On Invention

I recently finished reading The Most Powerful Idea in the World - A Story of Steam, Industry & Invention by William Rosen. Below are three key ideas from the book that I wanted to share with you:

1) On the Process of Invention: "To him (Abbott Payson Usher), every invention inevitably followed a four-step sequence: 1. Awareness of an unfulfilled need; 2. Recognition of something contradictory or absent in existing attempts to meet the need, which Usher called an "incomplete pattern"; 3. An all-at-once insight about that pattern; and 4. A process of "critical revision" during which the insight is tested, refined, and perfected."

2) On the Reflexive Nature of Innovation: "If there is one consistent theme in the story of innovation, it is its reflexive character. Without deep coal mines, there would not only have been no need for steam-powered pumps to drain them, there would have been no fuel for the pumps. The cast iron used to manufacture boilers, cylinders, pistons, and gears had impurities hammered from its 'blooms" by steam-driven hammers. The primary cargo for the first coal-driven locomotives was coal itself; a close second was the iron ore that was smelted and wrought into six-foot rail segments. These are all examples of the capacity of technological advances to spill over into the economy at large, and so multiply their initial effects; Wilkinson's 1774 patent on his boring machine didn't just enrich the inventor, but enabled the growth of Boulton & Watt."

3) From Abraham Lincoln on this topic: "The advantageous use of Steam-power is, unquestionably, a modern discovery. And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt. What appears strange is that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as as well as a toy in the days before Edward Coke's original Statute on Monopolies, any man could instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention...The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery of new and useful things."