How to cure a hamster of jet lag – give it Viagra!
The 20-year-old Guglielmo Marconi wrote in 1894 to the Italian Minister of Post and Telegraphs, Pietro Lacava, to outline his plans for wireless telegraphy and request government funding.
Lacava never replied. he scrawled a suggestion that the young man should be sent to a lunatic asylum across the top of the letter and consigned it to the depths of his ministry’s filing system. By the time it resurfaced, Marconi’s ‘ wireless’ had transformed the world’s communications.
As Albert Jack’s entertaining ragbag of stories about the history of innovation shows, there have always been plenty of people eager to believe that would-be inventors are mad. They’ve been outnumbered only by those prepared to tell inventors that their plans won’t work. No sooner had Marconi’s ideas been presented to the British public in an 1897 lecture, than Lord Kelvin, the president of the Royal Society, stepped forward to announce that: ‘Radio technology has no future.’ (Kelvin had a spectacularly bad record as a prophet. At different times he also declared that, ‘X-rays will prove to be a hoax’ and that ‘heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible’.)
Kelvin was a great scientist. For a less talented man, the risk of making a fool of oneself in front of posterity was even higher.
Dionysius Lardner, a 19th-century writer on science, stated categorically that: ‘Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, will die of asphyxia.’ he then had to watch as railways criss-crossed the globe and millions upon millions of passengers travelled on them, all breathing freely. Today, he’s remembered solely for his one fatuous remark.
It wasn’t just big inventions like radio and railways that were ridiculed when first proposed. What now seem entirely commonplace objects were initially met with hoots of derision.
The American entrepreneur King Gillette was told that his safety razor was a joke. No one would use a blade a few times and throw it away. In the first year of production, he sold 51 razors by mail order. A century later, the company Gillette founded changed hands for $57 billion.
When Ron hickman had the idea for what became the Black & Decker Workmate, one company he approached predicted sales ‘in the dozens’.
At the time of its inventor’s death, the
Workmate had shifted 100 million units worldwide.
Many of the inventors in this book faced worse than ridicule. Theirs was a dangerous trade. In Jack’s account of the early parachutists, it’s noticeable how often the dates of the pioneers’ deaths coincide exactly with the dates of their most daring experiments.
Wan Hu, a Chinese official of the Ming Dynasty, had plans to become the original spaceman when he attached 47 gunpowder-based fireworks to a chair and prepared to blast into the wide blue yonder.
When the dust and smoke of the resulting explosion settled, there was no trace of Wan Hu, although he now has a crater on the Moon named after him. And the American Thomas Midgley is considered one of the great, creative chemists of the 20th century, but he poisoned himself with his experiments and eventually lost the use of his legs. He invented his own invalid bed but, in 1944, succeeded only in strangling himself in the mechanism he had devised to haul himself upright. And the difference between success and failure — between fame and riches, and obscurity and a wasted life — depends on chance and serendipity. The idea for the microwave oven first occurred to engineer Percy Spencer when he was standing in front of a radar unit and noticed that the chocolate bar he kept in the top pocket of his white lab coat had melted. A few months later, in October 1945, he applied for a patent for his Radarange oven. The earliest machines were 5.5 ft high and weighed half a ton.
The more uplifting side- effects of Viagra, which was originally intended to relieve chest pains in angina sufferers, were discovered by chance. Sales from the drug are now at the $2 billion a year mark, though no one has yet found a means of making money from another property researchers accidentally found it possesses — it reduces jet lag in hamsters.
If any lesson is to be drawn from the book, it’s that confidently predicting the future of invention is a mug’s game. The man who wrote in a 1949 Popular Mechanics magazine that ‘computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons’ would today have a smartphone weighing a few ounces in his pocket.