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When Scientific Amateurs Have Eureka Moments

This article is more than 8 years old.

A new book by British historian Gavin Weightman explores the fascinating contributions of non-scientists to five key inventions of the past century.

Eureka: How Invention Happens (Yale University Press, 266 pages) explores the entangled adventures of the amateurs responsible for the invention of flight, television, barcodes, mobile phones and personal computers.

You might be surprised by the inclusion of barcodes--but as Weightman shows, the transformative effect it's had on society is almost as great as the other inventions. And it was thanks to a man who learned Morse Code in the Boy Scouts.

It is extremely unlikely, Weightman writes, that a scientist would have come up with the concept.

Joe Woodland, who first dreamed up the idea of adapting Morse Code for the identification of groceries, was a trained engineer, but there was nothing much in his technical education which suggested the innovation he proposed. More important was his time in the Boy Scouts, during which he was taught the dots and dashes of telegraph Morse. His attempt to build a working checkout system failed for lack of the appropriate technology.

It was science that came to the rescue at this point, with the inventions of the laser and the microchip, and allowed the full emergence of the barcodes we see all around us today. But as Weightman adds, the inventors of both of these technologies had no idea they would be employed at the supermarket checkout counter--and later for labeling almost everything.

Television has an equally delightful history riddled with happenstance but also with the stories of inspired pioneers determined to bring a new way of transmitting visual images into existence.

Although October 2, 1925 is generally accepted as the first time television actually worked in demonstration, Weightman first takes the reader back a century to the discovery of the element selenium by Swedish chemist and mineralogist Jacob Berzelius. Key to the future technology of 'seeing with electricity' as television was first called, was the fact that selenium in several of its forms could act as a photoelectric cell.

Jumpt to 1884, Weightman writes, when a precocious German student named Paul Nipkow felt inspired by the recent invention of the telephone to work out the model of what he called an 'electric telescope'.

The component that was entirely original was a perforated disk which, in one revolution, scanned an image and in doing so threw light of various strengths, according to the composition of the image, on to a selenium cell, which in turn sent electrical impulses to a receiver that transformed the variable electric current back into an image with an identical and synchronized receiving disk.

But at this stage, Weightman writes, it was really an idea that could not yet be worked out in actuality. The technology was too crude, and it would be over 40 years before the first clunky system was demonstrated by the Scottish enthusiast John Logie Baird.

How Baird's breakthrough was almost immediately improved upon by others (who in the long run elbowed him out of the way) follows a familiar pattern in the histories of the other technologies that Weightman describes in his engaging book.

But the fundamental importance of the outsider, he writes at the close of his book, can't be appreciated enough.

Their creations were inevitably crude and it would require all the investment and expertise of mainstream science and industry to turn the ugly duckling into a commercial swan. But time and again, even in the twentieth century, those innovations which have transformed our lives have been pioneered not by the big guns of established industries or the laboratories of the most brilliant scientists but by a few visionaries who had the temerity to imagine they could make the impossible possible.

Available in hardcover and e-book formats. Highly recommended--and not just for geeks, as Weightman is a superb writer and makes each of his subjects accessible to the general reader.

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