
Forget About the Mythical Lone Inventor in the Garage - polymathist
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/05/argonne_national_lab_director_on_the_myth_of_the_lone_inventor_in_the_garage.single.html
======
ajdecon
Well, like so many other things, it's field-dependent. :-)

If you're working in software, you don't even need a garage: a dorm room or
studio apartment, a laptop, and a few thousand dollars to pay for web hosting,
will fill your need for physical equipment. I think that one of the great
achievements of the past few decades has been the invention of an entire field
of technical endeavor in which the base costs are so low.

But not all innovation is in software, and it's good to get a reminder that
most fields have substantial equipment materials and equipment costs. A lab
doing electronics, biotechnology, energy research, and many other _totally
necessary things_ has much higher requirements.

When I was doing microfluidics work in grad school, I was doing some of the
cheapest microfabrication research out there. All I needed was a continuous
supply of photoresist ($800/L), some decent-quality silicon wafers ($200/pk of
20), access to a high-resolution transparency printer for masks ($150/print),
silicone plastic for making devices ($50/lb), and a good fluorescence
microscope ($50,000 or so). Oh, and access to a clean room with about
$1,000,000 worth of equipment, but that was shared and I don't know what our
"rent" for access was...

Edit: costs estimated from the Internet and 2yr-old memories, but I think
they're pretty close.

~~~
6ren
Another advantage of a "lab" is interaction with other bright people in the
field. It's a key benefit of YC; Jobs designed the pixar building to enhance
this; many great software ideas came out of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC; and I've
also experienced it myself at my old compsci dept.

~~~
dredmorbius
The Internet has, if not replace, then extended that metaphor considerably.

Or at least it does when people with a common interest can reach out and find
one another.

One of my huge frustrations with so-called "social media" is that they
frequently make just this sort of interaction very difficult.

People who _empathize_ similarly can reach out and like one another. However,
people who can actually GSD need to wade through a ton of noise in search of
signal. Even old Usenet did better (charters and cancelbots FTW).

This is one of the reasons why topically-organized sites (Reddit, HN, etc.) do
far better for communications in my book.

------
polymathist
While I do agree with a lot of the points here, I wonder if perhaps recent
advances in technology (particularly those that might be considered platforms
for future innovations) are making the idealistic "Garage Inventor" more and
more realistic. It probably still requires a big lab to create new
technologies or new branches of science, but nowadays anyone with a laptop and
some money for web hosting can create something that reaches millions of
people. Although that's entirely different from what Edison, Hewlett, and
Packard were doing, I'd argue that it's still within the realm of
"innovation". (not to say that every website is particularly innovative, just
that the possibility is there.)

------
bjornsing
The author can't be too happy with the picture of Albert Einstein at the
top... For those that don't remember this Albert guy made one of the most
important discoveries of all time; working in solitude, in the Swiss patent
office, in-between reviewing patent applications. :)

~~~
danking00
And soon after, a team of experimentalists the world over set about proving
him right. People rarely remember the experimentalists, the guys who go
through all the hard work of providing the evidence to the theorists.

See: Michelson and Morley, Eddington, and others.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity>

------
waterlesscloud
Man who works in giant lab extols virtues of giant labs. Film at 11.

------
wfrick
Good piece, with major implications for public policy. Encouraging more people
to go into startups is great, but funding more R&D (especially in energy) is
crucial as well. Also, Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From makes this
case very well at book length.

------
ilaksh
I can't wait until some of the programmable-matter type approaches really take
off. The closest we have is 3d printing.

What I am hoping to become popular and inexpensive something like 3d printing
but with the ability to either assembly parts into machines automatically or
the ability to print functional machines all in one go.

When you have inexpensive machines that can do that type of thing, then you
really will be able to program reality in your garage, and print out fully
assembled machines from open source components you downloaded from the
internet.

On a slightly different topic, I was thinking, in response to this article, in
a way, no one who is trying to innovate in technology (especially things like
software) is really working alone. Instead we are building off of existing
platforms and modules that others have created. For example, I am probably one
of the most introverted programmers around, but the platform that I am
building, ostensibly working on it completely alone, integrates many, many
different pieces of open (and closed) source software/APIs, created relatively
recently by hundreds or thousands of different people.

I'm working on a product based on jQuery, jQuery UI, WebKit (V8), CodeMirror,
NodeJS, jQuery context menu, noty, NowJS (socket.io), CoffeeScript, FckEditor,
jQuery editable, jquery ipweditor, Google Web Fonts (more than a dozen
contributed fonts by many different authors), Google API hosting, AjaxUpload,
NodeJs (NPM, shellJS, formidable, rimraf, async, request, cssmin, vows, zlib,
mongolian, etc.) Rackspace API, PayPal/Stripe API, Ubuntu (Debian), Xen. Just
look at the huge number of people that have contributed to Debian/Ubuntu, V8
or WebKit or Node.js recently or the rest of it over the years -- there is no
way I could even consider doing this project without that stuff. So in a way
everyone is in the lab already which is open source/APIs/github or whatever.

~~~
mahyarm
What's happening are CNC machines are starting to be sold as consumer devices.
You can attach a lot of tools to a CNC-like machine, be it a laser etcher, a
plastic squirters, millers, etc. It's kind of like kitchens.

------
codemac
Solitude is great for creativity. Labs/offices/hacker spaces are great for
making that creativity a reality. You don't hire in more people in a startup
because you want to stifle creativity... you need to get shit done sometimes.

The "why not both" meme comes to mind. Go sit in a hammock for a month or two,
come back to the lab and try to get somewhere practical, then go back to the
hammock. You need creativity, but you also need critique from peers out on the
same ledge you're on.

Which reminds me of the hammock driven development talk[1]. The talk really
resonated with me.

[1]: <https://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586>

------
saturdaysaint
The inventor in the garage is a real, re-occurring figure in the rise of
industries, although the author is correct that these figures are more
commercializers and integrators than scientific trailblazers. The irony is
that there's no greater example than the namesake of Bell Labs...

------
rotten
Most real paradigm shifts happen outside the mainstream though.

