The Tinkerers

by Alec Foege

  In other words, our society is based on the constant process of rearranging things and trying to discover some new combination of value. For the past sixty years or so, the United States has been a hotbed of technological innovation. Is that era coming to an end? Will innovation move somewhere else? What can the nation do to revive that tinkerer spirit?

  Fortunately, evidence of new approaches to tinkering is everywhere. Tinkering schools, places where kids are given the tools and freedom to pursue their wildest ideas, are popping up nationwide. So are so-called maker fairs, the modern-day equivalent of craft shows, with the focus on robotics as opposed to macramé. On the economic front, there are newfangled fund-raising engines for bankrolling nascent projects, such as Kickstarter, Y Combinator, and TechStars, which allow tinkerers to get feedback and financing midprocess.

  In the following pages, I will explore these trends and others, both in examples drawn from the past as well as interviews I conducted with contemporary tinkerers.

  De Tocqueville, in 1835, wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” Indeed, our irrepressible optimism and hope in the face of extreme adversity are qualities that have long endeared us to other countries. Or at least they used to, until we stopped radiating these exemplary characteristics a decade or so ago. Suddenly, it didn’t matter what the outcome of a solution to a big problem was, as long as someone publicly stated that an effort had been made. The so-called experts had done nearly everything they possibly could, or so it seemed.

  Take the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in April 2010. After an explosion that killed eleven workers, the ruptured oil well spewed around 60,000 gallons of sweet crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. That’s an amount equivalent to the Exxon Valdez spill, dumped into the Gulf every four days. The situation went on this way for weeks. And then months.

  A host of potential solutions were implemented in an effort to terminate what was initially believed to be a relatively minor accident. First came the underwater remote-controlled robots, which attempted and failed to activate the 450-ton blowout preventer, a valve at the wellhead that was supposed to have automatically cut off the leak five thousand feet below if it sensed a sudden change in pressure.

  Then came the controlled burning of the oil pooled on the water’s surface. On April 28, crews began an in situ burning, a technique in which a five-hundred-foot-long boom is used to move concentrated pockets of oil to a separate area where they are ignited. Other efforts included dropping a variety of domes on the wellhead and attempting to bring oil to the surface for collection. But as the days passed, the oil kept on flowing. The well was finally plugged in late July of that year, with mud and then, finally, cement. By the time BP was able to cap the well, it had already belched 4.9 million barrels of oil, or 205.8 million gallons, into the fragile ecosystem off the coast of Louisiana. And there wasn’t a thing the average American could do about it.

  Apparently, the experts—the engineers in charge and those employed by the US government—couldn’t do much either. The result was the largest manmade disaster in American history. Then, within days of when the cement plug was finally inserted, President Obama announced that two-thirds of the spilled oil had either evaporated or been removed by cleanup crews.

  Even the most credulous of oil industry experts had trouble believing the effects of the disaster were reversed so easily. Regardless of the reality, however, the perception of the Gulf oil spill was that American ingenuity had failed in a time of great need. In the American tinkering paradigm, a brilliant individual should have emerged and somehow found a brilliant solution sooner. But that didn’t happen. The incident ultimately lacked much-needed closure. Rather than rise to the occasion with an ennobled, enlightened ingenuity, America did its best to cover its tracks and suggest that the problem wasn’t even really a problem.

  In August 2010, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist, published a piece in the New York Times titled “America Goes Dark.” He described how the United States, “a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System” was now dismantling its infrastructure. “Local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain,” Krugman wrote, “and returning them to gravel.”

  Krugman’s main point was that the US government was not investing stimulus funds in the tools needed for our own economic growth. Three decades of antigovernment rhetoric had convinced many Americans that spending taxpayer funds on anything was a waste of taxpayer funds. But government—the US government, specifically—had built this country into an innovative economic powerhouse by investing in “lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.”

  I would take Krugman’s point one step further and argue that the American government and people helped the country grow both by investing in innovation and by committing themselves to the traditional tinkerer spirit. A sophisticated, cutting-edge infrastructure was the perfect crucible for the kind of innovation the United States embodied.

  In this book I would like to make a case for the continued importance of the tinkerer in contemporary life and in the role he or she will play in the future of the United States. This is not another book for miserable white-collar workers praising the virtues of manual labor. The point about the devolution of tinkering in American life is not that we have lost a physical connection to the work that we do. It’s that the notion that we can fix any problem or achieve any goal that we set for ourselves has deteriorated into a sanitized, corporatized version of what constitutes achievement.

  Tinkering as a cultural force once operated well outside American society’s mainstream. Tinkerers, even Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison, were sometimes regarded with suspicion or amusement as they made new things out of what existed around them. Indeed, the true ones still do. Tinkering is disruptive; it challenges the status quo. For an individual, or a small group of individuals, to go against conventional wisdom, and thus drastically increase the risk of personal or professional failure, is no small task, even for those imbued with an instinctive American optimism.

  In today’s corporate world, tinkerers are often found in the engineering profession, partly because engineers have access to the best toys. And while engineering traditionally has been regarded as a respectable profession, in modern America it has been diminished in a culture that venerates business leaders and entrepreneurs. In his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, computer scientist Fred Brooks Jr. described how senior corporate managers were often pegged as “too valuable” to devote their time to technical issues, and thus were turned away from contributing to much-needed innovation initiatives. He told how some laboratories, such as Bell Labs, eliminated job titles to overcome this problem: all employees, whether managers or technicians, were referred to as a “member of the technical staff,” essentially negating the unique value of those who did the actual figuring of how to make something work. IBM developed two roughly equivalent corporate ladders to address the issue: a managerial and a technical one. Brooks suggested that managers and technical types be trained to be as interchangeable as possible to strengthen the technical know-how of the senior management team.

  The implication Brooks makes is that anyone can master the engineering skills required to innovate, and that managers simply need to be schooled in the ways of inventing the future. This notion is antithetical to everything history teaches us about how innovation occurs. Managers and technicians or engineers have intrinsically different value systems and are motivated to peak performance for entirely different reasons. More bluntly, managers crave order and measurable productivity; innovative engineers require unstructured time and an environment that allows for failure as well as success. When corporations blur these differences, they only distract from the indistinct but determinative contributions professio
nal tinkerers provide in a corporate setting.

  Corporate America has grown rigid as it has grown larger. Despite the dot-com era’s many images of creative whizzes reweaving the very fabric of innovation, it remains extremely difficult for the free-thinking alchemists of today to perform their peculiar strain of magic and thrive while doing it. Google, which has positioned itself as an innovation engine from its earliest days, sought to eradicate this problem by creating its 20 Percent Time program. Under this unique program, Google engineers are expected to spend one day a week, or 20 percent of their time, working on a project that does not necessarily come under their job description. The idea is that tinkering outside of your basic skill set sometimes reaps some surprising and innovative results. But even Google has its limits, apparently: in July 2011, it shut down Google Labs, a platform open to the public that allowed users to comment on the latest projects produced by Google engineers during their 20 percent time.

  Modern-day American companies, especially large public companies, simply find it difficult to justify the inevitable overage of resources required to foster truly free-form tinkering. Even if they appreciate it, their investors rarely do.

  A good description of how genuine tinkerers are regarded in the modern American workplace can be found in a 2005 management guide by Cornell economist Samuel Bacharach: “Tinkering goals tend to be incremental improvements in the status quo of the organization. The changes a tinkerer makes are first-order changes that do not fundamentally transform the organization. Tinkerers are concerned about changes in specific rules and operations and tend to be risk-averse.” Bacharach contrasts that with what he calls the “overhauling approach” favored by big thinkers concerned with “broader goals.” Bacharach’s portrayal of tinkerers reinforces what has become the ruling image, that of tinkerer as scattershot madman.

  This fundamental misreading of the tinkerer’s outlook suggests that another way of telling the story of the modern tinkerer is required. This book intends to serve as that alternate history. Throughout these pages, I will explore the work and mindsets of various modern tinkerers. Some are self-selecting, having presented themselves as the contemporary analogues to Franklin and Edison. Others would never think of themselves as anything as grandiose as that. Indeed, these secret tinkerers generally view their work as far from extraordinary. They are simply getting a job done in the best way they know how.

  Surface tinkering versus deeply probing tinkering is another dichotomy I set out to contrast. A common complaint among those who worry about the future of innovation in American society is that today’s young people aren’t motivated to tinker in the way their forbears were. It occurred to me along the way that many of America’s best-known tinkerers were not responding to any stimulus beyond their own curiosity. Truly impassioned tinkerers do what they do because it’s fun, not because someone is dangling an incentive in front of them. (Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School in San Francisco, California, whose story is told later in the book, knows this and has built his experimental educational programs around it.) As a result, some tinkering is debunked as mere careerism and some is revealed as hidden tinkering, or tinkering in the rough. Surface tinkerers make a big show of their methods, process, and the fabulous end products of their tinkering, whereas deeply probing tinkerers produce innovative thought regardless of the medium, changing the way we think about thinking about things.

  The other debate that infuses this book is the relative value of manual tinkering versus digital, or virtual, tinkering. Recent American history is full of examples of tinkerers who have innovated in worlds that exist only on the balance sheets of corporations or in the ether of the computer cloud. Indeed, these new-age tinkerers now outrank traditional tinkerers in both numbers and economic influence.

  That is not as worrisome as some observers claim. The canard that “we don’t make anything anymore” has the ring of truth, since there is no denying that much manufacturing appears to have migrated to countries where the living wage is much lower than in the United States. But, in fact, more manufacturing still happens on American soil than in any other country on earth. United States manufacturers created around $1.7 trillion in goods in 2009, according to United Nations statistics, outproducing China by more than 40 percent. So why is there a perception that Americans are losing the manufacturing battle?

  The answer is simple. The solution is complex. The simple reason for America’s continued dominance in manufacturing is that US companies have figured out how to manufacture stuff with fewer workers. Productivity due to innovation has swelled dramatically over the last thirty years. Since the middle of 1979, when manufacturing employment hit its zenith with 19.6 million workers, the US economy has shed around 8 million factory jobs. Meanwhile, American manufacturers have abandoned industries with low profit margins, such as shoes, consumer electronics, and toys, leaving emerging economies such as China and Indonesia to make many of those goods at a fraction of what they would cost here.

  American manufacturers now churn out mostly expensive, specialized products that require skilled labor, such as computer chips, fighter jets, medical devices, and industrial equipment. Stateside companies also make anything that requires a quick turnaround time, such as specialized parts for high-tech industrial lathes, which are also made in the United States. Thanks to superior roads, reliable electrical grids and a steady supply of clean water, American businesses excel at producing goods that must be world class.

  All of this productivity is, of course, cold comfort for the approximately 14 million Americans who were counted as unemployed in 2011. But the United States arguably rests in a better spot in the global economy than ever before. As long as the nation can continue to produce educated, highly trained workers, there will continue to be a worldwide demand for its goods. In the same way that the United States transitioned from a nineteenth-century agricultural economy to a twentieth-century industrial economy, it will transition again to a high-tech economy in the twenty-first century. For many, the shift will be a painful one, but in the long run it is the one most likely to result in sustainable growth and low unemployment.

  Tinkering is not a calling for everyone. But preserving the habitat of the tinkerer is one of the few time-proven ways we as a nation can get back on track. We can’t know the future in any way except to know that it will be different than today. Tinkerers acknowledge that in their seemingly haphazard ways. They can’t tell you what progress is, but they’ll know it when they see it.

  Tinkering is a state of mind as much as it is a mode of discovery. The motivations that Americans have had traditionally for creating solutions to the world’s problems are as varied as they are vivid. I suspect, as I detail in this book, that what we’re really talking about is a crisis of national confidence rather than a systemic failure.

  CHAPTER 2

  TINKERING AT THE BIRTH OF A NATION AND BEYOND

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IS OFTEN REMEMBERED as America’s first tinkerer. But the honorific could just as easily have been attached to George Washington. It is worth examining both men’s extrapolitical activities to help define the scope of tinkering’s role in the earliest years of the United States of America and to better understand how tinkering came of age in the contemporary era.

  Indeed, many of the Founding Fathers were tinkerers of one kind or another. Thomas Jefferson invented the hillside plow, the swivel chair, and the macaroni machine. James Madison devised a walking stick with a built-in microscope to observe organisms on the ground (unfortunately, it was too short for most men, other than the five-foot-tall fifth president). And Alexander Hamilton, a fitting forebearer to today’s financial tinkerers, established the federal public credit system and the US Mint.

  It’s hard to say with precision why so many of a small group of political figures and statesmen were also inveterate tinkerers. Some of the reasons are obvious. These were learned, curious men who lived in a time before conveniences such as electric light and time wasters such as t
elevision. Perhaps tinkering was a way to exercise the mind, or even to relax it.

  The spirit of possibility was also in the air. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these men created a nation out of an idea. In comparison, the notion that objects and institutions could be willed into existence from nothing didn’t seem particularly far-fetched.

  But over the centuries, Franklin has endured as the prototype for American tinkering. It simply may be because he generated so many inventions and discoveries. As nearly every US student learns, Franklin was the inventor of the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, bifocals, the odometer, and the armonica, an odd musical contraption he designed using a series of glass bowls to create notes based on a man he saw playing melodies on wineglasses in England.

  His experiments with electricity became a fulcrum of the industrial age. Franklin embodied tinkererdom in both the traditional and modern senses: He lacked a formal education; he was a dilettante steeped in experimentation but also was appreciative of the fanciful nature of his activities. He had a passion for discovery that seemed to exceed any practical need for the products of his labors, except when it came down to doing business, which he engaged in quite readily.

  Walter Isaacson writes that Franklin “had neither the academic training nor the grounding in math to be a great theorist, and his pursuit of what he called his ‘scientific amusements’ caused some to dismiss him as mere tinkerer.” Celebrated as the best-known scientist of his era, Franklin indeed became elevated beyond tinkerer, based on his experiments with electricity alone. But he also was a member of what Isaacson describes as the “upwardly mobile meritocracy,” an intelligent social climber who certainly would have been at home in our information-saturated modern society. He was certainly not an engineer: He lacked the purpose-driven focus, never mind the advanced schooling, that defined the profession. But his openness to discovery and his optimistic drive for self-improvement offered something even better to the young nation: a way to remake the world based on one’s own interests.