How Innovation Works

And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Matt Ridley 2020 Beaverton Library 303.483 RID

The usual story of innovation is The Great Inventor Working Alone. Ridley shows that most invention is incremental, a series of quick improvements by many technicians, either collaborating or competing. The Great Inventor myth is the justification for patents and monopoly, designed to hinder competition and maximize monopoly rents rather than rate of improvement.

• p4 global freefall of extreme poverty, from 50% in the late 1950s to 9% today. Deirdre McCloskey attributes this to "innovationism"

• p6 1917 invento Otto Frederick Rohwedder and baker Frank Bench in Chillocothe: sliced and packaged bread.

• p9 "disruptive innovation" is misleading, most is gradual, overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run.
• p10 William Petty 1662 "Few new inventions were ever rewarded by a monopoly
• p13 Steam engines, incremental: Newcomen, Papin, Savery
• p27 Edison (and 20 others) independently invented the light bulb. Edison invented the whole systems (wires and generators) that made it semi-practical, though he resisted Tesla's AC invention, which made it scalable.
• p31 Shuji Nakamura and the GaN blue LED in 1993
• p37 1990 Bernard Cohen argued that nuclear power was stopped by regulation, not accidents and wast3

• p38 Thorium reactors better? article IAEA

• p43 Shale gas
• p50 Ch2 Public health, variolization, vaccination, chlorination, penicillin, Salk/Sabin polio
• p80 Ch3 Trevethick Stephenson locomotive, Ericsson screw propeller, Otto/Benz internal combustion, Wrights
  • p103 Smithsonian 1914 modified Langley's aerodrome so it could fly, and they could pretend it was first capable flier.
  • p104 Jet engine: Whittle, Guillaume, German Ohain
  • p107 1970 to 2020; ten times more miles, 10 times fewer fatalities ... 59 per trillion passenger-kilometers

• p128 Gluconacetobacter dizotrophicus bacteria fixes nitrogen in ordinary plants (developed by Nottingham University professor Ted Cocking, formed Azotic Technologies company with David Dent in 2018

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