Why good ideas are oft-born as twins

"We often praise ideas for their originality and criticise other ideas for being insufficiently novel. So, what do we make of the fact that most important breakthroughs in sci-tech history—the telegraph, telescope, and transistor; the laws of calculus and gravity—were 'simultaneously invented' by independent people around the same time? (Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray notoriously filed for a telephone patent on the same day.)
    "Which is to say: Some of the most important ideas in the world weren't 'new' when the inventor we credit came up with them.
    "It's even more uncanny than that. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace didn't just independently come up with the basics of evolution. They both cited the exact same essay—Malthus's infamous 'Principle of Population'—as inspiration for thinking about species evolution as a competitive game where unforgiving environments shape genetic survival. As @DavidEpstein writes in today's essay, adapted from his ... new book Inside the Box, the frequency of idea twins in history suggests that once a problem is framed by a generation of thinkers with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost 'wants' to be found."

~ @Derek Thompson summarising David Epstein's essay 'Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original'

"All abstract knowledge depends, for its meaning and validity, on other knowledge that sets the context for it. For example, algebra depends on addition, and calculus depends on algebra. The more complex the knowledge, the more extensive the knowledge that must precede it.
    "One major aspect of the fact that knowledge depends on other knowledge—the aspect most relevant to and most violated in education—is that more abstract knowledge depends on less abstract knowledge. This is the principle of the hierarchy of knowledge."

~ Lisa Van Damme from her article 'The Hierarchy of Knowledge: The Most Neglected Issue in Education'

"Valid concepts [once discovered] function as a 'green light' to induction, permitting [further] generalisations from observed particulars, while invalid concepts block or distort the process."

~ summary of the inductive process given in David Harriman's 2011 book The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics & Philosophy

"[I]nherent in this is that concepts are future-looking. A concept is like a policy or a commitment. It’s like forming a file. ... A file, if you have a filing system, does not only organise and condense data that one already has, it does so on the premise of keeping up with this method of organisation. ... 
    "[T]o form a concept [then] is to institute a policy of applying what one knows from the study of each instance to the study of each other instance, to regard the instances as interchangeable, at least within a certain context, within a certain, you know, varying in degree. And this policy applies to information yet to be discovered, as well as to the information one already has ..."

~ Gregory Salmieri from his 2006 essay 'Objectivist Epistemology in Outline'

Thanksgiving isn't a New Zealand holiday, but giving thanks should be a universal trait.

Robert Green Ingersoll was the nineteenth-century's Christopher Hitchens—a famous and crusading atheist—like Hitchens except Ingersoll was kinder, and not a Trotskyite. And he was full of gratitude. This, here, was just a portion (the final part, starting page 58) ) of his famous 1897 Thanksgiving Sermon [hat tip Jerry Coyne] ...

A Thanksgiving Sermon

by Robert Green Ingersoll

Whom shall we thank? 

Standing here at the close of the 19th century — amid the trophies of thought — the triumphs of genius — here under the flag of the Great Republic — knowing something of the history of man — here on this day that has been set apart for thanksgiving, I most reverently thank the good me,. the good women of the past, I thank the kind fathers, the loving mothers of the savage days.  I thank the father who spoke the first gentle word, the mother who first smiled upon her babe. I thank the first true friend.

I thank the savages who hunted and fished that they and their babes might live. I thank those who cultivated the ground and changed the forests into farms — those who built rude homes and watched the faces of their happy children in the glow of fireside flames — those who domesticated horses, cattle and sheep — those who invented wheels and looms and taught us to spin and weave — those who by cultivation changed wild grasses into wheat and corn, changed bitter things to fruit, and worthless weeds to flowers, that sowed within our souls the seeds of art. 

I thank the poets of the dawn — the tellers of legends — the makers of myths — the singers of joy and grief, of hope and love. I thank the artists who chiseled forms in stone and wrought with light and shade the face of man. I thank the philosophers, the thinkers, who taught us how to use our minds in the great search for truth. 

I thank the astronomers who explored the heavens, told us the secrets of the stars, the glories of the constellations — the geologists who found the story of the world in fossil forms, in memoranda kept in ancient rocks, in lines written by waves, by frost and fire — the anatomists who sought in muscle, nerve and bone for all the mysteries of life — the chemists who unraveled Nature’s work that they might learn her art — the physicians who have laid the hand of science on the brow of pain, the hand whose magic touch restores — the surgeons who have defeated Nature’s self and forced her to preserve the lives of those she laboured to destroy. I thank the discoverers of chloroform and ether, the two angels who give to their beloved sleep, and wrap the throbbing brain in the soft robes of dreams. 

I thank the great inventors — those who gave us movable type and the press, by means of which great thoughts and all discovered facts are made immortal — the inventors of engines, of the great ships, of the railways, the cables and telegraphs. I thank the great mechanics, the workers in iron and steel, in wood and stone. I thank the inventors and makers of the numberless things of use and luxury.

I thank the industrious men, the loving mothers, the useful women. They are the benefactors of our race. The inventor of pins did a thousand times more good than all the popes and cardinals, the bishops and priests — than all the clergymen and parsons, exhorters and theologians that ever lived. The inventor of matches did more for the comfort and convenience of mankind than all the founders of religions and the makers of all creeds — than all malicious monks and selfish saints.

I thank the honest men and women who have expressed their sincere thoughts, who have been true to themselves and have preserved the veracity of their souls.

I thank the thinkers of Greece and Rome. Zeno and Epicurus, Cicero and Lucretius. I thank Bruno, the bravest, and Spinoza, the subtlest of men.

I thank Voltaire, whose thought lighted a flame in the brain of man, unlocked the doors of superstition’s cells and gave liberty to many millions of his fellow-men. Voltaire — a name that sheds light. Voltaire — a star that superstition’s darkness cannot quench.

I thank the great poets — the dramatists. I thank Homer and Aeschylus, and I thank Shakespeare above them all. I thank Burns for the heart-throbs he changed into songs. for his lyrics of flame. I thank Shelley for his Skylark, Keats for his Grecian Urn and Byron for his Prisoner of Chillon. I thank the great novelists. I thank the great sculptors. I thank the unknown man who moulded and chiseled the Venus de Milo. I thank the great painters. I thank Rembrandt and Corot. I thank all who have adorned, enriched and ennobled life — all who have created the great, the noble, the heroic and artistic ideals.

I thank the statesmen who have preserved the rights of man. I thank Paine whose genius sowed the seeds of independence in the hearts of ’76. I thank Jefferson whose mighty words for liberty have made the circuit of the globe. I thank the founders, the defenders, the saviors of the Republic. I thank Ericsson, the greatest mechanic of his century, for the monitor. I thank Lincoln for the Proclamation. I thank Grant for his victories and the vast host that fought for the right, — for the freedom of man. I thank them all — the living and the dead.

I thank the great scientists — those who have reached the foundation, the bed-rock — who have built upon facts — the great scientists, in whose presence theologians look silly and feel malicious.

The scientists never persecuted, never imprisoned their fellow-men. They forged no chains, built no dungeons, erected no scaffolds — tore no flesh with red hot pincers — dislocated no joints on racks, crushed no hones in iron boots — extinguished no eyes — tore out no tongues and lighted no fagots. They did not pretend to be inspired — did not claim to be prophets or saints or to have been born again. They were only intelligent and honest men. They did not appeal to force or fear. They did not regard men as slaves to be ruled by torture, by lash and chain, nor as children to be cheated with illusions, rocked in the cradle of an idiot creed and soothed by a lullaby of lies.

They did not wound — they healed. They did not kill — they lengthened life. They did not enslave — they broke the chains and made men free. They sowed the seeds of knowledge, and many millions have reaped, are reaping, and will reap the harvest: of joy.

I thank Humboldt and Helmholtz and Haeckel and Buchner. I thank Lamarck and Darwin — Darwin who revolutionized the thought of the intellectual world. I thank Huxley and Spencer. I thank the scientists one and all.

I thank the heroes, the destroyers of prejudice and fear — the dethroners of savage gods — the extinguishers of hate’s eternal fire — the heroes, the breakers of chains — the founders of free states — the makers of just laws — the heroes who fought and fell on countless fields — the heroes whose dungeons became shrines — the heroes whose blood made scaffolds sacred — the heroes, the apostles of reason, the disciples of truth, the soldiers of freedom — the heroes who held high the holy torch and filled the world with light.

With all my heart I thank them all.

* * * * 

"Ideas, especially philosophical ones, are fundamental to economic growth."

“The weaker the government, the better it is for innovation.”

~ Joel Mokyr

"Today, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University), Philippe Aghion (London School of Economics), and Peter Howitt (Brown University) “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth.”1 This follows a recent trend for the Committee to award to economics focused on economic growth, following Acemoglou, Johnson, and Robinson in 2024 and Kremer, Duflo, and Banerjee in 2019...

"One of the big mysteries of human history is the so-called 'hockey-stick of prosperity.' That is, the fact that, for much of human history, standards of living were virtually unchanged. Very little separated the Roman citizen in 1AD from the British citizen in 1700. But, starting in the 1700s, standards of living skyrocketed. ...

"Enter Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt. Collectively, their work helped explain why this growth happened, why it happened where it did, and how it is sustainable. ...

"All three winners explain economic growth through technology and culture (broadly defined). ... I highly recommend the Nobel Committee’s overview of their contributions."

~ Jon Murphy from his post '2025 Nobel: Growth Through Technology and Culture'

"Hurrah! Joel Mokyr has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. One of the greatest economic historians of our time. If you haven’t read him yet, start with 'The Lever of Riches,' 'The Gifts of Athena,' 'A Culture of Growth,' and 'An Enlightened Economy'."

~ Johan Norberg

"Mokyr's key insight is that one needs more than inventions that work—one needs a culture of knowledge-seeking, innovation, progress.

"Note the abstract from his now-classic 2005 paper [below], pointing us from the Industrial Revolution to the broader Enlightenment culture within which it arose—and to the earlier Baconian philosophical revolution.

"Ideas, especially philosophical ones, are fundamental to economic growth."

~ Stephen Hicks on the Nobel award

"Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of the American economy. Mokyr rejects the claims that the we are entering an area of stagnation or permanently lower economic growth. He argues that measured growth understates the impact on human welfare. Many of the most important discoveries are new products that are often poorly measured and not reflected in measures such as gross domestic product or income.

"The conversation closes with a discussion of the downsides of technology and why Mokyr remains optimistic about the future."

~ conversation with Joel Mokyr at EconLog

'Degrowth' says we're running out of land to feed everyone.

 Norman Borlaug says "no."

"Thanks to improved farming techniques, fertiliser, irrigation, genetic modification, and innovators like Norman Borlaug, humanity has massively reduced the amount of land required to feed a person."

More life-giving trends here.

What's humanity's greatest ever invention?

What's humanity's greatest invention? Probably voluntary exchange between free people ...

It wasn't a “Gilded Age” of "Robber Barons." It was The Inventive Period

The so-called “Gilded Age” of "Robber Barons" should be better named, says Andrew Bernstein in this guest post. It should be known as the Inventive Period of Capitalism.

The Inventive Period

by Andrew Bernstein

A recent issue of American Heritage magazine, devoted to analysing important cultural issues in U.S. history, contains an article that provides ample clues to the true nature of late nineteenth-century America. The piece, “People of Progress,” features the greatest innovators of the twentieth century, and takes as its point of departure Christian Schussele’s famed 1862 painting, “Men of Progress,” a depiction of 19 great American inventors and creative thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Schussele’s painting portrays such men as Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884), the inventor and manufacturer of the reaping machine and other agricultural equipment; Charles Goodyear (1800-1860), who created the vulcanization process that made rubber useful; Samuel Colt (1814-1862), the gun inventor and manufacturer; Peter Cooper (1791-1883), the builder of the first American steam locomotive; Samuel Morse (1791-1872), the innovative thinker responsible for both the electric telegraph and the Morse Code; William Morton (1819-1868), the dentist who co-discovered ether’s use as an anesthetic; and Elias Howe (1819-1867), inventor of the sewing machine. These, as well as 12 other equally accomplished thinkers and inventors, form the subject of Schussele’s masterpiece.

The administrators of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (founded by industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper in 18591) recently commissioned one of its leading graduates, the artist Edward Sorel, to paint a sequel to Schussele’s work—a portrait of 20 innovative Americans who changed the world in the twentieth century. Sorel, with assistance from the editors of American Heritage and American Heritage of Invention & Technology, chose the subjects. And not surprisingly, some of the geniuses depicted started their brilliant careers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Anti-capitalist historians regularly refer to this late-nineteenth-century era as “the Gilded Age” and deride its great industrialists as “Robber Barons.” They claim that its extensive industrial development was achieved by means essentially tawdry and unprincipled. They are profoundly mistaken and have failed to identify the essence of the era. It must be known as the Inventive Period.

In Schussele’s painting, Benjamin Franklin looks down on those assembled as both inspiration and presiding genius. Sorel grants this honor to Thomas Edison. Edison (1847-1931) is the exemplar of his age. He is widely known as the inventor of the electrical lighting system, the phonograph, the electric generator, and the motion-picture projector. He also later coordinated movies with phonographic sound to create the world’s first multi-media presentation. But Edison is by no means alone in exemplifying the scientific/technological genius of the period. Sorel’s portrait projects numerous other great minds.

Among them are George Washington Carver (1864-1943), the brilliant black American botanist and agronomist, who developed a new type of cotton, Carver’s Hybrid. Born a slave, he is most famous for developing sweet potatoes and peanuts as leading crops, but he also invented hundreds of plant-based products, taught methods of soil improvement and, by means of his discoveries, induced southern farmers to grow crops other than cotton. Also included is Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923), the German immigrant who went to work for General Electric as its first director of research and development and in the 1890s pioneered the understanding of electrical transmission.

Neglected Geniuses

Since Schussele’s portrait concentrates on the early nineteenth century and Sorel’s on the twentieth, there are many great late-nineteenth-century thinkers who are included in neither painting. Here we can cite merely a few. One is George Eastman (1854-1932), who in 1884 patented the first film in roll form to prove practical. In 1888 he revolutionized photography by perfecting his Kodak camera, and in 1892 established the Eastman-Kodak Company, one of the first to mass-produce standardized photographic equipment. Another is Cyrus W. Field (1819-1892), an entrepreneur whose interest in transoceanic telegraphy led to the completion in 1866 of the transatlantic cable. Field later was instrumental in laying the cable that linked the United States to Australia and Asia by way of Hawaii.

The advances in architecture wrought by William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907) and Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) must not be overlooked. Jenney, an engineer in the Union Army during the Civil War, settled in Chicago and opened an architectural office. He pioneered the use of iron-frame construction for large buildings, which he first employed in the Home Insurance Company Building in 1885. His revolutionary method of curtain-wall construction is still used today and earned him the title of “father of the skyscraper.” Sullivan apprenticed with Jenney early in his career. Later, it was his designs for steel-frame buildings that resulted in the establishment of the skyscraper as a distinctively American type of building.

George Westinghouse (1846-1914) introduced numerous inventions in various fields, but concentrated on the railroad industry. Before the age of 20, he created the “railroad frog,” an invention that permitted trains to switch tracks. His most famous advance was the air brake, invented around 1866, which became a standard feature on all trains. Westinghouse developed hundreds of innovations, acquired more than 400 patents and, together with the Croatian immigrant Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), pioneered the use of alternating current (AC) power in the United States. Tesla invented the AC induction generator in the 1880s, the first practical motor powered by alternating current. He sold the patent to Westinghouse, who put it to commercial use in the Niagara Falls power project. Westinghouse and Tesla demonstrated that alternating current was able to generate electrical power over great distances more economically than the direct current favoured by Edison.

John Roebling (1806-1869), a German immigrant, pioneered the construction of suspension bridges in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. He demonstrated the practicality of using steel cables in bridge construction—and today, early in the 21st century, several of his bridges still stand, including the famed Brooklyn Bridge in New York, constructed in the 1870s. Another great creator, largely forgotten today, is the U.S. Army surgeon and bacteriologist Walter Reed (1851-1902). In the 1890s, Reed’s investigations contributed greatly to the understanding of typhoid fever, leading to the control and prevention of epidemics of the disease. In 1900 Reed demonstrated that the yellow-fever virus was transmitted by the bite of the mosquito Aedes aegypti. By exterminating the mosquitoes, the disease was virtually wiped out.

A great thinker from the Inventive Period who is widely remembered is the Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). In 1874, his work on the multiple telegraph gave him the idea for the telephone. Experiments with his research assistant, Thomas Watson, proved successful on March 10, 1876. Later that year, Bell demonstrated the telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, an event leading to the organization of the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell’s other inventions include the audiometer, a device for measuring hearing acuity and, later in life, the aileron and other aeronautical advances.

Space does not permit even the mention of all the inventors, entrepreneurs, and groundbreaking industrialists who flourished during the period. The achievements of Frank Julian Sprague (1857-1934), for example, are no longer remembered. Sprague, a brilliant electrical engineer who graduated from Annapolis and worked for Edison, electrified Richmond’s trolley system in 1888. He demonstrated that electricity was cheap, and that it could be used on both surface and elevated cars. In 1890 about 15 percent of America’s urban transit mileage was electrified; by 1902, 97 percent.

On the eve of the twentieth century America’s technological advances were only beginning. On the morning of June 4, 1896, Henry Ford (1863-1947) battered down the brick wall of his rented garage with an ax and drove out his first car. Others, of course, had already built and run cars, but Ford began the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and made the automobile a commercial reality. Soon millions of Americans were driving cars. That same year, Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, who were self-educated regarding the principles of aeronautical engineering, accomplished the first controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Throughout the 1890s, the Wrights had been studying aeronautics and experimenting with flying devices. Both the automotive and aviation ages dawned in early twentieth-century America as a direct outgrowth of the achievements of the late nineteenth. (Ford and the Wright brothers are included in Sorel’s painting.)

The Underlying Factor

What underlying factor was responsible for this unprecedented outpouring of innovations, inventions, advances, and new products? The answer should be obvious, but unfortunately, to many historians it is not. It was the political and economic freedom of the capitalist system that enabled these inventor-entrepreneurs to flourish.

The late nineteenth century (until the proliferation of trust-busting and government controls in the early twentieth century) was the freest period of American history. The leading economists, professors, legal theorists, and judges upheld the principles of individual rights, limited government, economic freedom, and profit-making. Economists such as Amasa Walker, Arthur Latham Perry, and Francis Bowen wrote the leading economics textbooks of the day. Their works—Science of Wealth, Elements of Political Economy, and American Political Economy, respectively—championed the ability of the free market to create wealth and upward economic mobility.2 William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), the leading American social scientist of the late nineteenth century, wrote of “The Forgotten Man,” the honest labourer who supported himself by productive work. The principle of the Forgotten Man is that he needs the liberty of the American system if he is to flourish. He is the one always victimised by the socialists’ schemes to redistribute the income earned by private individuals.3

The law writers and legal philosophers of the day shared the same commitment to limited government. The most prominent, Thomas Cooley and Christopher Tiedeman, wrote their major works in the second half of the nineteenth century. The upshot of both Cooley’s A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Powers of the American Union (1868) and Tiedeman’s A Treatise on the Limitations of the Police Powers of the States(1886) was the defense of property rights.4

In practice, most American judges of the period agreed with the individualistic principles of the country’s leading legal philosophers. After the Civil War, American courts generally presumed to be unconstitutional any laws restricting property rights and the rights of both businessmen and workers to set the terms of labor that they deemed best. As one example, the New York State Court of Appeals in 1885 struck down legislation seeking to limit the hours of industrial employment, ruling that such a law violated the rights of both worker and employer to engage in a voluntary transaction.

Additionally, the American courts of the late nineteenth century repeatedly placed severe limitations on the government’s power to tax and to subsidize business ventures. The courts generally gave strong support to the capitalist principle that productive enterprise was to be privately funded, owned, and operated. One representative ruling by a Missouri court in 1898 found against governmental paternalism, whether state or federal, and proclaimed that individuals know best how to conduct their own business and personal affairs.5

In this era, the U.S. Supreme Court gradually came to be the great defender of an individual’s right to property, freedom of contract, and economic liberty. For example, Stephen J. Field (brother of Cyrus Field), for many years a distinguished Justice of the high court, issued pro-freedom dissenting opinions in such famous disputes as the Slaughter-House cases (1873) and Munn v. Illinois (1877), holding that the government could prevent neither employers nor workers from entering fields of their own choosing or violate the right of individuals to the full use and disposal of their property. The majority opinion at this time was that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the rights of the recently freed slaves only and that there was nothing in it to prevent the states from interfering in business activities. But by the mid-1880s, after the San Mateo case (1882) and the Santa Clara case (1886), Justice Field prevailed. Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite, in an oral statement, spoke for a unanimous bench in 1886, proclaiming that all the justices “understood and accepted the fact that corporations were persons within the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The right of individuals to work and to use their own labor and property as they saw fit now came under the legal protection of the Supreme Court.6

Religion and Capitalism

Religious leaders of the period characteristically upheld the virtues of work, frugality, sobriety, and wealth earned through honest effort. The weekly religious periodical The Independent, edited for a while by the noted Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), defended the free market as the means by which both capitalists and workers would achieve material gain. For almost four decades Beecher preached from his influential Brooklyn pulpit the ability of hard-working individuals to rise economically in the capitalist system.7

The intellectual, cultural and political climate of the country upheld freedom, limited government, and property rights in this era. The economic results are not surprising. The most innovative and creative minds were free to develop new products and methods, to start their own companies, to bring their innovations to the marketplace, to convince consumers that the new products were superior to the old and, in time, to earn fortunes. There were few government bureaucrats and regulators to prohibit their activities, restrict their output, dictate working conditions, or limit their market share. “The first condition of this proliferation was that the innovations did not require the assent of governmental . . . authorities.”8

Most of the innovators of the Inventive Period were entrepreneurs who sought and made wealth by virtue of their creative work. Edison retired with a net worth of $12 million, an enormous sum in those days. His inventions were profit-driven. “Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory was conceived to bring scientific knowledge to bear on industrial innovation . . . . Its inventions were goals chosen with a careful eye to their marketability.”9

Such instances were numerous during the Inventive Period. Eastman, Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric Company), and Ford are all examples of innovator-entrepreneurs who developed their new products into profitable business ventures. Willis Carrier (1876-1950) invented the air conditioner in 1902, held more than 80 patents by the 1940s, and founded the manufacturing firm that bears his name. (He also made Sorel’s painting.) Bell’s most famous invention led, of course, to the founding of the Bell Telephone Company. Roebling made a fortune from his wire-manufacturing company, as did McCormick from his firm’s producing the reaping machine and other farm equipment. Colt was an entrepreneur who opened his own plant, Colt Patent Arms, in 1855. He pioneered advanced manufacturing methods such as the production line and the use of interchangeable parts, making his company the largest private armory in the world. Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875) wanted a commercially practical sewing machine and brought together several related patents to create his immensely popular product. By 1860, he was the largest manufacturer of sewing machines in the world. A business innovator, Singer began such practices as installment buying, advertising campaigns, and service with sales.

Because of the climate of political and economic freedom during the Inventive Period, America’s entrepreneurs were able to revolutionise the fields of heavy industry on which general prosperity depended. Between 1860 and 1900, American output of bituminous coal increased by 2,260 percent, crude petroleum by 9,060 percent, steel by 10,190 percent, and other industries increased by similar amounts.10 Industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) and John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) built Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil into enormously productive concerns that flooded the country with steel and oil products. In the 1880s and 1890s, the great railroad man James J. Hill (1838-1916) constructed the Great Northern Railroad with only private funds to the immense betterment of people in the northern plains and northwest states. It goes without saying that Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Hill earned great wealth.

The lesson of the Inventive Period can be applied today. Political and economic freedom will lead to widespread innovation. This principle can already be seen in the computer industry, in which the relative absence of government regulation has enabled such innovators as Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and others to create an information revolution, and to earn fortunes in the process.

To defend freedom against the distortions of the anti-capitalist historians it is important to reject the inaccurate and opprobrious title of “the Gilded Age” for the late nineteenth century. We must recognise and celebrate the true nature of the era.

It was the Inventive Period.

Notes

See www.cooper.edu/engineering/chemechem/general/cooper.html.
Louis M. Hacker, The World of Andrew Carnegie, 1865-1901 (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1968), pp. 68-73.
Ibid., pp. 81-85.
Ibid., pp. 86-92.
Ibid., pp. 95-96.
Ibid., pp. 98-107.
Ibid., pp. 74-80.
Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 265.
Ibid., p. 250.
Hacker, p. xxxi

* * * * 

Andrew Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the City University of New York. He lectures all over the world. His books include The Capitalist Manifesto, American Racism: Its Decline, Its Baleful Resurgence, and Our Looming Race War, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters, and his newly-released (and highly recommended) collection of essays Aristotle Versus Religion.

This post previously appeared at the Foundation for Economic Education.

Innovation

"One does not get a jet engine by improving the propeller. One does not breed horses until they give birth to a car. Telephones did not come from research on mail. Where on earth did the inspiration for the transistor and these other 'leaps' of innovation come from to begin with?"

~ Robert Rinehart, from his otherwise un-recommendable article 'Paradigm Shifts'

How your cooking teaches you about progress

Kitchen by Johnny Grey Studios

"THERE'S A STORY TOLD about kitchens since the start of the 20th century: between 1900 and 1960, almost everything about them changed, but since 1960, virtually nothing has. The story is meant to illustrate a wider point about the slowdown in physical technology that seems to have taken place in other walks of life — not just how we eat, but how we transport people and build things.

    "There is a lot of truth to this story ... But it misses another type of technological change that did happen and which might be even more important in determining the quality and deliciousness of the food we eat. ... The kitchen of 2020 looks mostly the same as that of 1960. But what we do in it has changed dramatically, almost entirely for the better—due to a culture of culinary innovation....

    "By 1960, home cooks were no longer surrounded by the noxious fumes of open flames and instead had chilled or canned ingredients and electric tools to prepare them.
    "These advances set the stage for a new way to cook. But that new way to cook depended on more than cooks and their new technologies alone; it required a change in goals and horizons. ...

    "Joel Mokyr, in A Culture of Growth, argues that innovation can be stifled by a fear of 'disrespecting the past' or an excessive adherence to tradition. In the kitchen, ... new cookbooks made it possible for cooks to replicate traditional recipes at home. But focus tended to be on how to best replicate those recipes that were born in professional kitchens, not to figure out what the home was best suited for. By the 1980s, a new idea began to emerge: that home cooks could even best restaurants if guided by a scientific approach....
    "[Cookbooks based on modern scientific home cooking] brought food science out of 'the realms of industrial production and laboratories' and into the home. Armed with [these], recipe writers, and sometimes even home cooks themselves, began to wonder if they could improve on traditional techniques instead of just copying them. After all, weren’t those fancy chefs we used to admire just stubbornly following tradition?
    "So began an explosion of popular food science. ...

"New publications began to popularise food science in the home for those unwilling to dig through [tomes like] 'On Food and Cooking.' 'Cooks Illustrated,' which launched in 1993, created recipes and techniques specialised for home cooks in their test kitchen. 'Serious Eats' joined it in 2006, giving each recipe a 'why it works' section to explain its food-scientific logic. Alton Brown’s 'Good Eats' premiered on the Food Network in 1999 and truly took the food science approach to the masses, with Brown as a funny and entertaining guide through the world of science and cooking.
    "By the 2000s, food science–oriented outlets were debunking dozens of common myths with the new approach. Pasta doesn’t need to be boiled in loads of water. That water doesn’t need to be 'salty as the sea' either. Sea water is about 3.5% salt; 1% is probably plenty. And it doesn’t matter whether the salt is added before or after the water comes to a boil (both sides had proponents). You don’t need to rest steaks before you cook them. Nor do you need to worry about just flipping steak once. Searing doesn’t 'lock in juices,' either, it creates the maillard reaction, and you can do it either before or after roasting a piece of meat for the same effect. Even the practice of marinating itself was called into question. The list goes on.
    "It’s not just little tips and tricks either. Food science created new recipes, and indeed whole new categories of recipes. Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey’s 'no-knead bread' (published in 2006) is an example of this new attitude in action: we don’t need to follow traditional bakers’ three-day sourdough recipes; we can make delicious bread overnight with almost no work ...

"IT'S A FAMILIAR PATTERN in how innovation seems to work. The central thesis of Anton Howes’s 'Arts and Minds,' a history of the Royal Society of Arts, is that the Industrial Revolution was driven by a new 'ideology of innovation.' This ideology held that everything could be improved by careful tinkering and experimentation. And this ideology spread from person to person. People become more inclined to experiment when they see others doing it and succeeding. Copying, not innovating, is the basic human skill.
    "Home cooking culture is now defined by this obsessive tinkering and experimenting. ...

"So kitchens might not have changed their outward appearance much in the last 60 years, but the cooking that takes place in them has been transformed. It’s transformed because of what home cooks have access to: the recipes, techniques, knowledge, and know-how for cooking food better. We’ve built up a vast array of knowledge and technique well tailored to the home, ranging across cuisines, styles, and goals. It’s what Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake call intangible capital, all the stuff in the production process we don’t see: our systems, our software, our skills, our techniques. We can’t touch this intangible capital, so it’s easy to underrate. But a new method for making bread overnight can be just as useful as a new machine that does it."

~ Nick Whitaker, from his article 'Better Eats'

“The man who manufactured weather.”

"The heat wave of 1901 was brutal across the eastern United States, setting some records that persist to this day. One of these occurred in St. Louis were, according to a recent retrospective in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 'For nearly seven weeks, temperatures were above 90 on all but three days. It was 100 or hotter on 15 days, including a terrible four-day run of at least 106.”
    "At a time when the electric ceiling fan was a new invention, there was little hope for relief. To mitigate the suffering, the Post-Dispatch raised funds from its readers to distribute ice to the poor from refrigeration plants at the city’s breweries. Still, hundreds died in St. Louis. It is estimated that 9,500 people died of the heat across the country. Crops withered, and factories closed to prevent workers from collapsing.
    "There is a lot of talk about the summer of 2023 being unusually hot due to global warming, though it is also thanks to the naturally recurring 'El Niño' weather pattern. But as the heat wave of 1901 indicates, dangerously hot summers are an old problem, particularly in the American South. And one man gave us the solution, making civilized life in the summer possible: Willis Carrier, the inventor of modern air-conditioning...
    
"He patented his device in 1906 and made continual improvements to its mechanical operation.
    "But he went beyond that, developing a whole sub-science to support his discoveries. In 1911, he presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers his paper, 'Rational Psychrometric Formulae,' which described the relationships of temperature, humidity, relative humidity and dew-point that provide the theoretical basis for air-conditioning. 'Psychrometrics' comes from the Ancient Greek word for 'cold': 'psuchron.' You could call it the science of comfort.
    "In 1915, Carrier partnered with a group of young engineers to found the Carrier Engineering Corporation devoted to manufacturing and improving air-conditioning systems.
    "Carrier’s achievement made him, as I put it, 'the man who manufactured weather'."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'The Man Who Manufactured Weather'

Technology for the win

"At the start of the 20th century, people not having enough food was a major problem (much more so than today).
    "Fritz Haber proposed a technological solution.

    "Vladimir Lenin proposed a political solution. 

    "Compare and contrast the results."

~ Peter Hague, starting a Twitter conversation... 

NB: Spelling corrected, link added 

Mankind's real benefactors

"It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the [environmentalists at] the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground not [bureaucrats at] the Federal Aviation Administration.
    "It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of [people] by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2010 column 'The Real Public Service'

There’s No Natural ‘Carrying Capacity’ for the Human Population

 

You may assume that this planet has a natural "carrying capacity" beyond which the human population just cannot go. Sounds reasonable, right? There are sonly so many billions the planet can support, right? Wrong, says Don Boudreaux in this guest post: for humans left free to produce, the planet has no natural carrying capacity. The reason, he explains, is that the planet's ultimate resource is the human mind ...

There’s No Natural ‘Carrying Capacity’ for the Human Population: An Essay Inspired by the Happy News that the Human Population Has Reached Eight Billion

by Don Boudreaux

The late, great Julian Simon spent decades battling intellectually against biologists and zoologists who were convinced that human population growth, if governments did not hold it in check with draconian measures, would spell doom for multitudes of humans. (I might as well have used the present tense above, because many of the scientists with whom Simon did battle, including the most prominent, Paul Ehrlich, are still alive.) These students of animal development and behaviour insist that every species inhabits an environment with a natural “carrying capacity.” If the population of a species grows in number beyond the limits of its environment’s carrying capacity, the death rate of members of that species will rise, while its members’ birth rate fall, because species members will confront unusual difficulty gaining access to food, water, and shelter. The species’ population is thus confined to the limits of its environment’s carrying capacity by the brutality of uncaring nature.

Simon argued that humans, at least those of us who live in free societies, are a categorically different sort of species. He observed that to the extent to which we, members of the human species, inhabit a social environment characterised by free and innovative markets, our species does not inhabit a natural environment with a finite carrying capacity. Simon’s argument starts with the fact that we humans are uniquely enterprising and innovative. When this fact combines with the further reality that market prices are signals about which specific resources are becoming more scarce relative to other resources, human entrepreneurship and creativity are incited to discover ways both to make currently known stocks of scarce resources go further and, more importantly, to discover either new sources of those resources or more abundant substitutes. When we succeed in these endeavours, as we now normally do, we literally produce more resources.

Simon’s explanation is revolutionary. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, we don’t obtain resources from an existing stock created for us by nature, leaving fewer resources available for use tomorrow each time we withdraw some amount for our use today. Instead, resources are ultimately fruits of the human mind and effort. And so we produce more petroleum, more tungsten, more copper, more bauxite in the same way that, when our demand for apple pies or Apple laptops increases, we produce more apple pies and Apple laptops.

For humans in market economies, therefore, the environment has no natural ‘carrying capacity.’

As Simon tirelessly documented, his account of humans’ relationship with the natural environment is amply confirmed by history, especially by modern history. Over the past few centuries the human population has grown remarkably – earlier this month it hit eight billion. At the same time there’s also been astounding growth in humans’ standard of living. Were there a natural carrying capacity on earth for the human population, history offers no evidence of it. Quite the contrary.

Despite the economic soundness of his argument and its consistency with the data – and despite his famous victory in a 1980 wager with Ehrlich on whether or not a bundle of five natural resources would become more scarce over the course of a decade – Simon’s argument left many biologists and zoologists unconvinced. And biologists and zoologists aren’t alone. Pick at random a professor, student, news reporter, or blogger and ask him if we humans are today threatening our long-term survival by over-using resources. Chances are high that the answer you’ll get is an unhesitating yes. You’ll likely be further told that our only hope of avoiding the terrible fate of billions of us being done in by natural forces is for us, especially those of us in rich countries, to dramatically reduce our consumption.

There is, I suppose, something gratifying in counselling personal sacrifice. Sacrifice often is admirable and worthwhile, as when you sacrifice your time to help a neighbour in distress, or sacrifice your comfort today in order to undergo painful medical treatments that will better ensure that you’ll survive past tomorrow. But sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake is, at best, pointless. Costs are incurred in exchange for no benefits....

If Simon is correct, green-inspired efforts to encourage or compel those of us in market economies to reduce our consumption today yield no benefits. Such efforts conserve no resources; they simply result in our producing fewer resources, an outcome that is utterly useless. The uselessness of this outcome lies in the reality that whenever we “need” new resources, we can produce these.

Was Simon naively pollyannaish? Has history’s apparent confirmation of his thesis simply been a matter of good luck? No.

Consider a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal – an essay whose title speaks volumes: “One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Clean Fuel.” The authors, Nick Stork and Joe Malchow, report very Simonesque news:

In a lesson about how the energy transition is likely to play out, landfill operators’ ability to make use of excess gas has exploded in recent years. New facilities are being created to convert trash into renewable natural gas, molecularly identical to the gas that heats homes. The process cuts down greenhouse-gas emissions while creating a low-carbon energy source…

The potential has spurred major sanitation and energy companies to break into this new market. This year Houston’s Waste Management Corp. announced an $825 million investment to boost renewable natural-gas capture. In October the British company BP agreed to acquire Archaea Energy (which one of us founded and the other invested in), a company that designs, builds and operates RNG plants in the U.S. to convert waste emissions. Archaea produces 6,000 oil-equivalent barrels a day through 13 RNG facilities with plans to construct 88 more to serve rising demand. Our only input is trash.

Quiet, private innovation in gas processing made this possible. Archaea sells largely to voluntary buyers who wish to lock in clean gas at fair prices. RNG still comes at a premium compared with other fuel sources, but driving down the cost of producing RNG will mean more of it is available to buyers on attractive terms. We are working to lower the price of RNG by creating standardized and modular production facilities with decreased operating costs, higher processing efficiency, and uptime rates that start above 90 percent.

Energy – indeed, low-carbon energy – from trash!

If turning trash into energy that’s transmissible over long distances nevertheless sounds either fanciful or likely insignificant in its long-term impact, imagine yourself as a native American roaming 600 years ago through the woodlands of what is today western Pennsylvania. You’re thirsty and bend down to enjoy a drink of water from a brook, only to discover that the water at that spot is undrinkable because it’s polluted with a smelly, oily, noxious substance oozing out a few feet upstream. How plausible would this You of 600 years ago have found a prediction that the icky stuff that pollutes your drinking water would, in just a few centuries, be a much-sought-after ‘natural’ resource that powers much of humanity’s activities?

Julian Simon died almost twenty-five years ago, just shy of his 66th birthday. Were he still alive today, he would surely celebrate our population of eight billion and remind anyone who would listen that, far from pushing humans closer to the earth’s carrying capacity, the creative potential of those eight billion human minds will further expand our access to resources. We need only to allow this creativity to operate freely.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; a Mercatus Center Board Member; and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He is the author of the books The Essential Hayek, Globalization, Hypocrites and Half-Wits, and his articles appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, US News & World Report as well as numerous scholarly journals. He writes a blog called Cafe Hayek and a regular column on economics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Boudreaux earned a PhD in economics from Auburn University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.

This post originally appeared at the AIER blog.

*Who* deserves better of mankind, and does more essential service to his country, than do the whole race of politicians?

"Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than do the whole race of politicians."
          ~ Jonathan Swift, from his Gulliver's Travels

Hat tip Johan Norberg, who points out, in his new(ish) book Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, that "a hundred and fifty years ago it took twenty-five men all day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain. With a modern combine harvester, a single person can do it in six minutes." I wonder how many of you ever pause to give thanks to Hiram Moore, Alfredo Rotania, Hugh Victor Mackay, George Stockton Berry, and the Baldwin Brothers.

The source of all invention ...

"All the inventions of man have individualism as their end, because they spring from the individual function of intelligence, which is the creative and productive source."

          ~ Isabel Paterson, from her book The God of the Machine

Genius(es)

"It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader.
    "Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found [new things to make, new] ways to make industry more productive, and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about."

          ~ Thomas Sowell, from his book Wealth, Poverty & Politics

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"Whoever could make two ears of corn ... to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind ... than do the whole race of politicians." #QotD

"Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than do the whole race of politicians." 

          ~ Jonathan Swift, from his Gulliver's Travels

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Uplift Friday: How Innovation Works

Difficult times need uplifting conversation. Like this ...

Consider: No matter how bad things are, we still live in amazing times -- so amazing that, even though we're all locked up, we can still watch a great interview with a fellow in a closet in the north of England!

Enjoy the conversation: The Rational Optimist talks about How Innovation Works:

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Thank you, Thomas Edison

Adam Mossoff reminds us it's a good time to raise a glass to the great inventor whose new ideas changed lives:

Today is Thomas Edison's birthday! With his patented innovations, he contributed to massive transformation in human life. Celebrate by turning on a light, listen to recorded music, watch a movie, talk on telephone; just a few of the technologies he invented or perfected.

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Johannes Gutenberg's information revolution holds many lessons for today

 

If history is a battle of ideas, then the man most responsible for allowing ideas to be widely spread must be among history’s greatest heroes.
Lawrence Ludlow examines that man in this guest post – and argues there are still important lessons to learn from his story about innovation, immigration and freedom of information.

In a previous post some years ago, ‘NASA, the Aerospace Welfare Queen,’ I explored what happens when technology is grafted on to big-government militarism and the bread-and-circuses mentality of the state. The result? The kind of scientific 'achievement' described by Ayn Rand as Project X in her novel Atlas Shrugged. Not very inspiring. But this post will be uplifting. It will focus on a true benefactor of mankind, Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of printing with moveable metal type. His innovative application of printing technologies was not only a showcase example of market entrepreneurialism, but a greater source of benefit to mankind than state-sponsored technologies can ever hope to be. His is a story not only of invention and innovation, but of immigration, opposition to politically connected interests, and freedom of information.

Remember the Millennium?

Nearly ten years ago – in time for the millennium celebrations – Johann Gutenberg (ca. 1400-1468) was singled out as the greatest inventor of the past 1,000 years by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Life rated his printing of the Bible as the top event of that time period. In addition, the Exlibris news and discussion group (University of California at Berkeley) dubbed him Man of the Millennium.

There were good reasons to celebrate Gutenberg's innovation – not to mention subsequent related breakthroughs such as (1) offset printing, which transferred images from page-size plates onto paper beginning in 1904, (2) digital printing, which developed in the 1980s, and (3) web-page publication, which developed in the 1990s and was the result of a decision (in 1988) to end the 30-year stranglehold of the U.S. government on Internet development.

And while some may argue that the origins of the Internet lie in the government-sponsored ARPANET, the ARPANET is yet another example of state-sponsored Frankenstein technology – a relative dead-end that did not yield significant benefits until it was released from its state-enforced dungeon to become transformed by the private sector into the World Wide Web.

In a sense, the Web has multiplied the potential of Gutenberg's original invention: first, Gutenberg made possible the publishing industry, in which scarce resources are concentrated to fund the dissemination of information from relatively few replication centers; the Web and the app economy take it further, making it possible for everyoneto become a publishing center.

Fact and Fiction: The Discovery of Printing

Let's look at what Gutenberg did and didn't do. He did not invent either book printing or moveable type. In The Gutenberg Bible, James Thorpe, former director of the Huntington Library, points out that the earliest known wood-block printing of a book took place in 9^th century China with the 16-foot-long roll of the Diamond Sutra. To produce it, entire pages were carved into flat wooden blocks that were inked and pressed onto paper rolls.

Furthermore, as early as the 11^th century, printers in China (and Korea) were experimenting with pieces of moveable type made of baked clay. That invention, however, did not endure in East Asia because too many distinctive pieces of 'type' (the baked-clay letters) had to be created to print a book. In contrast to the 26-letter English alphabet, for example, the Chinese language uses approximately 40,000 ideographs – far too many (at the time) to offer any labour-saving advantages through printing.

Copying Books by Hand

In Europe until the time of Gutenberg, books were copied by hand, usually on some type of parchment (the skin of an adult sheep, goat, or cow) or on vellum (skin from a newborn calf). During the early Middle Ages, most of this copying took place at monasteries in a scriptorium, but by the 13^th century, busy manuscript-copying establishments were located in major cities – usually near the early universities where books were in demand. Wherever manuscript copies were made, however, they contained errors.

The quill pens used by copyists – usually made of goose feathers – required frequent refills from ink pots, and the tedium of copying led to errors consisting of repeated or omitted portions of text. Even the introduction of wood-block printing in Europe during the late 14^th and early 15^th Centuries (usually for illustrations) offered few advantages. For example, wood-block carvings were laborious to create and could be ruined with a single false stroke of the carver's knife. They also wore out quickly and could not produce clear imprints for very long.

And while it is true that manuscript copyists used abbreviations to save time, new books still required about a year to produce. Not surprisingly, they were very expensive. As a result, the literacy rate was low – only 30% in some English towns during the 15^th century.

The Printing Press in Action

The idea of printing with reusable pieces of durable, moveable type held definite advantages for Europeans. Since the Latin alphabet had only 23 basic letters, only a limited range of metal pieces of type had to be cast and replicated. Once created, these pieces of type could be arranged into orderly rows and pages of text on a printing forme. The letters were inked up, and damp paper or parchment was lowered onto them to receive the ink impression.

The result was hundreds of nearly identical copies of books. Once a set of pages were printed, the pieces of type could be reassembled again and again to print other pages and books until they finally wore out after many uses. All things considered, printing with re-usable, metal type yielded savings in labor and cost, greater accuracy and consistency in the final product, and a remarkable increase in the volume of books available.

A Market-Driven Process

The invention of printing, however, did not occur in a vacuum. Like any other product, it was subject to market conditions to which Gutenberg responded in an entrepreneurial way. We already have seen how the Western alphabet – with its limited set of letters – played a supporting role in the success of European printing.

To this, we can add the availability of paper in 15^th century Europe – a cost-effective substitute for parchment and vellum. According to Warren Chappell and Robert Bringhurst (A Short History of the Printed Word), the process of making paper from plant fibers was discovered in China in the 2^nd century. It spread to the Middle East in the 8^th century (where it was improved), and the Moors brought it to Spain (11^thcentury). By the late 13^th century, a paper mill that used linen and rag fibers was operating in the Italian town of Fabriano . From there, it spread rapidly through Europe – just in time for Gutenberg's invention.

Gutenberg was responsible for the print process itself, and his story has been outlined by Christopher de Hamel in The Book: A History of the Bible. As a stepping stone to the invention of printing, however, Gutenberg may have developed a mechanical-stamping process in the late 1430s. Details of his metal-stamping process, however, are unclear, and what little we know is based on the much-debated record of a lawsuit that was filed after the death of one of his business partners.

Nonetheless, it appears that while living in Strassburg, Gutenberg and his partners intended to mass-produce small, inexpensive convex mirrors by using Gutenberg's metal-stamping process. They planned to sell the mirrors to pilgrims visiting the holy relics in the city of Aachen. The relics were displayed every seven years, and pilgrims would pin the expensive mirrors to their hats, or they would hold them up as they viewed the holy objects. The mirrors would reflect – and thus capture – some of the spiritual presence of the relics.

Unfortunately, Gutenberg and his partners miscalculated the date of the pilgrimage (or perhaps it was changed); the pilgrimage took place in 1440 instead of 1439. This delay and the partner's death led to the failure of the enterprise. Nonetheless, this business venture may have contributed to Gutenberg's later innovations when he moved to the city of Mainz in 1448. Note, however, that this was an entirely private endeavour. No risk was forced upon taxpayers.

Gutenberg's Test Projects

In Mainz, where Gutenberg eventually established his printing operation, a legal document once again provides the few reliable details that have been passed down to us. The document (called the 'Helmasperger Instrument' after the notary who signed it on November 6, 1455) describes the attempted recovery of two loans taken out by Gutenberg in 1450 and 1452. It also mentions Gutenberg's project as 'the work of the books,' and it is described in Johann Gutenberg and His Bible, by Janet Ing.

Despite a settlement that obligated Gutenberg to repay with interest any money not used on the project, the settlement may have favoured Gutenberg – despite a legend that he was bankrupted as a result. Furthermore, it is possible that Gutenberg continued to print books in Mainz during the 1450s even though his moneylender (Johann Fust) and his assistant (Peter Sch'ffer) became partners in their own printing business there.

In 1454, the year before he printed his Bible, Gutenberg completed a few smaller projects, and they testify to his entrepreneurial spirit. They included a pamphlet warning of the danger posed by the Turks, who had just captured the ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. In addition, there were four printings of indulgences, which were sold to raise funds for a war against the Turks. He also printed a New Year's greeting in German and a small Latin grammar. These small projects indicate a businessman who was 'ramping up' his operation for a bigger undertaking, such as the printing of the Bible. Once again, Gutenberg's projects were entirely for profit.

Marketing the Bible

In the case of the Bible, Gutenberg was targeting a specific group of customers: religious institutions such as monasteries. They were his best potential customers because they needed large Bibles for public readings. Only a limited number of wealthy individuals could afford the other copies. Providing a glimpse into Gutenberg's sales effort, we have a letter written by Aeneas Silvius, who subsequently became Pope Pius II in 1458. He personally witnessed Gutenberg displaying several sections of his not-yet-completed Bible in October 1454 at a conference of nobles in Frankfurt. The purpose of the conference was to rally public support for war against the Turks.

Gutenberg clearly perceived the anti-Turk hysteria as a boon to his sales effort – a kind of rally-round-the-Bible marketing opportunity that exploited Christian fears of Turks and their faith – Islam. From the letter of Aeneas Silvius, we also learned that Gutenberg had pre-sold every copy of his Bible before its completion.

Furthermore, there is undisputed evidence that Gutenberg had to increase the size of his print-run by about 33% to meet the high demand. This required him to re-set (with type) and re-print additional pages of some early sections of his Bible and purchase additional paper and parchment. The re-printed sections of his Bible contain subtle differences that can be seen today in the surviving copies.

Short-Term Benefits of Printing

The scale of the Gutenberg Bible project was astonishing for its time. Each printed Bible consists of two volumes totaling 1,286 pages and measuring 11-' by 16 inches. They are set in two columns of large, Gothic, black-letter type with 40 to 42 lines per page, and they can be read at a distance of three feet. Approximately 160 to 180 copies were printed – 75% on paper and the rest on parchment. Paper copies weigh 30 pounds each, and parchment copies weigh 50 pounds – each requiring the skins of about 160 animals (over 6,000 skins for all of the copies).

Although the Latin alphabet has only 23 letters, a complete set of metal upper- and lowercase type used to create the Bible – including abbreviations, diphthongs, and punctuation marks – consisted of 290 characters. Four to six employees were busy setting type, and the print office held 200,000 printed pages stacked up for binding at the conclusion of the project.

Today, only 48 copies survive – 36 on paper, 12 on parchment. Only two parchment and four paper copies are in the U.S. , and prices have risen dramatically. A copy sold for $2,600 in 1847 and $50,000 in 1911. In 1978, the going price was $2.2 million, and in 1987, one volume (1/2 of a set) sold for $5.4 million at Christie's. Nobody knows what Bill Gates paid for the complete copy he purchased in 1994, but some say it was nearly $31 million. A single leaf can easily fetch more than $60,000. Contrast this with NASA. Who wouldn't happily pay to shut it down – along with its succession of orbiting money-pits that disintegrate and rain down debris from the sky?

The influence of Gutenberg's Latin Bible was tremendous, and by the end of the 15^thcentury, 80 more Bible editions were printed in Europe – all but two of them based directly on Gutenberg's text (which was itself based on a 13^th-century version of Jerome's late-4^th-century Vulgate translation).

Even more important were the spread of printing beyond its birthplace in the city of Mainz and the consequences of that proliferation. By 1470, there were printers in 14 European cities, and by 1480 they were located in more than 100. By the end of the year 1500, over 1,100 print shops were doing business in more than 200 European towns, and they had printed over 10 million books. We refer to these early printed books (through the year 1500) as incunabula, from the Latin word for swaddling clothes or cradle, because they represent the infancy of printing.

Long-Term Benefits of Printing

The creation of large numbers of books was not the only spin-off benefit of Gutenberg's invention. The abundance of books was reflected in the growing size and number of libraries as well. Before the advent of printing, libraries existed only in a few centres of learning and were very small. In England, for example, the largest libraries were located at Canterbury and Bury – each holding about 2,000 books.

Cambridge University Library held only 300 titles at the time, but today it holds over 5.5 million books and more than 1.2 million periodicals. With the widespread availability of books, the literacy rate increased. From a 15^th-century rate of 30% in some English locations, it rose to between 30 and 40% in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, 60% in the 18^th century, and 90% in the 20^th and 21^st centuries (although today's government schools are doing their best to curtail independent thought and churn out slogan-spouting automatons instead).

While the literacy rate rose, there also was a shift from oral learning to learning through reading – which made self-education even more widespread. There also was greater access to ideas and an increase in knowledge on the part of literate men and women. This helped to unleash an era of innovation and invention that continues today.

Some people even credit the success of the Protestant revolt to the printing press. If we consider the World Wide Web to be an outgrowth of the printing process, the number of 'publishing' centres continues to grow. For example, a Netcraft survey compiled in June 2006 identified 85,541,228 sites. There are now well over a billion, and growing.

Immigration: China to Islam to Westminster

We already have seen how the art of paper-making had its roots in East Asia and spread to the civilization of Islam before arriving in Europe. The free movement of people across borders – immigration – enabled the rapid spread of the new technology, and the story of William Caxton (ca. 1422-1492) illustrates perfectly the spread of printing and ideas from one country to another.

Caxton is famous because he printed the first book in the English language and introduced the printing press to England. Nonetheless, he spent much of his life abroad. By the year 1446, he was living in Bruges (Belgium). There he printed the first book in English in about 1473/1474 – the Recuyell(compilation) of the Historyes of Troye, which was his own translation of a French courtly romance. He completed this translation while living in Koln (Germany), and he probably learned the art of printing from Ulrich Zell, a priest from Mainz (Germany).

He moved back to England in 1475 or early 1476, and he set up a print shop near Westminster Abbey. There he published the first books printed on English soil. Among these were Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1476) and the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (1477). The latter was based on a work that originally was written in Egypt by Mubashshir ibn F'tik in the 11^thcentury. The original was translated from Arabic into Spanish, then Latin, and finally French before being translated into English. For those who suffer from the current xenophobic infatuation with impermeable borders and immigration restrictions, the story of printing offers a powerful and much-needed antidote.

Special Interests Oppose Innovation

With its many benefits, one would think that the invention of moveable-type printing was universally hailed, but vested interests can be counted on to oppose changes that threaten them. Just ask aerospace engineers how they would feel if competitors such as Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne eliminated their NASA gravy train. In the case of 15^thcentury printing, calligraphers and illuminators levied political pressure to restrict its spread. Resistance was strongest in the city of Florence , where (according to Chappell and Bringhurst) calligraphers and their customers were 'contemptuous of what they considered the vulgar and mechanical imitations of good manuscripts.'

Oddly enough, the establishment of printing by the end of the 15^th century did not spell doom for calligraphers. As more people learned to read, more learned to write. Consequently, the art of calligraphy continued to thrive. The 16^th century was distinguished by many of the most beautiful manuscripts, and it also was the age of the great handwriting manuals.

Printing 'or Imitation Handwriting?

To understand the early opposition of calligraphers, we must remember that Gutenberg and other early printers did not conceive of printing as a way to produce a new kind of product. They viewed their technology as a way to produce handwriting. Consequently, calligraphers viewed printing as a direct competitor. Perhaps the greatest authority on early printing, Konrad Haebler (author of The Study of Incunabula as well as The German Incunabula and The Italian Incunabula), wrote extensively about the goals and practices of early printers. He explained that early printers – to comply with the aesthetic demands of their customers – were compelled to use confusing (to us) abbreviations in their printed products even though they were rendered entirely unnecessary by the new technology.

It is easy to understand why scribes made use of these labour-saving shortcuts: it reduced the amount of writing they had to do. But the printing press made it possible – and easy – to spell out every letter of every word without additional effort. In fact, the creation of unique pieces of type to imitate abbreviations (and diphthongs) was an additional burden and expense.

As Haebler explained, however, any attempt to break this rule resulted in products that could not be sold because they did not comply with the exacting standards of customers. Book buyers expected to see abbreviations, and printers gave them what they wanted. It was only in later years that they could depart from this imitation of manuscript models and take full advantage of the new technology. In a similar way, modern architects only gradually understood the new design possibilities made available by building materials such as steel and glass curtain-wall. The result is the sleek, geometric, glass-sheathed structures of today's skyline.

The Customer Is Always Right

Haebler described other characteristics of manuscripts that also were preserved by early printers. For example, the beginning of new chapters and other important sections of a book included oversized initial capital letters that were several lines high and projected into the body of the text and into the margins as well. Early printers – including Gutenberg – left large blank spaces in their columns of neat text so that calligraphers and illustrators could fill them in with large capital letters and decorations by hand. To this day, many incunabula contain all of their original blank spaces because rubricators were never hired to decorate them.

In a similar attempt to replicate the standards of hand-written text, books on medicine, law, and theology were printed using Gothic type almost exclusively. Otherwise, they could not be sold. Furthermore, when the art of printing spread from the German-speaking world to Italy in 1465 (with the arrival at Subiaco of German printers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz), Roman letters – the ancestor of our Times Roman font – were used for the first time instead of Gothic letters.

Roman type became the necessary standard – in Italy – for all printed works of philosophy, literature, science, art, and authors from classical antiquity. It suited the aesthetic tastes of the learned men of Italy, who had imbibed a humanistic Renaissance education and had an appreciation for ancient Roman inscriptions. Again, the customer always came first.

Below is an example of what is now considered the perfected form of Roman type, printed in 1478 by Nicolaus Jenson in Venice (from Plutarch's Lives, or Vitae illustrium virorum).

Below is an example of Gothic type, printed in 1480 also by Nicolaus Jenson in Venice (from Antoninus Florentinus, Summa theologica, part IV).

In contrast to the sensitivity of these early printers to the preferences of their customers, the 'products' and 'services' of government agencies are usually provided in abysmal fashion or are forced upon the public under threat of a penalty. Next time you are compelled to 'contribute' to any state bureaucracy, remember the early printers and ruminate on what has been lost.

Epitaph for a Genuine Benefactor

It is not surprising that Gutenberg's name faded from memory shortly after his invention. His Bible is not dated, and it does not mention him by name. In fact, Gutenberg's connection with his Bible was only recovered many years later and after much research and controversy.

Nonetheless, a rector of the University of Paris, Professor Guillaume Fichet, wrote an early testimony to Gutenberg on December 31, 1470, just a few years after Gutenberg's death.

'Not far from the city of Mainz, there appeared a certain Johann whose surname was Gutenberg, who, first of all men, devised the art of printing, whereby books are made, not by a reed, as did the ancients, nor with a quill pen, as do we, but with metal letters, and that swiftly, neatly, beautifully. Surely this man is worthy to be loaded with divine honors by all the Muses, all the arts, all the tongues of those who delight in books, and is all the more to be preferred to gods and goddesses in that he has put the means of choice within reach'of mortals devoted to culture. That great Gutenberg has discovered things far more pleasing and more divine, in carving out letters in such a fashion that whatever can be said or thought can by them be written down at once and transcribed and committed to the memory of posterity.'

Gutenberg is a hero in the history of ideas. Everybody reading this is in his debt.

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Lawrence Ludlow is a freelance writer living in San Diego.
This post previously appeared at FEE and Strike the Root.

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