“Innovation lies at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences”

We love to romanticize people. It gives us a sense of comfort to know that it is possible to achieve great things all by our selves. Every year Forbes comes out with its 400 wealthiest individuals and Times releases its 100 most influential people. We love admiring great achievers for what they stand for. It is the same reason we love the story of the 10,000 hours to become an expert, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. It’s the idea that we can achieve our dreams independent of anyone else, and that our achievements are highly correlated with the amount of effort we put in.

To a large degree, this is very true. Michelangelo wrote, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.” The countless hours of routines is what built these great achievers.

This makes it possible for us to believe that people built the innovations of the digital age all by themselves. When Jack Dorsey was taking a lot of credit in the media about creating Twitter, Evan Williams, of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, told him to chill out. “But I invented Twitter,” Dorsey said, according to Nick Bilton of the New York Times. Williams responds, “No, you didn’t invent Twitter. I didn’t invent Twitter either. Neither did Biz [Stone, another co-founder]. People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”

Walter Isaacson, in the book The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, comments on this exchange between Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams:

Therein lies another lesson: the digital age may seem revolutionary, but it was based on expanding the ideas handed down from previous generations. The collaboration was not merely among contemporaries, but also between generations. The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them. Steve Jobs built on the work of Alan Kay, who built on Doug Engelbart, who built on J.C.R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush. When Howard Aiken was devising his digital computer at Harvard, he was inspired by a fragment of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine that he found, and he made his crew members read Ada Lovelace’s “Notes.”

Innovations like the computer, programming, the transistor, the microchip, video games, the internet, the personal computer, software, online, and the web, were all created not by individuals, but by a group of brilliant engineers and visionaries . Out of all examples, the only one to be argued would be Tim Berners-Lee in creating the Web. Even though he wrote the initial code for it by himself, he could only do so building on the ideas of the Internet. One thing that remains consistent among all the characters involved in each innovation is that they were comfortable residing at the intersection between the humanities and the sciences. These same people were the truly innovative ones, who helped create the human-machine symbiosis at the core of all recent innovations. Walter Isaacson comments:

Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

After Isaacson deeply analyzes all the characters involved in the birth of the computer, he says:

The main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage. Some studies of technology and science emphasize the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps. Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative world done at Bell Labs and IBM’s Endicott facility. This later approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps — the Eureka moment — are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together.

It was a joy reading The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. When writing about every individual involved in the innovative breakthroughs of the past century, he gave each one their due respect. Isaacson brought together all the pieces and painted a beautiful picture of how innovation was done by a collaborative effort of visionaries and engineers who saw the beauty that resides at the intersection between the humanities and the sciences and not by the lone geniuses.