12 ms·

When you change the world and no one notices

• swampthinker 10y ago
  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.
• david927 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Also investors who think "generationally": > When innovation is measured generationally, results shouldn’t be measured quarterly.
  • Noseshine 10y ago
    What makes you so sure? See my previous comment here (with a link to the source) above in reply to "Silicon Valley" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12435177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12435177). Basically, 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. SV and all its firms stand on foundations laid by (very) big and (very) generous government. Investors ant at least statistical certainty, meaning while they of course account for most of their venture companies to fail they want to at least be certain for them all as a group. They won't finance a "business" that is just experimental with no advance idea what the whole thing is even about. Because such basic research isn't a business. I once worked for a startup that was eventually sold for a few hundred million (no I did not benefit from that). We got funded (by the tens of millions) - by Silicon Valley venture capital - because we were #2 in a market where the #1 just had an incredible IPO. We did exactly the same as the #1, and #1 also didn't actually do anything innovative, just a different version of what had already been in this world for decades, technology not all that superior to existing things, the changes were in the business model mostly. "Predictable" innovation. Here's an example: Imagine someone would try to get venture capital for a human-computer interface right into the brain. I'm taking about something out of a sci-fi movie, not based on the extremely basic steps we've thus far taken. Would they get funding? Never. It's tens of billions of investment and it's completely uncertain if it would take 10 or 100 years. This isn't a well-defined research project, this is very broad. Now imagine a serious threat to the United States - war, and not just one of those little ones abroad. Would the US government fund such a crazy idea? Sure, just like they've done many times. They will throw (non-existing) billions at this and at many other crazy ideas without asking for potential monetary return. While an investor wants a statistical chance that the overall portfolio has a positive monetary return, the government (at war) wants a statistical chance for a positive result - non-financial, not caring, actually expecting, that costs will by far exceed returns. If the stuff created in such an effort eventually creates businesses that's nice but not even part of the motivation. When they paid for the Manhattan project, the Norden bomb sight, or electronics and computing R&D they didn't stop to think about if that would ever create a financial return.
• cyberferret 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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..
• apsec112 10y ago
  "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 10y ago
    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.
• peter422 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      > 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 10y ago
        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.
• IANAD 10y ago
  > “Zen-like patience” isn’t a typical trait associated with entrepreneurs. Or investors.
  • tyre 10y ago
    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.
• mahyarm 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
  • bayofpigs 10y ago
• paulrouget 10y ago
  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-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...) 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 10y ago
    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.
    • mirimir 10y ago
      FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph
    • Houshalter 10y ago
      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.
• minikites 10y ago
  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?
• simbalion 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    What do you mean by "should" be ruling the world? There is only what you can enforce.
• dsjoerg 10y ago
  Great inventions may be ignored. However, many ignored inventions are just sucky pieces of garbage.
• pseudointellect 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Of all the possible conclusions that could have been drawn, this one is the farthest from truth.
• supercoder 10y ago
  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.
• NamTaf 10y ago
  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.
• rwallace 10y ago
  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?
  • nradov 10y ago
    augmented reality
  • Artoemius 10y ago
    Artificial intelligence.
  • hacksonx 10y ago
    Invisibility cloaks.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• dkarapetyan 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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_public_debt#/media/File:Federal_Debt_Held_by_the_Public_1790-2013.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...).
    • botterworkshop 10y ago
      This was a fascinating video! Thanks for sharing! Love Steve Blank
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      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.
• sunstone 10y ago
  'concurred the sky'? Sure, typos happen to everyone but this is definitely of the highest order.
• asimjalis 10y ago
  The problem is that while great innovations frequently go unnoticed, going unnoticed does not automatically imply greatness.
• Bakary 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    And what would be a proper "evidence" to rely on?
    • yiyus 10y ago
      Statistical evidence.
      • truth_sentinell 10y ago
        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.
      • truth_sentinell 10y ago
        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.
• ky738 10y ago
  Nobody noticed cause Santos Dumont did it first :D
• moron4hire 10y ago
  >> 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?
• robertkrahn01 10y ago
  New vs. News https://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=15m23s https://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=15m23s
• blazespin 10y ago
  The time between invention and practical application is shortening (Internet plays a huge part) which is why the pace of innovation is accelerating.
• cperciva 10y ago
  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".
  • flashman 10y ago
    It's almost like saying the birth of Hitler changed the world. No it didn't, it was what he did later.
  • _nedR 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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-ushering-in-the-next-generation-of-3d-printing/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/15/how-expiring-patents-are-u...
• nhebb 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
• ilaksh 10y ago
  A more general related concept is the difference between merit and popularity. Some people actually forget that they are not the same thing.
• conqrr 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Or you lose. But the people who experienced that outcome obviously weren't worth quoting.
    • jfoutz 10y ago
      The three gates are implicit in success. Perhaps you can pass gate 2, perhaps not. The insight is recognizing and passing the gates.
  • mwfunk 10y ago
    Unfortunately people always haul this quote out as proof that because they're being ignored and ridiculed, they must be onto something and about to "win". It's supposed to be an inspirational quote to keep you motivated when it feels like the whole world is against you, but whenever I see it used (on online forums at least) it's always by someone who seems to think that it not only has predictive power, but it somehow illustrates the inevitability of the total dominance of desktop Linux (or whatever they're insisting is inevitable). I've seen that quote so preposterously misused over the last 20 years, over and over and over again as a form of argumentation, that I fear it's lost all meaning at this point. :(
• Fricken 10y ago
  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#Primitive_beginnings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Primitiv...
  • sytelus 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
    • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      >It was Wrights who figured out that curved wings can produce enough power to lift the aircraft. (sytelus, above) // Or maybe not? >“In his Codex on the Flight of Birds, da Vinci discusses the relationship between the centre of gravity and the centre of lifting pressure on a bird’s wing. He explains the behaviour of birds as they ascend against the wind, foreshadowing the modern concept of a stall,” says Jakab. “He demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of the relationship between a curved wing section and lift. He grasps the concept of air as a fluid, a foundation of the science of aerodynamics. Leonardo makes insightful observations of gliding flight by birds and the way in which they balance themselves with their wings and tail, just as the Wright brothers would do as they evolved their first aeronautical designs." (http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2016/01/leonardo-da-vinci-legacy.cfm http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2016/01/leonardo-da-vinci-l...) //
• Lerc 10y ago
  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.
  • ohashi 10y ago
    So you're saying my Beanie Baby investment has a chance?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • whack 10y ago
    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.
    • grosbisou 10y ago
      He acted on what he believed. That fact doesn't make him a clown to me. The dude sailed boats in the unknown to give humanity new horizons. Who cares if he was wrong at the start.
• noobermin 10y ago
  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
  • pmontra 10y ago
    Thanks.
  • SpeakMouthWords 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
  • aweisman 10y ago
    I think the wording kind of gives it away. I don't think cars or other vehicles would be described as "horseless carriages", but rather "gas-powered carriages" or something that suggests what replaces the horse.
    • kragen 10y ago
      "Horseless carriage" was actually a common term from about 1895: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=horseless+carriage&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Chorseless%20carriage%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=horseless+carr...
• Reason077 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Also posted in my comment below: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• LeonB 10y ago
  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.
• sytelus 10y ago
  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-Transportation/dp/0486402975 https://www.amazon.com/Wilbur-Orville-Biography-Brothers-Tra...
  • sillysaurus3 10y ago
    Another (completely unrelated) tidbit from that time in history: There were two competing schools of thought regarding flight. One was the modern school of thought: that pilots should be given control. The other was inherent stability, the idea that planes could be made to balance themselves in the air with no input from a pilot. I just think it's interesting how difficult it is to see good ideas when they haven't been invented yet. And how easy it is to relentlessly pursue bad ideas.
    • geon 10y ago
      Planes do balance themselves. Stability was traditionally achieved with a carefully placed center of gravity. Modern fighter planes are unstable, but are stabilized by computers, not the pilot.
  • jayjay71 10y ago
    This is fascinating. I can't believe I never knew this.
• raverbashing 10y ago
  The Wright brothers kept their experiment a secret purposefully, so it's not surprising that they didn't show up on the news
• FuNe 10y ago
  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.
• mgamache 10y ago
  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
  • restalis 10y ago
    "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" This alone makes one wonder if they deserve the recognition they get. Many people made great personal sacrifices to publicly make a point related to flight or something else. Whereas the Wright brothers played their secret mission game, Traian Vuia carried his plane all over the Europe from Lugoj to Paris (using the transport infrastructure of that time, mind you) only to publicly show and test it. That obviously happened long after the incremental development of the plane itself, considering the repeated postpones due to financial constraints (as all the required expenses were pretty much his own).
  • aidos 10y ago
    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".
• Animats 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• megablast 10y ago
  > 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-angeles http://flightsphere.com/flight-time/from/new-york/to/los-ang...
  • ktRolster 10y ago
    The innovation in commercial flight since 1950 has been in reducing prices. It's ridiculously cheap to fly anywhere these days, and wonderfully cheap.
• soufron 10y ago
  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?
• soufron 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• jedmeyers 10y ago
  To me this piece feels like an ad for index funds, riddled with false facts and generalizations.
• z3t4 10y ago
  First they will ignore you. Then they will laugh at you. Then they will work against you. Then you win.
• cmarschner 10y ago
  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
• marceloboeira 10y ago
  Such an American mistake to think that the Wrights invented the airplane...
  • chaostheory 10y ago
    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'...
• lx0741 10y ago
  Don't forget the existing and we'll established businesses who will fight for their lives any threatening 'idea'
• gonvaled 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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-energy-timeline http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-en... > 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.
• roel_v 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• y04nn 10y ago
  Not a word about Gustave Whitehead, who may have been the first to successfully flight?
• aaron695 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    >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....
• JohnStrange 10y ago
  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.
• tbarbugli 10y ago
  It's funny and saddening at the same time to see how often the first entry on HN is a worthless/incorrect/inaccurate/ article .
• chx 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    the iPhone was not a new idea, though it was quite an evolutionary leap.
• hsdkfsdkfjh 10y ago
  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.
  • pipio21 10y ago
    In my opinion, it is wrong to believe in the two extremes: That there were no revolutionary innovators or to ignore previous work in some areas. When Wright brothers did their test, planes were already flying thanks to the innovation of lots of other people. But planes could fly without control and crashed. A solution was needed and the Wright brothers provided it expending very little money: flexing the wings. The fact that they could come with the first valid solution provides a lot of value for society, in the same way of solving the nuclear problem by slowing the neutrons with heavy water(a crazy idea from a single guy) gave America an advance over the Germans. The same could be said about the problems yet to solve: who will make the first viable fusion nuclear reactor? It has to be noted that while the Wright brothers invented flexing the wings, they did not invented ailerons, but a twisting mechanism that was not practical, but they were awarded a patent anyway on them for several reasons ( American protectionism being one of them). Those patents make America aviation industry lag behind other nations and forced the Government to act.
  • koonsolo 10y ago
    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.
• creadee 10y ago
  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=100&phrase=2&query=wilbur+wright&sort_by=byDA https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers?items_per_page=...
• jondubois 10y ago
  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.
  • nine_k 10y ago
    This makes some sense. An exciting new thing that sort of works has a limited appeal. A highly polished and optimized thing that works flawlessly and is cheap to produce can and likely will have hundreds of millions of happy users. Figure where the most money is.
  • mkagenius 10y ago
    An alternate positive view can be that innovation finds its way no matter how much it gets neglected.
    • jondubois 10y ago
      That's true, it's motivating in an idealistic way but not in a financial sense. You could have made so much money doing other stuff during that time.
  • mseebach 10y ago
    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.
• dgudkov 10y ago
  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.
• d--b 10y ago
  "It happened with index funds" Wait, what? index funds invention on par with flying? Oh, "collaborativefund.com" ...
• grabcocque 10y ago
  The Alexander Graham Bell/Western Union story is a fabrication. http://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2011/01/the-greatest-bad-business-decision-quotation-that-never-was.html http://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2011/01/the-greatest...
• tmcbride23 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    If any of that is true, they not only do not care, they are calling you crazy. Best.
• digi_owl 10y ago
  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.
• NKCSS 10y ago
  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.
• kragen 10y ago
  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.