What Took it so Long?

In one of his books, Nassim Nicolas Taleb wondered why it took so long to invent the suitcase with wheels? After all, he said, both the suitcase and the wheel had existed for long, so what took so long to put them together? He didn’t have the answer, which is why Anton Howes’ article caught my eye. Even better, the scope of his article was the generic question: why did so many such obviously simple yet useful inventions not come up much, much earlier? It’s not like they needed some other technology to be available first, or the use or need wasn’t evident.

 

But first, suitcase on wheels apart, a few other examples:

“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.”

Or the semaphores used for signaling:

“It strikes me as odd, too, that there was an explosion of signalling systems like semaphore only towards the end of the eighteenth century.”

On a lighter note, he adds super-popular board games, like Dungeons and Dragons? Even if you don’t know the game, his explanation makes it clear:

“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… (Yet) 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?”

 

Ok, so you got the question, “ideas behind their time”, as Alex Tabarrok calls it. Howes eliminates the usual suspects when it comes to new inventions:

“Skill, materials, science, institutions, or incentives… none of them quite seem to fit.”

His depressing answer?

“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.”

The silver lining though?

“Even today… the fermenting (low-hanging) fruit still abound.”

So go invent something, you’re out of excuses!