Innovation has marked the history of civilization. Innovation and invention which, despite popular misconception, are not the same thing. Innovation refers to adding to or improving on an existing technology. Photocopiers were innovations based on the much older lithograph machines and it could well be argued that without fax machines neither modern printers, or in fact, the Internet would exist. Invention refers to the creation, from scratch, of something which has literally never existed before.

A similar meaning to ‘discovery’, being something that was either not known before or at least no one thought to use in that particular way. The medicinal use of penicillin was not technically invented but it was certainly discovered in the truest sense. This sort of buildup of innovation being mistaken for invention exists even now, things being referred to as having been ‘invented’ when they are really simply improvements or alterations of existing inventions. Major changes in many cases but changes none the less. Not creations and often with little regard to or even knowledge of the original invention. The ‘granddaddys’ as it were.

Tally ho

The invention of the wheel is often held up as one of the great doings of the human race, right along with fire and sliced bread. There, admittedly, being a bit of a drop off between the second and third. The next logical invention after this was the chariot which was, after the cart, the first application of the wheel to human uses and the first to be applied to the notion of non-walking travel. People had been riding horses before this but that still required more effort than driving a chariot, the notion of ‘driving’ in fact, going back to Ancient Rome, and the term ‘car’ showing up in translations of Ovid.  

Fine tuning

Love them or loath them, the modern synthesizer has changed the musical landscape and has been doing so since the early 1960s. Yet it is not, in fact, Robert Moog who is to thank/blame for its existence. Nor is it the 19th century tinker Thaddeus Cahill who did his best to give the world the very first electric piano. In both cases, these innovations were based on the already existing piano which itself was basically an improvement on the design of the harpsichord, thought to date back to the late 14th century, the earliest known reference being in 1397, which in turn was a variation on the pipe organ, the invention upon which all other keyboard instruments are based.

The clear blue sky

The Wright Brothers are often credited with the invention of human flight. Even if one puts the word ‘mechanized’ at the beginning this not quite true. The first ‘airship’ with an engine was the blimp, which was an advancement on the design of the dirigible, which themselves were basically fancy hot air balloons. The Wright brothers were innovators of the first order, greatly improving and adding to existing technology.

Innovation and Invention: Down the wires

One of the most popular innovations has the greatest misunderstanding behind it. On many people’s “Greatest Inventions” lists the smartphone, started by Research In Motion with the Blackberry, not Steve Jobs with the iPhone as legend would have it, was not’ invented’ at all. I realize that I leave myself open to attacks by the Apple Cult by stating this but the truth must be told. The smartphone is an improvement of the cellular phone which was an advancement of the landline telephone, itself going through many iterations over the years, which traces its existence back to the invention of the telegraph. When people at the dawn of 20th century referred to ‘the wireless’, as indeed happened, they were not speaking of Internet connections, or indeed telephones, but in a far more fundamental and literal sense of the first instance of wireless communication the world had ever seen.