INVENTION AND THE MEDIA

Some of you may have missed this particular piece buried in the body of the Progressive Review. Sam Smith is the editor and these are his comments on how he makes decisions on what to include in the PR. They are very close to the criteria that I use. I don't neccessarily agree with everything that I post, I just think that it's food for thought and that we need to be aware of it (whatever "IT" might be)...................PEACE................Scott



INVENTION AND THE MEDIA
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Sam Smith

WHENEVER the Review passes along a story about a new invention that
challenges conventional assumptions about how the world is run, it gets
letters from readers challenging our assumptions about what news we pass
along.

One of the pleasures of editing this journal is that its readers are
exceptionally intelligent about a variety of things. For example, I am
particularly careful about what we publish about airplanes because - for
reasons best known by the doyens of media demographics - the Review
seems to attract people well informed on the principles of aerodynamics.
We have also have physicists, chemists, experts on medical imaging,
theologians, accountants and so forth. . .

But part of intelligence is being hospitable to the new, the possibility
that old theories may be wrong, and the understanding that even the best
paradigms can fall into disrepair. The Review tries to deal with this
with a mixture of skepticism with receptivity.

Some of our readers don't like this and we get letters along the lines
of "Oh Sam, you don't really believe that, do you?" The answer is, "No,
I don't believe that, at least not yet, but it sure is interesting."
This strikes me as a more healthy - even intellectual approach - then to
argue that something couldn't possibly work because it never has before.
Remember: the reason we have inventions is because someone thought of
something for the first time.

I admit a bias that dates back to childhood. Too many hours reading
Popular Mechanics and dreaming of the car I was going to have with
folding wings from which I could quickly exit any traffic jam in
America. I don't have that car but I don't for a minute regret having
imagined it.

My father - though by trade a lawyer and businessman - was always
tinkering with the possible. He designed a proto-cruise control for our
car that was installed by a local mechanic and probably kept all of us
in a perpetual state of risk. My older cousin Mitch Hastings invented an
FM car radio and, as a young boy, I would drive around with my father
and Hastings adjusting the wires under the dash as needed. Earlier, my
father had introduced FM stereo broadcasting to Philadelphia. He brought
the first wood chipper and the first round hay baler to the state of
Maine. But I also know that he ruined my mother's vacuum cleaner trying
to remove the air from a silo he made out of black plastic. In my
family you didn't expect everything to work; you just expected to keep
trying.

A story in the NY Times on America's loss of inventiveness begins this
way:

"When James E. West was 8 years old, he propped himself on his bed's
brass footboard one afternoon and stretched to plug the cord of a radio
he had repaired into a ceiling outlet. It was one of his first
experiments. Mr. West's hand sealed to the light socket as 120 volts of
electricity shimmied through his body, freezing him in place until his
brother knocked him from the footboard and onto the floor. Like more
storied inventors who preceded him, he was quickly hooked on the juice -
even as he lay shivering from that first encounter. . . Over the past
several decades, he has secured 50 domestic and more than 200 foreign
patents on inventions relating to his pioneering explorations of
electrically charged materials and recording devices. According to the
National Inventors Hall of Fame, an organization in Akron, Ohio, that
counts Mr. West among its inductees, about 90 percent of all microphones
used today in devices like cell phones, acoustic equipment and toys
derive from electronic transducers that he helped to develop in the
early 1960's."

We live in a time that treasures rationalism, logic, and the assumption
that if we follow the assigned order of things in the assigned way,
everything will work out. In fact, that isn't the way life works at all.
Some of the best things in life come through serendipity, a taste for
repeated failure, and a refusal to believe what everyone else does.

This is where inventors come from. They often don't get the best grades
because they have so little inclination to follow the rules. They just
come up with the some of the best ideas.

So when the Review runs an article about a possible new source of energy
and it get letters accusing the inventors of being con men, it doesn't
surprise me to read in the Times that America is losing its inventive
edge. We can't all be inventors, but we can, however, at least be nice
to them.

For example, the Review got this sort of derogatory mail after running a
piece about a Harvard doctor's proposed new energy source. It was not
the idea itself that had caught our eye, but the fact that the story had
been written by the science editor of the high respectable Guardian, and
that it reported two public utilities and a Wall Street firm both
interested in the project. If we were being conned we were in some
interesting company.

This is the sort of story that most American media ignore because they
don't want to be accused of having been misled.

But the Review doesn't mind being wrong because if it were as perfect as
much of American journalism pretends to be it would not only be, in
truth, much more wrong, it would also be conning the reader. We only
claim that our average is pretty damn good.

The search for truth, like the search for a new energy source, is an
imperfect business. In both cases, this journal can only bring you news
only of that search. The final answer will have to wait for now