The Best Thing since Junction-Field Effect Transistors
Penicillin, the printing press, and cheese and onion crisps - What makes an invention well known rather than merely successful?
Things mentioned in this podcast:
- ‘TRIZ’
- BBC poll on the ‘best invention’
- Top inventions of the last 25 years
- ‘The most important inventor you’ve never heard of’
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This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing that wonderful invention, sliced bread. Peter, yeah, why, what are we talking about this for? So Chris, isn't sliced bread great?
Speaker B:Yeah, so Chris, he's not here today, so we can be as rude as we like about him. With his finger on the technology pulse as ever, we're doing a project at the moment, which is a survey of technologies, and we were looking at all sorts of technologies that are currently under development and research that are to do with humans interacting with computers. It's quite a fun little project. And Chris was astonished to discover that there was a thing called e-ink. It completely passed him by.
Speaker A:Well, hold on, not just Chris, because when we talked about this in research, I had no idea what you were talking about. I still don't really know what it is.
Speaker B:Think Kindles. So the screen on the Kindle is what's commonly known as an e-ink screen. It's sort of similar, it looks similar to a liquid crystal display, but actually it kind of works more like an etch-a-sketch. So do you remember etch-a-sketch? Yeah, I certainly do. It's a bit like that, but very, very small level. So we got thinking, why do we have the idiom, the best thing since sliced bread? And rather than the best thing since the transistor, which would arguably be a much more significant invention than sliced bread.
Speaker A:Yeah. So I guess, you know, why are some inventions that are so lauded and others are not? They just go unseen really, but yet being wonderful. Yeah.
Speaker C:Could you have had the Kindle if it weren't for the etch-a-sketch?
Speaker B:I don't know. I mean, the technological determinism is something we might want to get onto. Yeah. But yeah, I...
Speaker C:I'd never thought of that. The etch-a-sketch was basically a Kindle where you could make your own things. Yeah. So it's better. It was like a kind of make your own book on a Kindle.
Speaker B:Yeah. Well, I've got a remarkable tablet. It's like a sort of adult's etch-a-sketch. But yeah, I don't know if there's any inspiration from etch-a-sketch to the invention of E-ink. But anyway...
Speaker A:I didn't know you could get adult etch-a-sketch. I guess you get them from adult shops, right? It's a digital notebook that uses E-ink. Yeah, it's a grown up etch-a-sketch. Okay. So, well, let's answer that question. Why are some inventions famous, more famous than others? Peter, do you want to carry on?
Speaker B:Yeah, just to explore it a little further. So, I mean, there's been obviously significant inventions which have had a huge impact on health and well-being and everything else. Things like, you know, central heating and concrete and manufacture of steel, antibiotics, white goods, cars, electrical generation and distribution and clean water. These things are pretty big, right? But they've all kind of gone, they're all mundane. You sort of pass them by. No one cares about the fact that we've got clean water. Yeah. But people still obviously get excited about sliced bread because we still use that idiom. We do. Yeah.
Speaker C:Well, but the archetypal visual invention is, of course, the light bulb, which, you know, appears above your head when you get a good idea. And I'm assuming that that happens, first of all, obviously, because there's illumination. But I doubt, and I'd certainly never seen someone in a 19th century illustration have an idea by a candle appearing above their head. So I suspect also the light bulb obviously is maybe Edison's most famous invention and is, I think, the perfect example of an invention. In what sense? Well, it's like, there it is. It's a thing you can point to. It looks quite different to what was there before. The actual discovery process for what worked as a light bulb was apparently fairly long and arduous. And when it was done, it's done. And it's basically unchanged for the last, you know, hundred years until very recently. So, yeah, I mean, I think this question of what makes an invention significant and then what makes it famous? What makes an invention famous? I want to kind of go back a bit and ask what an invention is, because I'm more and more convinced that there's no such thing.
Speaker A:I mean, is this about iterations?
Speaker C:Well, I would say that, like, if you imagine the space of possible things you can do with stuff, right? So take a dishwasher, right, and then take a washing machine and then gradually morph one into the other, right? So that you have, you know, in between you've got something that... What, you mean clothes and... You've got something that washes socks because you, by, you know, you putting them on a little rack and then it squirts water at them kind of thing. What I'm saying is that I don't, I'm not sure every day, obviously every invention has to depend on previous inventions and in some way sort of concatenates a bunch of other inventions. So you can't have a light bulb until you've already invented electricity, for example. You can't invent electricity until you've got magnets and you can't have magnets until you've got certain kind of, you know, tooling to be able to, you know, isolate them. And so there's this kind of things, just all the technologies that we have today, you know, are a kind of sediment of kind of ideas, tiny little ideas that, you know, have sort of encrusted over the years. So down at the bottom you've got wheels, you know, there's probably even wheels in mobile phones. I mean, you know, wheels are everywhere, right? And then halfway up more recently you've got sort of, you know, you've got like different kinds of metals, you know, metallurgy, and then higher above there you've got your transistors and everything is layered on top of that. And I wonder if it makes sense to talk about, you know, meaningfully about the idea of some little portion of that being an invention. But yeah.
Speaker A:You have to, otherwise how are you going to have that discussion?
Speaker C:Well, I know, but it does become really difficult because then you start to wonder whether or not the, you know, I mean, is the car an invention or is that the car actually just a carriage and an engine, you know, is a carriage an invention or is it just, you know, a certain kinds of metallurgy and woodworking and wheels, you know, what is the, where's the, which bit is the invention?
Speaker A:No, but we, for example, ourselves can make a judgment on that, i.e. us three here. Do we want to call the aeroplane an invention? You can talk about, well, it's got this, it's got that. Well, let's just say, yeah, it's an invention.
Speaker B:I think it is meaningful to label certain convergence of either different technologies, different materials or processes or combinations of those and call it a thing. Because there's the first time that someone did that. So take the car, there was carriages and there were engines before the car existed. And it was when somebody decided, let's put an engine on a carriage that you've got the car invent, the car was invented as a unique combination of those things. Sounds okay to me. I'm happy with that.
Speaker C:Well, okay. I mean, you know, but what I'm saying is I'm not sure, I'm not sure it is physically like meaningful. I'm not sure it carves out a space of the world that is different. Once you call it an invention, is it something that's qualitatively different? I just wonder if it's not just a slightly arbitrary apportioning of a label to something. But anyway, look, let's crack on. I'm slowing things down with my philosophical, with my attempts to get us to think clearly and coherently.
Speaker A:So I forgot what we were talking about. We were talking about inventions, do they exist? We've decided, yes, they do exist. So why are some inventions more famous than others? That's what we're talking about.
Speaker C:Yeah. But also, can we, the difficulty, which I've found, of being able to measure the significance of an invention, I think partly because of what I'm on about.
Speaker A:I mean, I wonder if it's the case that a hundred years from now, 200 years from now, a thousand years from now, people would be saying, do you know what? We don't even think about, you know, the internet. You kind of forget that that existed.
Speaker C:Well, I suspect that that is actually more and more. I mean, my kids don't, unless I'd stop them and tell them that there's such a thing as the internet, all they see is the services they get through it. They don't even think of the internet as a thing. It's just life. And they call it Google. And I'd say, no, Google's just a search engine on the internet. And so I guess, you know, what I'm saying is that every, almost all technologies rely on all other technologies, in a way. No, you're going down that avenue again. No, no, no, no, no, I'm not. Because so the thing is that, yeah, OK, go on.
Speaker A: veryone was wandering around.: Speaker C:Well, sliced bread wasn't actually the guy who invented the bread slicing machine. And unfortunately, I didn't weirdly, I didn't actually make a note of this. But the guy, it was a big thing at the time. Like it was a machine that they sold to bakeries. I think it started somewhere in the US. And it was huge. You know, every bakery that got the bread slicing machine, suddenly they were they were besieged with people desperate for their delicious sliced bread because it took so much of the pain in the bum out of bread slicing. So, so, yeah, that idiom survives more so than the recognition that bread slicing was ever a thing we needed. It seems so familiar to us.
Speaker A:But OK, look, where do we want to go with this? We've decided more or less that inventions exist.
Speaker C:Well, I've tried to look for correlations between famous inventions and significant inventions. But Peter may have may be ahead of me.
Speaker B:No, I was going to say we can explore why it is that one of the what are the mechanisms that cause some things to fade to mundane to the mundane versus some things are ever prevalent. So, I mean, you're I'm well, let's do that.
Speaker A:And we'll then we'll come on to what you were mentioning there, Nick. Yeah. OK, Peter.
Speaker B:So just take, for example, you're the smartphone. It might be because it's always in your in your hand and in your field of view. But that feels to me like a sort of fairly significant recent congruence of different, different things that were there before. But it's prevalent in not only your life, but also sort of social sort of the cultural narrative. People talk about mobile phones, you're using them too much or there's a new one out next week and all that sort of stuff. Whereas something like concrete, right? It was invented a long time ago. The Romans basically invented concrete. But in the last hundred or so years, the production of concrete is just exploded. And people who are into concrete get very excited about it because there's so many different types of concrete. And the way that concrete is made, you can tune it to have to have any kind of properties you want more. I'm suddenly I'm getting really interested in concrete now as I hear you talking about it. But most people would be like, oh, concrete is really, really mundane, really boring.
Speaker C:Have you seen that film Locke with Tom Hardy in it where he's basically driving his car and speaking to people on speakerphone? No. It's the only film I know which has really tackled head on the exciting world of concrete. He's a concrete engineer. OK, yeah. And he's got one of one of the many things he has to juggle on his journey is the fact that his assistant will be supervising the pour the next day. And and it's really complicated. It's like the biggest concrete pour for, you know, in Europe or something. And wow. And so his assistant is going to manage getting it all in at the right time and stuff. But no, you're absolutely right. That was the first time I'd ever really thought about the fact that concrete is a, you know, a thing that people have to worry about.
Speaker B:Similar things to steel is probably a better example because methodology is really advanced science and constantly making new ground. But steel is a as a material exquisite. You can you can tune its parameters to be lighter or stronger or more flexible, more brittle, very, very finely. And the sort of the understanding of the chemistry is incredible. But, you know, people think steel, oh, that's kind of, yeah, it's in buildings and my car's kind of made out of it. But the amount of sort of the knowledge that that piece of steel represents is astonishing.
Speaker C: hat. So I found a survey from: Speaker A:So, for example, if I would say to you, turn that question back to you, what's your favorite invention of the last 25 years? An answer that I'm not saying this is yours, but you might say something like, well, the algorithms or the process, whatever it is that made the processes behind Amazon possible, for example. That's what we should be thinking about.
Speaker C:I would I'd probably go with something in the in the area of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And that's not because there's some specific thing that's been invented, but more the progress that has been made, which is the progress that's been made. It is the significant thing, not a particular invention where you can say, well, that that bit there is, you know, the self-driving car algorithm. That's the invention that is, you know, is really significant.
Speaker A:Peter?
Speaker B:Yeah, I was grappling towards a similar kind of a similar unifying theory as to why things fall out of out of consciousness. And it was sort of related. So the things that I, the really important things that I've mentioned, steel, concrete, antibiotics, central heating, blah, blah, blah, they are, they're, they're all quite technical. So you, and they're, they're, they're, they're not immediately visible. They're sort of, they're either a component or a supporting thing or something that's sort of there, but not the main thing you're looking at. So when you look at a building, you don't see the concrete and steel, you see the facade, you see the shape and design of it. That's all facilitated by the materials it's built out of, but it's not the thing you're kind of looking at. You're seeing it, but you're not looking at it. So it's like, but in order to understand the magic in the steel, you have to, you have to read quite a lot of books. And most people haven't got, aren't interested in doing that.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:Actually, that's prompted a thought, which is about the, the, the problem of opacity in modern technology, which didn't exist. I mean, I, I think, you know, if you look at 50, 60 years ago, how much of sort of popular literature, literature kind of, you know, the magazines that kids read and stuff was all about like fun inventions and machines and stuff that did stuff. And how exciting things were in the 19th century when you had a new kind of, you know, you could look at a steam train, you can look at the bits and you could work out how it worked by just by, you know, by someone guiding you through it. And big, you know, things that move and all those, even things like the first computers, like the, you know, the, the analytical engine and stuff, you could look at it and work out how it works and then marvel at the ingenuity of it all. And I think, I wonder if actually the problem is that now more and more things are just something on your smartphone and, and less and less visible. And so it could be that actually, you know, when people go, oh, the best invention of the last 20 years is the smartphone. Well, that really is thousands of inventions that are making a smartphone do, do what it does, but we're just going to sit there and see it as one thing. Yeah. I wonder if the idea of inventions at all is going to disappear, that people will just sort of, you know, because there are fewer and fewer things that are going to fall into that category.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's what you mean. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I've got a question for you. I don't know if this is a good question or not. I remember once on one of our podcasts, Nick, we were talking about, you were talking about asbestos, right? Yeah. And, and you said, I just had no idea that was a naturally occurring thing. Yeah. Well, similarly, I've got a confession to make here, which is there are still certain inventions, some very basic ones that I just don't understand how they work. Right. And I find just magical. Try me, Fraser. Try me. Yeah. So I think the difficult one here will be Peter. But so for example, records and record playing. I just still don't, I do not understand how that needle going on that bit of vinyl somehow turns into sound.
Speaker B:Face palm from Peter. Yeah, sorry, Peter. You're a sound engineer, Fraser. You're partly a sound engineer. I'm partly a sound engineer.
Speaker C:But for him, it's like, it's like witches and wizards and alchemists just blending things together and then they work without needing to understand the mechanism.
Speaker B:We've hit on the distinction between a technician and an engineer. Yeah. You're not an engineer.
Speaker A:I'm not an engineer. But also, and I mean, if that's how I feel about record players, how do you think I feel about mobile phones or toasters? I mean, I mean, actually, I think probably toasters and mobile phones are not in quite the same area. But anyway, that's my... They are quite different. Yeah, they are quite different. I once, yeah, I tried making a call on a toaster. It just did not work out. Yeah, you burn yourself badly, yeah. So that's my question. Is it a question that's worth answering? What's your kind of...
Speaker C:Peter must have a technology black spot somewhere.
Speaker A:Yeah, what's the thing that's an invention, a fairly common thing that you go, I just do not understand that?
Speaker B:I can't think of a fairly common one. Okay, an uncommon one. I mean, but yeah, I'm slightly baffled by how quantum computing works.
Speaker C:You were expecting him to say fridges. No, he's gone straight for quantum computing.
Speaker B:Yeah, I'm still working that out.
Speaker A:What is quantum computing?
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker C:He doesn't know, does he? That's the whole point. No, he doesn't know how it works.
Speaker B:So traditional computing, silicon, like in your phone, relies on little components, which have certain states. And the states are usually either one or zero. Okay. Quantum computing uses a different kind of state, a different object to store the state, which is a qubit. And usually that's like one atom or one subatomic particle that can have many more than one, many more than a binary state. It can have many millions and billions of states. That's in essence what it is. It's using a different medium to do the computation that's using quantum properties rather than electrical properties. Okay.
Speaker A:So I don't even understand what it is now you've explained it, so let alone how it works. I'm not surprised.
Speaker C:Really fast computers.
Speaker A:Yeah. Anyway, well, I think before we sort of go down that rabbit hole, I mean, that's what you don't understand. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker C:So, Nick? Yeah, this is more something I sort of, I think we're talking about things where you sort of understand it on an intellectual level, but at the visceral level you go, no, that's just impossible. And for me, it's the Google Maps 3D feature. And I don't know if you've used that, but they're basically all of London now and the increasingly large bits of the world. Now you press 3D and Google Maps satellite view turns into a 3D model of London. And you can zoom in and swivel it round and look at the backs of buildings. And it's all, it's amazing. I don't understand it. I mean, you know, basically they've done something with maths to work out which bits of the images that they've taken, all these 2D images they've got. Somehow they've worked out which bits are the backs of buildings and they've pasted it onto a 3D model that they've somehow generated. But for something so unassuming, you know, it's just there. It's a little button in the corner. And it turns into what to me would be, I mean, if someone had shown me that, you know, when I was a kid, that's all I'd have done. I'd have sat there all day looking at Google Maps. And now it's just there. It just blows my mind. Yeah.
Speaker A:Okay. So just before we finish, Peter, explain to me, how does a record player work? Okay.
Speaker B:So sound, right, is the movement of air. Yeah. That your ear picks up because there's a drum, your ear drum moves with the movement of the air. Yeah. So you can, so in the same sense, you can move a diaphragm to generate that movement of air like a speaker does. So the record, the groove on the record has little bumps and grooves, little bumps and sort of variations in the groove, which create the same movement in the speaker when it's amplified to create that movement. So all that groove is is like a picture of the sound wave that's produced by the sound that you're trying to reproduce. Does that help?
Speaker A:It helps. Okay.
Speaker C:Have you ever taken a comb and rubbed it down the edge of a table to make a sound?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:Right. See, I mean, for me, the big step that I don't really get is how a bunch of clicks can be a sound, like it's just bumps, like different clicks can become a sound. But that's the bit that I could never really get my head around is how is it that just by, you know, by making some clicking noises really fast, you could turn it into music. But the comb example really helps for me, because the point is that that's how our ears work. Our ears work that such that when it's slow enough, it sounds like clicks. But when it's fast enough, it sounds like a musical note. And it's just, you know, it's just how your ears work. Okay. Are we any closer to solving the mystery of record players?
Speaker A:Well, very much so. Good. And all I'll say is, yeah, thanks for that, Peter. And next week, we'll be discussing tapes. And then after that, we'll move on to CDs.
Speaker B:Well, tapes is a natural extension. No, I don't. No, I don't. Yeah, okay.
Speaker A:All right. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.
