The Tinkerers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - WISING UP ABOUT A SMARTPHONE

  CHAPTER 2 - TINKERING AT THE BIRTH OF A NATION AND BEYOND

  CHAPTER 3 - CONTEMPORARY TINKERER FINDS HIS WAY

  CHAPTER 4 - EDISON’S FOLLY REINVENTS TINKERING FOR THE MODERN AGE

  CHAPTER 5 - MYHRVOLD’S MAGIC TINKERING FACTORY

  CHAPTER 6 - WHEN TINKERING VEERS OFF COURSE

  CHAPTER 7 - THE TINKERER ARCHETYPE IS REBORN

  CHAPTER 8 - PARC AND THE POWER OF THE GROUP

  CHAPTER 9 - A TRIO OF ALTERNATIVE TINKERING APPROACHES

  CHAPTER 10 - A DIFFERENT KIND OF SCHOOL

  CHAPTER 11 - CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON TINKERING

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  For my wife, Erica, who knows a thing or two about ingenuity

  CHAPTER 1

  WISING UP ABOUT A SMARTPHONE

  A FEW YEARS AGO I ENGAGED my then two-month-old smartphone, a BlackBerry of some sort or another, in a very nontechnical road test: I sat on it. I only noticed the damage when one afternoon I reached to check my email. The small screen, usually jittering and scrolling with plenty of new messages, was suddenly a disconcerting Technicolor swirl with a huge black spot in the middle. A Rorschach test for the addled info junkie.

  Suffering from the withdrawal symptoms familiar to anyone addicted to their phone, I drove in a mild panic to the nearest Verizon Wireless store, located in a small strip mall in a neighboring town.

  After a short wait, I met with a sales representative seated in front of a computer screen. After asking for my vitals, he typed for a few seconds and waited. Then he typed, then he waited. Then he sighed.

  “You can get a new phone,” he said.

  “Free of charge?” I said, already knowing the answer.

  “No,” he responded. “At retail price.”

  “How much is that?” I asked.

  “Four hundred fifty dollars.”

  Could I get my current BlackBerry fixed? The rep shook his head sadly. “They don’t let us repair the phones in the store anymore,” he said. “That was my favorite part of the job. Now all I get to do is sell phones.”

  I felt his pain. Having grown up tinkering with Radio Shack electronic kits, I used to love taking things apart—radios, tape players, anything I could get my hands on.

  But in the last twenty-five years or so, the number of household devices we can easily tinker with has dwindled.

  When I arrived home, I dug out my old BlackBerry. Two and a half years earlier, I had marveled at its slick design and state-of-the-art “world phone” capability. Now it just looked thick and clunky. And what would I do without its previously special ability to make calls from other countries without swapping out a computer chip? It didn’t matter since virtually every phone can do that now.

  I googled my model number to see if I could find a more affordable replacement. What I stumbled onto instead was a short video on YouTube. The video showed a pair of hands disassembling a BlackBerry and replacing the screen in a matter of minutes. A male voice, with an appealingly clipped English accent, guided me through each step.

  I was hooked.

  Through another Google search, I found an online retailer selling replacement screens for around $45, as well as a small smartphone-specific toolkit, including a tiny torque screwdriver and a little plastic tool for prying apart the BlackBerry’s flimsy case. One FedEx delivery later, I had my phone disassembled and its parts neatly laid out on my desk. The screws came out easily; the case popped right off. Inside the phone, there were remarkably few parts. Following the YouTube video instructions carefully, I was able to unplug the broken screen, which was attached to the circuit board by a tapelike digital connector leading to a six-pin plug. I snapped in the new screen with little trouble, clicked the case back together, and tightened up the tiny screws with my tiny torque screwdriver.

  Just ten minutes after starting the process, I powered it up. Good as new.

  My tinkering journey ended at the point when I had a working phone again. But it certainly didn’t have to. Having discovered through my own persistence that this modern-age bit of machinery wasn’t quite as complicated as I had first thought, I might have been emboldened to make my own alterations to it.

  Indeed, a quick online search revealed the fruits of a few intrepid BlackBerry tinkerers. One was titled “How to Convert a BlackBerry Camera into a Webcam.” Another demonstrated how to reverse-engineer a BlackBerry into a complete home automation control system.

  Perhaps the best example of the smartphone-tinkering phenomenon is the remarkable case of George Hotz. Hotz came to fame in 2007 as a seventeen-year-old hacker of Apple’s iPhone.

  Hotz, a T-Mobile subscriber, wanted to use the iPhone with his existing phone plan. But at the time, Apple had an exclusive deal with AT&T. Armed with nothing more than an eyeglass screwdriver, a guitar pick, and a soldering gun, he was able to erase his iPhone’s baseband processor, the computer chip that determined which phone carriers the device would operate with. On his own PC, he wrote a new string of code for his iPhone, allowing it to operate with any wireless network. Hotz staked his claim as the first person to unlock an iPhone. This accomplishment quickly brought him both fame and notoriety.

  A few years later, in January 2010, Hotz succeeded in unlocking a Sony PlayStation 3 video-game console, which ignited a torrent of malfeasant hacking, culminating in a grand attack by a hacking group known as Anonymous that temporarily forced Sony to shut down its PS3 online gaming network.

  I don’t mention Hotz’s story as evidence of hackers wreaking havoc, but rather to show the immediate power seemingly innocuous tinkering can have in contemporary society. It’s important to note here that Hotz viewed himself as performing a valuable service to society in both of these cases.

  And Hotz’s impressive resume as a tinkerer backed up his claim. While still in high school, he invented a personal transportation device called the Neuropilot that users could drive around just by thinking about it. His senior year, he won a $15,000 science-fair prize for building a 3-D display. In May 2011, Sony extended an invitation to Hotz to visit its American headquarters, where he met with engineers working on the PS3 and explained how he broke into their system.

  Where do we draw the line between tinkerers and hackers? What role does tinkering play in contemporary society? How did tinkerers traditionally influence American industry and society? Do we still have what it takes as a nation of tinkerers to excel in the global economy? This book explores the impact American tinkerers have had on the growth of the nation, and what role they may play in our future. It also explores some of the cutting-edge approaches being taken to address what some fear is the waning American tinkering spirit.

  I believe the answers to these questions lie somewhere in the tension between corporate discipline and individual ingenuity. My experience with my BlackBerry is a perfect example. With the rapid decline of Research In Motion—the company that manufactured it—since I first purchased it, no doubt new ideas for repurposing these smartphones are cropping up every day.

  But there is no guarantee that the best ideas will ever be realized, much less filter into the marketplace. That’s because too many average people are discouraged from ever opening these gadgets and examining how they work. Of course, large manufacturers would prefer that we simply toss them out and replace them with something shiny and new. That’s just the nature of capitalism.

  But there are some fresh avenues emerging through which the United States as a leading economy and culture can improve the odds that the finest work of its most talented tinkerers finds its way into the commerci
al mainstream. This book explores some of those avenues.

  The clerk’s sadness at not being able to fix things anymore, and my own sense of accomplishment at having avoided the “throw out and replace” syndrome, I think, were both symptomatic of something afoot in our culture: a return to an important tradition that has been to some extent a casualty of the remarkable efficiency with which we produce all manner of stuff. For many generations in the postindustrial age, puttering around with the mechanical devices that surrounded us was practically a rite of passage, and for many, a way of life. It tethered us to our machines and reaffirmed our notions of modern civilization. Deeply probing how things worked also provided children and adults alike with endless hours of enjoyment. It saved enterprising souls hundreds if not thousands of dollars on repair bills. It also often resulted in new and startling discoveries that sometimes led to fresh innovations.

  The first gadget Steve Jobs cobbled together while still in high school with his geeky older college buddy Steve Wozniak was a “blue box” that enabled free long-distance phone calls by duplicating the appropriate digital tones. Sure, the blue box was illegal, but that didn’t stop the mismatched pair of “phone phreaks” from selling a bunch of the units to college students and other intrepid pranksters. The blue box grew out of a simple love for playing around with gadgets and making them bend to the will of a few individuals.

  Jobs and Woz, who later cofounded Apple Computers, weren’t preparing for a career in hacking phone service. Rather they were engaging in the time-tested American tradition of tinkering with what was around them, and through doing so, exploring their potential for future innovation. It didn’t hurt that Jobs had grown up next door to a Hewlett-Packard engineer who liked to tinker with electronics in his garage and who let him watch. Or that he became a member of the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Club as a teenager, where he was exposed to the company’s new inventions in an up-close fashion.

  The word “tinkerer” had, until recently, a slightly negative connotation, suggesting individuals who are somehow aimless, lacking focus, or not sufficiently motivated to create something genuinely new. To many, “tinkering” sounds like a quaint pastime reserved for those who are retired or otherwise disengaged from the everyday process of mainstream productivity. That’s if they think of tinkerers at all. The term itself has fallen out of use, at least in the traditional sense. But historically, American tinkerers were a relatively eclectic bunch who hatched extraordinary, life-changing innovations by sheer will and forward momentum. Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, Samuel Morse, Charles Goodyear, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers.

  Then life got more complicated. It’s often assumed that somewhere in the late 1800s, at the turn of the century, tinkerers went the way of the horse and buggy. But I would argue to the contrary: America’s tinkering tradition has always been a key part of its ongoing greatness.

  So what do I mean by tinkering, in contemporary terms? At its most basic level, tinkering is making something genuinely new out of the things that already surround us. Secondly, tinkering is something that happens without an initial sense of purpose, or at least with a purpose quite different from the one originally identified. Tinkering also emanates from a place of passion or obsession. Lastly, tinkering is a disruptive act in which the tinkerer pivots from history and begins a new journey that results in innovation, invention, and illumination.

  Increasingly, however, American tinkering is the unlikely by-product of a country driven by greed and conformity. Within our success as a nation and a global economy lies a paradox. The United States, with its highly disciplined approach to capitalism, invented the modern corporation and the marvelous, sleek objects it produces. Indeed, our processes have become so rationalized and efficient that we can produce new things that are cheaper than the old ones they replace. But as those wondrous corporations become bigger and more efficient, they conspire to take control of many of the outlets of our tinkering, threatening to snuff out the very creativity and brilliance that fueled the growth of those corporations. Still, American tinkering nonetheless prevails: prosperity may have made many Americans fat and happy, but it also gave other Americans just enough leisure time to pursue that which seems almost futile.

  What are the characteristics of tinkerers? They are smart and immersed in the world but not necessarily trained in a specific field. They may be affiliated with large corporations or institutions, but they rarely fit in due to their desire to pursue their own interests. They are generalists in a world of specialists. They might be inventors, but they don’t necessarily have to be. Mere inventors set out with an assigned goal, such as devising an electric car with enough power and range to supplant gas-fueled ones. They even can be trained engineers with a penchant for unstructured exploration. Tinkerers are focused on fiddling around with what they find around them, and in the process taking existing inventions and repurposing them, as in the case of George Hotz, and in some instances solving problems that the culture doesn’t even know need solving.

  In other words, tinkerers can be anyone with big ideas and the time to pursue them.

  Tinkerers may not have a clear goal, but that’s what makes them so exciting and dynamic to the culture around them. Tinkerers are dilettantes, but in a good way. They are optimists with the mental fortitude to shape their optimism into something concrete.

  Messing with the innards of a BlackBerry isn’t, as it turns out, as fraught with difficulty as you might have imagined. And using a video with step-by-step instructions to fix something isn’t quite the same thing as disassembling it and figuring it out yourself. But the willingness to try and the refusal to be cowed by the powers that be (in this case the manufacturer that implores users not to break into their products and—the horror—void the warranty) is something intrinsically American. This is not to say that it doesn’t exist in other cultures, but rather that Americans imbue it with a unique mix of cockeyed optimism and brash madness. In this context, middling acts and muddling and puttering and tinkering can become something noble, even transforming, in the right hands at the right moment and with the right problems to solve.

  Once upon a time, the United States was a nation of tinkerers, both formally trained and homespun innovators who solved the nation’s biggest problems, mostly from behind the scenes. Now, after an era of economic excess that transformed our nation from one of doers to consumers, the United States risks losing its hallowed tinkerer tradition—as well as the engine of innovation that fueled an unprecedented era of growth. Economic success has given us the time and resources to tinker, but it has also blunted our impetus to do so.

  A National Science Board report released in May 2010 noted that US investment in research and development has remained essentially flat since the 1980s, at 2.7 percent, though the federal government’s contribution has steadily declined while governments of countries such as Japan and South Korea have increased their scientific funding.

  More astonishingly, in our technological age, only one-third of American college students earn degrees in science or engineering. While trained engineers have no monopoly on professional tinkering, they tend to be less intimidated by our modern-day gadgetry. The comparative figures are 63 percent in Japan and 53 percent in China. For a long time, the United States ranked among the countries with the highest ratio of engineering and science degrees; now we’re near the end of the list of twenty-four countries that track such data. And the economic growth that once went hand in hand with that big-sky imagining and doing is in jeopardy of moving elsewhere.

  In 2009, for the first time, non-Americans registered more US patents than homegrown inventors, with foreigners receiving 50.7 percent of new patent grants. The number of patents awarded to US residents peaked in 2001. The reasons for the shift are made clear by a few obvious facts. As US universities graduated fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, countries such as India and China have graduated more. In addition, American corporations increasingly have shipped research
and development overseas in an effort to lower costs. IBM, for nearly two decades the company that produced the nation’s highest patent volume, now farms out much of that work to its labs in India. While IBM still owns the rights to any inventions its engineers develop worldwide, the US Patent and Trademark Office registers the related patents as nonresident ones.

  And, finally, taxes on innovation are at least partly to blame. The United States was once the world leader in tax credits for research and development; now, we rank seventeenth, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, as other nations have used tax cuts to spur innovation.

  But at least one tinkering expert thinks the shift originates in something more primal. Dean Kamen, one of America’s best-known contemporary inventors, whom I spoke with for the purposes of this book, told me, “Tinkering has changed dramatically, but the principle of tinkering—taking the available technology and assembling it to solve problems and create solutions and thereby create real wealth—is not only part of this country, but it is the essence of what made this country viable.” Kamen added, “I think we can talk about we’re a democracy and about capitalism. But the fact of the matter is for two hundred years we were the envy of the world because we created real wealth.”

  While most people won’t immediately associate wealth creation with tinkering, the two actions are arguably inseparable. “Real wealth is not a zero-sum game, like moving oil here or moving gold there,” says Kamen. “There’s lots of wealth out there—but every time a new mouth comes out to feed, if you haven’t created new wealth, all you’ve done is reduced the average for the globe, which now has 6.3 billion people.”

  The economist Paul Romer told an interviewer in 1999, “There is absolutely no reason why we cannot have persistent growth as far into the future as you can imagine.” By “growth,” Romer meant growth in value, rather than growth in the number of people on earth, or growth in the number of physical objects. “The way you create value is by taking that fixed quantity of mass and rearranging from a form that isn’t worth very much into a form that’s worth much more,” Romer explained in another interview with Reason magazine in 2001. The example he gave was turning sand on the beach into semiconductors.