Anton Howes
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22/10/2016

Is Innovation in Human Nature?

The Industrial Revolution was caused by an acceleration of innovation. But how was that acceleration caused? Most theories of the acceleration’s causes assume that innovation is in human nature, that it has always been around.

So, they might argue:
  • Property rights became better enforced so budding innovators felt more secure to make themselves known.
  • Patents appeared so innovators could reveal their secrets and still profit from them.
  • Brits were particularly skilled or well-educated so innovators could more easily get their innovations implemented.
  • British society started to accord dignity or honour to innovation so innovators felt motivated to have a go.
  • Demand increased so innovators had a big enough market to begin selling their innovations.

And so on.. All of these arguments assume the same thing — that innovation is a part of human nature, a choice that has always been recognised. Their implicit claim is that, other than in mid-eighteenth century Britain, save for a few short-lived cases, choosing innovation was simply just not worth it.

I disagree.

The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so — it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so. Incentives matter too, of course. But a person needs to at least have the idea of innovation — an improving mentality — before they can choose to innovate, before they can even take the costs and benefits of innovation into account.

An illustration: at a conference I was at last month the attendees wore lanyards with name tags, which listed their names on one side. Over the course of the conference the tags would inevitably flip over, hiding the names. People would, when introducing themselves, periodically check each other’s tags, flipping them the right way around. But only one person — one single person, of attendees in the hundreds, had the ingenuity to write their name on the other side. To my shame, it wasn’t me.

Everyone at that conference had an incentive to do that innovation. Everyone was there to meet one another, so the innovation helped achieve that goal. And the cost of the innovation was negligible. It took a couple of seconds to whip out a pen and scribble a name. It simply did not occur to them to innovate. Innovation can be extraordinarily rare — despite the opportunities, despite the incentives.

And I find the same old story during the British Industrial Revolution. My favourite example is John Kay’s flying shuttle. It was an improvement to the loom, which radically increased the productivity of weaving, and which finds a place in every textbook. A shuttle is the thing that weavers pass from side to side, drawing a thread, the weft, under and over the threads facing away from them, called the warp. Weavers would lift every other warp thread and pass the shuttle from hand to hand, hence passing the weft under the warp threads that were lifted, and over the ones that were not lifted. Under and over, under and over.

Kay’s innovation was to use two wooden boxes on either side to catch the shuttle. And he attached a string, with a little handle called a picker, so that the shuttle could be jerked across the loom, at great speed. Here’s a video of it in action.

Kay’s innovation was extraordinary in its simplicity. As the inventor Bennet Woodcroft put it, weaving with an ordinary shuttle had been “performed for upwards of five thousand years, by millions of skilled workmen, without any improvement being made to expedite the operation, until the year 1733”. All Kay added was some wood and some string. And he applied it to weaving wool, which had been England’s main industry since the middle ages. He had no special skill, he required no special understanding of science for it, and he faced no special incentive to do it. As for institutions, the flying shuttle was technically illegal because it saved labour, the patent was immediately pirated by competitors to little avail, and Kay was forced to move to France, hounded out of the country by angry weavers who threatened his property and even his life. Kay faced no special incentives — he even innovated despite some formidable social and legal barriers.

Kay’s flying shuttle is just one example, but it is illustrative of many more innovations that were low-hanging fruit, ripe for the plucking for centuries. So the usual, natural state is the state of those millions of weavers who preceded Kay, who never knew another innovator and so never even received the idea of innovating. As the agricultural innovator Arthur Young put it, the natural state is not innovation, but “that dronish, sleepy, and stupid indifference, that lazy negligence, which enchains men in the exact paths of their forefathers, without enquiry, without thought”.
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4 Comments
Mark Buell link
17/2/2020 02:53:24 am

Anton;
This is a continuation of my replies on the "Where Be Dragons" post, as I quite agree with your thinking that innovation is uncommon. However, I do think it is natural for man to innovate - witness the natural turmoil of the teenage years. I completely agree that ultimately innovation is not common and is suppressed. I have to agree that most people, even in their youth, prefer not to innovate, but to maintain status quo. Common sense, and history, tell us that.

Innovative thoughts do come naturally to some, but most frequently come to naught, either because they are squelched by other people, or because the thinker hasn't the grit necessary to follow through, or because the idea simply isn't practical at that moment for some reason or another. But in certain times, innovation is encouraged, and then we see an abundance of it. The Greek Golden Age, the Industrial Revolution, the late 19th century - great examples.

However, personally, I can't conclude that there are more than a very few "low-hanging fruit" ideas, or "ideas behind their time". Kay's shuttle seems to be one, and rootsforprogress mentions the cotton gin.

Reply
Will Beazley
8/4/2020 07:37:23 pm

"As for institutions, the flying shuttle was technically illegal because it saved labour"

Can you give me a source for this? It sounds really interesting and I want to know how common this was and what laws existed.

Reply
Anton Howes
16/4/2020 06:58:21 pm

Hi Will,
Sure! I still haven't identified all of them, but here are a few examples that spring to mind.

There was the 1551 “An act for the putting down of gig mills” (5 & 6 Edward VI c.22) which banned the use of the machine (later cited in the 1790s and early 1800s as part of workers’ petitions to restrict the use of new machines). A great source on this is Adrian Randall’s book Before the Luddites.

One is that the Statute of Monopolies of 1624 prohibited patents for inventions that were not “generally inconvenient”. In Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England - which became the standard legal textbook - this line was explained with the following example, citing some kind of prior decision (I’ve not yet traced this - it could be either an act of Parliament or a royal proclamation): “there was a new invention found out heretofore, that bonnets and caps might be thickened in a fulling mill, by which means more might be thickened and fulled in one day than by the labours of fourscore men, who got their livings by it. It was ordained that bonnets and caps should be thickened and fulled by the strength of men, and not in a fulling mill, for it was holden inconvenient to turn so many labouring men to idleness”. As such, according to custom, all and any labour-saving patent should have been disallowed. This only seems to have stopped over the course of the eighteenth century, and it’s not entirely clear why. Before the 1760s, patent petitions for labour-saving machines often tried to make the case that they would not cause any unemployment (usually by saying that the industry did not already exist in Britain, and would thus be labour-creating).

This sort of attitude seems to have been common. James I issued a proclamation prohibiting the making of needles in 1623, and Charles I issued proclamations re-enforcing the ban on gig mills in 1633, as well as prohibiting brass buckles because “those who case the brass buckles can make more in one day than ten of those that make the iron buckles can do”. See the footnotes to Cunningham’s The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Vol II, p.295 which gives the primary sources.

There are some further details of these in Lipson’s Economic History of England, 1948. See pp.51-53.

By the eighteenth century, the belief that labour-saving inventions were illegal was quite widespread. e.g. various dictionaries from the 1730s through to the 1750s stated that machines like saw mills were prohibited by act of Parliament due to the resulting unemployment (this might be because there seems to have been a 1633 proclamation banning the sawing of wood using wind power, according the Lipson and some of the other sources - though others give this as 1635). In 1759, the Society of Arts actually conducted an investigation into whether or not saw mills were illegal, given that it was almost universally believed, but found no evidence to justify it (they then proposed a premium to reward the introduction of sawmills into England). You can read more on this specific case in E. W. Cooney, “Eighteenth Century Britain’s Missing Sawmills: A Blessing in Disguise?,” Construction History 7 (1991): 29–46.

What’s so striking about many of these, is that they persisted for so long. Although in the nineteenth century many lawmakers dismissed them as laws that were “obsolete”, this was not the way that many of the workers saw it - they frequently cited them in their petitions to prevent the use of certain machines. Hope that helps!

Anton

Reply
Gordon Hart link
5/1/2021 01:24:27 pm

Well, the answer to this question does rather depend upon how one defines the word innovation. After all, at its very core innovation is simply problem solving, and problem solving is absolutely at the very core of human nature. Humans are extremely effective at problem solving, and have been for millennia. To escalate the meaning beyond problem solving, you have to confer to innovation a property beyond 'very good problem solving'.

It gather from your article that this additional property is the motivation to either perceive that there even is a problem to resolve at all, or even if the problem is recognised, the motivation to bother resolving it?

Innovation is Motivation?

This has a certain pithy appeal.

Reply



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