The Engine of Invention is Built for Speed
Until I sat down to write this I had not thought of Friday as an exceptional day. I recognize now it is in fact the first day that I had stepped into the 21st Century Invention Revolution. I work for a company called Nanotronics which makes products that are using never before possible ideas to transform factories. Yesterday it was not the technology alone that made the day representative of how the future will work, but the process that we used. A few of us had been thinking about a product that would help move some older industries into nanotechnology. Nothing that I can think of is viewed with as much skepticism as Nanotechnology. It has taken so long for Nanotechnology to become a scalable reality that people have suggested taking Nano out of the name of our company. I have sat impatiently in day-long conferences as both industry and government sheepishly argued over cold sandwiches whether we even need to address Nanotechnology. It is looked at still as a sci-fi fantasy that was supposed to happen but never did, but isn’t all technology now embracing the nanoscale?
Yesterday we did not revolutionize nanotechnology, but we took an important step because it happened so quickly. The seed of the ideas grew from years of experience working with companies aching for new solutions, to implementing our Creative Director’s vision to make the user experience of this product work, down to the 3D Printing lab to build a prototype, implementing small changes, and finally to the machine shop where it was built. Before the end of the day Fed Ex had the product in hand and by this week a very large factory in Germany will be using it. Before that happens, right in the building where we work, we will be seeing companies build real workable mini-factories using this.
There is a lot of nostalgia for 20th century innovation, and even the way people invented, but in general I tend to think of the 20th century model as being reactionary. I know that from 2016 it seems strange to call the era of the computer, automobile, and internet reactionary, but despite that great progress, the seeds of modernity were born of 19th century inventions that were scaled in the last century. It was beneficial to the American worker as the work week became shorter and the working class lived in ways that it had never before experienced. My home town of Akron, Ohio was the Rubber Capital of the world and for almost 100 years our neighborhoods were communities built by industry and vice versa. Academics also made great progress; in disease prevention, in agriculture, in energy. My old lab at Columbia was where the laser was invented before being adopted by industry.
The truth is though that despite trending 20th abundance, the invention revolution is still rooted in the late 19th century. This was the time where having a patent was the ultimate symbol of American potential. This produced the previously unthinkable velocity of experimentation to mass public adoption within short periods of time and in human scale proximities. That last point is exemplified in the now legendary tales of great inventors racing to the patent office. It was literally the same offices that Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison sent teams as fast as the invention was completed to be the first to commercialize. In the most famous cases of the telephone and the electric light the road from invention to mass usage was so short that it is only understood now if we discuss the proliferation of social media. (Yes, Zuckerberg and team really did roll out Facebook in a few nights from a Harvard dorm room). Fast prototyping now has largely involved very little hardware, very slow academic procedures, and corporate beaurocracy. We do not invent the equivalent of the incandescent light now, with construction starting in lower Manhattan for mass distribution of electricity within a month. We would laugh at such a concept, and in general 20th manufacturing has made a point of not doing this.
Now things are changing, and while we see the toys of today’s electronics being made by individuals and small companies, the major difference between now and the 19th century invention revolution is that we do not see factories rising today from the inventions of yesterday. I do not invoke yesterday and today as metaphor. I mean literally that factories should be built, or at least iterated in conjunction with technological discovery. I am of course not the only person talking about prototyping. We have 3D printers and Arduinos that can make any designer of CAD files into builders of objects almost immediately. What we now need to see is not only the object, but the Production Line.
We need to prototype the factory, and that is partially possible because of three increasingly commoditized things that most people know about: robotics, machine learning and the small footprint of additive manufacturing. One more that is less obvious, but that can be learned from the 19th century invention race: A factory is a collaboration of disciplines, from engineers, to creative directors, to AI specialist, to architects and to entrepreneurs. It is possible to build things in garages or in the woods, but hard to architect the proximity of diversity and customers. This is not at all to say that the lone genius is a myth, as is often claimed. Invention in a solitary setting is highly undervalued in an age of open work spaces and company cafeterias and gyms that blend into a collective experience that is meant to replace the individual. Instead it is thrilling to foster the ideas and creations of the Auteur, and to quickly react to inspiration, which a prototyping environment allows for. It is possible for today’s Edison’s and Bell’s to build factories the way cities were built around them in the 20th century, but it would take massive changes in culture, and even more it would not be practical.
Nanotronics has three locations, and one of them is at New Lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard overlooking the Manhattan skyline. This is a deliberate choice for many reasons that people can already imagine, including being in a culturally vibrant city. What has been ignored until very recently however is that formally abandoned shipyards make for great campuses to prototype the future factory. The requirements of the 19th century are the same as now, and the benefits that come of small spaces with a relatively small but extremely agile workforce of inventors and builders can serve as the model for what can become of the country and world as a whole. It has been said that we are entering into the 4th Industrial Revolution. This is an exciting concept, but I also think that we are moving into a Race to Invention for the Factory. This could only be done now, in this century, and I hope that anyone who is interested in watching the future unfold can take a walk or subway to the homes of this revolution. Hopefully there will be a culture of racing to invent again. This time it is invention of the factory itself. Everyone else can create the way inventors did over 100 years ago, but this time faster and cheaper.
