What happens in the United States is that the Defense Department is trying to create a system to link the research computers at the various universities they were funding so that they could time-share. They tell the professors at these universities, “You have to figure out a way to link to our network.”
The professors do what they always do. They delegate that task to their graduate students. About thirty of them joined together to invent what becomes known as ARPANET, the predecessor to what is now the Internet. It was based on a system called packet-switching, which meant that, unlike Minitel in France and unlike the phone company in the United States, there were no central hubs in which the information was controlled by whoever ran the system.
In a packet-switch network, the information is all broken up into small packets. It scurries through a web, with address headers so it knows where to go and how to reassemble itself when the packets get where they’re supposed to be.
It means that every single node on that network has the power to create and store and transmit and forward information. It becomes a web in which there’s no central control mechanism.
Later, at Time magazine, we once wrote that that was done to survive a nuclear attack from the Russians. If you have a centralized system and you take out one of the hubs, you can screw up the whole network. But with the Internet, if any one of the thousands or millions or billions of nodes gets knocked out, the information just knows how to route around that.
That distributed system, where every node has equal power to create information, is at the heart of the Internet. It’s not centrally controlled, unlike the systems that were being developed by British Telecom or Minitel by the French Telecom.
DR: What role did Marc Andreessen and the company Mosaic that he helped to create play in fostering the widespread use of the Internet?
WI: Mark Andreessen’s contribution was huge. The World Wide Web, which is a set of protocols for easily navigating the Internet, had been created at CERN in Switzerland by a guy named Tim Berners-Lee. But what turns out to be the most important element for that is the piece of software called the browser that allows a normal person to easily navigate the web.
When Mark Andreessen was at the University of Illinois, a big, corn-fed Iowa guy, he does what great innovators do. He combines a feel for technology, because he was a great computer coder, with a feel for the humanities.
He knew how people interface with great products. He created the Mosaic browser, which had wonderful technical features and was done in a smart way. It was made public. It was made free. It was almost as if it were more open-source than proprietary.
So everybody got to use the Mosaic browser, and it caught on. That not only made the browser important, but it caused the web, the World Wide Web, to be the best way to navigate the Internet.
Only people like me, who are early Internet geeks, remember that it wasn’t inevitable that websites with hyperlinks and hypertext were going to be the way the Internet became easy to navigate. There were things like Gopher and Veronica and Archie and Send and Fetch and all these other ways to navigate the Internet.
But the Mosaic browser becomes the popular user interface. Just like Steve Jobs took the personal computers of the early days that were for hobbyists and hackers and said, “I’ll make an easy graphical user interface and make it easy for people to interface with their computer,” Mark Andreessen had the same innovative spirit. He says, “I’ll make it easy for people to interface with the World Wide Web.” And the way he did it was so that you could hop around anywhere.
DR: What led to the development of the smartphone?
WI: Steve Jobs’s great innovative genius was connecting our technology to us as humans, which is what he did when he created the Macintosh, which is easy to use. When he comes back to Apple in the late 1990s, after having been fired from the company twelve years earlier, he and his brilliant team sit around grousing, “Our cell phones suck. It’s not intuitive. There’s no screen on which to see things.”
He made one of those great creative and innovative leaps. Having been in the business of personal computers, he said, “Let’s reinvent cell phones and do for them what we did in the early days of computers, which is make them intuitive and easy to use.” He had already invented the iPod, which had a way to put a thousand songs in your pocket. It was just a beautifully intuitive music player.
He said that if the people who made cell phones figured out a way to make them easy to use and to put music on them, it would kill the iPod. So he decided he was going to create a cell phone that was an easy-to-use music player, a cell phone, and also an easy-to-use personal assistant and computing device—all three rolled into one.
In a stroke of genius that he did not know was a stroke of genius initially, he creates a place where people can put apps. When he eventually opens up the App Store to outside developers, you get things from Amazon to Uber to Airbnb.
DR. What was the innovation that led to the widespread development of e-commerce?
WI: Unlike some of the other entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or even Bill Gates, who came at it from inventing a product, Jeff Bezos came at it from a business and finance mind-set as well. He figured out how you could do an easy-to-use online store.
That coincides with the explosive growth of personal computing and then the advent of smartphones. By the late 1990s, when Amazon is coming along, it coincides with a period when everybody is getting easy-to-use personal computers and easy-to-use access to the Internet.
In the beginning of the 1990s, an ordinary citizen could not go on the Internet. You could go on an online service like America Online or CompuServe. But those were walled gardens that had their own ecosystems.
Al Gore gets made fun of, but the most important innovation in the early ’90s was the Gore Act [the High Performance Computing Act of 1991] and a subsequent act the following year [the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act of 1992], which opened up the Internet to people who want to dial in and use it for personal or commercial reasons. He invents things like the “.com” address, which means that you don’t have to be at the university or a major corporation to get on the Internet. You can create your own business.
Gore opening up the Internet to things like dot-coms in the early 1990s, the spread of easy-to-use Internet interfaces such as Mark Andreessen’s Mosaic web browser—all of this laid a fertile field for a guy like Jeff Bezos to come in and say, “I’m now going to create a store that will sell books on the Internet, and I’m eventually going to make it an everything store.” E-commerce is one of those things that was largely driven by one great, creative visionary, and that was Jeff Bezos.
DR: What was the innovation that led to the development of social media?
WI: The first insight into social media, I think, was Steve Case at America Online. This is before the Internet was opened by the Gore Act. People would go onto services like America Online or CompuServe or Prodigy. Those services had information you could get—stock prices, sports scores, weather, news.
What Steve Case realized with America Online was that community and social networking were the killer app—not only inventing that wonderful phrase “You’ve got mail” but creating easy-to-use bulletin boards and chat rooms and instant messaging services all embedded in the early AOL. That caused the rise of bulletin boards on the web.
When the web takes off in the 1990s, it leads eventually to services like the WELL and other online communities. Then it gets driven by various entrepreneurs who create things like MySpace.
Then, famously, Mark Zuckerberg is in a dorm room at Harvard trying to create a college facebook service where you can connect with other people at your college. Zuckerberg ends up winning because he makes his the best and the easiest to use.
There’s also a network effect. If you’re on AOL and your friends are on CompuServe, it doesn’t quite work. Once somebody has the place everybody wants to go to, it goes into hyper growth mode, because everybody wants to be where everyb
ody else is. Facebook won that race.
Facebook did it by creating a better product. They did it by doing things that can be a bit harmful, like becoming addictive or incenting people to send out things that enrage or incite them.
But it was mainly done by creating a product that made it easier for people to connect. Once again, it was led by the type of person who would connect technology to humanities, who understood “Hey, a like button will work” or “A share button will work.”
DR: Two final questions. Do you see any signs that innovation is slowing down in the U.S. compared to China or other countries?
WI: There is a danger. Part of it is that the four or five big technology companies, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, maybe Microsoft, have such control in their particular fields.
Since the invention almost twenty years ago of things like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others, we haven’t had as much innovation in the digital technology realm. I don’t believe you have to break these companies up, but I do believe a little more antitrust enforcement, where these big companies can’t favor their own products over those of new innovative entrepreneurs, would be healthy, so that we’d have a greater market for creativity and innovation.
DR: How important is a country’s culture or government to the advent of innovation?
WI: It’s absolutely critical whether it’s a culture that allows failure; a culture that celebrates success and creating a business; a culture that can regulate with a soft and sensitive hand instead of an iron fist; a culture that knows how to protect intellectual property but not allow patents to get in the way of innovation.
These all require delicate balances. It’s not to go hell-bent for or against regulation, or for or against intellectual property; it’s understanding the delicate balance. Ever since the Patent Act of 1790 and the antitrust enforcements against Standard Oil, we’ve gotten the balance pretty much right in this country.
I fear that the hyperpartisanship we have now could cause the culture of America to lose that ability to say it’s all about balance or nuance when it comes to government, academia, corporations, and entrepreneurs all being part of an ecosystem that can flourish.
DAVID McCULLOUGH on the Wright Brothers
Historian; author of The Wright Brothers and many other books
“Then I began to understand what kind of human beings they were and what they were up against when they set out to achieve this immensely exciting mission, which no one in history had ever been able to do. How did they do it? Why was it they who accomplished this?”
Many of the world’s most singular and transformative achievements have been the work of the most unlikely of individuals. That was certainly the case with manned flight.
For millennia, humans dreamed of following birds and flying from destination to destination, saving time and energy. And the greatest human minds, like Leonardo da Vinci, developed possible ways to achieve that feat.
But no human was actually able to do this until two unknown brothers, operating out of a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, showed the world how planes that they had designed and built could indeed take humans off the ground—and, importantly, also bring them safely back.
That Wilbur and Orville Wright, with no formal engineering or aeronautical training and no college degrees, did this, with their own limited funds, after years of experimenting on the isolated beaches of windswept Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, is truly remarkable.
But as remarkable as that accomplishment was, it seems just as remarkable that the Wright brothers were unable to convince the U.S. government to support their efforts or, later, even to affirm their success. Indeed, it was the French government that lured the Wright brothers to Paris to show their feat, and it was there that they demonstrated their invention to large French crowds, who were utterly amazed. Acceptance in the U.S. came a bit later, a bit to the brothers’ chagrin.
Without doubt, one of America’s most distinct contributions to human progress during the twentieth century was the invention of the airplane. And what better person to chronicle this contribution than America’s most beloved historian, David McCullough?
Over the past five decades, David has written best-seller after best-seller about such historic American creations as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal and such American leaders as Teddy Roosevelt, John Adams, and Harry Truman. David has now written more than a dozen books, all of which are still in print.
For the quality of these and other books about America, David McCullough has won every award an American citizen can win: two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, the National Humanities Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and more than fifty honorary degrees.
I have had the privilege of interviewing David on many occasions, and he is always as enthusiastic and voluble in describing his subject as someone who is speaking about the subject for the first time. That was true as well in this interview about the Wright brothers, which took place as part of the Congressional Dialogues series at the Library of Congress on June 24, 2015. The secret to the brothers’ success, in David’s view, was that they never gave up. They failed repeatedly but kept tinkering and experimenting and reinventing.
They would not accept failure—but for reasons unrelated to a desire for fame or money. Those were of no real interest to them. They simply wanted to prove humans could build and safely fly planes.
David suggests, though, one other reason for their success. They loved to read. They had grown up with books and were always reading. And they were reading the classics of literature and history. David suggests that this informal liberal arts education the brothers gave themselves, in both their youth and their adulthood, produced manned flight as much as did their self-taught engineering and mechanical skills.
As a believer in the value of the social sciences, I found David’s point highly encouraging. But I found it highly discouraging that I had not figured out how to use my own social sciences background anywhere near as productively as did the Wright brothers.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You can pick any subject as a historian. Why did you pick the Wright brothers?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH (DM): I was working with the collection of Edith Wharton letters that are at Yale University in the Beinecke Library, and I came across a letter that she wrote to a friend of hers, describing how she was coming back to the Hôtel de Crillon on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and stepped out of her beautiful chauffeur-driven limousine and noticed a lot of people on the sidewalk were looking up into the sky. She looked up, and there was a Wright biplane flying over Paris.
Wharton went on to describe beautifully—as she, one of our greatest writers, could do—the thrill of that image in detail. Then she said, “Imagine. I’ve seen the first airplane ever to fly over Paris.” In fact, it was the first airplane ever to fly over any city up until that point, and it was being flown not by one of the brothers but by a French aristocrat, the Comte de Lambert, who had been taught by Wilbur Wright how to fly that plane.
Then I found out that Orville Wright was also in France at that point, and that Wilbur Wright had been there almost a year before. I thought, “What in the world are the Wright brothers doing in France? They’re meant to be back in Ohio in their bicycle shop.”
At that point, about all I knew about the Wright brothers was that they were bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, who invented the airplane. It’s what we all learned in the five minutes that they’re given in high-school history classes.
Then I began to understand what kind of human beings they were and what they were up against when they set out to achieve this immensely exciting mission, which no one in history had ever been able to do. How did they do it? Why was it they who accomplished this? Two men who’d never been to college, never even finished high school, but who were thoroughly, as I soon found out, well-educated on their own, in everything—including, I must emphasize, the liberal arts.
Although they grew up in a house that had no r
unning water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, it was a house full of books. Their father, an itinerant minister, insisted that they be readers, so they grew up reading Dickens and Mark Twain and Hawthorne and the poetry of Virgil and Plutarch’s Lives and Thucydides and history and natural history and philosophy and theology.
They had a full liberal arts education. I hope that some of the people in education today, and the parents who are advising their children, and the students who are making decisions about what they’re going to do with their time in college, will keep in mind that these brothers, who cracked one of the most impossible technical mysteries of all time, had a liberal arts education. And it carried them further in their work and in their imaginative and creative thinking than they would have gone otherwise.
They were also taught by their father to write the English language correctly and effectively. They were incapable of writing a dull letter or a short one.
DR: If the Wright brothers were here tonight, is there a question you would like to ask them?
DM: There are so many questions. I’d like to talk with Wilbur more about art and architecture. He was fascinated with the paintings in the Louvre when he first got there. He’d never been in an art museum in his life.
He loved walking through the city of Paris and looking at the architecture and the way the public buildings are set off by open space in front of them. He wrote these marvelous letters home to his father and his sister, particularly about the nave of the great cathedral at Le Mans and how it reaches up and up toward the sky and, as you get up in the upper clerestory it’s all lighted, with light coming through stained-glass windows. He describes this reaching for the sky.
And, of course, that’s just what he’s doing, reaching for the sky. The fact that this architecture is moving him this way—Wilbur was a genius. I don’t think there’s any question about it. Orville was clever and mechanically ingenious.
The American Experiment Page 24