Harold Evans: The individual dominates the story of U.S. innovation
[Mr. Evans is the author of "They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators" (Little, Brown, 2004).]
Why does the American economy keep confounding the Jeremiahs (and the Dow Jones Industrial Average keep soaring)? It is the appetite for innovation, the extraordinary capital to support risk, and the political framework of freedom for the individual. I recently asked Sergey Brin and Larry Page, through their search engine Google, what they could discover about American chief executives and innovation. They gave me 9,850,000 entries to read. By now it may be up to 10 million or more...
... An entrepreneur may be the enemy of innovation. David Sarnoff, the black-belt bureaucrat who headed RCA, was a classic entrepreneur, but he was the relentless and unscrupulous enemy of innovation in the introduction of FM radio. He was heavily invested in making AM radios and broadcasting AM through RCA's National Broadcasting Corporation. So he did his best to sabotage the astoundingly brilliant Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890-1954), inventor of FM, even though he had the right of first refusal of Armstrong's invention.
Armstrong, the inventor of so much in the technology of transmitting sound, was forced into being an innovator, starting his own company and broadcasting music flawlessly from WQXR in New York on July 18, 1939. (Interestingly, the 425-foot radio tower he built in Alpine, N.J. in 1937 to 1938 for the first FM radio station, was the salvation for NBC, among others, when the antenna on top of the World Trade Center collapsed in the 9/11 outrage.)
Postwar, Sarnoff became a genuine promoter of innovation in pioneering a system of color TV compatible with black and white, defeating the non-compatible electromechanical system pushed by Bill Paley of CBS. But Sarnoff, entrepreneur, also did to Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971), the inventor and innovator of electronic television, what he had done to Armstrong. In the end he had to pay Farnsworth for his groundbreaking patent but then had the gall to claim the credit he did not deserve as "the father" of television. He was certainly an innovator in the creation of a number of myths about himself: Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century issue (in 2000) still credited him as the innovator of both radio and television.
When an innovator is overlooked or an innovation misrepresented it is not simply a question of equity; it distorts our perception of the essence of innovation and the essential qualities of an innovator. It clouds our perception of what it takes to survive in global competition.
The individual dominates the story of American innovation and is insufficiently honored in our histories -- to say nothing of the abysmal history courses in schools and colleges. Only recently did Columbia University honor Armstrong with a plaque in his laboratory, and Rutgers University is still short of funds to catalog properly the immeasurable riches of Thomas Edison's papers -- all five million pages of them.
The research departments of major corporations have not been unproductive -- one thinks of the Bell Labs for the transistor and today Monsanto in biotechnology -- but can anyone have had more impact on our world than the 23-year-old trucker who got frustrated at the day he spent on the noisy pier in Hoboken, N.J., waiting to have his cotton bales unloaded from his truck, loaded onto the cargo ship, and then unloaded and loaded again at the other end?
For nearly 20 years, Malcom McLean did nothing about his inspiration that it would have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble if he had just been able to drive his truck on to the ship. Why didn't anybody facilitate that before he organized the sailing of the Ideal X from Port Newark, N.J., on April 26, 1956? Might as well ask why it took us so long to put wheels on luggage.
Read entire article at WSJ
Why does the American economy keep confounding the Jeremiahs (and the Dow Jones Industrial Average keep soaring)? It is the appetite for innovation, the extraordinary capital to support risk, and the political framework of freedom for the individual. I recently asked Sergey Brin and Larry Page, through their search engine Google, what they could discover about American chief executives and innovation. They gave me 9,850,000 entries to read. By now it may be up to 10 million or more...
... An entrepreneur may be the enemy of innovation. David Sarnoff, the black-belt bureaucrat who headed RCA, was a classic entrepreneur, but he was the relentless and unscrupulous enemy of innovation in the introduction of FM radio. He was heavily invested in making AM radios and broadcasting AM through RCA's National Broadcasting Corporation. So he did his best to sabotage the astoundingly brilliant Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890-1954), inventor of FM, even though he had the right of first refusal of Armstrong's invention.
Armstrong, the inventor of so much in the technology of transmitting sound, was forced into being an innovator, starting his own company and broadcasting music flawlessly from WQXR in New York on July 18, 1939. (Interestingly, the 425-foot radio tower he built in Alpine, N.J. in 1937 to 1938 for the first FM radio station, was the salvation for NBC, among others, when the antenna on top of the World Trade Center collapsed in the 9/11 outrage.)
Postwar, Sarnoff became a genuine promoter of innovation in pioneering a system of color TV compatible with black and white, defeating the non-compatible electromechanical system pushed by Bill Paley of CBS. But Sarnoff, entrepreneur, also did to Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971), the inventor and innovator of electronic television, what he had done to Armstrong. In the end he had to pay Farnsworth for his groundbreaking patent but then had the gall to claim the credit he did not deserve as "the father" of television. He was certainly an innovator in the creation of a number of myths about himself: Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century issue (in 2000) still credited him as the innovator of both radio and television.
When an innovator is overlooked or an innovation misrepresented it is not simply a question of equity; it distorts our perception of the essence of innovation and the essential qualities of an innovator. It clouds our perception of what it takes to survive in global competition.
The individual dominates the story of American innovation and is insufficiently honored in our histories -- to say nothing of the abysmal history courses in schools and colleges. Only recently did Columbia University honor Armstrong with a plaque in his laboratory, and Rutgers University is still short of funds to catalog properly the immeasurable riches of Thomas Edison's papers -- all five million pages of them.
The research departments of major corporations have not been unproductive -- one thinks of the Bell Labs for the transistor and today Monsanto in biotechnology -- but can anyone have had more impact on our world than the 23-year-old trucker who got frustrated at the day he spent on the noisy pier in Hoboken, N.J., waiting to have his cotton bales unloaded from his truck, loaded onto the cargo ship, and then unloaded and loaded again at the other end?
For nearly 20 years, Malcom McLean did nothing about his inspiration that it would have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble if he had just been able to drive his truck on to the ship. Why didn't anybody facilitate that before he organized the sailing of the Ideal X from Port Newark, N.J., on April 26, 1956? Might as well ask why it took us so long to put wheels on luggage.