How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  But, from a clinical point of view, Semmelweis had convincing data to support his hypothesis. At a time when doctors did not scrub in or out of the operating room, and were so proud of the blood on their gowns that they let it build up throughout their careers, Semmelweis persuaded the doctors of Vienna to wash their hands before delivering babies, and the results were immediate. In April 1847, 57 women died giving birth in Vienna General’s deadly First Clinic—18 percent of all patients. In the middle of May, Semmelweis introduced hand-washing. In June, 6 women died, a death rate of 2 percent, the same as the untroubled Second Clinic. The death rate stayed low, and in some months fell to zero. In the following two years, Semmelweis saved the lives of around 500 women, and an unknown number of children.

  This was not enough to overcome the skepticism. Charles Delucena Meigs, an American obstetrician, typified the outrage. He told his students that a doctor’s hands could not possibly carry disease because doctors are gentlemen and “a gentleman’s hands are clean.”

  Semmelweis did not know why hand-washing before delivery saved lives—he only knew that it did. And if you do not know why something saves lives, why do it? For Levy, Meigs, and Semmelweis’s other “gentlemen” contemporaries, preventing the deaths of thousands of women and their babies was not reason enough.

  As the medical community rejected Semmelweis’s ideas, his morale and behavior declined. He had been a rising star at the hospital until he proposed hand-washing. After a few years, he lost his job and started showing signs of mental illness. He was lured to a lunatic asylum, put in a straitjacket, and beaten. He died two weeks later. Few attended his funeral. Without Semmelweis’s supervision, the doctors at Vienna General Hospital stopped washing their hands. The death rate for women and babies at the maternity clinic rose by 600 percent.

  Even in a field as apparently empirical and scientific as medicine, even when the results are as fundamental as life not death, and even when the creation is as simple as asking people to wash their hands, creators may not be welcome.

  Why? Because powerful antibodies of the status quo mass against change. When you bring something truly new to the world, brace. Having an impact is not usually a pleasant experience. Sometimes the hardest part of creating is not having an idea but saving an idea, ideally while also saving yourself.

  Semmelweis’s idea challenged two millennia of medical dogma. Since the time of Hippocrates, doctors had been trained in humorism: the belief that the body is made up of four fluids, or humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Humorism lives in our language today. In Latin, black bile is melan chole. People with too much of it were said to suffer from melancholy. Too much yellow bile, chole, made a person irritable, or choleric. An excess of blood, sanguis, made them optimistic, or sanguine. Phlegm made them stoic, or phlegmatic. Good health meant these humors were in balance. Disease and disability came from imbalances caused by inhaling vapors or “bad air,” an idea known as “miasma theory.” Diseases were treated by removing blood. In the nineteenth century, doctors removed blood by placing leeches on their patients’ bodies, a treatment called “hirudotherapy.” The leeches attached themselves to the patient’s skin using a sucker, behind which lay a three-bladed, propeller-shaped jaw. Once the sucker was in place, the leech latched on by biting, injected anesthetic and blood thinners into the patient; then it sucked the patient’s blood. Once full, it dropped off to begin digestion. The process took up to two hours. It was important to wait. If the leech was removed prematurely, it would vomit into the patient’s open wound.

  Semmelweis’s idea that puerperal fever might be carried by doctors from corpses to patients and could therefore be prevented by hand-washing contradicted the ancient trinity of humorism, miasma, and hirudotherapy. How could hygiene impact health when disease was generated spontaneously inside the body?

  As Semmelweis lay dying, another creator, Louis Pasteur, answered this question. Where Semmelweis pointed to the number of women who did not die and expected common sense to prevail, Pasteur used carefully designed experiments to advance what became known as “germ theory.” He produced incontrovertible evidence to show that living microorganisms caused many diseases. Pasteur was well aware of the controversial nature of his theory and possibly also of the hostile rejection that proponents like Semmelweis had suffered. Humorism’s true believers had been fighting rumors about germs for centuries. Pasteur was meticulous with his evidence, persistent with his claims, and eventually convinced most of Europe. Semmelweis’s clinical results hinted at the truth, but they were not enough to overcome two thousand years of belief in something else. A new idea needs much better evidence than an old one, as some of our best thinkers have pointed out.

  David Hume: “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

  Pierre-Simon Laplace: “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”

  Marcello Truzzi: “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.”

  Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  Prevailing ideas are fortified by incumbency and familiarity, no matter how ridiculous they may seem later. They can only be changed by people ready to meet rejection with evidence, patience, and stamina. Semmelweis believed that saving hundreds of women was enough.

  One reason for Semmelweis’s collapse was that he did not expect such a good idea to be so soundly rejected and was shocked at the vicious and sometimes personal attacks. But creation is the infiltration of the old by the new, a stone in the shoe of the status quo, and this makes creators threats, at least to some. As a consequence, creation is seldom welcome.

  Still, Semmelweis’s surprise is typical. The most common misconception about creation is that good ideas are celebrated—partly because of something that happened in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1855.

  5 | BETTER MOUSETRAPS

  In a long, flowing hand that joined words as well as letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal, “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.” By 1889, several years after Emerson’s death, the line was being misquoted as “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” Later it was changed again, to “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” and became famous.

  These words did more than cause a misunderstanding about the popularity of new things in general. Many people take them literally, and as a result, the mousetrap has become one of the most frequently patented and reinvented devices in America. Around four hundred applications for mousetrap patents are made every year. About forty patents are granted. More than five thousand mousetrap patents have been issued in total—so many that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has thirty-nine subclasses for mousetraps, including “Impaling,” “Choking or Squeezing,” and “Electrocuting and Explosive.” Independent inventors hold nearly all mousetrap patents. Almost all of them cite the quotation they believe is Emerson’s. But the world does not beat a path to their door. Fewer than twenty of the five thousand mousetrap patents have ever made any money.

  The saying was not intended to inspire better mousetraps. Rather, a better mousetrap inspired it. Emerson could not have written it: he died before commercial mousetraps were invented. I know the story well in part because my great-grandfather, who lived at the same time as Emerson, made his living as a rat catcher. His principal tools were dogs: Jack Russell terriers, a relatively new breed in those days and one developed specifically for hunting vermin. Other mouse-trapping techniques included cats—actually less effective than dogs, despite their reputation—as well as cages and drowning. This changed in the late 1880s, when an inventor from Illinois named William C. Hooker crea
ted the first mass-production mousetrap. And not long after that, my family’s trade changed, too. There was little demand for rat catchers when people could buy cheap traps. Hooker’s trap is the one we know today: a spring-loaded bar released by a trigger when a mouse takes the bait. This is the “better mousetrap” referred to in the 1889 revision of Emerson’s words. It does not need building: William Hooker has already built it.

  Hooker’s “snap trap” was perfected within a few years. It was cheap, easy, and effective. It remains the dominant design today. It traps a quarter of a billion mice a year, outsells all its competitors combined by a factor of two to one, and costs less than a dollar. Almost all of the five thousand mousetraps created since Hooker’s have been rejected.

  The idea that creators are hailed as heroes is as wrong today as it was when Emerson did not write it. Emerson’s actual point was about what he called “common fame”—the success a person has in their community if they provide valuable goods or services. If he were writing today, Emerson might have said, “Open the best coffee shop in town and your neighbors will wait in line for a cup.” He is not exhorting us to invent an alternative to coffee.

  The mistaken belief that the world awaits a better mousetrap has yielded more than mousetraps. It has given rise to an industry of predators. Businesses called “invention promotion companies” advertise on television and radio and in newspapers and magazines, promising to evaluate people’s ideas, patent them, and sell them to manufacturers and retailers. They charge an initial fee of hundreds of dollars for “evaluation.” The evaluation almost always concludes that a person’s idea is patentable and valuable. Then the companies demand thousands of dollars for legal and marketing services. Inventors are made to feel that their idea has been specially selected. They are given the impression that the invention promotion company will be investing its own time and money in their idea so it can earn royalties. In fact, the companies make all their money from the up-front fees. They have little success marketing inventions or helping inventors.

  In 1999, the U.S. federal government intervened to protect the “Nation’s most precious natural resource: the independent inventor.” The American Inventor’s Protection Act was signed into law by President Clinton, and the Federal Trade Commission filed lawsuits against invention promotion companies operating under names including National Idea Center, American Invention Associates, National Idea Network, National Invention Network, and Eureka Solutions International. In a moment of knowing poetry, the FTC called its program Project Mousetrap.

  One company, Davison & Associates, settled with the FTC by making a payment of $11 million and promising not to misrepresent its services. The company has since changed its name to Davison Design. It has an amusement park—like “factory” called Inventionland, complete with a castle, pirate ship, and tree house hidden behind a false bookcase in its offices in O’Hara, Pennsylvania. Inventionland is staffed by employees called “Inventionmen.” Their creations include a pan for making meatballs, a rail for storing flip-flops, and clothes for dogs. Many of their inventions are based on Davison’s own ideas, even though they are billed as “client products.”

  Inventionland is where we find the truth about better mousetraps. The FTC settlement forced Davison to disclose how many of its clients make money. According to the company’s November 2012 report, an average of eleven thousand people a year sign its agreements. Of these, three make a profit. In the twenty-three years between Davison’s founding, in 1989, and 2012, twenty-seven people have made money using the company’s services, barely more than one a year. How much money? Davison has to disclose its prices. Its customers multiplied by its prices equals sales of $45 million a year. Davison says the money it makes on sales of its customers’ products is 0.001 percent of its revenue and that this represents a 10 percent royalty on what its customers make. If this is correct, Davison makes $450 a year from royalties and Davison’s customers all added together receive a total of $4,050 a year for the $45 million a year they spend on the company’s services—less than one dollar returned for every ten thousand invested.

  Davison offers to sign up more than sixty thousand ideas a year. This alone should make an inventor suspicious—and it might but for the myth of the better mousetrap. Unfortunately, anyone who loves your idea the first time they hear it either loves you or wants something. What to expect when you’re inventing is rejection. Build a better mousetrap and the world will not beat a path to your door. You must beat a path to the world.

  6 | THE MOST DECISIVE OF DENIALS

  Rejection hurts, but it is not the worst thing that can happen. On February 22, 1911, Gaston Hervieu grasped the railing on the first platform of the Eiffel Tower and looked down. He was almost two hundred feet above Paris. The people watching him from the ground looked smaller than his fingernails.

  Hervieu was an inventor of parachutes and airships. In 1906, he was part of a team that tried to reach the North Pole by airship; in 1909, he developed a parachute to slow the descent of aircraft. Hervieu had climbed the Eiffel Tower to test a new emergency parachute for pilots. He checked the wind, took a nervous breath, and began the test. His parachute opened as soon as it cleared the platform. The silk filled with air, making a hemisphere in the sky, then sailed safely to the ground. A photographer from the Dutch newsweekly Het Leven captured the moment: a figure descending gracefully, silhouetted beneath the tower’s northwestern arch, with the watching crowd and the Palais du Trocadéro in the background.

  There was a catch, though. Hervieu did not make the jump himself; he used a 160-pound test dummy instead. To most people this seemed prudent, but for at least one man, it was an outrage. Franz Reichelt was an Austrian tailor who was developing a parachute of his own. He denounced Hervieu’s use of a dummy as a “sham” and, one year later, on the morning of Sunday, February 4, 1912, arrived at the Eiffel Tower to conduct an experiment of his own.

  Reichelt had made sure his test would be publicized. Photographers, journalists, and a cameraman from the Pathé news service were all waiting to meet him. He posed for pictures, doffed his black beret, and then made an announcement that took most people by surprise. He would not be using a dummy or even a safety harness. He said, “I am so convinced my device will work properly that I will jump myself.”

  Gaston Hervieu, who had come to the Eiffel Tower to watch Reichelt’s test, tried to stop him. Hervieu claimed there were technical reasons why Reichelt’s parachute would not work. The two men had a heated discussion until, finally, Reichelt turned away and walked to the tower’s staircase. As he began his ascent, he looked back and said, “My parachute will give your arguments the most decisive of denials.”

  Hervieu had carried a parachute and a dummy up the 360 steps to the tower’s first floor, but Reichelt carried nothing: he was wearing his parachute, just as a pilot would if he were about to leap from a crashing airplane. Reichelt’s description of the concept appeared in news stories the following day: “My invention has nothing in common with similar devices. It is partly waterproof fabric and partly pure silk. The first serves as clothing and adapts to the body like ordinary clothes; the second consists of a parachute which is folded behind the pilot like a backpack.”

  Two assistants were waiting for him when he reached the top of the staircase. They set a chair on a table so that Reichelt could stand above the railing and jump. For more than a minute, he stayed with one foot on the chair and the other on the railing, looking down, checking the wind, and making last-minute adjustments. It was below freezing in Paris, and his breaths came out as steamy plumes. Then he stepped off the railing, into the void.

  A photographer from Het Leven waited beneath the tower’s northwestern arch, ready to take a picture exactly like the one of Hervieu’s test, only showing a living man, not a dummy.

  That picture does show a living man, but it is different from the one taken a year earlier in another way. Where the photograph of Hervieu’s test shows a perfect parachute, the photograph
of Reichelt’s test shows a blur like a broken umbrella. The broken umbrella is Reichelt. His “parachute” did not work. It was a suit of clothes intended to turn the person wearing it into something like a flying squirrel. Large silk sheets connected Reichelt’s arms to his ankles, and a hood stood above his head. Reichelt fell for four seconds, accelerating constantly, until he hit the ground at sixty miles an hour, making a cloud of frost and dust and a dent six inches deep. He was killed on impact.

  Modern parachutes use 700 square feet of fabric and should be deployed only above 250 feet; Reichelt’s parachute used less than 350 square feet of fabric, and he deployed it at 187 feet. He had neither the surface area nor the altitude needed to make a successful jump; this was why Hervieu had tried to stop him.

  Hervieu was not the only one who had told Reichelt that his parachute suit would not work; it had also been rejected by experts at the Aéro-Club de France, who had written, “The surface of your device is too small. You will break your neck.”

  Reichelt ignored all these rejections until the only thing left to reject him was reality. And, as physicist Richard Feynman said seventy-four years later, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

  Dramatic ending aside, Reichelt’s story is the story of most would-be creators. We hear about creation’s few wins and never know its many losses. Tales like Ignaz Semmelweis’s are carefully chosen cherries. Much of their power comes from dramatic irony: we know the creator will be vindicated in the end. This can make creators seem like heroes and rejecters seem like villains. But rejecters are nearly always sincere. They want to stop wrong and dangerous thinking. They believe they are right, and they usually are. If Reichelt had landed, we would read his story differently. Reichelt would seem like a hero, Hervieu a jealous rival, and the Aéro-Club de France a group of out-of-touch obstructionists. But only the outcome would be different. The motives of Reichelt’s rejecters would be unchanged.