
How old were the inventors of major inventions? - tosseraccount
http://andolfatto.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-old-were-inventors-of-major.html
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dredmorbius
Invention, creativity, and the benefits of invention are a topic for much
exploration.

The 34 inventions mentioned are a small set -- that's just at the threshold of
large-sample statistics for normally distributed data, and the datapoints here
may well not bbe.

For a larger set of inventions, Joseph Needham's _Science and Civilisation in
China_ might provide an interesting basis. Under development for over half a
century, the 27 volume work (several still in process) details thousands of
years of innovation in China, in excruciating detail. The work's Wikipedia
entry alone is staggering. Needham's biography has been written by Simon
Winchester, and is highly recommended.

There are numerous books on innovation I recommend. There's _What Technology
Wants_ by Kevin Kelley and W. Brian Arthur's _The Nature of Technology_ both
cover inventions and inventing.

Robert Gordon's _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_ (2016) looks at the era
of invention and development since 1870. Gordon writes in great detail, but
very readably, of the tranformation of the US landscape, cityscape, and
suburbscape over this period, focusing especially on domestic living and
lifestyle, transportation, food, medicine and health, work, communications,
and entertainment. I've got disagreements with some of Gordon's economic
thinking, but his history is solid.

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kristopolous
That sample size is probably too small to faithfully break down things that
far.

Really this is when people got lucky enough (or perhaps influential enough) to
be attributed with an invention that is considered historically relevant.

I guess the real takeaway is just to keep trying to do great things

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jdale27
Absolutely. Very sketchy to try to draw any meaningful conclusions from this
data.

Also, what about the people who invent/innovate on a smaller scale, which
doesn't get recognized as much as these inventions but is in aggregate perhaps
as significant? This analysis sort of rings bells of the "Great Man" theory of
history.

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dataker
As someone in my early 20s, I can say the young innovator myth also severely
hurts the youth.

When you're told you need to achieve X by 30, you may end up destroying
relationships, having health issues and depression.

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fidz
But what if we can achieve X in early age without compromising anything?

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maxxxxx
Sure, it's great if you can pull that off. But for a lot of people expecting
they have to be a great success in an early age puts a lot of pressure on them
and I think it impedes learning.

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tonyedgecombe
Which is why you should measure success based on what you put in rather than
what you get out.

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gilrain
Ageism is an irrational pox on an industry that prides itself on being
rational.

~~~
kristopolous
Younger people work longer hours for less pay. You can burn them out and cut
them out of their fair share without mercy.

If you think it's about anything more than this, you don't know capitalism.

I get paid ~4 times as much but only work ~1/4th as much as I did 15 years ago
primarily because I'm not foolish and 19 ... I'm unlikely to actually be 16
times more productive for being 16 times more expensive.

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DominikR
There is no such thing as a "fair share", you get what you negotiate. You are
free to not accept any such contract if you are not content with it.

Or is anybody forcing you to accept this or that kind of work?

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auxym
I think his point is that 19 year olds are much poorer negotiators, and that
gets taken advantage of.

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DominikR
Who cares? They have the chance to learn to be better negotiators, which
they'll hopefully be some day.

Do we need to handicap more experienced negotiators so that 19 year olds do
better?

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kristopolous
huh? how did I offend your unrealistic neoliberalist fantasies here? oh right!
reality.

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FreedomToCreate
The policies for improving innovation are too simple and don't work. Simply
increasing immigration of STEM workers, increasing STEM education and throwing
money at the education department won't get people more educated. Have you met
really intelligent engineers and scientist. The ones that make a difference
are not in STEM for the money, they are in it because they are inspired and
driven to research and invent. A culture of STEM needs to be created amongst
people to push this type of agenda forward.

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nxzero
Idea that major inventions are by design is flawed; as such, any analysis of
the age of an inventor's age when discovering an invention is useless in my
opinion.

If you want to invent, do it.

If you want to discover a major invention, invent more often.

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chaostheory
Why is having more data that may offer a different perspective or new insight
useless?

~~~
nxzero
No, my point is that "what is great" is random and not inherently reflected by
what becomes mainstream. In fact, it's very possible that age influence the
process due to younger inventors have less resources like capital, investors,
network, etc.

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api
It takes a long time to learn enough and accumulate enough experience to have
a high chance of doing something new. Not saying you can't do it young since
many obviously do, but this doesn't surprise me at all.

I also think that youthful rebellion is a bit of a myth. The youth often rebel
how, against, and in the ways they are told to rebel by elder philosophers and
polemicists. It also often takes a lifetime to genuinely critique your culture
in a way that is truly incisive.

I think Tim Leary was joking about this with "don't trust anyone over 40." He
was over 40.

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erikpukinskis
Makes sense. Before 25 it's unlikely you can even _see_ what's happening.
You're kind of flailing around blind trying to learn all the words and figure
out which "facts" presented to you are actually just stories.

Once you can see what's happening, you can start trying to solve a problem. It
takes 10 years for you to get good at the basic skills. It's not _that_ likely
that your pre existing skills are the ones you'll need. Then the world changes
while you're watching and now you have all the ingredients:

1) vision

2) skill

3) a head start

So 35 is sort of a bottom limit for some kinds of invention.

Of course there are exceptions. If you have skills in the family you can start
learning them at 5. And some people are just born in the middle of the
kerfuffle and can see what's going on at a very early age. That's where
someone like Bob Dylan or Fiona Apple comes from, doing world class work at
16-17 years old.

And the Internet makes the first step of "seeing what's going on" much more
accessible, for both young people and everyone else. so I would expect the
curve to expand out quite a bit this century.

The skill training is really just about hours though so I don't think the
Internet accelerates that much.

~~~
tamana
You should meet Ben Franklin, Galois, and Mozart.

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karmacondon
No phonograph or light bulb on the original list? How odd.

~~~
perlgeek
Neither is the transistor, laser, integrated circuit, microscope (or indeed
optional lenses), or many other very significant inventions. So it's really a
sample, rather than a systematic coverage.

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azazqadir
The point is, lots of inventions are not mentioned. This makes the sample size
taken, too small. So, the conclusion made in this article might not be
accurate.

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DonaldFisk
The inventions mentioned by perlgeek and karmacondon don't change things much:
transistor (Bardeen 39, Brattain 47); laser: (Townes 43, Shawlow 37); IC
(Kilby 34); microscope (unknown). Telescope (Lippershey 38). Phonograph
(Edison 30); light bulb (Swan 32). The mean is 37.5.

I thought I'd also see how my own, admittedly very minor, inventions
([http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/Patents.html](http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/Patents.html))
fit into the pattern. Patents were filed when I was 32, 36, 36, 39, 44, and
55. So, 40.3, and that can only change upwards.

~~~
jrapdx3
Arguably the first US patent for a transistor, specifically the field effect
transistor, was awarded in 1926 to Julius Lilienfeld, though the invention was
not implemented back then. The later developers of transistors (Shockley,
et.al.) built model devices using the ideas in these patents though never
referenced or credited Lilienfeld's work. However, the later work was taken in
a different direction and avoided conflict with the earlier patents.

Lilienfeld went on to invent the electrolytic capacitor in 1931 when he was 51
years old. He was 44 years old when he patented the FET. This is very much in
line with the other data.

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sparkzilla
There's a really great book, now out of print, called _Tolstoy 's Bicycle_,
which is an encyclopedia of the ages at which people achieved notability (not
always success) The title comes from Tolstoy riding a bicycle for the first
time age 67. Reading that, you'll see that success can come at any age.

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Deprogrammer9
"Mr. Marconi is a donkey" \- Nikola Tesla

~~~
plainOldText
"Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my
patents." \- Tesla

I think this one is more illustrative of Tesla's character and the fact that
he was not driven by financial motivations.

~~~
stan_rogers
Well, except that Tesla didn't invent anything like the radio (the patent
grant was considerably later, only in the US, and specifically to freeze out
Marconi... who also didn't invent the thing). Marconi's apparatus was
essentially an improvement to Oliver Lodge's demonstration machine for the
BAAS memorial tribute to Hertz, largely done by the British Post Office
telegraphy engineers, with eventual help from the inventions of Lodge (a
tuning apparatus) and J. C. Bose. One could say that radio was accidentally
invented by several people several times over the preceding century, notably
by David Hughes, who at least tried to have the phenomenon investigated. It
was dismissed at the time as mere magnetic induction, something Tesla assumed
was the case as well, and so believed his cockamamie scheme for wireless
remote power was radio. Being able to convince interested nationalist laymen
that a foreigner didn't do it is not the same thing as actually inventing
something yourself. (Several of Tesla's other "inventions" were created by
other people before he was even born. The neon light, f'rinstance, is just a
Geissler tube.)

Look: many, many props to the guy for the induction motor and polyphase AC,
right, but he was rather in love with himself. He was an ingenious tinkerer
with a subtle mind, but there are some very good reasons to believe that he
didn't really understand _half_ of what he was trying to do, especially at
high frequencies. There's a reason why radio doesn't look like Wardenclyffe
now, and never did. Oh, and no financial motivations? That's a wee myth grown
out of his sale of patents to Westinghouse, without which arrangement AC would
have failed (because the onerous royalties due Tesla would have made it too
expensive compared to Edison's DC). He had no trouble begging for money while
looking for further fame and fortune.

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ryanmarsh
Robert Greene deftly handles the issue of age and genius in his book Mastery.
I highly recommend it.

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WalterBright
Interesting that they left Edison off the list.

