
When you change the world and no one notices - waqasaday
http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/when-you-change-the-world-and-no-one-notices/
======
jondubois
If you want to make money, you should never invent new things - Just copy
existing things and improve upon them.

That's why our society has such a short-term focus.

The brightest software engineers these days are writing essentially the same
software over and over again (with very slight modifications).

I think the same can be said of almost any industry - All our intelligence and
energy is spent on competing with each other and then using
marketing/advertising to leverage tiny advantages in a product/service in
order to win over disproportionate amounts of customers.

I think the reason why it takes years for disruptive innovations to get
noticed is because marketing (and by extension, the media) is paid for by
'today money'.

Marketers don't take bets based on future prospects - They don't need to
because there is so much financial incentive for them to stay in the present.

~~~
mseebach
I think you're rather short-selling incremental improvements. Very few of the
things that makes our lives so much better than those of our ancestors, are
nearly infinitely long strings of incremental improvements.

A present-day smartphone is obviously very, very different from Bell's first
telephone, but on the other hand, there wasn't really a clear disruptive
discontinuity anywhere along the string.

~~~
Retric
Uhh, hand-off between cell sites is clearly disruptive discontinuity. You can
link this to the invention of radio well after telegraphs / telephones. But,
radio is very much it's own thing.

What makes it seem like a smooth transition is the length of time it takes to
get to consumer products plus the need to seem like prior products. Internal
combustion engines where around for a log time before being refined enough for
portable power. But, heat engines are very much their own thing. Similarly
battery's and capacitors are their own things. However, when you get a car
it's got a huge range of such disruptions packaged into one thing.

------
Lerc
It's also worth keeping in mind the Saganism

    
    
        But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not 
        imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They 
        laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed 
        at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the 
        Clown.
    
    

We can see what is currently being laughed at. Bitcoin stands out as a good
example. History will decide if they were geniuses or clowns. All we have at
the moment are opinions.

On the other hand there is a particular form of sneering dismissiveness that I
see from a few people that I use as a guide. In the Bitcoin case all the right
people were panning it so I grabbed a few for $11 each, that worked out well.

~~~
whack
Sorry to hijack your comment, but Columbus was actually a clown. People in his
day already knew that the world was spherical, and that if you traveled west
long enough, you would get to India. However, their (accurate) calculations
showed that the distance you would have to travel in order to get to India
from the west, were so long, that such an expedition was bound to fail.

Columbus on the other hand, came up with his own calculations showing that the
distance needed to get to India was actually manageable and that he could do
it. His calculations were a joke, and off by an order of magnitude. Luckily
for him, there happened to be an entirely unanticipated continent in between
Europe and Asia, which he was able to land on. If not for that fortuitous
stroke of luck, Columbus would have died on his expedition as a nobody,
exactly as everyone has predicted.

~~~
random_rr
"Columbus was actually a clown"

Come on man. He was much less clown-like than many, many, many of his
contemporaries. He did something novel and pushed the world forward. Sorry he
didn't do it in the manner you would have preferred.

~~~
bbctol
He was a hell of a lot _more_ clown-like than his contemporaries, who had
accurate measurements of the size of the Earth and the length of Eurasia.
Columbus didn't trust maps not made by Christians, and refused to believe
China wasn't as large as Marco Polo had believed. He did something daring,
brave, and incredibly stupid, and got luckier than anyone else in history.

------
Fricken
The irony is that, while the Wright Brothers are the only household names from
the pioneering days of flight, essential contributions were made long before
Kitty Hawk, and many came after them to make their planes useful.

The Work of the Wright brothers was just one link in a causal chain with
beginnings preceding them by over 250 years.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Primitiv...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Primitive_beginnings)

~~~
sytelus
ummm... no. Ofcourse, no innovation gets built on its own in modern age, you
are at very least taking advantage of the fact that someone else invented
wheel, fire and steel :). However Wrights had very novel contribution. If you
read through history, you will see that 1900s were absolute breeding ground
for new flying machines and theories. People were trying out crazy stuff like
flipping bird wings. It was Wrights who figured out that curved wings can
produce enough power to lift the aircraft. They actually did this
scientifically by their own wind tunnel experiments (a very first). I would
say this was very original and not thought out before. In fact, if they had
told this idea to someone else without demonstration they would have been
laughed off. Sure, rest of innovations in aviation didn't belonged to Wrights.

~~~
chriscool
In
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation)
there are the following:

* Sir George Cayley was first called the "father of the aeroplane" in 1846... Among his many achievements, his most important contributions to aeronautics include:

Conducting scientific aerodynamic experiments demonstrating drag and
streamlining, movement of the centre of pressure, and the increase in lift
from curving the wing surface.

* In 1871 Wenham and Browning made the first wind tunnel.

So no the Wrights didn't figured out that curved wings can produce enough
power to lift the aircraft and no it was not a first to use wind tunnel
experiments.

------
mahyarm
A lot of the adoption curve comes from the economics too. The same thing 10
times cheaper is a revolution itself.

We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot cheaper
only in the past ~5 years.

1870 PV cells were a pretty piss poor energy source, the real revolution
happened in the last 10 years when they started to become an economic
competitor.

~~~
bsder
> We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot
> cheaper only in the past ~5 years.

Unfortunately, SLA-based printers mostly suck and, unlike most software
things, can't actually evolve to get better due to material constraints.

However, now that the _SLS_ patents have expired, we're starting to see
_useful_ 3D printers at useful price points. Being able to print a _robust_
plastic (nylon) and not having to worry about creating supports for narrow
parts are big deals. Of course, SLS is a little less hobbyist friendly because
of the powder handling.

~~~
PietdeVries
I think the article is complaining too much... True, it takes 30 years for an
idea to grow to something useful, but that is not because nobody cares (or
think you are nuts) - the idea just hasn't gotten to a final, usable form.
Carter can put solar cells on the Whitehouse, but to no use. The cells will,
compared to today's solar cells, hardly generate any power and cost way too
much. Same for the car, the personal computer, the mobile phone and the plane:
there was simply no market and no use for the average Joe to actually buy
it...

~~~
digi_owl
Pretty much. It seems more like someone complaining that their VC driven, get
rich quick, startup scheme petered out before they could cash in. And is
looking for external scapegoats rather than asking if the scheme really had a
chance in the first place.

------
dkarapetyan
This is one reason I dislike the silicon valley and sf culture of
"innovation". A lot of it is a variation on a well-known theme and the model
is predicated on unsustainable hypergrowth followed by surviving until
acquisition. Basically chasing fads and trends instead of doing anything truly
innovative because the venture model can't follow through something that
requires a decade of incubation.

~~~
Noseshine
What opened my eyes to where the true innovative roots of SV were planted was
a lecture from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (CA):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)

TL;DW: It all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on
electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen
amounts of government debt
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_public_debt#/media/File:Federal_Debt_Held_by_the_Public_1790-2013.png)).

~~~
digi_owl
Similarly, antibiotics languished until WW2 because it a right pain to mass
produce. But with the war came effectively bottomless budgets, and so the
needed R&D for mass production was bootstrapped.

------
mgamache
If I remember correctly the Wright Brothers were secretive. They were trying
to perfect the Flyer to get a military contract and didn't want to publicize
the advances they were making. They didn't invite anyone to see the initial
test flights. At the time, the French were getting much more/better press for
doing less. Without the press reports no one believed they were actually
flying.

 _Wilbur and Orville Wright made their historic first powered flight on
December 17, 1903, from Kill Devil Hill in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The
longest of four flights that day lasted 59 seconds and covered a distance of
852 feet. There were few witnesses to the flights and no reporters_

[http://www.wifcon.com/anal/analwright.htm](http://www.wifcon.com/anal/analwright.htm)

~~~
aidos
There's a Kiwi inventor most people never heard of called Richard Pearse who
was also working on flight (along with people all over the world, I'm sure).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse)

 _> > It is claimed Pearse flew and landed a powered heavier-than-air machine
on 31 March 1903, some nine months before the Wright brothers flew their
aircraft. The documentary evidence to support such a claim remains open to
interpretation, and Pearse did not develop his aircraft to the same degree as
the Wright brothers, who achieved sustained controlled flight. Pearse himself
never made such claims, and in an interview he gave to the Timaru Post in 1909
only claimed he did not "attempt anything practical ... until 1904"._

------
noobermin
One minor note. The warning about horseless carriages is fake[0].

[0]
[http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp](http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp)

~~~
SpeakMouthWords
I had a hunch that was the case. I can't imagine the people of the time being
concerned about the air being polluted.

~~~
snowwrestler
Not in the popular sentiment, but the first known scientific prediction of
potential global warming was by Svante Arrhenius at the end of the 19th
century.

------
Animats
That's because the 1903 Wright Flyer was barely able to fly a few hundred
feet. It was just a proof of concept for stability. The 1904 Flyer II was able
to circle and fly for about five minutes. The 1905 Flyer III crashed a few
times, and then they reworked the controls and were able to fly 24 miles.

At last, they had a minimum viable product. In 1907 they came out with the
Wright Model A, which was the production version of the improved Flyer III.
This had a range of 125 miles, and was the first production aircraft.

~~~
chriscool
In
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation)
there is:

"Santos-Dumont later added ailerons, between the wings in an effort to gain
more lateral stability. His final design, first flown in 1907, was the series
of Demoiselle monoplanes (Nos. 19 to 22). The Demoiselle No 19 could be
constructed in only 15 days and became the world's first series production
aircraft."

So it looks like the Wright Model A was not the first production aircraft.

------
swampthinker
Drones had a very similar adoption curve, and really only got past the "toy"
perception when DJI's Phantom came out.

RC Planes and helicopter POV footage was great to enjoy on YouTube, but the
learning curve was so immense that it kept the mainstream market away.

------
moron4hire
>> no mention of the men who concurred (sic) the sky for the first time in
human history.

Maybe that was the problem. They _weren 't_ the first to conquer the sky.
People had been flying in hot air balloons for 120 years by that point. By
1903, getting people up into the sky was old-hat. Sure, they did it in a
different way, but what they demonstrated was--strictly speaking--inferior to
the technology that was already available. If you wanted to get up into the
clouds in 1903, you weren't going to use a Wright Brothers machine that would
only let you skip along the ground for a few minutes at a time, you'd use a
hot air balloon and stick around for a while. Can people really be blamed for
missing the fact that heavier-than-air flight would be able to travel much
faster and farther than balloons?

------
paulrouget
It's true that innovation process used to take a long time. See the story of
the telegraph for example, which was clearly a breakthrough, but took half a
century to be adopted
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet)).

Nowadays, the process might take a lot lot less time than before though
([http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-
revolu...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-
revolution-1.html))

And also - let's remember that it's not because something goes through the
first steps of this seven-step path that it will become a breakthrough.

~~~
roywiggins
They were sending images by telegraph in the 1860s but it didn't catch on.
Admittedly the ye olde faxes had to be specially prepared, it couldn't
reproduce a printed image directly. But still, amazing how long it took images
to routinely travel electronically.

~~~
Houshalter
What I don't understand about the telegraph, is why it never evolved further.
Surely a primitive machine could tap out morse code (or something like it),
and decode it, much faster than a human operator? And surely there was demand
for this, given the very high costs of sending telegraphs. So high they were
inaccessible to the average person.

And then once you have a machine that can do this, well you can start to
consider routing, and telegraphing straight into homes, and having telegraph
services that store information that can be access remotely...

It took until the telephone to reach the average person's home. And telephones
are much more sophisticated than just sending blips over a wire. They had much
higher bandwidth. And there was much greater complexity involved in wiring up
everyone's house, then a crude automated routing telegraph machine would
require, I think.

~~~
paulrouget
It did evolve quite a bit. There were machines to automatically encode/decode
messages. You could even plug a keyboard to it. Some people (Morse himself)
had such a device at home.

Routing was a thing, but there were some limitations of how many
communications could happen at the same time on the same wire (Baud was the
one who actually worked on that), making scaling difficult.

The important thing to understand is at the end of the century, as bandwidth,
infrastructure scaling, reliability were all getting better, the phone
happened, as a logical next step. The telegraph never made is as a personal
device because the infrastructure and the science of the telegraph reached a
point where phones were possible.

Morse for original mechanism, Baud for scaling, Bell to use voice instead of
beeps.

------
nhebb
> _It happened with the index fund – easily the most important financial
> innovation of the last half-century. John Bogle launched the first index
> fund in 1975. No one paid much attention to for next two decades._

That's in part because everyone was googly-eyed over managed funds thanks to
Peter Lynch's 29% average annual return for the Magellan Fund from '77 to
'90\. Index funds didn't beat that dude.

~~~
chaostheory
After he retired, Peter Lynch was one of the people who pushed index funds in
his books. He may be one reason they're so popular today.

------
hsdkfsdkfjh
The other thing is that these kinds of "misunderstood heroic ignored genius"
tales are complete bollocks. In reality there was always an existing idea out
there before these "revolutionary innovations".

For example, people had been imagining flying for millennia before the Wright
brothers. Leonard da Vinci had drawn hang-gliders and helicopters hundreds of
years before and there was the myth of Icarus thousands of years before that.
Our distant ancestors even "flew" through the trees. People also have flying
dreams, before they've even flown in reality and they probably had flying
dreams thousands of years ago too. It's not a new idea so no wonder people
weren't _that_ amazed when the Wright brothers flew. There are never any truly
new ideas, only remixes and hybrids of existing ones, e.g. Relativity was
Einstein's synthesis of ideas from (among others) Poincaré and Lorentz and you
can trace their ideas back too.

~~~
koonsolo
Having an idea or theory is one thing, but putting it into practice is
something completely different.

It's not hard to imagine going to Mars and live there, or even have a bunch of
theories on how this would be possible in practice. Doing it however, takes a
lot more than that.

I can't imagine current media completely ignoring this when it would actually
take place, which basically did happen with the Wright brothers.

Ideas and theories only prove their worth when something practical is done
with them.

~~~
hsdkfsdkfjh
Not so. Having an idea isn't easy. Relativity was "just" an idea long before
there was any practical application of it, and it was "just an idea" that took
a _lot_ of work. It's simply not true that ideas are easy but practical
application is hard. Actually the reverse can be true, sometimes an idea can
take a lifetime to develop while the practical applications are trivial by
comparison. Nor is it true that "Ideas and theories only prove their worth
when something practical is done with them". This one really _sends me_
actually! There's currently no application for theories of black holes, but
those theories are worthwhile in their own right, for if there's anything that
makes humans worthwhile, it's their ability to conceive of such ideas as black
holes. Physics and mathematics, art and music are valuable in themselves
regardless of practical application because they are edifying, beautiful, they
are something we can be proud of amidst all our failings as a species. So if
we wipe ourselves out, by nuclear weapons or some such stupidity, or if we are
wiped-out by an asteroid, _even if_ we never reach Mars, future intelligences
may find our writings and movies and learn that we dreamed of going to Mars.

~~~
Mz
You are kind of contradicting yourself: Nothing is really new! Except the
theory of relativity, proving ideas are hard!

~~~
hsdkfsdkfjh
I didn't say developing an existing idea was easy, I just said it wasn't
entirely original; that all ideas are the result of breeding between existing
ideas is no measure of how hard are to develop!

------
creadee
I got curious as to how true it was that the Wright's first flight was hardly
reported, so searched New Zealand's Papers Past. Maybe not front page news,
but not ignored, either...

[https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers?items_per_page=...](https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers?items_per_page=100&phrase=2&query=wilbur+wright&sort_by=byDA)

------
soufron
Also, the author is wrong on the first flight which was not the wrights but
clement ader... in 1890. Nice fail. He should be more modest and avoid giving
les sons to journalists and industrialists when he does not now his own
history, even 140 years later and with the Hell of the internet and Wikipedia.
He should be more self-aware that being right about innovation is indeed
difficult.

For those interested in clement ader :
[https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ole_(avion)](https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ole_\(avion\))

~~~
tzs
Plenty of people, including Ader, got into the air before the Wrights, but
their flight was not controlled flight. The Wrights were the first to get the
whole package of powered, controlled, heavier than air flight to work.

------
soufron
The author has a good intuition but he forgets patents and secrets. 3D
printing was a success in the industrial world through the 90s. It became a
public success when its patents ended around 2004. Why would people talk about
something they can't use anyway?

------
cmarschner
The mechanics of innovation adoption have been extensively studied (e.g. [1]).
It takes the innovators (which are often shrewd introverts) to create new
things and early adopters (well-connected extroverts) to spread the word to
the next group. As adoption continues, maturity increases and prices go down.
At the same time, more and more people are using the product, which convinces
more rosk-averse people to have a look. At best the result is a chain
reaction, but it always follows a sigmoid curve. And due to more efficient
means of communication, the adoption curves are still accelerating. It took
decades until telephones or TVs were established. Today we got smartphones,
HackerNews and the Twitter firehose. Suffice it to say that, yes, innovators
are always a fringe part of a group, and they better don't care too much what
others are saying. I would say this property is to some extent scale free, as
one finds the same patterns within research communities which, as one would
expect, should _all_ consist of innovators.

[1] Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm

------
Reason077
_Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even
20 miles per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling
through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would
call for prompt legislative action._

Congress were actually rather insightful in these predictions. Millions now
die every year from motor vehicle accidents and air pollution.

~~~
noobermin
Also posted in my comment below:

[http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp](http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp)

------
david927
_Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over
existing products._

For true innovation to happen, what we need are brave investors.

~~~
jabo
Also investors who think "generationally":

> When innovation is measured generationally, results shouldn’t be measured
> quarterly.

------
IANAD
> “Zen-like patience” isn’t a typical trait associated with entrepreneurs.

Or investors.

~~~
tyre
Really depends. Investors can drag out meetings for months until they are
ready. They'll wait you out if you're not able to exert leverage.

------
JohnStrange
I think that inventions are similar to bars; nobody can really tell you which
ones become popular and which won't. Neither the barkeeper nor the inventor
can really control their fate.

I'm still waiting for the ridiculously cheap, extremely high density write-
once laser storage on adhesive transparent Tesa film. There was a working
prototype already more than a decade ago, they funded a spin-off company, and
since then nothing seems to have happened.

Extremely bendable e-ink-like displays at throwaway-pricing were also promised
to me more than ten years ago.

My personal explanation is that many good inventions are bought by the
competition and then quickly hidden in the drawers, because not every
technology that is better than before allows the company who owns it to also
make more money than before. Or many of these inventions are just bogus
marketing speech to attract investors and they really don't work.

------
sytelus
The author have got many facts downright wrong: Wrights were actually very
secretive and they were reluctant to publish anything before they got the
patent. They were so adamant about the patent that they didn't do any public
demonstration of flight for years until they were literally forced by
competing claims. In those times people making claims for "heavier than air"
flights were numerous and it was hard to take anyone seriously unless they do
demonstration. They not only chose not to do so until they got patent but also
did almost nothing to enhance their technology meanwhile. Their contribution
except for first flight is very marginal and their rest of the lives are
dominated by nothing but patent worries, bringing massive lawsuits on others
and getting royalties. They also made a very generic patent claim essentially
asserting that any system that produces lift is covered by it. This produced a
lot of friction in bringing new innovations to market leaving USA
significantly behind of Europe.

I admire Wrights thoroughly for their vision, hard work and making miracle
happen through their miger resources but saying that no one would have noticed
if they saw first airplane in air is bogus.

Reference: [https://www.amazon.com/Wilbur-Orville-Biography-Brothers-
Tra...](https://www.amazon.com/Wilbur-Orville-Biography-Brothers-
Transportation/dp/0486402975)

~~~
simo7
On top of all these mistakes...there is also the very American mistake of
believing Ford invented the car.

When I've read it I knew I had to take all the rest with a big grain of salt
:|

~~~
masklinn
> there is also the very American mistake of believing Ford invented the car.

I don't quite see that since the author dates the quote to 20 years before
Ford's popularisation of automobiles, he obviously couldn't have been the
inventor of something being investigated by a congressional committee long
before his age.

Then again, the "report" is an anachronistic piece of fiction:
[http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp](http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp)

~~~
simo7
I am referring to "Twenty years before Henry Ford convinced the world he was
onto something".

No need to convince anybody since Ford started manufacturing and
commercializing cars roughly 10 years after his peers in Europe.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The thing Ford was on to was one-job production lines (where each worker does
one job-atom and the work moves to the next stage) wasn't it? IIRC Ford's
project was to make the car affordable to those of more modest means, so
"everyone" could have a car.

If you look at the quote then this interpretation makes more sense IMO - the
quote clearly considers the position that cars were being made commercially 20
years before Ford.

TL;DR the Ford point is he democratised car use in the face of congress's
earlier consideration that such widespread use would kill agriculture and
people. (Mind you the congress memo quote seems pretty right on).

~~~
masklinn
> The thing Ford was on to was one-job production lines (where each worker
> does one job-atom and the work moves to the next stage) wasn't it?

IIRC Olds already had a one-job production line, but the line was static and
workers had to move around between assemblies. Ford's innovation was to make
the workers "static" (with well laid out workspaces) and move the assembly
between the jobs.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I think you're right: I toyed with adding "static" but then needed to
emphasise it was the workers who were static, then it was getting too wordy.

------
sunstone
'concurred the sky'? Sure, typos happen to everyone but this is definitely of
the highest order.

------
d--b
"It happened with index funds"

Wait, what? index funds invention on par with flying?

Oh, "collaborativefund.com" ...

------
ky738
Nobody noticed cause Santos Dumont did it first :D

------
rwallace
Okay, suppose we grant this at least for the sake of argument.

What's your 'watch this space'? What technologies currently in prototype stage
do you think have a bright future?

~~~
Artoemius
Artificial intelligence.

------
pseudointellect
The article's subtle implication that we are all changing the world but it'll
take time for that change to be realized is truly arrogant and delusional.

~~~
sidcool
Of all the possible conclusions that could have been drawn, this one is the
farthest from truth.

------
conqrr
A quote by Gandhi comes to mind when reading those seven steps. "First they
ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

~~~
hueving
Or you lose. But the people who experienced that outcome obviously weren't
worth quoting.

~~~
jfoutz
The three gates are implicit in success. Perhaps you can pass gate 2, perhaps
not. The insight is recognizing and passing the gates.

------
dgudkov
What I read from this story is that it's crucial for an invention to reach the
stage when it really starts delivering practical advantage. No one noticed
early success of the Wright because what they had achieved so far didn't have
any practical application. So no reason to blame people for shortsightedness
-- it's rational behavior.

------
raverbashing
The Wright brothers kept their experiment a secret purposefully, so it's not
surprising that they didn't show up on the news

------
gonvaled
> The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our
> streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for
> prompt legislative action.

That was quite prescient! Unfortunately we didn't do that, and cars took over
the streets, caused millions of deaths and injuries, and indeed poisoned our
atmosphere.

~~~
pmontra
And more

> The cost of producing gasoline is far beyond the financial capacity of
> private industry…

Check the history of subsidies to the oil industry
[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-
en...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-energy-
timeline)

> In addition the development of this new power may displace the use of
> horses,

Obviously.

> which would wreck our agriculture.

Probably this was wrong. Instead it got transformed and made more efficient.
They didn't foresee the tractor, the tresher, etc.

This is a lesson about the impossibility of thinking in advance about even the
major consequences of new technologies. You get some, you miss others, so it's
difficult to decide if you'll be better off.

Edit: the report turned out to be fake (see noobermin's comments). It was
written in 1950 as satire, when it was spot on but too late to stop cars. A
lesson about checking sources.

------
tmcbride23
I'm an inventor, I have experienced this exact thing I have a sever cabinet
that powers it self and a anti gavity machine but no one cares!! I've aplied
to the YC 16 winter for acritic nails that change colors with your phone or
you can load a gif I hope they go for it so I can make cars fly.

~~~
Mz
If any of that is true, they not only do not care, they are calling you crazy.

Best.

------
dsjoerg
Great inventions may be ignored. However, many ignored inventions are just
sucky pieces of garbage.

------
apsec112
"Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even
20 miles per hour. (...)"

This quote is a well-known hoax:
[http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp](http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp)

~~~
RealityVoid
Heh, that quite stood out to me, partly, not because it is so wrong but
because it is so right. The part about "The menace to our people of vehicles
of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning
the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action" seems like such
contemporary issues I would have been amazed if someone would have foretold
their importance back then.

------
digi_owl
And until a world war made the military sit up and spend massively into their
development, they were a rich man's novelty.

Never mind that so many had made claims about flight before the Wrights, that
having the press be less than interested was to be expected.

------
aaron695
This article is just plain wrong.

Every point is incorrect / misleading and the 'point' is the direct opposite
of reality.

People latch onto new amazing we'll change the world ideas to easily.

Real change happens from hard work and gradual change is the real reality.

~~~
coldtea
> _Real change happens from hard work and gradual change is the real reality._

Real change has also happened from "spur of the moment" ideas and inventions.
There's no "system" the world operates on. Sometimes it takes hard work,
sometimes it's a random neuron firing....

------
peter422
The vast majority of products that people don't understand and believe to be
useless are in fact useless.

The first time I used Google I knew it was amazing and never used altavista
again. When Facebook came to my campus it spread like wildfire.

These stories are quite interesting but at the same time what are they
suggesting? An investor wants you to spend your whole life chasing a dream
because they don't care if it fails and get paid if it succeeds. If you love
doing something, do it regardless of what people think. But don't let an
investor convince you to waste years working on something that nobody wants
because that is what all successful entrepreneurs do. In a few cases it works
out but the vast majority of the time it doesn't.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I think you are missing the point, as the author states the same thing halfway
in:

 _Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over
existing products._

It's not that every huge shift is also accompanied by a lengthy doldrums. Uu
chose clear outliers-and yes while VC is predicated on outliers this post is
actually a counter balance to what VC mostly decide on which is traction. So
I'm not so cynical about this post because it's not saying " do what sales"
and all the other typical VC tropes which are more in line with what you
describe. Most successful entrepreneurs do something incremental so I think
your analysis is wrong there as well.

The only problem I see with this post is that more than likely, they don't
actually invest on this ethos so it's giving entrepreneurs with vision a false
hope.

~~~
bambax
> _Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over
> existing products._

But that doesn't apply to Google. Although there were many, many search
engines when Google first appeared, none worked like it -- in fact, none
worked, at all.

Google worked from day 1 and everyone who used it, saw it very clearly.

~~~
boomlinde
On a technical level that might be true, but to the average user I think the
edge google had over its competitors was that its product was vastly superior.
How they built better search results was a matter of implementation, while the
end product didn't stray far fom the public idea of a search engine.

------
roel_v
To compare the 3D printing of the 1980's with that of today is a stretch, at
best, both in quality and price. And people who care have been '3D printing'
(high quality, like with laser sintering, not Makerbot crap) for years.

It's disingenuous to suggest that the very first moment something has been
shown in a proof of concept should be the moment that everyone starts
rejoicing and flocking to it en masse. Many technologies need years or decades
to get mature enough for wide spread use (which the author seems to equate
with 'getting recognition').

~~~
makomk
Not only that, there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for 3D printing early on.
It just took the expiry of the key patents for that enthusiasm to turn into
something ordinary people had access to.

------
minikites
I don't disagree with the thesis of the article for inventions that were
destined to be successful but I think it exhibits a strong sense of
surviorship bias in predicting anything contemporary to be in the same league.
I think transformative inventions like airplanes or index funds can by
definition only be defined in retrospect and the odds that anything
contemporary can be predicted to turn out the same way are slim. I wonder what
a good order of magnitude would be for failed inventions vs successful ones,
maybe 10000:1?

------
megablast
> Wilbur and Orville Wright conquered flight on December 17th, 1903. Few
> inventions were as transformational over the next century. It took four days
> to travel from New York to Los Angeles in 1900, by train. By the 1930s it
> could be done in 17 hours, by air. By 1950, six hours.

And by 2016, 6 hours still.

[http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/new-york/to/los-
ang...](http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/new-york/to/los-angeles)

~~~
ktRolster
The innovation in commercial flight since 1950 has been in reducing prices.
It's ridiculously cheap to fly anywhere these days, and wonderfully cheap.

------
grabcocque
The Alexander Graham Bell/Western Union story is a fabrication.

[http://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2011/01/the-
greatest...](http://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2011/01/the-greatest-bad-
business-decision-quotation-that-never-was.html)

------
NKCSS
Not always true; the iPhone went through all those stages very quick and
created a new reality. The iPad did the same, in a smaller way. While one may
argue these are mere improvements, they were major enough to change the entire
social dimension in only a few short years.

------
LeonB
logged in to say, "this process can take decades."

...try millennia!

The aeolipile, regarded as a curious novelty (a 'temple wonder'), created by
Heron of Alexander in 1st century AD was the first steam turbine... the
eventual mastery of which led to the industrial revolution.

------
jedmeyers
To me this piece feels like an ad for index funds, riddled with false facts
and generalizations.

------
FuNe
I understand the votes - that piece is like being written especially for HN
BUT it's only just that. It tries to extrapolate a moral story from a few
convenient incidents and ignores all the rest. I.e. its method is really
unscientific but it poses like such.

Some inventions seem to take long to gain traction - yes. Others though (how
many compared to the first set?) gain traction immediately (e.g. lots of
inventions in medicine or lots of inventions in -ehm- IT). Others still don't
get on ever.

There is no easy moral here. We could derive some statistics if we had all
data or some teachings per story. How your invention will be treated by the
near or far future is not just a matter of newspapers and general public
interest.

PS: Also -as I read in commends here- the main point seems bogus too as
Wrights themselves were extra secretive about their experiments.

------
y04nn
Not a word about Gustave Whitehead, who may have been the first to
successfully flight?

------
marceloboeira
Such an American mistake to think that the Wrights invented the airplane...

~~~
chaostheory
imo It's a common mistake for people to think that something was made by one
team or person, when in reality things like the lightbulb were incrementally
improved and evolved by many different people working separately. It's a
harder story to remember and 'sell'...

------
chx
> It takes 30 years for a new idea to seep into the culture.

From Altair to IBM PC, 7 years, Mac, only 10. From IBM Simon to the iPhone
fueled boom in 2008 only 14 years passed.

~~~
avh02
the iPhone was not a new idea, though it was quite an evolutionary leap.

------
robertkrahn01
New vs. News
[https://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=15m23s](https://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=15m23s)

------
ilaksh
A more general related concept is the difference between merit and popularity.
Some people actually forget that they are not the same thing.

------
lx0741
Don't forget the existing and we'll established businesses who will fight for
their lives any threatening 'idea'

------
asimjalis
The problem is that while great innovations frequently go unnoticed, going
unnoticed does not automatically imply greatness.

------
Bakary
The article is certainly interesting but it has the same trait as too many pop
science books: it relies on selective anecdotal evidence to support their
specific point.

~~~
truth_sentinell
And what would be a proper "evidence" to rely on?

~~~
yiyus
Statistical evidence.

~~~
truth_sentinell
I have a problem with this. I don't know if is ignorance by me or what is it.
But AFAIK, most "truths" on diferent sciences are based purely on statistic
evidence of a sample. Let's suppose that they do an study on why people cheat.
They pick 100 random people on an university and do whatever they have to do
to test them. Let's say 90 out of 100 cheat because they get bored. Then these
scientist draw a conclusion and say "people cheat because they get bored".
That's a very broad term.. and again, afaik is the same with other studies.

Is this just one way to do it or is it what every scientist do? How can you
possibly englobe everybody to a cause for certain trait based on studying
100,1000, or even 100,000? I can't get my mind atound this.

------
z3t4
First they will ignore you. Then they will laugh at you. Then they will work
against you. Then you win.

------
kragen
The article's timeline of flight goes like this:

1903\. First flight, ignored.

1904\. Nameless hot-air-balloon-flying count dismisses possibility of flying
machines.

1905\. People see Wrights flying around Dayton.

1906\. Passing mention of Wrights in NYT.

1908\. Reporters sent to observe Wrights, credence given.

1930s. NYC LAX: 17 hours.

1950\. NYC LAX: 6 hours.

This story is a lie. I don't mean that it contains anything actually false (as
far as I know, it doesn't) but it is actively and intentionally misleading by
its selective omission of facts. Although the rumors were eagerly repeated,
people generally didn't believe the Wrights had built a flying machine because
_the Wrights refused to demonstrate it_. Then, when other people started
building airplanes, they started suing them. Consequently, the US lost its
leadership in aviation to France (and Brazil!) for over a decade, which would
have been a longer period of time if France hadn't been devastated by the
Great War.

Here are some of the omitted events from the timeline.

1896\. People fly in Octave Chanute's biplane hang glider.

1900\. Wrights begin glider experiments at Kitty Hawk at Chanute's suggestion.

1901\. Wrights lecture in Chicago on their glider experiments, and in
particular wing-warping control, at the invitation of Chanute, who lives
there.

1902\. Wrights continue glider experiments, visited by Chanute.

1903\. Wrights apply for wing-warping patent.

1903\. Wrights' first four flights, of 12 to 59 seconds. Airplane irreparably
damaged immediately post-flight. Several newspapers report the event,
inaccurately, from a leak by a telegraph operator. Dayton Daily News
disbelieves tall tale, doesn't report.

1904\. Wrights issue public statement, build new airplane, invite reporters to
first flight attempt on the condition that no photos be taken. Attempt fails.
Further dozens of test flights are undertaken in strict secrecy, except for
eyewitness accounts published in a beekeeping magazine. Longest flight exceeds
five minutes. Airplane destroyed.

1905\. Wrights continue tests witnessed by a small circle of friends. Longest
flight is 38 minutes. Scientific American doubts the alleged experiments
happened. Dayton Daily News reports "The Flight of a Flying Machine." Wrights
end experiments, refuse to fly any more without some buyer signing a contract
to buy an airplane. Governments of US, Britain, France, and Germany (!) refuse
to sign contracts without a demonstration.

1905\. Aéro-Club de France and other organizations federate in the Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale.

1906\. Paris edition of New York Herald asks of Wrights, "FLYERS OR LIARS?"

1906\. Santos-Dumont makes a powered heavier-than-air flight in Bagatelle
Field in Paris, certified by Aéro-Club de France and the Fédération
Aéronautique Internationale.

1906\. Wrights make 0 flights.

1906\. Wrights receive patent on wing-warping control techniques they derived
from Chanute's work.

1907\. Wrights make 0 flights.

1908\. The Clement-Bayard company in Paris starts a production run of
airplanes of Santos-Dumont's design; 100 planned, 50 built, 15 sold.

1908\. Wrights finally sign a contract. Make first public demonstration in Le
Mans, France. Make first passenger flight. Airplane destroyed in crash. Wilbur
emerges from wreckage with cut on nose.

1908\. Glenn Curtiss starts making airplanes with ailerons to avoid the
Wrights' wing-warping patent.

1909\. Curtiss sells an aileron plane; Wrights begin suing him and basically
everything that moves, including foreign aviators who visit the US.

1909\. Clement-Bayard planes are sold with a choice of Clement or Wright
engines.

1909\. Wrights form the Wright Company.

1910\. German court rules Wrights' patent invalid due to their disclosure of
wing-warping in 1901.

1910\. Wrights stop working on airplane design and switch to working full-time
on suing other airplane designers.

1910\. Octave Chanute publicly deplores Wrights' secrecy and litigiousness.
Dies.

1912\. Wilbur Wright dies of typhoid.

1913\. Wrights win lawsuit against Curtiss.

1915\. Orville Wright quits the company.

1917\. US enters World War I, has no domestically produced airplanes of
acceptable quality due to Wright-initiated patent battles; US forces fly
French airplanes. US government forces aircraft companies to enter a cross-
licensing cartel.

Kids, don't be like the Wright Brothers. Be like Chanute. Be like Santos-
Dumont. Change the world, don't try to own it.

------
NamTaf
I don't like his Vanguard example. He's pointing to exponential growth and
saying that for two hand-picked points, it appears as if nothing had changed.

That's sort of how exponential growth works. The growth in the most recent
period makes all the other growth before it look trivial. I bet if he could
zoom in on the '75 to '95 period he could plot the arrows in the same place
and draw the same conclusion.

------
cperciva
The Wrights' first flight didn't change the world. Nor did photovoltaic cells
in 1876; nor did 3D printing in 1989. And none of these inventions _could_
change the world at the time, because they were little more than proofs of
principle: They showed that something was possible, but they were not in fact
_usable_.

Photovoltaic cells aren't becoming popular now because people are suddenly
realizing that they exist; they're becoming popular because _the technology
has reached the point where the cells are cheap enough and efficient enough to
be practical_. The same goes for 3D printing, and the same went for the
Wrights' aircraft: They received plenty of attention once they moved from the
realm of curiosities to being useful inventions.

The title of this article should be "when you _don 't_ change the world and no
one notices".

~~~
_nedR
I may be wrong but i thought that the main thing holding up the 3d printing
revolution, was the long wait for the relevant patents to expire.

~~~
cperciva
That may be one factor, but it seems like there's new technology for 3d
printing announced every few months; I'm sure there is innovation happening
and it's not just people sitting on their hands and waiting for the patents to
expire.

~~~
_nedR
Again i am not intimately familiar with 3d printing technology, but the timing
of at least some of those announcements might be due to expiration of relevant
patents, rather than the invention of new technology.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/15/how-expiring-patents-
are-u...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/15/how-expiring-patents-are-ushering-
in-the-next-generation-of-3d-printing/)

------
blazespin
The time between invention and practical application is shortening (Internet
plays a huge part) which is why the pace of innovation is accelerating.

------
cyberferret
An interesting article, but I would say this is one that is better showcased
to, say, a primary school audience rather than the HN crowd perhaps? The
writing style and concepts were a little too simplistic and lacked the depth I
would expect from the publications I normally see linked on here.

Note: But even for a younger audience, I would do some serious editing of the
text (e.g. misuse of "concurred" instead of "conquered" etc.) before
publication.

~~~
bochengkor
I noticed the simplistic language used too. But I found it refreshing as the
author is able to cite more external material while keeping the reader's (or
at least, my) attention to the core message. No distracting jargon or flowery
language were employed. But it could also be how my simple mind functions
too..

------
tbarbugli
It's funny and saddening at the same time to see how often the first entry on
HN is a worthless/incorrect/inaccurate/ article .

------
supercoder
Finally validates that my ideas that everyone has been saying are terrible,
confusing and useless are infact world changing just as I have thought they
are.

------
simbalion
The 7 step process shows us how the majority of people are "dumb". And by
dumb, I mean they lack the creative ability to look forward and imagine how a
technology can change the world.

Those of us who are not suffering that disability should not feel guilty for
our capabilities, but we should recognize that we are intellectually superior,
because we should be ruling the world from every corner, not them. Sadly, many
of them are the ones running governments and giant corporations.

All men may be created equal, but through different educational and parental
environments, all men do not arrive at adulthood as equals.

~~~
Bakary
What do you mean by "should" be ruling the world? There is only what you can
enforce.

