Russ: The is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. It is now time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And for this mornings flashback we are going to roll back to episode 170 from September of last year, when we had Dr. John Lienhard on the show. He is the author and voice of the very popular "Engines of Our Ingenuity" heard on NPR radio stations across the country. So check this out. When did you start producing Engines of Our Ingenuity and more importantly, what triggered the idea to do it?
John: Well, my trigger has been history, I suppose I really have to go back to 1970 when I took a summer workshop at the Smithsonian institution on History of Technology. After that I started writing articles and teaching courses on History of Technology and then we began doing the program on January 4th of 1988 and it's been airing ever since. It was an outgrowth of this interest in history.
Russ: OK, do you think the pace of inventive minds of ingenuity has changed, has sped up in the past couple of decades?
John: That is an extremely interesting question to which I just happen to have scads of quantitative data. Let me say this about that. The rate at which a technology improves as the result of invention was constant from as far back as we have any data up until about 1840. And, things like the efficiency of steam engines, the accuracy of clocks, things of that sort would double in any quantitative measure of goodness in about 30 years time and that continued 'til about 1840, then something happened, around 1840 we started professionalizing invention. What we did was create a class of people whose task it was to invent, a new class of engineers a new class of scientists, people who are not amateurs but who are dedicated to the process.
Russ: And that had a positive impact.
John: That had a strong impact and what happened was from then this doubling time shrank, right on down the the early 1950s at which it reached about one year. Things doubled in one year's time. Now at that point, we came to a point where things could double no faster. Because we were at the limit of our ability to retool both physically and psychologically we could not retool psychologically fast enough to adopt.
Russ: Around 1950.
John: Around the 1950s. Since then we have continued at about that rate and people who know about Moore's Law will recognize that as simply one example of that ah of that rate. And that has continued since then. So the rate of improvement as the result of invention has not altered since then.
Russ: Next question, has more to do with telling the future. What do you think are mankind's most difficult challenges in the future?
John: Oh, one of our most difficult challenges is certainly population. Ever since the 17th century, people have been making estimates of the carrying capacity of earth. And an interesting thing about those predictions is they have always come out around 13 billion people. It's, it's ominous that that number even as we change the basis for our estimation remains the same. And we are getting to a perilously large fraction of that number right now. So in one way or another the population of the earth is the greatest problem we face.
Russ: Interesting. What is your perspective on, this rapidly emerging global economy?
John: I think that question can be turned around. The globalization that we see is a manifestation of the information access that we are all encountering. It is very very hard to understand the magnitude of the change that is being brought upon us by the immediate access to information, the internet and all that it means. Shrinking of the earth that goes with our information connectivity.
Russ: I've got 2 final questions for you. First, who is the mother of invention?
John: The mother of invention is not who we think it is. There are 2 candidates that are constantly given to us. One is profit and the other, of course, is necessity. But an inventor does not invent to satisfy someone else's need. An inventor invents to satisfy his or her own need, and our need is to express ourselves. So the mother of invention is I think, freedom and if you want to give invention a mother and a father both, let's make the father hedonism, pleasure. Why did Archimedes run down the street naked shouting, "Eureka, eureka! I have found it!"? It was because the discovery of the law of flotation had given him such joy. Inventors will call upon necessity and profit as excuses.
Russ: And for my last question, let's say that you knew a young, aspiring entrepreneur that wanted to get into the world and make a difference with their ideas in 2008. What kind of advice would you give to them?
John: I would tell them to keep their eyes open and to look for the side road that nobody else sees. Why did 2 Japanese entrepreneurs have the wits to buy a license to make Bell's new transistors back in the 1950s? What did they see in this device?
Russ: Ok, keep your eyes open, which sounds like good strong advice. And that concludes the radio broadcast with the revisit with Dr. John Lienhard, but there is more. So go to thebusinessmakers.com and on the guest page for this weeks flashback with John, you will see a link to a webxtra with John. And this is a cool webxtra because we get Dr. Lienhard to talk about himself, and how he grew up as a dyslexic, many years before even learning about this challenging learning disability. And that wraps up this mornings Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And now its time for another Survival Tip, so lets welcome Dr. Don Minnick.
[Survivor Tip]
Russ: Stay tuned in for our interview with Global Politacal Economist, Marvin Zonis, professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.
