11 Comments

An enjoyable peek into your trip, Anton, and the fascinating links to some intriguing histories - many thanks!

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Getting married near Lucca next summer - this newsletter will come in very handy!

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Oh how wonderful! Congratulations! As it happens, I was actually there to attend a wedding (and tacked a holiday onto the trip). It was in a villa between the two cities, a bit closer to Pisa.

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Never dull. Thank you. The sheer amount of work and creativity.

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Regarding who gets credit for being “the” inventor: I think the historically significant invention is usually the first practical one that gains widespread adoption and launches the field to a new level of energy and investment. There are typically dozens of prior attempts that didn't quite take off because of not meeting practical requirements of cost, efficiency, power, reliability, etc.

My meta-contrarian opinion is that the inventor typically credited in the history books is actually correct. Edison invented the light bulb, Bell invented the telephone, Stephenson invented the locomotive, etc.

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I like the provocation of the take. You're probably right that the people who get the credit were those who happened to do the most to diffuse an innovation - Boulton & Watt certainly deserve credit for this with rotary steam power, for example, and Newcomen & Savery for the earlier application to mines. A counter-example: Leonardo da Vinci seems to get a lot of credit despite seeing very few of his designs through to practice.

I wonder if we need a new term for the people who bring about widespread adoption. I've seen "inventor vs innovator", though I dislike this distinction, popular in economics, as not being in keeping with common parlance. Rather than "inventor", where invention covers everything from the drawing board through to prototypes and into practice, we should have a word that covers the latter stage. "Entrepreneur" no longer works either, because it now includes essentially any business-starter, no matter how un-innovative.

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Agree on da Vinci, I listened to Isaacson's biography on audiobook and was left wondering why this guy is so famous as an inventor when most of what he sketched was never built and much of it couldn't have worked. Brilliant painter though.

I do think there is a distinction between inventing and distributing. One is getting a machine (or process, etc.) to work, the other is building an organization and in most cases a profitable business model around it. But when a prototype *doesn't* gain widespread adoption, I think it's usually because it wasn't practical—the invention step wasn't actually finished.

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"Populariser" ?

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Do we have any evidence of these people even knowing about these prior inventions? Its one thing to say Such and Such invented a version of X ergo Whosit mustve known about it when he invented X++; in todays world of mass communications and easy access to archives but, I can imagine in the past being seperated by many hundreds of miles language and plus with provencialism being much stronger then than now I can see Whosit never even hearing of Such and Such, and in all these priory statements science historians make they never seem to provide any or much evidence that Whosit knew of Such and Such in the first place.

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Depends on the invention really. I expect that with the later ones like the internal combustion engine, we'll have a fair amount of detail about sources of inspiration. With the steam engine - as you'll have seen from my recent ongoing series - we also do see some of the key people citing predecessors (like the 16thC inventors mentioning Hero of Alexandria). And we know, for example, that James Watt was repairing a model of a Newcomen engine when he developed his separate condenser.

When it comes to the real priority disputes - e.g. Hooke vs Huygens on the spring balance watch - it seems more like independent invention. Yet both will have been working from similar sources, which is probably why they managed to independently invent such similar things at around the same time. (Another one for my to-do list...)

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My wife's father was born near Lucca. Museums, pasta and gelato seems like a good way to do Italy.

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