by Alec Foege
So he approached the professor at the MIT Media Lab who was working on electronic ink, Joseph Jacobson (also founder of the pioneering company E Ink), and told him he knew how to build a printing press but otherwise was totally unqualified in any other way to contribute to Jacobson’s innovative project. “It just so happened that they were trying to figure out how to do the roll-to-roll printing of electronics” in which circuits, thin-film transistors and sometimes even semiconductors are printed on large roll of plastic or metal, so he said, ‘Okay, come in.’ So I sort of entered through the tradesman’s entrance.”
When Griffith got to MIT, the project he had arrived for, electronic ink, was pretty much finished; and its creators had left the university and formed the company E Ink to market the fruit of their labors. Within a few years, the result became readily available in electronic readers such as the Amazon Kindle. But there were still plenty of other problems to work on. The material for the e-ink display was only half the problem. To really make electronic paper come true, you have to make a world in which electronic ink will be printable on everything from flexible displays to changeable posters to clothing. The display itself doesn’t cost much; it’s the transistors and diodes and logic to run the display that are expensive.
When he arrived at MIT, Griffith rapidly became part of an academic culture that he describes as being unparalleled worldwide. It took a trip to Harvard for Griffith to discover what he liked so much about MIT. He recalled taking a class at Harvard Business School where latecomers were browbeaten by a professor who demanded to know why anything in the world was as important as being on time for his class. The assumption was that the late student was goofing off and not focusing on his or her studies. Back at MIT, when a student was late for electrical engineering professor Jerry Sussman’s class, Griffith said, “The first question [from Sussman] was, ‘Obviously you’re doing something more interesting than this class: tell us all what it is, so we can all be part of it and give you better ideas and suggestions.’”
He said that his studies at MIT made him more rigorous and a bigger risk-taker in his tinkering. While he praises the American graduate educational system as being the best in the world, he says that the best academic programs understand that “the really exciting stuff happens completely externally from the curriculum and the classes and everything else.”
Griffith is often asked by officials in Asian countries he visits, “How can we spur more innovation among our young people?” His answer, “Deliver free pizza to a well-equipped workshop,” is not the answer most expect. But he is a staunch believer in providing would-be innovators with the resources they need to solve a particular problem and then giving them the freedom to do whatever they want.
“I still don’t think of myself as an inventor,” said Griffith, “although my wife loves me to write that on the passport applications as my occupation. To me, ‘inventor’ sounds pretentious.” His sense is that if you fit the stereotype of an inventor, “then you’re mentally unstable.” He prefers to think of himself as an engineer well trained in science or a scientist who is “very applied” in what he does. He describes the “anarchic freedom” of MIT with a fondness that others reserve for their loved ones.
Griffith is also a strong believer in the power of teams of tinkerers, as opposed to the classic image of the “great man” inventor. “If I can implore you to do only one thing with your book, it’s to kill off this one-hundred-year-old damaging stereotype,” he said.
It’s not that Griffith thinks individuals don’t have great ideas. It’s just that he puts greater value in what happens when those ideas cross-pollinate with those of others. “Because innovation happens in groups of creative people who fertilize each other and encourage each other and compete with each other,” he said. “And I’ve never seen any innovation that’s at all interesting happen without that.”
Griffith’s view appears to be in stark contrast with the world of tinkering established by Thomas Edison, the quintessential “great man,” but in practice, it’s not all that different. While Edison was the main idea generator in his lab, he had multiple assistants helping him reject the ones that didn’t work and refine the ones that did. The passage of time has also made collaboration a more crucial element of the tinkering process. Edison lived at the dawn of the modern technological age; more than a hundred years later, innovating at a high level usually takes a group effort. Griffith said that all the lone inventors these days are inventing “perpetual motion machines and garden hoses,” whereas the people who are doing what most consider to be real innovation are large groups of smart people with differing skill sets who appreciate each other’s skill sets and complement each other.
In his description of how his work on printable electronics at MIT progressed, Griffith sketched an image of a motley crew of talented technicians with a wide range of backgrounds and abilities all laboring toward a common goal. “My background was rebuilding seventeenth-century, Rembrandt-era printing presses,” he said. “And we had a chemist whose background was in doing industrial agricultural chemicals. We had a physicist whose background was in laser optics. And we had a mechanical engineer who was just extremely good at building robots.” Griffith’s point seems to be that it is virtually impossible to determine whose background is the most relevant to creating something that has never existed before. In the case of the MIT Media Lab, it was, in his words, “a completely unlikely cast of characters but exactly the set of skills required to make gravure-printed and nanotechnology-printed electronics” that ultimately resulted in the process needed to generate true innovation.
Citing an example outside his own personal experience, Griffith explains that the scientists who pioneered the discipline of synthetic biology—in which the building blocks of genetic matter are reconfigured to create new chemicals and drugs, and potentially, new forms of life—were a civil engineer (Jay Keasling at the University of California at Berkeley) and the physicist James Collins, who also invented vibrating insoles that help senior citizens maintain their balance. “There’s not a biologist among the people who are leading the field of synthetic biology,” he said.
Indeed, Griffith averred, it is often the people who seem the least qualified to tackle a specific problem that, upon combining their knowledge and skill sets, are able to devise a novel solution to a previously unsolvable problem. That is not to say that working in a team that is tinkering toward a commercial end is easy. Griffith is all too familiar with the personal conflicts that can sideline an otherwise successful project. “I’m more and more choosing the ‘no-asshole’ rule,” he said, chuckling. “No matter how smart they are, no matter how useful they are, to make things really happen in the world, the ‘no-asshole’ rule is the most important rule to follow.”
Griffith sees two constant threads in his own tinkering: the first is the quest for new products to solve the world’s environmental problems. This category includes his solutions for municipal solid waste, electronic paper, and high-altitude wind power. The second category lies at the intersection of materials science, the study of materials and their properties, and information technology (again, the comparison to Edison holds, since the telephone and phonograph fit in this category). “Everything I’ve done is some union of those two things,” he said.
The second of Griffith’s passions strikes me as the more intriguing of the two, not to negate the incalculable value of endeavoring to save the planet from its (primarily) manmade demise. Rather it is that the second realm, in which Griffith proposes that all matter has an ability to “compute,” has such broad-reaching implications from a tinkering standpoint that it manages to incorporate all environmentally conscious innovation into its sphere. A computer is nothing more than a programmable machine, something that can be made to automatically carry out a string of mathematical or logical operations. In the realm of materials science, matter is engineered based on its specific properties, oftentimes determined on a molecular and cellular level. The cu
tting edge of materials engineering, as being practiced at institutions such as MIT, thus involves tinkering with the cellular makeup of cells, genes, and other microscopic building blocks in order to reconfigure them to become, in essence, programmable machines.
The discipline of synthetic biology offers a good example of this process. Artemisinin, a derivative of Artemisia annua, otherwise known as “sweet wormwood,” is the most effective cure for malaria, which is contracted by around 500 million people in third-world countries each year; and kills nearly 1 million, many of them children. As effective as it was, the demand far exceeded supply. In the early 2000s, Jay Keasling and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley hit upon the idea of manufacturing a cell from the genetic parts of other organisms that worked as a living microscopic machine that produced artemisinin in amounts that far exceeded those available by natural means.
After an infusion of $42.6 million in the form of a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Keasling cofounded a company called Amyris Biotechnologies (now known as Amyris, Inc.), which in less than a decade was able to bump up the amount of artemisinic acid produced by each cell by a million times what a natural cell can produce. The cost of the treatment simultaneously had been reduced from nearly $10 to under $1. Mass production and distribution of the synthetically generated artemisinin began ramping up for 2012.
In Griffith’s holistic approach to tinkering or innovating or inventing (in this sort of context, all three processes are ultimately involved), any material has the capability to be tweaked by humans to exhibit computerlike qualities. As he explains it, water and air pressure and biology all have the ability to process information, and with a bit of ingenuity, can operate in tandem with other systems to operate, at the very least, more efficiently and possibly even contribute some logic to a larger aim. Griffith likes to remind people that the first computers were rods and levers made out of the leftover parts of a jacquard weaving loom. Anything can be programmed to compute, by his estimation.
The reason this view is important is because it offers some nearly irrefutable evidence that virtual tinkering is equivalent to traditional manual tinkering, and that perhaps the most valuable tinkering going forward will be a hybrid of the two. “We have to virtualize a lot of our goods and services in order to reduce energy consumption and so, in some respects, it’s great that a lot of good brains are going there,” Griffith said. Viewed through the prism of Griffith’s dual focus on environmental concerns and materials engineering, virtual tinkering, whether it be financial engineering or the internal logic of Google’s search engine, is a way for contemporary civilization to shrink its carbon footprint while increasing the ability for humans to fashion new devices and structures with radically increased productivity from the materials that already exist.
Griffith’s green values permeate virtually every aspect of life. He mentioned how pleased he was that he and I were conversing via Skype, because of all the energy saved (presumably in that it precluded me from having to hop on a plane and fly from the East Coast to the West Coast). “I wish that Skype would improve on the same improvement curve that Google is improving on,” he said.
He recommends that more incentives be put in place for innovators to work in the green space, whether it be noncarbon energy (including nuclear energy) or more efficient vehicles.
Griffith’s suggestion is yet more evidence of how much the world has changed in the past one hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, independent research labs were relatively commonplace. And in each of those workshops, “people had one of every tool that was the best of that era,” said Griffith. Such workshops are no longer possible to assemble, “partly because there are so many tools to have.” The impossibility of being able to assemble a comprehensive workshop means that innovation, in contemporary terms, has become a lot more difficult.
These days, the innovation centers are industrial research labs and government-sponsored research labs and university research labs, all of which are good by Griffith’s estimation, “but my least favorite are the government research labs” because “we’ve atrophied there pretty well.” Some corporate research labs produce good work, but Griffith says “there aren’t enough ten-or twelve-person shops in the country.”
As far as Griffith’s ideal work situation, he said he most enjoys working on teams with half a dozen to two dozen people on “hard projects.” But he adds, with a rare note of pessimism, that he and most of the other modern-day tinkerers he mentioned rarely spend more than 25 percent of their time doing what they are best at. A good portion of the rest of their waking hours are spent scaring up the fiscal and political resources necessary to make their ideas a reality. Not that it’s ever been much different. “Leonardo certainly had to suck a lot of corporate cock to get where he was,” Griffith said bluntly.
Even his notion of successful tinkering is team oriented. He doesn’t necessarily believe that the commercial success of a single innovative product is as important as the influence the product has on other innovators. He uses Dean Kamen’s most famous invention as an example. “In ten years’ time, we’ll look at the Segway as genius,” Griffith said. “We’re in this trough of, what the fuck is that thing? And it makes you look like a retard. But that is the right type of thing for urban transportation solutions. Unfortunately, Dean’s head was a little too far out in the future. But it has heavily influenced an awful lot of things. Toyota and European companies are starting to think about vehicles that way.” He also cites his own work at Makani Power in a similar framework: “It pulled a lot of people in that direction.”
On the other hand, Griffith is eager to dispel the notion that the United States is the world’s only culture with a strong heritage of tinkering. “I don’t think it’s unique,” he told me bluntly over Skype, as he changed the diaper of his infant son, Huxley. “I would argue that South Africa and Australia are very similar in terms of the ethos.”
Griffith thinks that America has simply built up its two-hundred-plus-year history of tinkerers into a national legend to a greater extent than these other countries. He acknowledges that the United States has had its healthy share of major innovators and inventors, but no more, he suspects, than any other frontier nation where things needed to get done and people were at least five hundred miles away from the nearest necessary tools.
In an even more acrid assessment, Griffith told me that he believed the surge in American tinkering in the post–World War II period was “really the success of military funding, it’s not the success of anything else. Across every sector of the military, including NASA, this country has put more money into engineers since World War II, not only in toto, but proportionally, ten to one over the rest of the world.”
Griffith also disputes the notion that the United States no longer manufactures anything. He said not all manufacturing has fled America and not the “highest-tech” and “most profoundly difficult” manufacturing.
“The US can afford to fund the craziest research,” he said. There simply isn’t enough venture capital to bankroll “far-out high-risk research” in Australia. Griffith, now in his late thirties, chalks it up to one of the many differences between the Australian and American cultures. Another difference is that Australia seems to trail the United States by a few decades in terms of tinkering trends—not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. For example, according to Griffith, more than 2 million Australians still tinker with their cars, even newer ones that have state-of-the-art computers inside. In the United States, however, most gear heads have evolved into custom-car nuts, rather than wrangle with the sealed plastic box that is most of today’s car engines. Griffith said Australians don’t have any fear of the processing-chip-laden cars of today.
“‘Tinkerer’ is an odd word,” he said. “It’s sort of what people who do it professionally think is an insult.” He says that he thinks the biggest hurdle facing young American tinkerers in the current climate is student debt, not lack
of innovative ideas or skills. “Your smartest twenty-four-year-olds have got a quarter of a million in debt just around the time when they’re starting to think about wives and families or husbands and families. What choice are you going to take? You’ve got to take that Wall Street job. You owe the world a quarter of a million bucks for an MIT and Stanford education. Your innovation will go where you pay the best minds to go.”
A defiant Griffith says he has always pursued what interests him over what makes money. “I’m interested in the energy problem,” he said. “I don’t understand why everyone isn’t scared shitless by climate change and the energy problems coming up.” He encourages young tinkerers to engage the big world problems that similarly impassion them.
Griffith has a point. Considering how quickly the business world evolves in the current era, there’s no guarantee that the big money is headed where it used to. A career in the finance world, as an example, was regarded as a reliable, stable path to a big paycheck in the 1980s and 1990s. But after the meltdown of 2008, bankers were buffeted by torrents of layoffs with little hope of the storm subsiding.
And Americans routinely gripe about our inability to compete in a global economy where the bulk of manufacturing jobs have been shipped to nations like China. But while that certainly was true in the 1990s, the pendulum has begun to swing back a little, at least to a point where the argument has gotten blurred.
A sign of the shift: Google, based in Mountain View, California, decided in early 2012 to manufacture its new Nexus Q wireless home media player at a factory in nearby San Jose, just fifteen minutes from its headquarters. With manufacturing wages rising rapidly in China, it is no longer an automatic decision to assemble electronic components in Asia. Indeed, by April 2012, around one third of American companies with greater than $1 billion in revenues had plans or had considered returning their manufacturing operations to the United States, according to research done by the Boston Consulting Group.