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Exactly - it is hard to quantify how beneficial to humanity that a patent/invention/discovery is. No clear metric beyond fiscal alas. May well find that some
by Zenst 7y ago
Exactly - it is hard to quantify how beneficial to humanity that a patent/invention/discovery is. No clear metric beyond fiscal alas.
May well find that some of the best inventions are the ones we take for granted and in their time - made nothing. Tinned food, being one of the greatest ever as a way to preserve food (Nicolas Appert). Then their is the tin opener.
I suppose one way to quantify it would be sit down to work out what inventions you used in a week and with that, not all inventions are used by everybody, but some common ones we take for granted are, and in a way that we glibly just dismiss or overlook them.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI agree it's challenging, but I don't think it's impossible, at least in aggregate and as a first-order estimate. Or that fiscal is all we're left with. The case of inventions long going unsung is a whole 'nother aspect. Or of inventions that came around at one point in time but really didn't hit their prime until far later. Example: The drilling rigs which were used during the early part of the petroleum era -- 1859 - 1900 or so, were based on a 1,300 year old Chinese method for salt brine drilling. The main change since has been the introduction of rotary cutter heads (in the early 20th century, possibly late 19th), rather than a fixed bit at the drillhead itself. And yes, there've been incidental improvements in metalurgy, diamond-coated cutters, carbide steel, drilling muds, and more recently, hydrofracking (itself dating to the 1950s). For measures of impact, I'd look to the work, again, of Vaclav Smil, who's quantified a bunch of this stuff and has some good thoughts on how to go about that.