Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

Invention and Innovation is a captivating read, with a subtitle that indicates it is "a brief history of hype and failure." It comprises five chapters that offer aspiring innovators a deeper understanding of what their quest to "change the world" may entail in the grand scheme of things.The first chapter serves as an introduction and establishes the distinction between invention and innovation. Innovation is specifically the process of implementing new materials, products, and ideas for adoption by users, which is not always the case with inventions. However, both inventions and innovations can raise outsized hopes but turn out to be disappointments for various reasons examined in chapters 2, 3, and 4.Chapter 2 delves into highly successful innovations that were embraced globally but had undesirable, sometimes unforeseeable effects after decades of use. Three primary examples are leaded gasoline, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane/DDT, and chlorofluorocarbons CFCs, notably Freon, which depletes the ozone layer. The most encouraging lesson has been that we have come up with better alternatives.Chapter 3 examines inventions that were initially hailed as breakthroughs but eventually failed to dominate. Innovations like airships (the Zeppelin) became asterisks in the history of flying; nuclear fission suffered from a combination of issues (installation costs, regulatory measures, miscalculations on electricity demand catastrophes, etc.), and supersonic flight won’t happen tomorrow. Oppositely many fundamental scientific breakthroughs, such as James Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves, which provided the foundation for modern wireless electronics, happened to be recognized only decades after their discovery.Chapter 4 addresses some of the inventions that we are still waiting for, including a radical extension of human lifespan, transportation inside a near vacuum (known as the Hyperloop), cereal plants acting as legumes, securing most of their nitrogen requirements with bacteria rather than using synthetic fertilizers, or fully controlled nuclear fusion.Chapter 5 deconstructs hyperbolic claims and the vision of an ever-faster or exponential pace of both inventions and innovations. The exuberance of a "March of Intellect" promising radical transformation that accompanied the First Industrial Revolution has clung to every single industrial revolution since then and has only become even more pervasive and sensationalistic. Facts, basic physical realities, and known constraints do matter and often contradict bombastic predictions or implausible goals at the very same time they are expressed. For instance, flying about 1.8 billion zero-carbon passengers a year won't happen by 2030 or would require an unprecedented explosion of inventions, which is even more unrealistic.Entrepreneurs and executives should read this book to undergo a sort of mental cleansing process. As aspiring innovators, we are inundated with grand declarations about the accelerated pace of change. Maybe we must have faith in exponential growth to scale up our endeavors or reflect on Moore's Law coming to an end to think that we'll overcome roadblocks. However, we still have to deal with them. And we are more likely to understand them when we read fact-based, technically and historically accurate books such as all of Smil’s essays. They help us to distance ourselves from marketing spins, analyze data rather than fall prey to a “dataism” using half-baked data models or atypical exemplars that don’t not translate to other domains (like the pace of growth in microelectronics). They show to us that even when we believe that we have overcome the “proof-of-concept to production gap,” we still need to audit deployments and interpret the meaning of what we may dismissively call “side-effects.”Smil's quasi-exegetical dive into the history of innovation allows us to take full measure of the multidimensionality of the contexts in which inventors and innovators operate, be they geopolitical, socio-economic, or ideological. Innovations, their nature, pace, and obsolescence rate, as well as their originators, are cultural realities encoded in a world that reproduces itself and often has to correct its course for its own survival. Smil's practical skepticism is not some modern form of Luddism but a reminder that alleviating human misery, decreasing inequalities, reaching sustainability or saving the planet may not be as fancy as walking on Mars but are considerably bigger challenges.

I would not consider this to be my favorite book by Vaclav Smil, that honor belongs to "How the World Really Works", but as usual it's very well researched and offers a valuable point of view on the history of invention and innovation, different from the blind techno optimism or the techno doomsday prevalent in the media today. Definitely a worthy read. To paraphrase Winston Churchill - however beautiful the stories we tell, we should occasionally look at the results.

We seem to be caught up in a mental model that expects exponential innovation to solve all of our problems and do it quickly. Smil pokes holes in that mindset by recounting innovations that did more harm than good (lead in gasoline, DDT, etc) and by discussing all the predictions such as flying cars , that just haven’t happened. He does a really good job of exposing the factors that morale some of our goals such as zero Carbon unlikely, if not impossible. You might think this book is a downer, but it’s not. I highly recommend it as a tool for making sensible decisions about future directions

There is no question that Vaclav Smil is a brilliant thinker and a highly knowledgeable individual, particularly in the field of energy; according to the back cover of this book, Bill Gates states “The term ‘polymath’ was made for people like him”.Unfortunately, one of the consequences of brilliance and being a polymath is that sometimes it can be lost on others, because they are communicating at a level well above the average persons knowledge of these topics; I really feel that this is cardinal sin of this book — unless you already have significant knowledge of some of the topics, you may end up more confused than when you started.Take for example this paragraph on page 132 in a section about Nitrogen-Fixing Cereals:"These discoveries opened up the possibility of enhancing the presence of associative bacteria living in the proximity of cereal roots, but any effective realization of this goal would require a much better understanding of the conditions that promote these associations and of the realistic uptake maxima we could expect in light of the low concentrations of nitrogen fixed by associated diazotrophs: even if successful, this effort would be of only very marginal help. A much better prospect emerged with the 1988 discovery of endophytic (living inside plant tissues) Gluconoacetobacter diazotrophicus diazotrophs in Brazilian sugar cane by Johanna Döbereiner and Vladimir Cavalcante. Later research found that Herbaspirillum, Azoarcus, and Azospirillum species are also involved. As a result, it remains difficult to distinguish the endophytic and nonendophytic contributions."Certain sections of this book are just not approachable unless you already have cursory knowledge of the subjects’ background (notably botany, microbiology, and/or agrology in the case above), nitrogen-fixing cereals is one such section, however, this is not true with all sections.Additionally, another fault is that this book has the tendency of getting too "into the weeds" when it comes talking about the subject matter when a brief summary is all that is truly needed; this would have led to more opportunity for further exploration of other topics.Despite my three star review, I did enjoy this book, and was very much drawn in by the subject matter (innovation failures and successes), and I felt that the sections on DDT, airships and supersonic travel were particularly strong, and I had significant takeaways from, despite coming in with very little information about them.I also feel there is so much more left for Smil to explore when it comes to innovation (as is mentioned in Chapter 5, which I felt was a breath of fresh air), such as room-temperature super-conductors, small modular nuclear reactors, next-generation antibiotics, quantum computing, capturing tidal energy, etc.; however, if he does so, he needs to step it down a bit and make it a bit more digestible for the average reader.I'd love to see Smil do something similar to his previous book, Numbers Don't Lie, where he could do a higher-level dive into each of these innovations, notably summarize the problem, give a very brief history of the innovation over the years, and talk about the challenges they currently face; if he can do this without getting into the weeds, it will be an absolute home run.

it was short but not brief. still provide many angle and information about the inventions that changed the world. and also how they failled the world too.

Satisfeito.

From AI ending civilization soon, to hyper-loop, to landing on Mars and making life multi-planetary, to curing cancer, or evening reversing climate change by 2050, the world is laced with hyperbole. Yet most of us plebians don't understand these matters and thus are destined follow the rhetoric. Science cannot be differentiated from magic if you don't understand the basic principles. Vaclav Smil exfoliates these hypes layer by layer and expose the absurd premise. Did you know that modern integrated chips have reached miniaturization of 2 nano meter chips, but the width of a silicon atom is 0.2 nano meter, so the their not much physical limit to play. The days of Moore's law and ever smaller chips is slowing down. Likewise use of hydrocarbons cannot be replaced with other sources as rapidly as we are made to believe, only 2% of cars int he world are battery driven and even they once which are battery driven are made of material using carbon as a the primary source of fuel.The book is not an easy read though. Despite his science background, Smil, doesn't write in a very linear manner. I found myself having to parse sentences to understand them; paragraphs seemed to veer abruptly from the topic to topic. it is a deliberate read but once you get past his style, which is punctuated with brackets and lots of data, you will be fine.My suggestion is to ignore parts which you don't understand, atleast that what I did. I fully recommend reading at least one of Smil's books because the man really knows his stuff. I wouldn't call him a polymath as Bill Gates does, but he is definitely, an authority on topics related to energy like coal, carbon, hydrocarbons and thus understands the scale of problems like climate change.

Livraison rapide, en parfait état

The book reads well.Contains some good data and interesting perspectives.E.g. the "newest" and environmentally friendly refrigerant R290 was used already 100 years ago at the beginning of refrigeration. After many changes the industry goes full circle "back to the future".For me though the book is not at the level of Smil best works, Energy and Civilization being my reference

Merece la pena leerlo. Presenta realistamente y con números muchos de lo supuestos logros de la humanidad que no han sido tales y otros que sí