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.
The “I pull out a sword and hack the goblin’s head off” was actually a common occurrence when I was a child. We just never thought of using dice to resolve the inevitable disagreements. Of course, that was natural...we didn't have dice because we were in our bunkbeds in the dark, and we were supposed to be sleeping. We just kept alternating between who was the "dungeon master" and who was the "character", usually in a Western or a Medieval setting.
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.
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!
I would think this relates most to the storytelling aspect. Role Playing Games are, after all, collective story telling but they are more specifically telling fictional stories. and that is likely a major key. We may have had story telling and books for centuries but the fiction novel is relatively modern. So to a major extent, RPGs had to follow the development of fiction writing. Secondly, it is fiction largely based on fantasy. If you look at modern fantasy, it evolved from a secular view of past religions, objectifying them as myths. We did not have the modern concept of fantasy until we had a view of religious stories that saw them as neither faith nor heresy. Why those things evolved so late is a different topic, but a view of fiction and fantasy stories as prerequisites to a game evolving around them means the window for RPGs being invented earlier only goes back about a 100 years or so. The actual impetus which led to D&D being wargaming, just needing a more specialized scenario, does cover that range so the RPG is a late bloomer but only a century behind its time.
That was very interesting. I'm not a historical expert, but as a game buff the history of games is an interest of mine. I thing I remember from when I learned meditation in Hawaii was the instructor saying that people in modern society generally need more complex visualizations than people living simpler lives (He blamed television). People were happy playing checkers, go, nine men's morris, chess, etc for an immense amount of time. The games are still strategic, but generally seen as a bit dull by people not really into them. It seems the same with plays vs movies, or music over time. Maybe as our lives get more complicated our entertainments need to get more complicated to be an effective distraction?
The earliest example I can think of is actually the Bronte siblings, who collaborated on various 'plays' with ongoing storylines that spanned years. There isn't any evidence they used dice or that it all occurred in the context of group settings but it doesn't sound too dissimilar from some roleplaying campaigns I've participated in via skype/discord either. I think this suggests it is possible other people of the time period were engaging in collaborative storytelling games, its just that their games didn't survive the passage of time.
The Stone Age lasted 3.4 million years. What the heck were people doing all that time, anyway? Innovation, for most of human history, does indeed seem extremely rare.
I would argue its the combination of chance and storytelling that was for millenia forboden. Storytelling like The Odyssey was considered pedagogic - intended to impart values metaphorically. Dice & chance however were the province of gambling which virtually every culture looked down upon and was considered a sign of poor character. Moreover, there is the cultural value of self-determination that needed to precede roleplaying games, traditionally most cultures are ones of predestination: if you are born to a farmer you will be a farmer not a plucky hero who slays the dragon and wins the princess. As Einstein famously said, 'god does not play dice'. The idea of our lives being determined by whim, not by the gods, or good works or fate was the novelty necessary for RPGs along with the other factors you note above...all had to be present for the idea to have its time.
An excellent post that could become a research topic on its own. One thing that I would like to point out is that the typical dice used in RPG's are actually Platonic solids, except for the 10-sided die, they are not impossible :).
The book Why Nations Fail attributes the possibility of invention, the ground from whi h they can grow, to 'inclusive economic institutions" that allow patents and copywrite etc. A necessary condition ti which is then added the extra 'bothering to do things differently', because ther is an incentive to do so.....
Thank you for provoking my thoughts with your excellent post. I'll try to keep this brief (read: lack of helpful supporting references), but may I please posit that, it is not innovation which is rare, rather, it is acceptance (by society at large).
Children are natural intellectual sponges who can and do routinely make the wildest associations between apparently unrelated ideas. (With great irony: ) Luckily for society at large, we are able to force their thought patterns into narrow cultural norms before releasing them upon the world as adults. A simplest example of this is language: small children can absorb multiple languages to become fluent native speakers, yet we fill their heads with the do's and don't's of acceptable grammatical rules.
Sound permits infinitely variable frequencies, yet to be "music" (in the Western cultural tradition), we limit ourselves to diatonic scales (7 (12?) distinct notes per octave). After centuries of musical evolution (arguably culminating in the musical language of J.S.Bach), there was actually a regression in what was acceptable in the generations which followed (sons of Bach; Haydn & Mozart). 20th century composer like Schönberg tried to expand the harmonic language, but IMHO these were intellectual thought-experiments that received little popular support (so too, "Modern Art"). I read a paper recently which claimed a reduction in "chords used per pop-song" over the last 20-30 years. It's not that we can't innovate, it's that "nobody is trying to hear that."
Cultural constructs like table-ware, flying shuttles, or the theory of Evolution vs. the latest creation myth, can only flourish in an accepting and supportive societal milieu. We hear of inventors, writers, artists, composers who were "before their time." Why has the Spork languished? Where is my Pet-Rock now? The "Smiley Face" is doing better than ever these days.
Bicycles and Telephones require non-trivial technology before they can be considered / invented / marketed. But as you mentioned, flying-shuttles and D&D have no such requirements: they require merely to be embraced by a society (or sub-culture).
Supposedly there are only 10 movie genres. The names, faces, details change; but we are watching the same 10 movies over and over. Write a story completely outside the well-trodden path, and you either have an earth-shaking block-buster, or much more likely: your movie/story will never see the light of day. As creatures of habit, we "aren't trying to hear that."
Thanks again for your excellent post. Please keep pondering and sharing!!
I saw Alex Tabarrok’s post at Marginal Revolution several weeks about and have been thinking about these matters off and on since then. I’ve got a variety of observations.
I rather liked Tabarrok’s reference to an article in which Paul Romer pointed out that the “search space” of ideas is huge, but only sparsely populated by “useful” ones. So, one can imagine scads of researchers looking for new stuff and not finding it simply because it’s so very rare. I’m not sure how much I believe that, but, abstractly considered, it’s a possibility. That’s rather different than people just not looking, though I think there’s quite a lot of this.
Secondly, it seems to me we’ve got a variety of cases. There’s the one you’re writing about here, which is inventions which seem to be late in arriving. The “obverse” of that, if you will, might be accidental innovations. One example would be Alexander Fleming’s discovery penicillin. Another example would be the discovery of cosmic background radiation by Penzias and Wilson – though this discovery was purely scientific in nation and hasn’t had any practical value that I’m aware of. And then we have those new things that have had little economic value. How many patents have actually proved useful or valuable?
In the large I tend to think of this as an evolutionary process, but one in the realm of culture rather than biology. Evolution tends to be opportunistic rather than systematic.
On the flying shuttle, I know almost nothing about the history of weaving, but it does seem to me that looms are rather complicated mechanical devices, with the various frames, foot pedals, and mechanical linkages. They must have been among the most mechanically complex devices around prior to the invention of clockworks (well before the flying shuttle). The thing about clockworks is that, no matter how complex, the motion is all driven from one point. The loom involves two independent sources of motion, which must the carefully interlinked. The flying shuttle places both motions under the control of a single person. Given all the weavers in all the shops, I’m wondering if that functioned as a “soft constraint” that made the possibility of the flying shuttle difficult to see.
As for those soft constraints, I’m thinking about your most recent post, which is about navigational aids. A lot of them involve calculations, which would have been difficult or impossible without the Arabic notation system. Note in particular that many of those calculations would have been done with logarithm tables, which are inconceivable without the Arabic system, which was introduced into Europe in the 9th century CE. Why didn’t it arise independently in Europe? That is, it seems to me that culture is like this.
Which leads me to Dungeons and Dragons. In a similar vein, one might ask by detective stories were so rare prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century (and have been become ubiquitous in the 20th)? I should note that I’ve never played DnD though of course I know about it. When I read about it in the Wikipedia it struck me as involving a rather complex “factoring” of the game space into roles, rules, and ‘set up.’ It may be easier enough to step into the game space and operate in, but conceptualizing the space is another matter.
Finally, it seems to me that sometime during the 19th century invention came to be conceptualized as a process unto itself. Thomas Edison exemplified that conceptualization when he established his research lab and proceeded to invent in many arenas. John Kay, in contrast, was in the textiles business. The flying shuttle is something he invented to facilitate that business. That doesn’t require the conceptualization of invention as such. But somewhere between Kay and Edison that conceptualization took place. Your fellow Woodcroft would seem to have been important in that process.
To me, this essay's analysis has a bit of "the great man" approach to history, which says that things happen in civilization because few individuals of great courage, insight, creativity, malevolence, or whatever stride upon the stage and make them happen. Maybe that's what makes some aspects of history, but I disagree when it comes to innovation. Some say that America has all the courageous innovative entrepreneurs. But I've heard cogent podcasts reporting how amazingly entrepreneurial (and capable and courageous) are the little regular people who populate the markets in any big city, hustling to get what they can, buy it, move it, sell it, and live hand to mouth for themselves and their families.
So with this essay, it sounds like only the rare person is insightful and creative enough to imagine anything different than the status quo, dreaming and striving of innovation. I say baloney. Every farmer, every mechanic, every carpenter, really everyone is motivated by the self-interest of maximizing free time and energy and money. Everyone is always thinking, "if I could get this done a little more quickly, I could knock off from work early and relax," or, "if I could butcher these hogs a bit more efficiently, I bet I could do a few more and make an extra buck," or, "if I made a saw a bit different than my usual ones, I bet I could work less hard while still cutting down the same number of trees." Are there really people who go their whole lives not tinkering with what it takes to do their trade in order to make more, work less, or both?
The population density argument makes a lot of sense and maybe also, the 1970s coincided with the rise in car ownership, so kids could be ferried to friends on the other side of town, D&D being quite a minority pursuit in a way that football isn't.
Sometimes, it's just a lot of small things, though, isn't it? Printing had been falling in price for many decades before and maybe printing large books for a niche tipped over.
The “I pull out a sword and hack the goblin’s head off” was actually a common occurrence when I was a child. We just never thought of using dice to resolve the inevitable disagreements. Of course, that was natural...we didn't have dice because we were in our bunkbeds in the dark, and we were supposed to be sleeping. We just kept alternating between who was the "dungeon master" and who was the "character", usually in a Western or a Medieval setting.
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.
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!
I would think this relates most to the storytelling aspect. Role Playing Games are, after all, collective story telling but they are more specifically telling fictional stories. and that is likely a major key. We may have had story telling and books for centuries but the fiction novel is relatively modern. So to a major extent, RPGs had to follow the development of fiction writing. Secondly, it is fiction largely based on fantasy. If you look at modern fantasy, it evolved from a secular view of past religions, objectifying them as myths. We did not have the modern concept of fantasy until we had a view of religious stories that saw them as neither faith nor heresy. Why those things evolved so late is a different topic, but a view of fiction and fantasy stories as prerequisites to a game evolving around them means the window for RPGs being invented earlier only goes back about a 100 years or so. The actual impetus which led to D&D being wargaming, just needing a more specialized scenario, does cover that range so the RPG is a late bloomer but only a century behind its time.
That was very interesting. I'm not a historical expert, but as a game buff the history of games is an interest of mine. I thing I remember from when I learned meditation in Hawaii was the instructor saying that people in modern society generally need more complex visualizations than people living simpler lives (He blamed television). People were happy playing checkers, go, nine men's morris, chess, etc for an immense amount of time. The games are still strategic, but generally seen as a bit dull by people not really into them. It seems the same with plays vs movies, or music over time. Maybe as our lives get more complicated our entertainments need to get more complicated to be an effective distraction?
The earliest example I can think of is actually the Bronte siblings, who collaborated on various 'plays' with ongoing storylines that spanned years. There isn't any evidence they used dice or that it all occurred in the context of group settings but it doesn't sound too dissimilar from some roleplaying campaigns I've participated in via skype/discord either. I think this suggests it is possible other people of the time period were engaging in collaborative storytelling games, its just that their games didn't survive the passage of time.
The Stone Age lasted 3.4 million years. What the heck were people doing all that time, anyway? Innovation, for most of human history, does indeed seem extremely rare.
I would argue its the combination of chance and storytelling that was for millenia forboden. Storytelling like The Odyssey was considered pedagogic - intended to impart values metaphorically. Dice & chance however were the province of gambling which virtually every culture looked down upon and was considered a sign of poor character. Moreover, there is the cultural value of self-determination that needed to precede roleplaying games, traditionally most cultures are ones of predestination: if you are born to a farmer you will be a farmer not a plucky hero who slays the dragon and wins the princess. As Einstein famously said, 'god does not play dice'. The idea of our lives being determined by whim, not by the gods, or good works or fate was the novelty necessary for RPGs along with the other factors you note above...all had to be present for the idea to have its time.
An excellent post that could become a research topic on its own. One thing that I would like to point out is that the typical dice used in RPG's are actually Platonic solids, except for the 10-sided die, they are not impossible :).
The book Why Nations Fail attributes the possibility of invention, the ground from whi h they can grow, to 'inclusive economic institutions" that allow patents and copywrite etc. A necessary condition ti which is then added the extra 'bothering to do things differently', because ther is an incentive to do so.....
I suggest a distinction between the invention of the table top RPG and the marketing of it.
Thank you for provoking my thoughts with your excellent post. I'll try to keep this brief (read: lack of helpful supporting references), but may I please posit that, it is not innovation which is rare, rather, it is acceptance (by society at large).
Children are natural intellectual sponges who can and do routinely make the wildest associations between apparently unrelated ideas. (With great irony: ) Luckily for society at large, we are able to force their thought patterns into narrow cultural norms before releasing them upon the world as adults. A simplest example of this is language: small children can absorb multiple languages to become fluent native speakers, yet we fill their heads with the do's and don't's of acceptable grammatical rules.
Sound permits infinitely variable frequencies, yet to be "music" (in the Western cultural tradition), we limit ourselves to diatonic scales (7 (12?) distinct notes per octave). After centuries of musical evolution (arguably culminating in the musical language of J.S.Bach), there was actually a regression in what was acceptable in the generations which followed (sons of Bach; Haydn & Mozart). 20th century composer like Schönberg tried to expand the harmonic language, but IMHO these were intellectual thought-experiments that received little popular support (so too, "Modern Art"). I read a paper recently which claimed a reduction in "chords used per pop-song" over the last 20-30 years. It's not that we can't innovate, it's that "nobody is trying to hear that."
Cultural constructs like table-ware, flying shuttles, or the theory of Evolution vs. the latest creation myth, can only flourish in an accepting and supportive societal milieu. We hear of inventors, writers, artists, composers who were "before their time." Why has the Spork languished? Where is my Pet-Rock now? The "Smiley Face" is doing better than ever these days.
Bicycles and Telephones require non-trivial technology before they can be considered / invented / marketed. But as you mentioned, flying-shuttles and D&D have no such requirements: they require merely to be embraced by a society (or sub-culture).
Supposedly there are only 10 movie genres. The names, faces, details change; but we are watching the same 10 movies over and over. Write a story completely outside the well-trodden path, and you either have an earth-shaking block-buster, or much more likely: your movie/story will never see the light of day. As creatures of habit, we "aren't trying to hear that."
Thanks again for your excellent post. Please keep pondering and sharing!!
Hi Anton,
I saw Alex Tabarrok’s post at Marginal Revolution several weeks about and have been thinking about these matters off and on since then. I’ve got a variety of observations.
I rather liked Tabarrok’s reference to an article in which Paul Romer pointed out that the “search space” of ideas is huge, but only sparsely populated by “useful” ones. So, one can imagine scads of researchers looking for new stuff and not finding it simply because it’s so very rare. I’m not sure how much I believe that, but, abstractly considered, it’s a possibility. That’s rather different than people just not looking, though I think there’s quite a lot of this.
Secondly, it seems to me we’ve got a variety of cases. There’s the one you’re writing about here, which is inventions which seem to be late in arriving. The “obverse” of that, if you will, might be accidental innovations. One example would be Alexander Fleming’s discovery penicillin. Another example would be the discovery of cosmic background radiation by Penzias and Wilson – though this discovery was purely scientific in nation and hasn’t had any practical value that I’m aware of. And then we have those new things that have had little economic value. How many patents have actually proved useful or valuable?
In the large I tend to think of this as an evolutionary process, but one in the realm of culture rather than biology. Evolution tends to be opportunistic rather than systematic.
On the flying shuttle, I know almost nothing about the history of weaving, but it does seem to me that looms are rather complicated mechanical devices, with the various frames, foot pedals, and mechanical linkages. They must have been among the most mechanically complex devices around prior to the invention of clockworks (well before the flying shuttle). The thing about clockworks is that, no matter how complex, the motion is all driven from one point. The loom involves two independent sources of motion, which must the carefully interlinked. The flying shuttle places both motions under the control of a single person. Given all the weavers in all the shops, I’m wondering if that functioned as a “soft constraint” that made the possibility of the flying shuttle difficult to see.
As for those soft constraints, I’m thinking about your most recent post, which is about navigational aids. A lot of them involve calculations, which would have been difficult or impossible without the Arabic notation system. Note in particular that many of those calculations would have been done with logarithm tables, which are inconceivable without the Arabic system, which was introduced into Europe in the 9th century CE. Why didn’t it arise independently in Europe? That is, it seems to me that culture is like this.
Which leads me to Dungeons and Dragons. In a similar vein, one might ask by detective stories were so rare prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century (and have been become ubiquitous in the 20th)? I should note that I’ve never played DnD though of course I know about it. When I read about it in the Wikipedia it struck me as involving a rather complex “factoring” of the game space into roles, rules, and ‘set up.’ It may be easier enough to step into the game space and operate in, but conceptualizing the space is another matter.
Finally, it seems to me that sometime during the 19th century invention came to be conceptualized as a process unto itself. Thomas Edison exemplified that conceptualization when he established his research lab and proceeded to invent in many arenas. John Kay, in contrast, was in the textiles business. The flying shuttle is something he invented to facilitate that business. That doesn’t require the conceptualization of invention as such. But somewhere between Kay and Edison that conceptualization took place. Your fellow Woodcroft would seem to have been important in that process.
Bill Benzon
To me, this essay's analysis has a bit of "the great man" approach to history, which says that things happen in civilization because few individuals of great courage, insight, creativity, malevolence, or whatever stride upon the stage and make them happen. Maybe that's what makes some aspects of history, but I disagree when it comes to innovation. Some say that America has all the courageous innovative entrepreneurs. But I've heard cogent podcasts reporting how amazingly entrepreneurial (and capable and courageous) are the little regular people who populate the markets in any big city, hustling to get what they can, buy it, move it, sell it, and live hand to mouth for themselves and their families.
So with this essay, it sounds like only the rare person is insightful and creative enough to imagine anything different than the status quo, dreaming and striving of innovation. I say baloney. Every farmer, every mechanic, every carpenter, really everyone is motivated by the self-interest of maximizing free time and energy and money. Everyone is always thinking, "if I could get this done a little more quickly, I could knock off from work early and relax," or, "if I could butcher these hogs a bit more efficiently, I bet I could do a few more and make an extra buck," or, "if I made a saw a bit different than my usual ones, I bet I could work less hard while still cutting down the same number of trees." Are there really people who go their whole lives not tinkering with what it takes to do their trade in order to make more, work less, or both?
The population density argument makes a lot of sense and maybe also, the 1970s coincided with the rise in car ownership, so kids could be ferried to friends on the other side of town, D&D being quite a minority pursuit in a way that football isn't.
Sometimes, it's just a lot of small things, though, isn't it? Printing had been falling in price for many decades before and maybe printing large books for a niche tipped over.