Mark Steyn Quote

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. Technological change came from tinkerers, wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience. John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects. That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.