发明的前世今生).docVIP

The process of invention Patent records reveal that the way inventions are made has changed over the years IN THE 19th century, inventors were heroes. The likes of Stephenson, Morse and Goodyear were the shock troops of the Industrial Revolution. Their ideas helped drag humanity from agrarian poverty to manufactured plenty. These days, though, inventor-superstars, while not absent, are fewer and farther between. That may, in part, be because the process of invention has itself changed since the 19th century. There is no let-up in the growth of the number of patents issued each year, but the introduction of fundamentally new classes of technology seems rarer now than it was in the past. Information technology has certainly transformed the present day. But railways, the electric telegraph, photography, fixed-line telephony, the automobile and the chemical and steel industries each, separately, brought about transformations as big as anything IT has wrought so far. Perhaps the process of invention really was more heroic in Victorian times. To have an impression that something has changed is not, however, to prove that it really has. For that you need data. And, in?a paper?just published in the?Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Youn Hyejin of Oxford University and her colleagues have provided some. Invention can come about in two ways. Thomas Edison’s light bulb, for example, was not so much the product of a metaphorical light-bulb moment of discovery as of the bringing together of pre-existing components—an electricity supply, a heated filament, a vacuum and a glass envelope. None of these things was novel in the 1870s, but in Edison’s hands the combination became a patentable invention. In contrast, William Shockley’s transistor, invented 70 years later, involved a lot of new physics that Shockley and his colleagues had to work out for themselves. Both devices changed the world, though (Shockley’s was the foundation on which IT was built). And together they exem