This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent,...
There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incand...
One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market...
Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its sma...
If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we...
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These...
Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
Dense urban environments may do away with nature altogether—there are many vibrantly healthy neighborhoods in Paris or Manhattan that lack even a single tree—but they also perform the crucial service...
As Lynn Margulis writes: All the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over th...
As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing natural about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law.
Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.
De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being...