How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  42 When Jobs announced Apple’s first cell phone: Talk by Steve Jobs at MacWorld San Francisco on January 9, 2007. Video: http://​bit.​ly/​keyjobs. Transcript by Todd Bishop and Bernhard Kast: http://​bit.​ly/​kastbernhard.

  43 Apple sold 4 million phones in 2007: Data from Apple Inc. annual reports summarized at http://​bit.​ly/​salesiphone. Adjusted to convert fiscal years to calendar years and rounded to the nearest million.

  44 This was true, irrelevant, and revealing: The microphone built into the original iPhone had a narrow frequency response of about 50Hz to about 4kHz, compared, for example, to the subsequent iPhone 3G, which ranged from below 5Hz to 20kHz. Analysis by Benjamin Faber at http://​bit.​ly/​micriphone.

  45 “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”: This phrase was popularized by Bert Lance, director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter administration, who used it in 1977. See Nations Business, May 1977, p. 27, at http://​bit.​ly/​dontfix.

  46 Korean electronics giant LG launched: The LG Prada, or LG KE850, was announced in December 2006 and made available for sale in May 2007. Apple announced the iPhone in January 2007 and made it available for sale in June 2007. The LG Prada was the first cell phone with a capacitive touch screen. See http://​bit.​ly/​ke850.

  47 The secret of Steve was evident in 1983: This was the IDCA, or International Design Conference Aspen, 1983. The IDCA is now part of the Aspen Design Summit, organized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. More at http://​bit.​ly/​aspendesign.

  48 “If you look at computers, they look like garbage”: Brown, 2012, based on a cassette tape from John Celuch of Inland Design and a transcription by Andy Fastow at http://​bit.​ly/​jobs1983. The transcription has been edited slightly for clarity. The description of Jobs’s appearance is based on photos by Arthur Boden, posted by Ivan Boden at http://​bit.​ly/​ivanboden.

  49 “One minute he’d be talking about sweeping ideas”: Mossberg, 2012.

  50 One symbol lived long after the cat: TV Tropes, at http://​bit.​ly/​felixbulb. Many Felix the Cat cartoons showing prop use are available online—see, for example, http://​bit.​ly/​felixcartoon.

  51 Psychologists adopted the image: Wallas, 1926.

  52 The most famous is brainstorming: Osborn, 1942. See also http://​bit.​ly/​alexosborn.

  53 “Brainstorming is often used in a business setting”: Extract from “Brainstorming Techniques: How to Get More Out of Brainstorming” at http://​bit.​ly/​mindtoolsvideo. Transcript at http://​bit.​ly/​manktelow.

  54 Researchers in Minnesota tested this: Dunnette, 1963. Cited in Weisberg, 1986.

  55 Follow-up research tested whether larger groups: Bouchard, 1970. Cited in Weisberg 1986.

  56 Researchers in Indiana tested this by asking groups of students: Weisskopf-Joelson and Eliseo, 1961. Cited in Weisberg, 1986.

  57 Subsequent studies have reinforced this: See, for example, Brilhart, 1964, as discussed by Weisberg, 1986.

  58 Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs’s cofounder at Apple: Wozniak, 2007. Cited in Cain, 2012.

  59 According to novelist Stephen King: King, 2001.

  60 political scientists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas: Ogburn and Thomas, 1922.

  61 the moon chewed the sun in a partial solar eclipse: Eclipse details at http://​bit.​ly/​rhinoweclipse.

  62 “Sacrifices must be made”: Details of Lilienthal’s death from Wikipedia, at http://​bit.​ly/​lilienthalotto.

  63 “The balancing of a flyer may seem”: Wright, 2012.

  64 They saw an airplane as “a bicycle with wings”: Heppenheimer, 2003. Cited in Weisberg, 2006.

  65 “a sport to which we had devoted so much attention”: Wright, 2012.

  66 “Having set out” through “our own measurements”: Wright, 2012.

  67 Wings needed to be much bigger: The Wrights’ math was correct. Today, aerodynamicists use a Smeaton coefficient of 0.00327. See Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum at http://​bit.​ly/​smeatoncoeff.

  68 The Wrights’ aircraft are the best evidence: This point is beautifully illustrated in a presentation called “Invention of the Airplane” from NASA’s Glenn Research Center, available at http://​bit.​ly/​manywings. See especially slide 56.

  69 On November 1, 1913, Franz Kluxen entered: Little is known about Franz Kluxen of Münster (also listed in catalogs as Kluxen of Boldixum, a district of Wyk, a town on the German island of Föhr in the North Sea). According to Richardson, 1996, Kluxen may have been “one of the earliest (he started in 1910) and most serious buyers of Picasso in pre-1914 Germany … By 1920, all the Kluxen Picassos that can be traced had changed hands. Kluxen may have been a victim of the war or of hard times.”

  70 He forbade artificial chalk made from gypsum: Natural chalk is from the Cretaceous period, circa 145.5 + 4 to 65.5 + 0.3 million years ago; it includes ancient cell fragments visible only by microscope. Steele et al., in Smithgall, 2011.

  71 The picture covered thirty square feet: Painting with White Border is 140 cm x 200 cm = 2.8 square meters = 30.14 square feet.

  72 “extremely powerful impressions I had experienced”: Kandinsky, “Picture with the White Edge,” in Lindsay and Vergo, 1994. Cited in Smithgall, 2011.

  73 a common Kandinsky motif and a symbol: See, for example, Kandinsky’s Painting with Troika, 1911. The troika symbolizes divinity by recalling the prophet Elijah’s fiery chariot ride to heaven.

  74 His first works, painted in 1904: See, for example, Russische Schöne in Landschaft, from around 1904.

  75 His last, painted in 1944: See, for example, Gedämpfter Elan, 1944.

  CHAPTER 3: EXPECT ADVERSITY

  1 One summer night in 1994, a five-year-old named Jennifer: Jennifer is real—I have omitted her last name to help protect her privacy—and so are all the important details of her story. A few narrative details—that she had a pretty face, that her father signed the consent form, that she cried when given her shots—are imagined or assumed. The sources for Judah Folkman’s story are Cooke, 2001; Linde, 2001; published academic papers; and Folkman’s obituaries.

  2 “I had seen and handled cancers”: Linde, 2001.

  3 Scientists had little respect for surgeons: Today it is common for the best medical doctors to also do basic research. Judah Folkman is one reason why. For data on the rise of physician-scientists from the 1970s onward, see Zemlo, 2000.

  4 Angiogenesis became an important theory: One promising line of investigation is whether regular doses of aspirin and other medicines modulate angiogenesis and reduce the risk of, for example, colon cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer. See Albini et al., 2012; Holmes et al., 2013; Tsoref et al., 2014; and Trabert et al., 2014.

  5 A journey of a thousand miles ends with a single step: The famous line “A journey of a thousand miles starts with single step” is from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching; Tsu, 1972.

  6 He knows how many e-mails he has sent: Wolfram, 2012. It is a year and a half or writing and deleting because 7 deletes out of a every 100 keystrokes is 7 percent, but you also have 7 percent of keystrokes then getting deleted; this means 14 percent of keystrokes result in no extra text; 14 percent of ten years rounded up is a year and a half. This assumes that, on average, it takes as long to decide to delete something as it does to decide to write it.

  7 Stephen King, for example, has published: Includes novels, screenplays, collections of short stories, and works of nonfiction. From Wikipedia’s Stephen King bibliography at http://​bit.​ly/​kingbibliography.

  8 He says he writes two thousand words a day: King, 2001. “I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words.”

  9 Between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1999: My count of Stephen King’s words starts with Firestarter (1980) and ends with The New Lieutenant’s Rap (1999); it excludes the unedited version of The Stand, which is essentially a reprint of a prior book, and Blood & Smoke, which is King reading stories p
ublished elsewhere. I used the page count in the Wikipedia bibliography at http://​bit.​ly/​kingbibliography, which is for the hardback format of each book, and I assumed three hundred words per page. I subtracted six months because King was injured and barely writing after June 1999. King did not begin writing his Entertainment Weekly column, “The Pop of King,” until 2003, so that does not count toward his word total.

  10 “That DELETE key is on your machine”: King, 2001.

  11 One of King’s most popular books: King, 2001: “This is … the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best.”

  12 “twelve hundred pages long and weighed twelve pounds”: King, 2010.

  13 “If I’d had two or even three hundred pages”: King, 2001.

  14 “There’s a misconception that invention”: From Dyson’s website, at http://​bit.​ly/​dysonideas.

  15 “just an ordinary person”: Dyson interviewed at a WIRED Business Conference, 2012. Video at http://​bit.​ly/​videodyson.

  16 “The north and south winds met”: Baum, 2008.

  17 house dust particles about a millionth of a meter wide: House dust dimensions from “Diameter of a Speck of Dust” in The Physics Factbook, edited by Glenn Elert, written by his students at http://​bit.​ly/​dustsize, with sense checking by Matt Reynolds of the University of Washington.

  18 “I’m a huge failure because I made 5,126 mistakes”: Dyson interviewed at a Wired Business Conference, 2012. Video at http://​bit.​ly/​videodyson.

  19 “I wanted to give up almost every day”: Edited from Dyson’s website, at http://​bit.​ly/​dysonstruggle. Full quotation: “I wanted to give up almost every day. But one of the things I did when I was young was long distance running, from a mile up to ten miles. They wouldn’t let me run more than ten miles at school—in those days they thought you’d drop down dead or something. And I was quite good at it, not because I was physically good, but because I had more determination. I learned determination from it. A lot of people give up when the world seems to be against them, but that’s the point when you should push a little harder. I use the analogy of running a race. It seems as though you can’t carry on, but if you just get through the pain barrier, you’ll see the end and be okay. Often, just around the corner is where the solution will happen.”

  20 a personal fortune of more than $5 billion: Dyson Ltd.’s 2013 revenues estimated at £6 billion by Wikipedia, at http://​bit.​ly/​dysoncompany. Dyson’s net worth was estimated at £3 billion by the Sunday Times in 2013. See http://​bit.​ly/​dysonworth.

  21 “Iterative Process”: Rubright, 2013.

  22 “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”: Beckett, 1983.

  23 A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote: Csikszentmihalyi, 1996.

  24 “It is only half an hour”: Letter from Charles Dickens to Maria Winter, written on April 3, 1855, published in Dickens, 1894. Appears in Amabile, 1996, citing Allen, 1948. The complete quotation is: “I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me, make its own demands upon me, and sometimes, for months together, put everything else away from me. If I had not known long ago that my place could never be held, unless I were at any moment ready to devote myself to it entirely, I should have dropped out of it very soon. All this I can hardly expect you to understand—or the restlessness and waywardness of an author’s mind. You have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had occasion to think or care about it, and you cannot have the necessary consideration for it. ‘It is only half an hour,’—‘It is only an afternoon,’—‘It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes,—or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go my way whether or no.”

  25 Semmelweis had convincing data to support his hypothesis: Ignaz Semmelweis was not the only doctor to suspect that puerperal fever was being transmitted to patients by doctors. He didn’t know it, but he was one of several physicians who had reached the same conclusion. Fifty years earlier, in Scotland, a surgeon named Alexander Gordon wrote about it; in 1842, Thomas Watson, a professor at the University of London, started recommending hand-washing; and in 1843, American Oliver Wendell Holmes published a paper about it. All were ignored or condemned.

  26 Semmelweis saved the lives: Data from Semmelweis, 1859. Semmelweis’s numbers are not entirely clear, and there is no way to know exactly how many women would have died without hand-washing. The mean patient death rate in the First Clinic in the fourteen years before hand-washing was introduced was 8 percent, versus 3 percent in the Second Clinic over the same period. The average death rate in the First Clinic dropped to 3 percent in the years 1846 (when hand-washing was introduced in May), 1847 and 1848 (when Semmelweis was terminated in March). If the average death rate in the First Clinic had remained at 8 percent in these three years, then 548 more women would have died. This is the basis for the statement that Semmelweis “saved the lives of around 500 women.” This number is undoubtedly low. It does not include the fact that the average death rate only returned to its pre-hand-washing levels several years after Semmelweis’s dismissal, nor, as mentioned, does it include babies, as there is not enough data about newborns in Semmelweis’s paper to estimate how many babies were saved. (I have assumed that Semmelweis’s use of the term “patients” in his data about deaths means the numbers refer to women only, as this is how he uses the word elsewhere in the paper.)

  27 “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence”: The Hume quotation is from Hume, 1748; the Sagan quotation is from the opening lines of the PBS television program Cosmos, episode 12, first aired on December 14, 1980, available at http://​bit.​ly/​extraordinaryclaims; the Truzzi quotation is from Truzzi, 1978. Laplace’s quotation has a more complicated pedigree. The original source is Laplace, 1814, which states, “We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature and their diverse modes of action that it would not be philosophical to deny phenomena solely because they are inexplicable in the actual state of our knowledge. But we ought to examine them with an attention all the more scrupulous as it appears more difficult to admit them.” This was rewritten as “The weight of the evidence should be proportioned to the strangeness of the facts” and called “The Principle of Laplace,” by Théodore Flournoy in Flournoy, 1900, but is most commonly repeated as “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.” All four quotations are cited in the Wikipedia entry for Truzzi, at http://​bit.​ly/​marcellotruzzi; the story of Laplace’s quotation is told in the Wikipedia entry for Laplace, at http://​bit.​ly/​laplacepierre.

  28 “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards”: Emerson, 1909.

  29 “If a man can write a better book”: Yule, 1889. Cited in Hope, 1996.

  30 “Build a better mousetrap”: Much of this section is based on a brilliant article by Jack Hope. Hope, 1996.

  31 More than five thousand mousetrap patents: Hope, writing in 1996, estimated 4,400 patents, growing at 40 a year. His projection appears to be accurate: by May 2014 there were around 5,190 mousetrap patents, and applications show no sign of slowing down. See: http://​bit.​ly/​mousetraps.

  32 Almost all of them cite the quotation: Hope, 1996, quoting Joseph H. Bumsted, vice-president of mousetrap manufacturer Woodstream Corporation: “They feel it was written just for them, and they recite it as if that in itself were reason for Woodstream to buy their ideas!”

  33 Emerson could not have written it: Emerson died in 1882; the first mousetrap patent was issue in 1894.

  34 This changed in the late 1880s: Hooker’s mousetrap has
U.S. Patent Number 0528671. See http://​bit.​ly/​hookertrap.

  35 Hooker’s “snap trap” was perfected within a few years: See http://​bit.​ly/​victortrap. In May 2014, you could buy 20 traps for $15, with free shipping.

  36 “Nation’s most precious natural resource”: Ergenzinger, 2006.

  37 One company, Davison & Associates: At first, Davison was ordered to pay $26 million in compensation. The FTC and the company then reached a settlement and Davison made a “non punitive” payment of $10.7 million, which I rounded up to $11 million to keep the prose simple.

  38 Many of their inventions are based on Davison’s own ideas: See, for example, the “Swingers Slotted Spoon” at http://​bit.​ly/​davisonspoon. Despite being listed on the “Samples of Client Products” section of the Davison Web site the product information reveals: “This corporate product was invented and licensed by Davison for its own benefit.”

  39 sales of $45 million a year: This is calculated based on the disclosed number of 11,325 people a year buying a “pre-development agreement” at the published price of $795 and the disclosed number of 3,306 people buying a “new product sample agreement” at $11,500 which is halfway between the published estimated price of $8,000—$15,000. This adds up to gross annual revenue from these services of $47,022,375. Sources: http://​www.​davison.​com/​legal/​adsi.​html, and http://​www.​davison.​com/​legal/​aipa.​html, viewed and saved on December 31, 2012. “Other public information” refers to Dolan, 2006: “Last year [presumably 2005], he [George Davison] says, his shop netted $2 million on $25 million in revenue.” http://​bit.​ly/​dolankerry.

  40 He denounced Hervieu’s use of a dummy as a “sham”: The word in French is chiqué, which could also be translated as “bluff,” or “deception.” Reichelt: “Je veux tenter l’expérience moi-même et sans chiqué [sic], car je tiens à bien prouver la valeur de mon invention.” Le Petit Journal, February 5, 1912, “L’Inventeur Reichelt S’est Tué Hier,” at http://​bit.​ly/​petitjournal.