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and induction were driven more by practical problemsolving in the telegraph industry than esoteric rumination. And though it is true that the physics of James Clerk Maxwell produced an electrical revolution, the chemistry of Fritz Haber spawned an agricultural revolution, Leo Szilard’s idea of a chain reaction of neutrons led to nuclear weapons and the biology of Francis Crick fathered biotechnology, it is none the less also true that these sages needed legions of engineers to turn their insights into things that could change living standards. Tinkering Thomas Edison, with his team of forty engineers, was more important to electrification than thinking Maxwell; practical Carl Bosch mattered more than esoteric Haber; administrative Leslie Groves than dreamy Szilard; practical Fred Sanger than theoretical Crick.

p. 258 ‘One of Britain’s advantages in the eighteenth century’. Hicks, J.R. 1969. A Theory of Economic History. Clarendon Press.

p. 259 ‘By contrast in France’. Ferguson, N. 2008. The Ascent of Money. Allen Lane.

p. 259 ‘fully one-third of successful start-ups in California between 1980 and 2000 had Indian- or Chinese-born founders’. Baumol, W.J., Litan, R.E. and Schramm, C.J. 2007. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism. Yale University Press.

p. 259 ‘A telling anecdote about glass repeated by several Roman authors’. Moses Finley, cited in Baumol, W. 2002. The Free-market Innovation Machine. Princeton University Press.

p. 260 ‘A Christian missionary in Ming China wrote’. Quoted in Rivoli, P. 2005. The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy. John Wiley.

p. 260 ‘The proportion of GDP spent by firms on research and development in America has more than doubled’. Kealey, T. 2007. Sex, Science and Profits. William Heinemann.

p. 261 ‘The pioneer venture capitalist Georges Doriot said’. Quoted in Evans, H. 2004. They Made America. Little, Brown.

p. 262 ‘as Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams call it’. Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. 2007. Wikinomics. Atlantic.

p. 263 ‘The dye industry relied mostly on secrecy till the 1860s’. See Moser, P. 2009. Why don’t inventors patent? http://ssrn.com/abstracts= 930241.

p. 264 ‘Emmanuelle Fauchart discovered by interviewing ten chefs de cuisine’. Fauchart, E. and Hippel, E. von. 2006. Norm-based Intellectual Property Systems: the Case of French Chefs. MIT Sloan School of Management working paper 4576-06. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers/vonhippelfauchart2006.pdf.

p. 264 ‘Yet there is little evidence that patents are really what drive inventors to invent.’ There is a lively debate going on about whether James Watt’s aggressive enforcement of his broadly worded patents on steam engines in 1769 and 1775 actually shut down innovation in the steam industry. See Rolt, L.T.C. 1960. George and Robert Stephenson. Longman. (‘With coal so readily available, the north country colliery owners preferred to forgo the superior economy of the Watt engine rather than pay the dues demanded by Messrs. Boulton and Watt.’); also www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/do-patents-encourage-or-hinder-innovation-the-case-ofthe-steam-engine/; Boldrin, M. and Levine, D.K. 2009. Against intellectual monopoly. Available online: http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim.html; and Von Hippel, E. 2005. Democratizing Innovation. MIT Press. The contrary view, that Watt’s patent did little to hinder innovation and that without it he would never have attracted Boulton’s backing, is put by George Selgin and John Turner: Selgin, G. and Turner, J.L. 2006. James Watt as intellectual monopolist: comment on Boldrin and Levine. International Economic Review 47:1341–8; and Selgin, G. and Turner, J.L. 2009. Watt, again? Boldrin and Levine still exaggerate the adverse effect of patents on the progress of steam power. 18 August 2009, prepared for the Center for Law, Innovation and Economic Growth conference, Washington University School of Law, April 2009.

p. 264 ‘the list of significant twentieth-century inventions that were never patented is a long one’. Cited in Shermer, M. 2007. The Mind of the Market.