IS CURIOSITY OR NECESSITY THE MOTHER OF INVENTION? ?

IS CURIOSITY OR NECESSITY THE MOTHER OF INVENTION?

It's the popular view that "necessity is the mother invention." It supposedly arise when a society has an unfulfilled need. Would-be inventors, motivated by the prospect of money or fame, perceive the need and try to meet it. Some inventions come up with a solution superior to the existing, unsatisfactory technology. Society adopts the solution if it is compatible with the society's values and other technologies.  In 1942, in the middle of World War II, the U.S. government set up the Manhattan Project with the explicit goal of inventing the technology required to build the atomic bomb before  Nazi Germany could do so. That project succeeded in three years at the cost to over $2 billion (over $20 billion today). Eli Whitney in 1794 invented his cotton gin to replace laborious hand cleaning of cotton grown in the U.S South, and James Watt's 1769 invention of his steam engine to solve the problem of pumping water out of British coal mines.

These familiar examples deceive us into assuming that other major inventions were also responses to perceived needs. In fact, many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiority or by a love of tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind. Once the  device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Only after it had been in use for a considerable time did consumers come to feel that they needed it. Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purpose. Take Thomas Edison's phonograph, the most original invention of the greatest inventor of modern times. When Edison built his first phonograph in 1877, he published an article proposing ten uses his invention might be put. They included preserving the last words of  dying people, recording books for blind people to hear, announcing clock time, and teaching spelling. Reproduction of music was not high on Edison's priorities. A few years later Edison told his assistant that his invention has no commercial value. Within another few years he changed his mind and did enter business to sell phonograph. When other entrepreneurs created the jukeboxes, Edison objected vehemently to this debasement of his invention. Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music. When Nikolaus Otto built his first gas engine in 1866, horses had been supplying people's land transportation needs for nearly 6000 years, supplemented increasingly by steam-powered railroads for several decades. There was no crisis in the availability of horses, no dissatisfaction with railroads. Because Otto's engine was weak, and seven feet tall, it did not recommend itself over horses. Not until 1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle; he waited until 1896 to build the first truck. In 1905, motor vehicles were still expensive, unreliable toys for the rich. Public contentment with horses and railroads remained high until  World War I, when the military concluded that it did really need trucks. Intensive postwar lobbying by truck manufacturers and armies finally convinced the public of its need and enabled trucks to begin to supplant horse-drawn wagons in industrialized countries. Even in the largest America cities, the changeover took 50 years. The first cameras, typewriters, and television sets were as aweful as Otto's seven-foot-tall gas engine. That makes it difficult for an inventor to foresee whether his or her aweful prototype might eventually find a use and thus warrant  more time and expense to develop it. Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which untimately reach a stage of commercial production. For each great invention only a few meet the need for which they were initially designed and may later prove more valuable at meeting unforeseen needs. While James Watt designed his steam engine to pump water from mines, it soon  was supplying power to cotton mills, then, with much greater profit, propelling locomotives and boats.

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Source:Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, pp242-244

Note: Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel,  writes that Europeans occupying new territories
         killed less people with their guns, but more died with European germs and deadly diseases which
         they brought with them.