Dan Snow's History Hit - The Steam Engine and Simultaneous Invention

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

The revolution in speed ground to a halt in the 1960s. The previous half-century saw great leaps in how quickly people could get from place to place: high-speed railways, cars, intercontinental flight. In our lifetime transport may have become safer and comfier — but we aren't getting anywhere any faster.How did these great leaps happen? What grove this focus on transport innovation and where does collaboration come into play? And why has the focus shifted? In this episode, we talk to Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, about the acceleration of transport innovation from the steam engine to space travel.If you want to hear more from History Hit's newest podcast Patented: History of Inventions presented by Dallas Campbell then click here. Expect new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday.There are also hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, Dan Snow here. Very excited that History Hit are launching another new podcast. It's called Patented. It's a history of inventions. And I am so happy because it's hosted by one of my friends, one of my former colleagues at the BBC. He's the science presenter. He's the unstoppable Dallas Campbell. Each episode goes into the stories behind history's most impactful ideas and the geniuses who created them. From the steam engine to the condom. And today on the show we're going to be sharing the first episode with you. So Dallas is joined by Matt Ridley, love him, he's the author of How Innovation Works. They're going to discuss the revolution in speed from the steam engine to the supersonic jet. Let's bear in

mind folks that Queen Elizabeth II, still alive today, was born closer to the first intercity railway, Liverpool-Manchester, than to today. So we're talking about an unimaginable revolution that has happened in, well, two lifespans. From an intercity steam railway to a drone flying about on Mars. This is a wild journey, Ron, folks, and you're going to hear all about it on Dallas Campbell's new brilliant podcast. If you like what you hear, please head over to the patented History of Inventions feed to subscribe or follow for more. The link is in the show notes. Episode two is already out on that feed, so you can dive straight in there. Dallas talks to the geneticist, friend of this podcast, but on many times, Adam Rutherford, about how we got to where gene editing is today and debate about what the future holds. Crikey. Will I get

that linguistic ability and ultra-ripped six-pack that I've been hoping for? Let's see what Adam Rutherford says about that. New episodes of Patented will be released every Sunday and Wednesday. There's going to be episodes on tanks, at the atom bomb, spacesuits, treadmills, and breakfast cereal. With the new command steam engine, suddenly you're using heat to do work. And I think that's the mother of all innovations. Now, the history of inventions is full of myths. Apocryphal stories of lone inventors, spontaneous eureka moments. So you've got Thomas Crapper, who apparently invented the toilet, or Otto Titzling,

to thank for the bra. Edison and Edison alone inventing the light bulb. Archimedes in the bath, Newton and the apple. Why do these invention myths persist? Especially when the real stories are full of all the fun, juicy stuff. Competition, collaboration, and if we're really lucky, out-and-out cheating. Well, welcome to Patented, a brand new podcast about the history of invention from History Hit. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell, and in each week, we are going to dig into the stories behind your stuff and the people who created it. And for our first episode, I'm delighted to be talking to Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, about the real messy human way that innovation and invention really comes together. Now, this interview started as a discussion around the invention of the steam

engine, which is a fascinating story and a perfect example of how inventions rarely happen in a silo, which then led us to think more widely about the innovations of transport from the steam engine to human flight to space travel. So it's going to be a journey we best get going. So I thought maybe we could just start by a couple of definitions, the difference between invention and innovation, which people get confused about, I get confused about. Yes, in my view, there is a significant difference between invention and innovation. Invention is part of innovation, but it's not the whole thing. Coming up with a new prototype of something is only half the battle, or maybe less than half the battle, that a big part of the innovation

process is making something affordable, reliable, and available to people. And that is an enormous amount of work. So for example, Amazon is a very innovative company. It has pioneered e-commerce, but I don't think anyone would describe it as having invented anything, really. I mean, that may not be quite true, but it's mostly true. So partly what I've been trying to do is recognize the innovators, not just the inventors, the people who take new ideas and actually make them practical, which is not always at all easy. And yet they generally don't end up as a statue after doing it. Why are we so enamored of this idea of revolutions of invention?

Why do we like to have eureka moments and we like to have names of people? It's like, well, this person did this and this person did that. Why are we so fixated? I think we like to personalize things. We like to make one hero out of a story. It's harder to tell a story about teams of people collaborating and competing. And we also like to make it sound more sudden. We love these sudden breakthrough eureka moments, you know, James Watt and the kettle or Archimedes in the bath or whatever it might be. And most of

them turn out to be myths. There's quite a nice point in my book where I talk about the guy who, Malcolm McLean, who basically pioneered container shipping. He had this story told about him that, you know, it was while queuing in his truck to be unloaded at a port that he suddenly had this idea. And he denies it. He said, actually, it wasn't like that. It was much more gradual. But that's the way everyone keeps telling the story. So eventually, I sort of gave up trying to correct them. They're fairly harmless, these stories. Yes, exactly. But they do tend to leave the impression of innovation as being a much more sudden process than it actually is. I think it's nearly always much more gradual.

At the same time, we also talk about disruptive innovation, you know, the mobile phone transforming the world. And that leads us to forget about the long series of incremental changes that led to the mobile phone getting to the point where it could disrupt. So there's always a backstory behind these things. And there's always a context as well. It's always, you know, why things happen at a particular time. You talk a lot about freedom being an important thing, the freedom to fail and trial and error. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But maybe we could sort of pick up one of your stories and we could examine that your sort of thesis through that. I deal a

lot with sort of aviation and space. I thought maybe we could look at transport and you start off talking about, you know, Stevenson and the steam engine, but it's a good example of it being just a lot more complicated than we think, and very much a collaborative process, and very much a product of its time. Well, 201 years ago, George Stevenson met Edward Pease, the Quaker merchant who wanted to build a horse-drawn railway, basically persuaded him to make it a locomotive railway instead, or as well. And that's sort of the beginning of an incredible revolutionary change in the way human beings move around the planet and the speed at which they could go. But when you look into the detail, you find that what Stevenson was doing to the rails was just as important as what he was

doing to the engines. And in fact, he was getting a lot of help with the engines. It was Timothy Hackworth working with his son, Robert, who made most of the breakthroughs in terms of designing the first engines locomotion was the famous one first on the Stockton to Darlington railway which is what we're talking about but not only that you know he didn't invent the first locomotive Trevithick and various other people had built locomotives before then and in fact Stevenson's first locomotive which which was called Blucher, was copied from one made by someone else. But he improved it. And when he came to build locomotion, he put significant improvements in it. And then when he came to make Rocket, he put more innovations in. So it's a much more gradual story. And it's much more failure in it too. Trevithick had died

penniless abroad and disappointed and disillusioned because no one really took up his idea of the locomotive in very early 1800s. And others had kind of given up saying, look, in the end, we can't make these things nearly as cheap as horses in terms of transporting stuff. The metalwork's not good enough. The cost of coal is too high away from the pit head. So it's never going to work except at a colliery. There's all sorts of other factors coming in preventing this innovation happening. And of course, the first of a new technology is often not as good as the last of an old technology. And railways did not really compete with canals for quite a long time. And even after they build the Liverpool to Manchester railway and get that going with the rocket as the pioneering locomotive after it won the Rainhill trials, even after that, there's a pause.

And then in 1840, you get a sort of unleashing of animal spirits through the stock market and speculation. And suddenly, in 10 years, we build thousands and thousands of miles of railways and build hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of locomotives. So why was that? I don't quite understand why there was that pause. And you say sort of stock market. So there was financial incentives? Or why was there a pause? And what ended the pause? It's partly financial.

And that's the traditional explanation. But I think it's something else. I think it's mainly that we underestimate the impact of a technology in the long run, but we overestimate it in the short run. So this happens again and again. If you look at genomics in the last 10 years, the last 20 years, I should say, we sequenced the human genome in the year 2000. It doesn't, frankly, cure cancer like Bill Clinton says it's going to, or anything like that. But 20 years on, we've suddenly got gene editing, messenger RNA vaccines,

we've got new approaches to cancer, you know, so technologies take off much more slowly than we expect, because of that process of needing to make them affordable, reliable and practical, I think. Is it because we get scared of it? A new technology comes along and we're perhaps resistant to it. So we don't imagine what it might be beneficial in the future. That is also true, is that there's a huge amount of resistance to all sorts of new technologies. a huge amount of resistance to all sorts of new technologies. So, for example, the umbrella was campaigned against as a dangerous innovation by, guess who, the Hackney cab operators, who didn't want people on rainy days walking down the street with an umbrella. They wanted

them getting in cabs to stay dry. And coffee was banned almost everywhere in the 1500s and 1600s, mainly because the wine and beer industry was jealous, but also because rulers didn't like people going to coffee houses and talking about whether rulers were doing any good job. So there is a lot of resistance, you know, look at genetically modified crops, look at fracking, you know, there's been a huge amount of resistance to innovative things, nuclear power again. But I don't think that's why you get this pause at the beginning of a technology. Again, think of the internet. In 1990, we've got the internet. And some of us are starting to get

email addresses. But we find that not very many other people have them. So there's not much point because the only people you can talk to are academics. And they're always having arguments with each other on email. I think I gave up an email address, you know, because there didn't seem much point. And then about five years later, suddenly everybody has an email address and it's worth having. It's a bit the same with video conferencing. We've had video conferencing for 10 or 20 years now, certainly 10 years. And yet it was only with the pandemic that you could start to say, people, shall we jump on Zoom and expect them to know what you meant it's unbelievable how quickly this has happened and people will write about this in terms of the pandemic being a driver of innovation invention and not just

vaccine but things like here we are on zoom you know this has just happened in months from zero to the whole world suddenly embracing this technology so that's a good example of the gap between invention and innovation, I think. The innovation is everybody taking up Zoom and other platforms. Yeah. It just seems that throughout all your stories, human psychology features the way that we think about innovation. Actually, collaboration is one of those themes that comes along a lot in your stories. Actually, I think your favourite invention was the conversion of heat to work as your primary, number one, most important invention of all time, from which we get the steam engine, of course. But actually, that's quite a nice thing to unpack.

I think that when you look at the improvements in human living standards over the last two or three hundred years, which are truly extraordinary and global, the fact that we were innovating is not quite enough to explain it. Coming up with new versions of the machinery they had in 1700 wouldn't have done it alone. What needed to happen as well was the harnessing of energy, getting machines that actually applied energy to do the things we need to do, like a steam engine dragging a train along. So for me, it's interesting to think of innovation as a sort of anti-entropy thing. Entropy is the opposite of energy, the tendency of everything to get disordered and useless. But if you put energy into a system, you can make it do useful things for you, essentially. And before 1700, you've got two forms of energy really being used by humankind

one is for actually doing work and for that we'd use wind or water or people or oxen these are the things that actually move stuff or put stuff where you want it or mill grain or whatever it is that you're trying to do. And the other form of energy is heat. And you burn wood and you burn coal and you use it to heat your house or to boil water or something like that. But the two are separate. And in fact, nobody thinks of them as both forms of energy. And then with the Newcomen steam engine around 1712, suddenly you're using heat to do work. And I think that's the sort of mother of all innovations, because it leads to the possibility that you can make steam engines and internal combustion engines and run factories off machinery. And then you can make electricity and airplanes and everything else. You're burning stuff to make things happen, to make things move or to make

things revolve or whatever it might be. I'm always amazed and I always have to remind myself that, you know, when we think about energy now, we think about nuclear power, which we mentioned, it's still just steam energy. All you're doing is making fire in order to heat up water, in order to make steam, in order to make magnets revolve around copper wire. That's it. Absolutely. I think that's a very nice way of putting it. And, you know, they're just big kettles, nuclear power stations. Yeah. One of my favourite pauses in your story, and just while we're on the subject of steam engines, one of the ideas was, I think, in the Victorian times was this idea of a sort of vacuum railway, a pressurised tube whereby you

would suck out all the air and you would have a train that would run between these two points, which of course, we're now seeing again in this idea of the Hyperloop, this idea of where we're going to build big tubes everywhere. You're quite down on the Hyperloop. I visited it the other day. I went and had a little look at it in America and it was quite interesting. They sort of convinced me that it was going to work. And then I read your book and you were like, no, no, no, this will never work. But it's a good example of this was not an invention by Elon Musk. The Victorians had this idea of an atmospheric railway. Yeah, they actually built one under London and squirted some poor businessman down it. Explain what it is in case no one knows what I'm talking about.

Well, it's basically a tube and you push something down a tube. And one of the ways, obviously, if you can make the tube a bit of a vacuum, then there's no air resistance in the tube and it can go much faster. I mean, they did actually have these kind of things in offices, didn't they? And in supermarkets as well. I seem to remember they'd put the cash and up they'd go. Yeah. Yeah. And they built one in New York in the 1800s, which they'd never got beyond the stage of being a sort of visitor attraction. It went 100 yards underground or whatever. And you whizzed down this thing, propelled by an engine in a tube, which was partly evacuated, I think, and therefore less air pressure. And we're hearing the same idea, as you say, from Elon Musk at the moment about the Hyperloop.

And I'm just not convinced it's practical. This isn't just me being cynical, although there's a bit of that. It's me reading other engineers' accounts of it. I just don't see how it's going to be any easier to build than a railway, which is very expensive. And also, Elon Musk has this lovely description of how the brilliant thing is you could have a pod arriving every half minute, and six or eight people, and each pod goes to a different destination. Yes, Elon, we call that a bus. The trouble is with Elon Musk, it always sounds a bit ridiculous. And I always find myself rolling my eyes sometimes. And then he goes and does something

like the reusable rocket. Now you're quite down. The other thing you're a bit down on, which I'm going to take you up on later on is about human spaceflight. And you're like, oh, that doesn't count as innovation because, you know, it doesn't reach the everyday people. Well, I sort of think that's rubbish. But Elon Musk, I remember when I first saw those Falcon 9s return to Earth, and I thought it was a joke. I thought it was just an online thing and they'd played the film backwards.

And he does get things done. It is pretty impressive what he does. And I was quite impressed when I went to see the Hyperloop because I thought, well, this is just a, you know, like you say, a bit of a novelty, a bit of silliness. I'm like, oh Christ, they're actually doing it. It's actually going to- Yeah, but are they going to do it over 500 miles and well possibly reliable and yes people is it going

to really be able to transport you know do the arithmetic of how many times what are you going to do when you get a leak and the vacuum no longer works etc etc so there's issues i think the point is never to be starry-eyed about any kind of innovation just because it's innovative just because it's new i mean google glass is a good example of that. Google invents this thing called Google Glass, which projects the internet onto your spectacles. It's technically brilliant. It's extraordinary to have achieved it. It came out of that sort of skunkworks they have at Google called Google X. But it turned out nobody particularly wanted to buy it. It was a commercial flop, even though it was a technical success. So it's very important if you're thinking in terms of innovation rather than invention, that things do have to at some point pass the commercial test, will people buy

it? That's my problem with manned space. I mean, I'm a huge fan of the fact that we went to the moon. I think it's incredible. I think it's magnificent that we achieved that as a species. I think it's a huge landmark. I was 11 years old when it happened and I was woken up for the first spacewalk by my parents so they could watch it live on TV. That's brilliant. But it's a bit like painting the Mona Lisa. It's a wonderful achievement, but I don't think it's of any practical use and I'm not sure it ever will be. Well, the trouble is when people think of space, they tend to think of that. And space is a lot more like everything that we do on Earth now in terms of modern civilization kind of

relies on space technology and relies on getting into the's absolutely true but it relies on non-man space technology you know i mean i want to see exploration of the planets etc but i'm not convinced we need astronauts okay a little bit yeah i'll give you the apollo guidance computer but this is the thing because people always and i oh well we got t-fal frying pans you know and that's a silly argument i think the thing i think was interesting about Apollo, it's the fact that we managed to miniaturise a computer into the size of a shoebox, where it was Raytheon that did it and the MIT software programme. And we did a technological jump of about 20 years. The reason we have small computers was kind of because of that. And that's why we

beat the Russians. The Russians couldn't build a computer. They built the rocket, they just didn't have the computer to do it. So I always cite the AGC as really the kind of thing that got us to the moon. The remarkable thing, though, about miniaturization of computers, I think, is how extraordinarily regular it is. If you look at Moore's law, it has this strangely incremental progression, which kind of is weird when you think that Gordon Moore spotted the regularity in 1964. Therefore, we ought to have been able to say, oh, so we're going to be able to get to however many gigabytes per square meter it is in 20 years.

Why don't we get there now? But actually, that didn't prove possible. You had to go through each step. Each chip created the platform on which Intel or whoever could then make the next smaller chip. So there's a sense in which you have to go to what evolutionary biologists call the adjacent possible. You can't make great leaps ahead. You have to work your way through the stages.

Now, the Apollo guidance computer may have short-circuited a couple of stages. You can't see a step change in Moore's law around the time they're doing Apollo, if you see what I mean. No, you're right. But the interesting point you make about computing is that's the thing in our lifetime that we've seen this great leap. And you make the point of like, well, a computer 50 years ago, we would not be using now. However, we're still flying around on Boeing 747s. Actually, my dad was a 747 pilot. So I have a particular fondness. It's a magnificent creature, the 747 pilot so I have a particular fondness. It's a magnificent creature the 747. Well an amazing bit of innovation in the fact that it was the size of the 747 meant you could get more seats

on it which brought the price down so suddenly aviation became practical for everyone. Exactly there has been spectacular innovation in transport in my lifetime in terms of cost and safety. But not in terms of speed. Yeah and the contrast I make is with my grandparents. My grandparents were born around 1900. That's before the airplane and the motor car, essentially. There's a few motor cars around by then, but not many. But it's after the telephone. They die in sort of 1970 or something, with men on the moon, rockets in the air, helicopters, supersonic jets, incredible changes in transport. But the telephone is still the telephone, frankly. It's a little bit better, but not much. I've had exactly the opposite experience. I'm born 1958 when transport is just running out of steam, actually. And the only transport

innovations I've seen really are the drone, I reckon, and cup holders in cars and budget airlines. Important things, yeah. reckon, and cupholders in cars and budget airlines. Whereas in computers and communication, you know, I've got the mobile phone and the internet, social media, you know, a plethora of things. And that suggests to me that it's easily possible that the computer and communication revolution could also run out of steam and may already have done so in some ways. And we didn't see it coming as well. When I was a kid, it was all going to be jetpacks and robots. Well, there's a lovely cartoon I sometimes show, drawn in 1958, the year I was born, funnily enough, of what the world's going to look like in 2000. And it has a postman delivering letters with a rocket strapped to his back. So they're

over-predicting the rocket and they're under-predicting email. This is it. Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. Said Yogi Berra. And we'll be back after this short break. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. While we're on the subject of aeroplanes, I might just talk to you a little bit about the Wright Brothers. Because again, it's one of those stories that people are familiar with the Wright Brothers. And again, we like to celebrate moments and yes there was a moment when the Wright flyer took off the ground and flew 40 yards for the first time but again you know your whole thesis is there's reasons why it happened and it came from other people it came from other people who'd been experimenting with gliders it came from the fact that they were bicycle builders and understood craft and did it in small steps. So maybe take us through that story. It's a favourite and I never tire of it.

where a man named Samuel Langley got his pilot to try and take off for the first time in a man-powered aircraft. And Langley had designed the whole thing from scratch on his own in secret. Cleverest man in Washington, huge government grant, and it splashed straight into the Potomac River. The pilot was wearing a cork-lined vest. He knew what was going to happen, so he was okay. But the point is, Langley had done it wrong. He thought, I'm the cleverest person in Washington, therefore, I don't need to talk to anyone else. And I'll get everything ready and I'll show the world. Whereas the Wright brothers said, we're not the cleverest people. We're two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. We don't have a degree between us. Our sister has a degree, interestingly, but

we don't. But what we're going to do is we're going to pick the brains of everybody and anybody in the world who's thinking about flight. So there's Lawrence Hargrave in Australia who's thinking about box kites. There's Lillenthal in Germany thinking about gliders. There's Octave Chanute in Chicago who's kind of talking to everybody and anybody. There's people studying birds. There's wind tunnel experiments going on. And they are massively harvesting the insights of other people. And they're then putting them through a relentless process of trial and error in which they don't even try and put an engine on their gliders for four years. You know, they go to North Carolina every summer and they spend months there practicing with gliding, working out things like how do you steer an airplane? How do you turn

right or left? It's not a trivial question, actually. And then they reckon the engine will be the easy bit, actually. Finally, they turn to one of the helpers in their bicycle shop and say, can you build us a lightweight aluminium engine to put on this thing? And it isn't as easy as they thought, but they do eventually get there. And then, as you say, they do a 40-foot hop. And a few days later, they do 100 yards. And then over the next few years, they get up to the point where they can fly five miles around in a circle. It's all much more gradual and much more collaborative than the story we often tell. That's the kind of key thing, collaboration. Actually, there's a quotation in your book, which I love, which I'm going to steal a lot in the

future. Innovation is a collective phenomenon that happens between, not within brains. Yes. Very quotable. I like it. It's good. And it kind of sums up your... Yeah, because when you think about it, even if you are the inventor of something, you don't know how to make the ingredients. You know, you don't know how to make the steel or whatever. So inevitably, you're working with the accumulated knowledge of other people. I shall make you jealous now, and I'll say this not to show off, but I've had one flying lesson in my life. And my flying lesson was at Kitty Hawk in the 1902 glider, the glider they built the year before. So I could really understand kind of exactly that process.

And when I think about the Wright brothers, again, they were not the first in flight, but what they were were the first in controlled flight. So that glider, the 1902 glider, was understanding pitch, roll and yaw, without which you don't get anywhere. Because anyone can fly, but it's like, how do you land? And how do you control? And that's why the Wright brothers, I think, was so revolutionary. They weren't just like chucking a load of money at it. And they understood the other thing, which is trial and error. You try stuff out and you make mistakes and that's how you learn. Yeah. You don't expect to know the answer. You've got to find the answer out from

your experiments. One thing I particularly like about that story is the snottiness of the mainstream media when rumours about what the Wright brothers were doing reached them. There's this wonderful article, I think it was in Scientific American, saying, look, if two bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio, were flying around in circles over a field with an engine on an aeroplane, don't you think we'd have heard about it? I would have heard that, exactly, yeah. It was a replica of the glider, I should point out, actually.

I don't think the 1902 glider actually exists. But crikey, what is amazing, that was 1902, sieges in the 18th century. You know, it's no accident that George Stevenson called one of his first engines the rocket. You know, rockets did exist, albeit not with people on board and not with any control. But actually that trial and error thing. And again, you know, you mentioned Elon Musk earlier on. His whole ethos is about trial and error. I mean, he just blows rockets up all the time, knowing that they're going to fail in order to improve the innovation. I can't think of anyone who does that as publicly

as he does. He's really embraced that idea of like, we're going to send this rocket up and it's going to blow up, but we don't care because we'll learn. Yeah, as long as someone's not on it, of course. As long as someone's not on it. And I guess this comes from your other thing, which is about freedom. You need to have the freedom to be able to do that. I think freedom to fail is really crucial. Governments can't do it. And, you know, you can tell the story of Amazon, the company, as a story of failure after failure. I mean, they got a lot wrong in their early days, and indeed, not so early days. You know, they bought a bunch of dot-com companies that went bust. They diversified into toy manufacturing,

and it all went wrong. They did this, they did that, you know. And Bezos is quite upfront about this. You know, he says, yeah, no, we swung and missed most of the time. And then eventually we would swing and hit. And if you're not swinging enough, then you're not going to do it. There's a lovely quote from Edison, which I like, which is that I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work. And he literally did that, trying to find filaments for light bulbs. 6,000 different types of plant material for the filament of his first which is ridiculous and that i suspect was why he had an edge on swan and lodegan and maxim and all these other people doing light bulbs at the same time was that he was prepared to put in the elbow grease you know

the time the effort to not give up after 4 000 and and say this is good enough, but to keep going to 6,000, as it were. Or rather, he drove his people to do that because he ran a huge team and he drove them pretty hard. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, I suppose we think of Edison and people like Ford as innovators, perhaps more than inventors, because they are the people, you know, Ford didn't design a car, but he designed the production line that made cars affordable, and likewise with Edison and light bulbs. Completely right. I mean, Ford's great innovation was to bring down the price of cars, not to invent them. And there's a story told about Ford, which may or may not be true, which is that after the Model T was out there, he sent his engineers to scrap heaps all over America saying, find me why they failed. And they came back with stories of pistons breaking and big ends breaking and axles breaking and wheels braking and everything but there was one thing called the kingpin which never broke so he said right make that to a slightly inferior

specification well i think he's just saying we're over engineering it we don't need it because the rest of the machine's going to break down before that does yeah so i'm just looking at your book and sort of the things we've been talking about seem to run through everything from the steam engine through to the Hyperloop and whatever. So this is your chapter eight, Innovation Essentials. Innovation is gradual. There must be exceptions to this rule. There must be some kind of like wheels on suitcases, post-it notes.

You either have it or you don't. Yeah. Yeah. See, back to the point about the Wright brothers getting into the air in December 1903. There is a moment, you know, there is a moment when powered flight exists and 10 minutes before it didn't exist. That in a sense is sudden, but of course it's not sudden because we know that there's been all these gradual predecessors. Wheels on suitcases is the story I tell to discuss the issue of whether innovations come later than they should have done. And obviously they can. It must be possible for us to have invented certain

things centuries before we did, but it's surprisingly difficult to think of good examples. And when I looked into the history of wheels on suitcases, I found it doesn't really tell that story because it's not until airports are very large, porters are very scarce, wheels are very light, that it really makes sense to have a wheel on a suitcase rather than to hand your bag to a porter with a cart. Do you see what I mean? I hadn't even thought of that. That's a very interesting idea. The fact that airports expansion would have been the thing that, and presumably having smooth, very, very smooth tiled floors in airports so you can drag them across.

Yeah. But it is true that the first person to put wheels on suitcases went round Samsonite and all these other big suitcase manufacturers and said, look what I've invented. And they all said, nah, not interested. So you must get asked a lot now because you've written a book on innovation and everyone who writes books on innovation gets asked to predict the future. So do you have a long line of people ask you to sort of do a bit of crystal ball reading about what's going to be the next big thing? You know, if it's a process of peaks and troughs and stalls and starts, you know, where are we heading in the future? More computing, less computing, rocket travel, space travel?

Well, the first thing I say is a health warning. Don't believe anything I say about the future. Because one of the things I'm really impressed by is how incredibly difficult it is to predict the future of technology. You know, the search engine is fantastically useful, fantastically obvious in retrospect. Once you've invented the internet, 1990, you're bound to need search engines. They're going to be very profitable. We're off to the races. Nobody saw it coming. Google didn't think they were inventing a search engine. Sergey Brin and Larry Page thought they were cataloging the internet. Google didn't think they were inventing a search engine. Sergey Brin and Larry Page thought they were cataloging the internet. They didn't realize they were going to make money out of it,

et cetera, et cetera. So you get Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, saying in 1998, by 2005, it'll become clear that the internet's impact on the economy is no greater than the fax machines. You get the head of Microsoft saying, Steve Ballmer in 2007, saying there's no chance the iPhone's going to get market share. No chance. So people are really bad at forecasting technology. There's a strange asymmetry about it. What looks obvious looking backwards is not at all obvious looking forwards. And therefore, anything I say about the future of technology should be taken with a very, very large pinch of salt and not believed at all, let alone particularly if you are an investor, and not believed at all, let alone, particularly if you're an investor,

because I don't want you suing me. But I then sometimes go on to say, the one thing, I've touched on it already, is that just because we've had a lot of innovation in one sector in the last 30, 40 years, doesn't mean that sector is going to be the most innovative in the next 30, 40 years. Past performance is no guide to future performance, as they say in the stock market business. And so my example there is the point about 1950. Everybody thinks that transport is changing very fast. Nobody thinks communication is changing very fast. In fact, it's about to swap around. Most of the action is going to be in communication, not in transport. And now I think Moore's Law is running out of room. and now I think Moore's law is running out of room. I think I don't need to replace my cell phone as often as I did.

I only replace it because the battery starts to fail. The latest smart stuff that's digital isn't as interesting to me as it was 10 or 20 years ago. I think we're beginning to see diminishing returns in digital innovation and I suspect AI is going to be a bit disappointing for quite a while. Yes, it's going to do some things brilliantly. It's going to help us enormously and park a car and so on. But I don't think we're going to have driverless cars as quickly as people say. And on the other hand,

I think biotechnology, having achieved disappointingly little over 20 or 30 years, is now starting to outperform. And you're seeing the messenger RNA vaccine platform. You're seeing CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and what that can do for agriculture, but also for cancer treatment. And so I think biotechnology is where the action is going to be in the next 30 or 40 years. You know, I've had a good look at fusion energy.

going to be in the next 30 or 40 years you know i've had a good look at fusion energy i think that's no longer a pipe dream even though it's been disappointing for 100 years i think it is now beginning to solve its problems 20 years it's always 20 years exactly so as i say don't believe any of those predictions they're almost certainly wrong matt thank you so much for joining me today it's such a pleasure to chat and i've thoroughly enjoyed your book and i'm going to hopefully see if you'll come on again to talk about other things as we go on our series thank you so much for joining me today. It's such a pleasure to chat and I've thoroughly enjoyed your book. And I'm going to hopefully see if you'll come on again to talk about other things as we go on our series. Thank you. It's been a real joy to talk to you. Thanks again to Matt Ridley for joining me on this episode. Absolutely fascinating. And if you've enjoyed it, please share it with somebody else who you think also might enjoy it. We've got episodes coming up on the invention of the atomic bomb,

condoms, space suits, breakfast cereals, drones, even the humble alarm clock. So if any of that sounds up your street, subscribe or follow wherever you're listening now. I'll be back every Wednesday and Sunday with brand new episodes. you