The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [127]
When Hero of Alexandria invented an ‘aeolipile’ or steam engine in the first century AD, and employed it in opening temple doors, the chances are that news of his invention spread so slowly and to so few people that it may never have reached the ears of cart designers. Ptolemaic astronomy was ingenious and precise, if not quite accurate, but it was never used for navigation, because astronomers and sailors did not meet. The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. The telephone had sex with the computer and spawned the internet. The first motor cars looked as though they were ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage’. The idea for plastics came from photographic chemistry. The camera pill is an idea that came from a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided-missile designer. Almost every technology is a hybrid.
This is one area in which cultural evolution has an unfair advantage over genetic evolution. For insuperable practical reasons connected with the pairing of chromosomes during meiosis, cross fertilisation cannot happen between different species of animal. (It can, indeed does, happen between species of bacteria, 80 per cent of whose genes have been borrowed from other species on average – one reason bacteria are so darned good at evolving resistance to antibiotics, for example.) As soon as two races of animals have diverged substantially, they find themselves able to produce only sterile offspring – like mules – or none at all. That is the very definition of a species.
Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Henry Ford once candidly admitted that he had invented nothing new. He had ‘simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work’. So objects betray in their design their descent from other objects: ideas that have given birth to other ideas. The first copper axes of 5,000 years ago were the same shape as the polished stone tools then in common use. Only later did they become much thinner as the properties of metals became better understood. Joseph Henry’s first electric motor bore an uncanny resemblance to a rotative-beam Watt steam engine. Even the first transistor of the 1940s was a direct descendant of the crystal rectifiers invented by Ferdinand Braun in the 1870s and used to make ‘cat’s whisker’ radio receivers in the early twentieth century. This is not always obvious in the history of technology because inventors like to deny their ancestors, exaggerating the revolutionary and unfathered nature of their breakthroughs, the better to claim the full glory (and sometimes the patents) for themselves. Thus Britons rightly celebrate Michael Faraday’s genius in devising an electric motor and a dynamo – he was even recently on a banknote for a while – but forget that he got at least half the concept from the Dane Hans Christian Oersted. Americans learn that Edison invented the incandescent light bulb out of thin air, when his less commercially slick forerunners, Joseph Swan in Britain and Alexander Lodygin in Russia, deserve at least to share the credit, if not rather more. Samuel Morse, when applying for his patent on the telegraph, in the historian George Basalla’s words, ‘stoutly and falsely denied’ that he had learned anything from Joseph Henry. Technologies reproduce, and they do so sexually.
It follows that spillover – the fact that others pinch your ideas – is not an accidental and tiresome drawback for the inventor. It is the whole point of the exercise. By spilling over, an innovation meets other innovations and mates with them. The history of the modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating. And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.