social Change (1922), in which he posited the role of technology as an accelerating agent in changing society at large. About sixty years ago, following Ogburn, Hornell Hart was even more explicit in describing acceleration in technological change as well as social change. Hart even used one of the same basic measures that Lienhard finds so compelling—the speed of transport. But, the sociologist Hart did not feel so moved as Lienhard to translate his observations into carefully delineated equations.

Lienhard ties his own observations of acceleration to discussions of "technological motivation," which he says "is the key issue in our study of invention" (p.121). At the center of Lienhard's explanation for invention is hedonism—the pleasure of the inventive act and the sense that this generates something novel and useful. As an illustration, he traces transportation developments in the nineteenth century, and the core driver behind all these he finds to be the quest for speed: "There was a Zeitgeist, a collective unconscious, and its name was speed" (p. 119). Most readers will not be surprised to learn that Lienhard does not pretend to tell us quite where this Zeitgeist comes from or what brings it to the fore at a particular time, so it is particularly dismaying to see how important it is to him as an explanation for technological change. Business historians, in particular, may find the...