Age of Invention: Where Be Dragons?
Anton Howes | Feb 13, 2020 | 24 | 30 |
Welcome to my weekly newsletter, Age of Invention, on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. You can subscribe here:
A theme I keep coming back to is that a lot of inventions could have been invented centuries, if not millennia, before they actually were. My favourite example is John Kay’s flying shuttle, one of the most famous inventions of the British Industrial Revolution. It radically increased the productivity of weaving in the 1730s, but involved simply attaching a little extra wood and string. It involved no new materials, was applied to the weaving of wool — England’s age-old industry — and required no special skill or science. Weaving had been “performed for upwards of five thousand years, by millions of skilled workmen, without any improvement being made to expedite the operation, until the year 1733”, was how Bennet Woodcroft — one of the nineteenth century’s most important historians of technology — put it. (Lest you doubt that description of Woodcroft, he was, in addition to being an inventor himself, the man who compiled and categorised England’s entire patent record up to 1852, and who collected the inventions that would later form the basis of London’s Science Museum, particularly some of the earliest steam engines — among the most important machines in human history — that grace its engine hall today. My hero!) Weavers had been around for millennia, as had shuttles: one is even mentioned in the Old Testament (“My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, And are spent without hope”). As a labour-saving invention, Kay’s flying shuttle was even technically illegal.
I keep coming back to this example, because it goes against so many common notions about the causes of innovation. When it comes to skill, materials, science, institutions, or incentives, none of them quite seem to fit. But I keep seeing more and more such cases. There’s the classic example, of course, of suitcases with wheels - why so late? Was the bicycle another candidate?
It strikes me as odd, too, that there was an explosion of signalling systems like semaphore only towards the end of the eighteenth century. Although there were some seventeenth-century precursors, the main telegraphing systems in Europe seem to have been as crude as Gondor’s lighting of the beacons, capable only of communicating a single pre-agreed message. Ancient China at least had its smoke signals, as did many indigenous American societies, and apparently the ancient Greeks too. So what took semaphore so long to take off? Many of the eighteenth-century systems did not even need multicoloured flags, my favourite being Lieutenant James Spratt’s “homograph”, subtitled “every man a signal tower”, which involved just a long white handkerchief.
The economist Alex Tabarrok calls these cases “ideas behind their time”. I tend to just call them low-hanging fruit. Hanging so low, and for so long, that the fruit are fermenting on the ground. I now see them everywhere, not just in history, but today — probably at least one per week. And I now have a new favourite example, suggested yesterday on Twitter by Jordan Chase-Young: tabletop role-playing games.
I never played Dungeons & Dragons when I was a child, or even a teenager. But a few years ago I became hooked listening to a podcast in which three brothers and their father played a simplified version of the game. I had always assumed it was a highly complex affair, with tomes of rules to master, impossibly-sided dice, and a multitude of maps and detailed figurines. But all of that is actually just optional. At root, it’s simply collective storytelling, with pre-agreed constraints on what you can and can’t do. There’s a reason it worked so well in a podcast - there’s actually nothing to see, only to hear. I’ve now run my own version of the game with a few close friends, and it hardly even requires pen and paper. Most of it is people just describing what they wish to do, and then rolling dice to see if they’re successful. It doesn’t even require dragons or dungeons - you could right now invent your own version set on another planet, in the future, or in the ancient world. The only limit is imagination. It’s infinitely modifiable. And it’s extremely fun.
So why were such games seemingly only invented in the 1970s? Humans have been telling stories presumably since we evolved to speak. We’ve been using dice, or something quite like them, since at least 3,000 BCE. Why did it take us so long to combine them? Certainly, some elements were already present in the mid-1820s in Kriegsspiel, a Prussian battle simulation game, in which regiments had hitpoints that needed to be depleted to remove them from the field, as well as an umpire — much like the later Dungeon Masters — to roll the dice and decide if players’ orders succeeded. Even the 1820s, however, seems rather late.
One of the responses I saw on Twitter was that such games required a bureaucratic mindset - that it’s an essentially modern thing to reduce attributes like health or skills or the strength of an attack to numerical values. Children (and adults) have always played at roles, of course. In ancient Egypt children had miniature wooden swords; in thirteenth-century England, even kings played at being Arthurian knights. But tabletop role-playing games require systematising and formalising that play. It’s not just saying “I pull out a sword and hack the goblin’s head off”. Instead, first roll this die to see if you succeed. But is this really so modern? Obsessive counting of things, at least in the English-speaking world, seems to date at least from the seventeenth century — perhaps it wasn’t that widespread, but lists like actuarial tables and demographic statistics were already being compiled. The craze in seventeenth-century English policy circles was for “political arithmetic”. All in all, if the lack of such an attitude even was a constraint, it seems a soft one. If the predominantly agrarian society of 1820s Prussia could come up with Kriegsspiel, why not earlier still?
Another response I got was that such games needed literacy or numeracy, or had something to do with printing. But the whole thing can be done, and indeed invented, with just pen and paper. It could even be done with chalk on slate, or with sticks in the sand. As for the counting elements of such games, they essentially involve just agreeing a number — your health in the story, for example, or your ability to attack — and then comparing it with another number, such as an opponent’s armour or their ability to attack. It barely requires numeracy, let alone literacy. Tallying would cover most of it. And, of course, games might still be popular among a smaller group of literate people, even if much of the overall population was illiterate. Again, it seems too soft a constraint.
Finally, there was the response that the invention of such games required higher population densities. But that would be an argument against the invention of all games. We’ve had chess for millennia, however, and card games for centuries. If anything, we’ve been storytelling for even longer. An interesting variant of the argument, suggested by Matt Clancy, is that in fact tabletop role-playing games have been invented and re-invented many times, all over the world, but because of the lack of printing and low population densities, they have become lost and forgotten. Perhaps. Though I find it hard to believe that an activity so fun would never have been mentioned.
All in all, these arguments involve extremely soft constraints. Physically, there was nothing that actually stopped the invention of such games centuries or even millennia earlier. It required no special level of science, skill, or materials. So why did it take so long? Rather than there being any constraints, soft or otherwise, I think it’s simply because innovation in general is so extremely rare. It’s a matter of absence, rather than of barriers. The reason we have had so many low-hanging fruit throughout history is just because very few people ever bother to think of how to do things differently. We are, most of us, quite set in our ways. So even today, when there are many more inventors alive than at any previous point in human history, the fermenting fruit still abound.
24 | 30 |
This is a very thought-provoking post with a rich collection of examples for comparison. I wonder, though, how the analysis might change if we altered the fundamental question (“why don’t ‘low hanging fruit’ inventions occur earlier”?). I think there are a few reasons that the nature of this question actually limits the kinds of insights it can yield about our history.
We all know from our studies of science and statistics that causation is extremely difficult to determine. This is especially true for complex, multi-causal phenomena like societal trends. They never boil down to just one necessary cause, and the more time you spend digging into the background of an event or trend, the more (and more disparate) causes you discover.
The question of “why didn’t [event] happen in history?” is exponentially more difficult to answer than “why did [event] happen in history?” because it’s no longer a question about a specific event, but about all of human history. (Imagine applying this method to determining motive in a murder case—“why did the murderer do it?” can be hard enough to answer without clear evidence, let alone answering “why didn’t anyone else?”)
To illustrate this, let’s imagine that we could decompose the influences that contributed to the invention of DnD to only 10 variables (which is absurdly low). If we asked “why was DnD invented in the 70s and what made it catch hold?”, then we would only need to examine these 10 variables within a constrained period of time leading up to the event in question to arrive at a satisfying historical narrative.
In order to answer the inverse question of why it didn’t happen earlier, however, we would need to go through an inverse process and examine all of human history decomposed into all of its possible causal variables and then attempt an explanation of why those ten never merged before. This is an impossible task because it’s not actually a question about the facts of history—it’s a question that runs counter to those facts: a counterfactual.
Historical facts cannot be used to answer counterfactuals, and so we return to preconceived mental models about historical change in order to answer them. Counterfactuals do not yield insights: they reveal biases.
As someone who is employed in the field of “technological innovation” myself, something I’m continually asking is what counts as innovation. I find that most of the time, both in my daily work and in broader conversation, this term is a chimera. A word that can be applied equally to things as different as DnD and bicycles and spinning jennys doesn’t seem to me to be constrained enough to be identified or explained at all. I’m often tempted to think that either “innovation” is a bad category or that I simply am not aware of more rigorous definitions.
The impossibilities of counterfactual questions are magnified when that question is asked of an ill-defined category. I’m sorry for being ignorant of your past writing, but I’d be very curious to know whether or not you’ve already written on how to define and identify innovations, or whether you have a set of criteria you use for classifying them.
I apologize for the lengthy comment. I tend to think that good writing is writing that provokes more thinking, so thank you for provoking me with this post!
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Tell me, what is chess, if not a table-top role-playing game?
Bicycles? Constrained by mettalurgy and the engineering necessary AND economically needful to drive the building of drive trains, bearings, etc. A wooden bicycle is a velocipede - heavy - cumbersome. Disadvantage compared to carts and wagons.
Wheeled luggage? Constrained by need, by lack of mobility, by materials again. Wheeled luggage WAS invented earlier - note "shoppers". It just didn't have the time and place to be economically useful. Current wheeled luggage is also quite dependent on very recent technology.
I think you are looking at a phenomena that A) doesn't really exist, and B) is readily explained by prevailing economic conditions and technologies.
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