Invention and Innovation A Brief History of Hype and Failure

From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most readable book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm.

Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions.

Inventions that failed to dominate as promised:

• Airships
• Nuclear fission
• Supersonic flight

Inventions that turned disastrous:

• Leaded gasoline
• DDT
• Chlorofluorocarbons

Inventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial):

• Travel in vacuum (hyperloop)
• Nitrogen-fixing cereals
• Nuclear fusion

Finally, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.

Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.

Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of forty books, including Energy and Civilization and Growth, published by the MIT Press. In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2013 Bill Gates wrote on his website that “there is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil."

1 Inventions and Innovations: A Long History and Modern Infatuation 1
2 Inventions that Turned from Welcome to Undesirable 19
3 Inventions that Were to Dominate—and Do Not 63
4 Inventions that We Keep Waiting for 107
5 Techno-Optimism, Exaggerations, and Realistic Expectations 151
Further Reading 185
Index 209