The Tinkerers Page 6
When a piece of technology becomes refined enough that you can no longer tinker with it, people lose the fundamental interest in doing so. A hundred years ago, people tinkered with knitting machines and sewing machines and one-armed bandits. Later on, came the era of Heathkits and transistor radios. But somewhere along the line, the world of tinkering with technology got more complicated: today’s computer chips may have half a billion transistors in them and can’t be properly examined without a million-dollar piece of hardware.
One thing is for sure: today’s tinkerers need more than a little dose of humility and, hopefully, a healthy sense of humor. After all, imagine if the last ten years of your brainpower and entrepreneurial sweat were lampooned (as Kamen’s were) in multiple episodes of The Simpsons.
But it’s not as if tinkering is dead, Kamen assures me. “You could go into a junior biology class today and once a week they have their lab, and we might swab your cheek, put in a couple of reagents and do a little genetic analysis,” he offers as an example. His point seems to be that tinkering is not at all what it used to be, but rather what we tinker with has evolved from relatively simple gizmos to unabashedly complex ones. “Do you realize what the average junior high school kid does today in a public high school lab, twenty years ago would have won you the Nobel Prize?”
Kamen’s observation seems to be echoed in some trends that have emerged since the economic crisis began in 2008. The prices of high-tech tools and materials have dropped dramatically over the same period, offering engaged young people hands-on opportunities that previously would have been downright unaffordable. The Wall Street Journal cited the growing presence of equipment such as modern milling machines, which can craft metal pieces with factorylike precision, in dorm rooms. So-called hackerspaces, fully equipped community workshops where anyone can come tinker with a variety of state-of-the-art gear, are sprouting up all over the country by the hundreds.
SparkFun Electronics, a Boulder, Colorado–based mail-order company started by college student Nate Seidle in 2003, sells all manner of electronic parts and components expressly intended for tinkerers. SparkFun’s revenues grew from $6 million in 2008 to $18.4 million in 2010. The Arduino, a low-priced Italian-made circuit board microcontroller designed to operate as the computer core of countless DIY and student-devised electronics projects, has sold more than 120,000 units since its invention in 2005. Make magazine, a consumer publication devoted to do-it-yourselfers, started in 2005 with around 22,000 subscribers and increased circulation to 125,000 by 2011. The brightly colored, smartly designed magazine eschews the post-hippie, macramé-weaving vibe of the seventies and instead provides easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for projects such as how to build a gigantic bubble generator, how to make your own biodiesel fuel, and how to construct an alarm circuit for a shoulder bag to protect against theft. Make has expanded its influence with its popular Maker Faire, which it started in San Mateo, California, and now is held multiple times throughout the year at locations across the country, as well as in Canada and the United Kingdom.
The 1990s brought low-priced personal computers to the forefront, which suddenly allowed independent software developers to compete with large software manufacturers when designing new products. The number of undergraduates who earned mechanical engineering degrees in 2008 rose 27 percent from 2003, according to the American Association of Engineering Societies. During that same stretch, computer-engineering grads declined by 31 percent.
At the same time, spending on research and development has dwindled in the United States, down an average of 2.6 percent per year from 2000 to 2007, based on figures from the National Science Foundation. In the 1980s, that figure was as high as 6 percent.
In most ways, said Kamen, tinkering itself, has not changed. “What’s changed is what falls into that category,” he said. “That depends on what phase of human technical development you happen to be looking at.” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, that tinkering is happening at a very high level, oftentimes in categories, with computer hackers and genomics, that didn’t exist twenty years ago.
Kamen is convinced that if the United States does not remain the biggest and best proponent of tinkering, it will lose its position as a global leader. He points to emerging economies like those of China, India, and Thailand as the real long-term threats. As countries increase their economic power they are also quick to realize that their ability to understand and use the tools of technology is directly proportional to their quality of life and standard of living. “That’s been true since the discovery of fire,” said Kamen.
Things that Americans take for granted such as clean, easily accessible water and electric lights are simple examples of technology we at one point adopted that allowed us as a society to be more productive. Technology and innovation are what took American society from being a population of around 50 percent farmers one hundred years ago to less than 2 percent farmers now, with more food than we could possibly eat.
“The rest of the world is fully aware of why that is,” Kamen said. “The great irony to me is that it is only Americans who are clueless, who take for granted that role.” The consequence, he argues, is a malaise that has plagued in particular the most recent generations of Americans. The most technologically advanced society on the planet, whose wealth directly stems from that technology, has the one of the lowest percentages of young people studying science and technology in the industrialized world. Interest in these disciplines has declined as other, possibly less valuable diversions have captivated the eyes and ears of the nation.
As an example, Kamen recalls the landing of NASA’s MER-A Exploration Rover on Mars on January 3, 2004. The day after it gently touched down on the red planet’s surface, seven months after it had been launched from Earth, it began sending back some of the most remarkably vivid color images of Mars ever seen. NASA posted them on its website, which quickly became the most trafficked destination on the Internet in virtually every country around the world. “The world wanted to see this,” said Kamen. This American conceived and designed technological miracle had a wow factor that knocked global interest in it off the charts.
According to Kamen, there was only one country where the Mars landing, however, did not achieve top viewership numbers: the United States.
The reason: on that same day, January 3, pop star Britney Spears impulsively jetted off to Las Vegas, where she wed a friend from childhood, Jason Alexander, at the Little White Wedding Chapel. In the United States, entertainment news sites covering Spears’s impromptu wedding got the most web traffic in the hours that followed. Never mind that the marriage was annulled only fifty-five hours later.
By pure coincidence, the next morning was the kick-off date for an endeavor related to the educational program Kamen launched to combat what he viewed as correctable problems in America’s innovation value structure. Kamen founded FIRST, short for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, in 1989, to entice children to become more interested in pursuing studies in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering. Every year, FIRST holds competitions around the country for students, with college scholarships as prizes, often contributed by corporate sponsors. Among those is the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), which challenges high school students to build their own robots weighing up to 120 pounds, including batteries and bumpers. Each year’s competition has a stated purpose for the robot. In 2011, 2,075 teams participated in FRC competitions in the United States, Canada, and Israel. Kamen often cites FIRST as the invention he is most proud of.
I recently got to see what Kamen described in action at a Mini Maker Faire held in my small suburban hometown in Connecticut. The scientific and technological exhibition featured many cool displays, including a one-man submarine and 3-D printers. But the attraction that by far got the most attention was run by some local high school students involved in a program started by Kamen: the basketball-playing robots. Using some of the gyroscopic balancing technologies deve
loped by Kamen, these young students had created remote-controlled wheeled devices run on cheap motors that could scoop an ordinary basketball off the ground, suck it up through a curved metal ramp, and hook it almost perfectly into the basketball nets mounted on nearby posts. The robots had wheels, but tottered around almost lifelike, as their clearly enthralled creators maneuvered each next shot from a nearby bank of laptop computers.
The crowd, too, was riveted. It was clear they were invigorated by the ingenuity of the young people, in awe of their resourcefulness. The excitement was contagious.
“What will bring this country down, if that’s what happens,” Kamen said, “is that we no longer, our next generation of kids, are no longer capable of creating the changes, utilizing the state-of-the-art technology to create real wealth.”
As smart as I think Kamen is on many topics, and as effective as I believe the FIRST competitions are in getting the young people who participate to think about technology and science, I’m not convinced that he’s got a handle on how tinkerers actually influence the American economy. In his alarmist comments, I hear echoes of John Galt’s speech from Atlas Shrugged. Kamen imagines a society in which only an educated, technocratic elite can keep the American engine running strong, but the reality is obviously much more complex. Even America’s great historical innovators, for example, such as Thomas Edison, could be severely ineffective as businessmen, thus on occasion leaving the fruits of their tinkering to be developed by others.
Kamen goes so far as to suggest that America’s stagnant unemployment rate is a result not of too few jobs, but of too few educated workers to fill those jobs that are available. “The sad truth may be that it’s not that there’s a lack of jobs for ten percent of the American potential workforce today, but that there is a lack of competence and capability in the current workforce to fill all the jobs, never mind the really good jobs. If that turns out to be the case, this country better get used to seeing its unemployment rate go up, even if the economy gets better and the stock market gets better and the rich people get richer. And by the way, that’s the way the rest of the world used to look until we started this country.”
But there is little historical evidence that tinkerers can be trained, though there have been plenty of attempts in the twentieth century to foster formal environments, corporate or otherwise, in which a group of innovators put their heads together and tried to sprout some lucrative ideas. The notion that educating, or rather breeding, a young generation of whiz kids will return the United States to its rightful position as the world’s most powerful engine of innovation seems naïve at best and extreme at worst.
Kamen’s perspective on high unemployment levels may sound blunt and uninformed, particularly to veterans of the Occupy Wall Street wage inequality protest movement. But some recent studies suggest he may have something of a point. A recent e-book published by two researchers at MIT, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee, draws from data they were compiling to write about current strides being made in American innovation. While the authors acknowledge that the ailing economy was the main culprit in the continuing job shortage in the United States, rapidly advancing technology amplified the problem. As work once done by people becomes automated, “many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” write Brynjolfsson and McAfee. In the most recent recession, for example, one out of twelve people in sales lost their jobs. During the crisis, many businesses began exploring ways they could use technology to replace the humans they laid off. By the time the recession officially ended in June 2009, corporate spending on equipment and software had grown 26 percent; payrolls remained mostly flat.
As technology has become able to perform tasks once thought to be distinctively human, American workers have not kept up the pace in terms of education and unique skills. Automation was once primarily thought of as the realm of robots in factories, but now it is having an impact on jobs in marketing and sales, as well. Recent innovations such as robot-driven cars and voice-activated personal assistant software (such as the Siri feature built in to the iPhone 4S introduced by Apple in October 2011) suggest that the direction of this trend is unlikely to change soon. The authors of the MIT study agree that the key to improving the jobs scenario is to focus on education and innovation. “In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even scientific discovery, the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but rather to compete with machines,” they write.
Kamen worries that workers from other countries are not only increasingly able to perform skilled work, once done by Americans, at a lower price, but that these foreign workers are actually more capable than Americans are to do the work they are assigned.
American children are facing more competition globally than any generation before them. “I don’t think the fair question is to ask, how are these kids doing compared to their parents?” said Kamen. “The real, more terrifying question is, how are the thirty or forty million kids in this country compared to over a billion people their age in the developing world?”
Kamen, however, claims that he remains an optimist regarding the future of the American tinkering impulse. He laments how the United States used to have the strongest work ethic and the best public education system in the world, available to all its citizens. He also complains that all of our heroes come from the worlds of professional sports and entertainment. “Those are not the source of our wealth,” he said angrily. “They are the result of it. They are pastimes.” His goal is to make scientists as intriguing as celebrities to teenagers.
Kamen is convinced he can create the Super Bowl of Superior Thinking. To that end, he makes sure that FIRST’s competitions are larded with plenty of risks and rewards. The final rounds themselves are set up like major sporting events. “I don’t think FIRST exists to address an education problem,” he said. “Let’s assume that it’s not an education problem, it’s a culture problem. And it’s not a supply problem, it’s a demand problem.”
CHAPTER 4
EDISON’S FOLLY REINVENTS TINKERING FOR THE MODERN AGE
ODDLY, THOMAS ALVA EDISON’S REPUTATION as the premier inventor of the modern age does battle with his role as the prototypical American tinkerer. Unlike Dean Kamen, who established his credentials as successful entrepreneur, Edison’s creative brilliance seemed at times to be nearly eclipsed by his utter ineptness as a businessman. While Edison was responsible for inventing or commercializing an astonishing number of devices that define contemporary society, when it came time to bring them to market, he tended to narrow his focus on some minor aspect of the innovation he had sired into being and lose sight of the bigger picture; that is, the real world in which his inventions would thrive.
It’s ironic that Edison failed so much at business since, more than any other American tinkerer, he represents our modern image of the power inherent in combining first-class tinkering with commercial interests to create a dynamic societal force. But we need only look at his singular failure to commercialize the phonograph to understand how Edison’s story divided the first century of American tinkering from the second. One might legitimately argue that Edison’s failings, and there were many, ultimately served his country better than they served him.
In 1868, at age twenty-one, Edison got a job as a telegraph operator in the main Western Union office in Boston, which was home to one of the oldest and most technically advanced telegraph communities in the nation. Before taking the position, he asked the interviewer whether it would be okay for him to pursue his own projects in his spare time on the job, and was told yes.
So at night he worked the late shift as press-wire operator and, during the day he was free to explore Boston’s many telegraph shops and find out what others were doing with the technology. Boston was the Silicon Valley of its day, and there was plenty to discover.
Edison wrote articles for the Telegrapher, a trade journal, about the many telegraphic innovations he stumbled upon. The frenetic activity he witnessed also sp
arked his own ideas. It was around this time that Edison developed his trademark tinkering style of working on multiple projects at the same time. This appealed to the many local investors and corporate officers swarming around the community, and pretty soon, he had funding from a fellow operator, Dewitt C. Roberts, for one of his ideas, a stock-price printer based on telegraph technology.
Among the other devices Edison would develop in this scattershot creative fashion were easier-to-use telegraph transmitters, a fire alarm powered by a telegraph mechanism, and a facsimile telegraph, to transmit pictures and handwriting. Roberts also showed interest and provided funding for another Edison invention, an electric vote recorder, intended to automate the manual voting process then used by state legislatures and Congress. Edison had read about devices of this kind under consideration by the Washington city council and the New York State legislature. His innovation was to incorporate an electrochemical recording technology that was common in automatic telegraphs.
While Edison filed patent applications for everything he invented, the vote tabulator, which included buttons at each legislature member’s desk that registered votes on twin dials visible to the chamber’s speaker, came through first. Unfortunately, the resultant business had few prospects, since lawmakers were reluctant to speed up a drawn-out process that allowed them to lobby for additional votes.
Another Edison invention, for an improved printing telegraph receiver, earned the backing of a local telegraph company official; as did the fire-alarm telegraph, which lost a contract with the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the largest fire-alarm company in the country. Edison failed to get sufficient funding for his facsimile telegraph, so he simply stopped work.