Lienhard: How Invention Begins

From Scienticity

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John H. Lienhard, How Invention Begins : Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006. 277 pages with notes and index.

This is an admirable book, of the sort I easily admire and would like to have written myself, if only I had the skill. Poised and lyrical prose, with excellent scienticity and hermeneutics, all supporting clear thinking and graceful presentation of a provocative and profound analysis of technological history.

Lienhard's thesis is that big inventions, inventions that change the course of human history, are not the work of the lone genius, the "canonical inventor" (Lienhard's term)who gets the historical credit. Instead, that inventions express a zeitgeist and occur in a cultural matrix with a great deal of supporting technology infrastructure in place. His analysis is not meant as cheap shots to devalue the historical reputation of the canonical inventors, but as an enriching view of historical context that gives the reader a sense of why and how such inventions arrive, and what it is that the inventor and his precursors actually accomplished.

It may be true that not all invention takes place within the framework of communal motivation that we have been describing. But the test of any invention's importance is whether or not others have built upon it. And if an invention does not reflect a groundswell of collective motivation—no matter how clever that invention is or how great its potential—it will either die upon the vine or have to wait in the wings until it reveals the potential for serving such a groundswell.

We need to keep that in mind when we read about invention, for it is so often portrayed as solitary. Invention is, without a doubt, an individual act, but a new thing can neither come into being nor live, breathe, and grow if a framework of people and artifacts does not buoy it up. To understand the history of any successful invention we therefore need to look first for the mutual craving that drove it. That alone is what provided the invention with a supportive community; that alone is what made its emergence possible. [p. 137]

The subjects that Lienhard takes on include: the Wright brothers and the invention of the airplane; James Watt and the invention of the steam engine; the invention of thermodynamics; Gutenberg and the invention of printing; the invention of speed; the invention of artistic perspective; and the invention of learning. The last few are more abstract notions of "invention" but they fit in with Lienhard's argument quite nicely.

The shape and form of the world around us really comes down to a matter of composition and balance. By the mid-fifteenth century, we had swung too far toward seeing the eye of our minds. By the mid-eighteenth century, we had swung too far in the other direction, believing only what the eyes in our head tell us. But nothing lasts. We arrive at moments in human history where the two ways of seeing converge. I think Albrecht Dürer gave us such a moment in Gutenberg's wake. (Perhaps Galileo gave us another such moment in the near wake of Vesalius and Parè.)

But invention begins long before we reach such moments. Dürer was a great creative genius, no doubt. At the same time, he was also one of the products of the invention of printing with alphabetical, movable metal type., Our exploration of invention—of its texture and meaning—thus brings us to ask what the inventor really invents. We cannot just ask what came before the canonical inventor. We also need to ask what the entire arc of invention looks like. For while it is certainly true that the invention does not really begin with "the inventor," neither does it end at the near-mythological figure. [p. 193]

How Invention Begins was exciting to read, brimming with stimulating thoughts and ideas.

-- Notes by JNS