james burke

• "let me illustrate how non linear the path of change can be, with a not very serious sequence events from the history of technology. this story will end in the modern world with a modern technological artifact, with which i assure you every single person in this room is intimately associated.
  
  so you ought to get there before i do. because you know the end of the story.
  
  one dark and stormy night in 1707, an english off the southwestern coast of england, an admiral called sir cloudsly showel -i'd have changed my name- is bringing the great english fleet back to england.
  
  he decides to turn right. and only one of the 44 navigators on the fleet says don't do it,so he does. hits the rocks off the southwestern coast of england, the entire fleet, the entire english fleet sinks. think about that.
  
  all the sailors drown, including admiral showel. this stimulates the english parliament, to offer a billion-dollar prize for better navigation techniques -like surprise! surprise!
  
  this offer prompts a clockmaker called huntsman, to look for a better steel clock-spring. those of you who sail will know that if you sail east or west the problem with longtitute means that the most important thing you can have is to know what time it is back at base to the second. because that will tell you that the star here, just came up so many minutes and seconds earlier or later than when it usually does at home and that tells you where you are, on the path east-west.
  
  this is very important for us english at the time, because we are coming over here to exploit you guys. we saw nothing wrong with taxation without representation? what's changed?
  
  anyway, the steel which huntsman invents is great for clocksprings. so that's solved. and also it turns out, for cutting other metal. so an iron maker called wilkinson uses it to bore out thin walled water pipes and then thin walled cannon-barrels which in spite of the fact that we're at war with both of you at the time, he sells to you and the french. nothing changes.
  
  a little bit later napoleon uses this lightweight cannon barrels to create a new thing called "mobile horse artillery" and wins all his battles!.. except the last.. sorry :)
  
  in 1810 napoleon sets up a prize to encourage french inventors and a champagne bottler called appere steps forward with an idea for which he wins the big prize, for putting food in bottles, champagne bottles, corking the bottle, boiling it, and killing the germs nobody knows exist. it works, everybody loves it.
  
  10 years later an english company is doing it also because they have bought appere's patent. which they only buy because it is literally sitting on the desk next to the patent in paris that they went there to buy in the first place. which is for a new paper technique that allows the first toilet-rolls to be made. you see what i've been saying on how innovation can be surprising? how could anybody could've forecasted the toilet-roll from even the most frightening of the navigational problems? english joke."