To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
BEFORE THEY CAN MAKE new products, inventors pose new possibilities. An inventor can be sitting on an airplane and suddenly become entranced by the floor tiles, the lighting system, the magazine rack, or the food cart. An inventor might observe people playing games or working on their computers, or perhaps gaze out the window to view an entire civilization from a distance. Whatever it is, an inventor will zero in on the one object or task that is primitive compared with what it could become. The potential seems so great that the thing seems to be malfunctioning, at least in the inventor’s mind.
When most people think that everything is working normally, an inventor will home in on the absurdity, the utter foolishness of the way everyone seems to accept the world as it is. Others won’t even see what’s wrong—until the inventor stumbles across it. By isolating a problem in a new way, by redefining it, by focusing it down to something more specific than meets the average eye, the inventor constructs a new possibility where none was thought to have existed. This thinking strategy doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, and we can’t just start practicing it well without some guidance. By the same token, those who are rehearsed in imagining one possibility after another couldn’t break the habit if they tried. Once they are possessed by this inner drive, it tends to stay with them.
Elwood “Woody” Norris has been creating opportunities his entire career. But like many inventors, Norris didn’t initially set out to become one. A tall man with a big smile, and childlike enthusiasm for just about everything, Norris looks more like a high school gym teacher than a man of science, and he tells his story with aw-shucks expressions such as “in’dat cool?” Growing up in rural Maryland in the 1940s and 1950s, his family was so poor that they lacked indoor plumbing. His father was a Cumberland coal miner, and his mother had only an eighth-grade education. Out in the backyard was a foul-smelling chicken coop. “I remember it quite vividly,” says Norris. That’s where he played with radios. Along with old tube consoles, he’d scavenge discarded televisions and anything else electronic. He’d bring the gear back to the coop and then dissect and reassemble it until he unlocked the mystery of how these things worked. “I always had an interest in tearing things apart,” he says.1 At night, he’d cover his makeshift laboratory with a tarp to keep it dry.
Unable to afford college, after high school Norris entered the U.S. Air Force, where he learned more about electronics, especially Doppler radar. His parents, meanwhile, had gotten a divorce, and his mother moved to Seattle and remarried. One day, she telephoned her son in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Her second husband had been declared a missing person after failing to come home from work. Norris got a discharge from the service and went to care for his mom, landing himself a $400-per-week job as a technician repairing electronics at the University of Washington, where he was free to hang out at the library.
Norris’s invention career literally began as a joke. In April 1960, he was in the UW library reading an article in Radio & Television magazine about a new electric shaver that ionized whiskers without making any contact with the face. He was amazed—until he read the editor’s note, which revealed that the article was an April Fool’s prank. Furthermore, there would be a $300 prize for the person who could write the most convincing story about a fake new gadget for the next year’s issue. “I sat down to write an article about a phony invention,” he recalls. What could it be?
Creating a possibility in your mind doesn’t necessarily mean that the underlying problem you’re trying to solve is new. What’s new is your particular representation of the problem. Successful inventors often aren’t the first to come up with the basic concept of their own invention. Alexander Graham Bell wasn’t the first to discover the need for the telephone. Other inventors had been working on the problem for at least fifteen years before he made his first call. Thomas Edison didn’t discover the need for the electric light. The need had been burning in the minds of other inventors for at least thirty years before he switched on his first bulb. Wilbur and Orville Wright didn’t discover the need for the airplane. The race to build a flying machine started at least a century before Kitty Hawk. In the same vein, the future inventor of the first quantum computer, the first portable genomic scanning machine, the first nanotech cell-repairing robot, or the first antigravity machine won’t be the first person to have imagined those possibilities. The original dreamers were also demonstrating inventive behavior.
The most common explanation of what drives inventive activity is the age-old maxim, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” But that aphorism explains almost nothing and is wrong in most instances. Because new scientific discoveries or technological possibilities often give rise to new desires, it’s usually even more correct to say the opposite: “Invention is the mother of necessity.” Although successful inventions seem in retrospect to fill a clear human need, what they really do is to generate the demand in the first place. Only a handful of people imagined the telephone, the electric light, and the airplane beforehand. After these things existed, however, masses of people suddenly couldn’t do without them.
The task of choosing or finding the unrealized possibility isn’t as straightforward as saying, What would people want? Ask yourself that question, spend some time thinking about an answer, and you’ll see that there’s a special habit involved. Inventors are attuned to finding the problem inside the problem or finding the problem outside the problem. They frame the challenge in such an original way that they’ve redefined a need and turned it into something new. That is the key: The new potential begins life in the inventor’s mind.
This is where the process of invention is misunderstood. People often look at the invention and then work backward. When they see a successful new technology, they immediately relate it to the trouble it has alleviated. But you can’t understand the process of invention by looking only at the inventions. You must first empathize with the inventors, the people who stirred up that trouble in the first place. The “mother of invention” adage doesn’t explain why certain individuals take on a life of creative problem solving, some to the point of obsession, whereas others don’t consider it. “The crucial question is why some groups respond in a particular way to the same human needs or wants that in some other groups remain unfulfilled,” writes technology historian Carlo Cipolla.2 What motivates inventors to do what they do, and why are some people, companies, and societies more inventive than others?
Psychologist Carl Jung suggests that the drive to create possibilities is actually something that comes from within the individual rather than from the pull of an unmet need in the marketplace of human activity. “The creative mind plays with the objects it loves,” Jung argues.3 The impulse derives from childhood experimentation and imagination. “The creation of something new,” he adds, “is not accomplished by intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.”
This instinct to play describes what keeps happening with the inventors you’ll meet in this book. Inventors don’t have to be intellectually advanced, at least in terms of formal education. Many of them insist that they aren’t especially smart. But they all display flashes of genius, and that genius is derived from their childlike proclivity to play with the things that interest them. That’s the source of their urge to invent, their compulsion to create, their creative juice. In Jung’s terms, inventors develop an inner necessity to imagine new possibilities and realize them. They make their own fuel and keep it burning.
In 1960, Woody Norris, thinking about how to win the $300 April Fool’s prize, quickly narrowed his possibility search to what he knew best: audio systems. Taking a close look at the high-fidelity systems on the market—known then as hi-fi—it struck him that the tone arms on phonographs were ridiculous. The end with the needle would sweep about six inches across the record while the wires at the base of the arm barely moved. The angle by which this apparatus moved seemed absurd. No wonder the needle skipped and scratched the record if someone in the room jumped or if someone touched the system. But as Norris notes, “The brain has all these different, disconnected things vying for your attention.” To focus and to overcome this distraction, Norris developed a technique of verbalizing the problem. “It goes out of my mouth, and around the side my head and into my ear. Talk about the problem. Don’t just think of it.”4
Norris imagined a new possibility: incorporating radio as part of the record player itself. His potential solution seemed absurd enough to win the April Fool’s prize. Norris decided that the problem lay in the wires that carried the electrical sound patterns from the needle to the amplifier. The wires had to be eliminated. He envisioned a wireless cartridge that would hold the needle and move from the outside of the record along the radius to the inside. A built-in radio transmitter would send the sounds to the amplifier. In radio, he saw a new possibility for changing the record player. He called his idea the “radial tracking tone arm.”
But before sending his hoax story to the magazine, Norris called a local hi-fi dealer and pretended he had read about this invention. The store owner was interested in seeing it and perhaps selling the product. Based on this, Norris decided not to send the story in as an April Fool’s joke but instead to build a prototype as specified. “That was the first time in my life I’d ever thought of anything new,” he recalls.
What happens to his inventions after he creates them doesn’t interest Norris very much. In this case, he ended up building a working model for an electronics company under a lucrative contract and patenting his concept. The device was eventually marketed, with limited success. Eventually, of course, the turntable itself was rendered obsolete by the laser, digital audio, and the compact disc. All inventors must start somewhere, and they usually can recall the precise details of their first invention, even though the invention itself is usually not very significant. The larger point is that Norris came to believe that he may have come across a method of spotting possibilities missed by almost everyone else.
Spotting new possibilities happens not in physical space but rather inside what can be called the mental model of the inventor’s creation. After observing the world, inventors take all the information they have gathered about the system they are considering. Then they combine this information with their technical experience and background, however limited that may be. “Through interaction with a target system, people formulate mental models of that system,” suggests cognitive psychologist Donald A. Norman. “These models need not be technically accurate, but they must be functional.”5 After the model is constructed in the mind, the inventor can make changes to it. The process of modifying the model is what generates additional possibilities.
After doing this for the first time, Norris wanted to see whether he could do it again. One evening several years later, he was heading home from the university when he ran into some buddies who were starting a company. It was the mid-1960s, and the stock market was hotter than it had been in a generation. Entrepreneurial fever was breaking out everywhere. The leader of the group, Grant Heaton, told Norris that he and his friends were developing a sales strategy, a marketing strategy, and a financial strategy. There was only one thing they lacked: a hot new product to sell. The entrepreneurs had a vague notion that selling new medical devices would be profitable. Norris told them he would invent something for them in that realm.
Again, he needed to create a new possibility. And again, he focused on what he knew most about: sound and how it is transmitted. What about listening to what was happening inside the body? The idea of trying to hear internal organs can be traced to Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C., but it wasn’t until 1816 that French inventor René Laennec created a wooden tube for isolating and reverberating the sound, a tool that evolved into the stethoscope. But the stethoscope was a mechanical device limited to detecting vibrations.6 Norris saw this as an unreasonable constraint. The X-ray machine, meanwhile, enabled visual representations of the body’s interior, but evidence was piling up that the high-frequency light beams it emitted were inappropriate or harmful for certain applications, such as observing a fetus in the womb. In addition, X-ray images were like photographs: They didn’t show movement, and they certainly didn’t detect sound.
Norris was constructing a mental model of a new possibility. Why wasn’t there a better way of hearing what was going on under the skin? Why not invent a device based on the basic principles of sound and see whether it could do more than the old stethoscope?
From his Air Force training, Norris knew about the Doppler effect, in which delays in successive sound waves seem to grow more frequent as the sound source approaches the listener. The pitch, or frequency, keeps changing. The buildup of the waves reaches a crescendo when a train, airplane, or other sound source passes by, and then the pitch wanes as the source gets farther away and the interval between the waves grows longer. As a result, you don’t have to see the train to know it’s passing by. Why not apply this knowledge to this problem?
Why not use sound to see inside the body? Why not shoot high-frequency sound waves through the skin? Norris knew about ultrasound, electromagnetic energy that beats more than twenty thousand times per second—too frequent for the human ear to detect but strong enough to penetrate most forms of matter. “The idea was to create a thing that would emit ultrasound into your skin,” he says. “Because of the Doppler effect, if something in there was moving, there would be different frequencies. The shifts would create movements that you would be able to hear.”
Norris was engaging in a common habit of inventive engineering: taking a technology or technique that works in one domain—in this case Doppler radar detection of aircraft or weather patterns—and then repurposing it for a new problem space.
Was Norris the first inventor to think of this basic idea of diagnostic ultrasound? Hardly. But he imagined the possibility without knowledge of other efforts. Throughout history, most epochal inventions have been born in a rush of nearly simultaneous discovery. Ultrasound technology was certainly in that groundbreaking category. Aside from the birth control pill, one would have a hard time coming up with an invention in the past half century that revolutionized obstetrics and gynecology more than diagnostic ultrasound. In this case, doctors, engineers, and inventors all over the world were constructing their own mental models of the possibilities at roughly the same time. “There were others, as often happens, working on the same idea,” Norris says. “I never really researched it.”
If he had, he might have found that John J. Wild, a British surgeon working at the University of Minnesota and later for Honeywell, had developed a technique in the 1950s for bouncing ultrasound pulses off of internal tissues, finding that muscles, tumors, and organs deflected different echoes. But this technique is borrowed from underwater sonar, which itself is modeled on the way whales and bats sense their surroundings. Norris’s idea of detecting Doppler shifts to pinpoint internal movement was different from Wild’s idea of measuring echo patterns, and each method had different applications and created different possibilities.
Others were approaching the problem from their own frames of reference. Karl Dussik, an Austrian doctor, and Ian Donald, a Scottish doctor, were lead authors on seminar papers on medical ultrasonics in the 1940s and 1950s, respectively. New centers for the study of ultrasonic diagnostics were also cropping up in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland.7 There was even a medical ultrasound project at the University of Washington, where Norris had been working. Leading that effort was Donald W. Baker, then director of a campus lab within the electrical engineering department. Norris says he is surprised to learn that there was such a project at UW or elsewhere. For his part, Baker, now retired, says he doesn’t remember Norris specifically but supposes that anyone on campus could have been influenced by talks and papers he and his colleagues were giving. At the time, most universities prohibited professors from receiving patents on medical devices because such advances were considered to be detached from the world of for-profit commerce. “In today’s world,” says Baker, “ideas like this would definitely be patented.”8
In this respect, Norris was ahead of his time. Over a weekend, he developed a crude prototype using materials from Radio Shack and other electronics stores around Seattle. He gutted a flashlight and fitted it with a radio receiver and an ultrasonic emitter adapted from an early TV remote, which operated at 40 kilohertz. He smeared petroleum jelly on his skin and began using the device to detect frequencies inside his body. Boundary layers deflected back different density patterns, and any internal movements would come back at frequencies other than 40 kHz because of the Doppler effect.
Norris’s mental model worked in practice, as good ones often do. Norris wrote up descriptions and created sketches of his idea for what was eventually called a Phase-Lock Doppler System for Monitoring Blood Vessel Movement, later known more generally as the Transcutaneous Doppler. “You could use it to hear sound in a much more isolated way,” he says. “You could separate the different sounds under the skin and inside the body. You could slide it up your arm and your leg. You could hear blood clot. You could hear the fetal heartbeat, which was separate from mom’s heartbeat, and which was often difficult to pick up with a stethoscope.” The range of possibilities was mind-boggling.
Norris assigned his concept to his friend Grant Heaton’s new company, Medical Development Corporation, in return for a promise of equity in the venture. Two years later, Norris received an unexpected call. The invention was now considered to be a valuable piece of intellectual property. The patent was issued in January 1972, listing Norris as the inventor.9 If this exact technique had already been described in existing patents or in published papers, it wouldn’t have been eligible for patent protection. Norris was told he had forty thousand registered shares in the start-up. “I said, ‘Great! What are they worth?’” The answer was $8.50 per share, or $340,000.
As with the case of most inventions, however, it would take years to find out just how useful or valuable this one was. It wasn’t until the 1980s that this technique would evolve, be combined with other techniques, and result in the ultrasound devices and sonogram images now familiar to virtually all mothers-to-be in developed countries. Diagnostic ultrasound is now used for hundreds of applications, and equipment sales are part of a multibillion-dollar industry controlled by companies such as Philips, Siemens, Toshiba, and General Electric.
As it turned out, Norris’s contribution to the field was a relatively small one. But the invention was the launching pad for his career. After selling his stock and paying a 15 percent capital gains tax, Norris quit his job and set up shop as an independent inventor. Years later, Norris would hit upon an even more original breakthrough in the sphere of sound. Yet his proclivity for creating possibilities in his mind was honed early on. “I just look at things differently,” he says, “and I developed a process for doing that.”
There is more than one way to create a new possibility, and of course not all such ideas are of the same magnitude. We can adopt a useful shorthand for classifying inventions into four types according to the nature of the process that brings them into the world. Let’s look at each of these types.
First, an inventor might try to find fault with something people already use and imagine a valuable improvement—for example, the flat panel computer screen or the portable kidney dialysis machine. That’s the better mousetrap.
Second, inventors sometimes recognize a latent opportunity that others miss. They dream up something that people didn’t know they needed. Examples are the Sony Walkman or the Segway human transporter. That’s the hopeful niche.
Third, inventors may reframe a previously insurmountable problem, sensing a fresh approach for creating something that does not yet exist but that would clearly be in great demand—for example, the electric light or the airplane. That’s the epochal breakthrough that might transform the world.
Now and again, there are surprises, and an invention from any of the first three categories ends up having a much wider application than even the inventor dreamed. The steam engine or the laser are examples. That’s the lucky strike.10
To see how all these kinds of approaches work in practice, let’s explore how Alexander Graham Bell created possibilities in his mind. His most famous invention fell into one or another of the preceding categories at different times. It started as a better mousetrap problem then became a hopeful niche, a way of delivering urgent telegrams by voice. Then it became an epochal breakthrough, and in retrospect it was certainly a lucky strike.
The central mystery surrounding the invention of the telephone has always been why someone else didn’t invent it much sooner. Why did more than four decades pass between Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831 and Bell’s breakthrough in 1876? The demand for the telephone may have been a latent one, but it was there for inventors to find. All the needed scientific knowledge and physical components existed. What took so long? “The answer,” suggests Bell biographer Robert V. Bruce, “lies deep in the working of the human mind.”11
The story of the invention of the telephone is one of reframing a possibility in a unique way. Others had thought that the telephone would work like a telegraph; a circuit would be made and broken in patterns that represented the content of a message, as in the dots and dashes of Morse code. This was the model for an apparatus invented in 1861 by German inventor Philipp Reis. The user would speak or sing into a diaphragm, which would vibrate a metal needle on its surface, creating a series of rapid but discrete electric pulses. The term telephone (meaning “far-speaking”) had already been coined, and Reis used it to name his device.
The representation of the problem seemed to be on the right track, but it got inventors stuck on the wrong mental model. The electric current that the Reis transmitter produced didn’t vary in relation to the sound’s amplitude—its degrees of loudness. Therefore, the device would never be able to send speech, only musical monotones. It should have been called the teletone. Still others picked up where Reis left off, viewing the telephone as a generalized version of the telegraph. Thomas Edison, for example, later used a Reis device as the starting point for his own mental model of a telephone system. He, too, got trapped.
Bell, on the other hand, knew very little about Faraday, electricity, or the telegraph. Instead, from an early age he had developed a mental model of how speech works. His mother was almost completely deaf, and while growing up in Edinburgh, Scotland, “Aleck” would often play the piano while his mother pressed her hearing horn against the instrument’s sounding board. Bell’s father and grandfather were accomplished speech therapists and elocution coaches, his father going so far as to create Visible Speech, a best-selling catalog of images representing every sound the human voice could make. Bell’s father devised these symbols for teaching children, illiterates, and nonnative speakers to read English. But this new alphabet—based on lip, tongue, and larynx positions—inspired Aleck, at age nineteen, to experiment with drumlike membranes that measured the air vibrations caused by human speech. A year later, Aleck began using Visible Speech to teach a class of deaf kids in London to speak. In this way, he recalled, he “was thus introduced to what proved to be my life’s work—the teaching of speech to the deaf.”12
For the young Bell, new possibilities arose from his inner drive to understand hearing and speech, and follow-on ideas always seemed to arise from current ones. He noticed, for example, that when he pressed the foot pedals on his family’s piano and sang notes into the instrument, the corresponding piano strings would resonate. He was amazed at this phenomenon of “sympathetic vibration,” and it would later play a big role in his inventions.
Bell initially didn’t set out to invent the telephone. More experienced inventors, meanwhile, did set out to do so and failed. Instead, Bell came up with a new theory, and it was a theory that began as a series of possibilities he created in his mind. Those possibilities led to his experiments with converting sound into continuously undulating electricity, which soon led to the telephone we have come to know.
Bell’s compulsion to understand the ear and the nature of sound seemed to serve as an endless wellspring of ideas. In 1871, after his family emigrated from Scotland to Canada, Bell traveled to Massachusetts and began teaching at the Boston School for the Deaf; two years later, he won an appointment as a professor of elocution at Boston University. It was during this time that his teaching interests and his passion for invention converged. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, patent attorney who pioneered deaf education in the state, enrolled his teenage daughter, Mabel, in Bell’s class. Hubbard was also an outspoken critic of Western Union, the telegraph monopoly, and he encouraged Bell to create a “multiple telegraph,” a machine that would send many messages at once over an existing telegraph wire. The need for a multiple telegraph was obvious. Thomas Edison, among others, was already working on the problem. Bell made it his goal, too. He set out to build a better mousetrap.
Bell had several experiments going at any given time. He’d work late into the night on his inventions in his Boston apartment, teach in the mornings, and attend or give lectures in the afternoon. As a result of all this activity, he quickly made key contacts within the world’s leading scientific community. Through colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was given access to a Helmholtz machine, which employed electromagnets to vibrate a set of tuning forks. In this machine, designed by the great German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, Bell saw a parallel to the way different vocal pitches caused his family’s piano to resonate. In his investigations, he created a new possibility. Why is this machine being used only to generate pitches in a room? Why can’t a series of harmonic sounds be transmitted over a wire? If that were possible, it would create an additional problem. You’d need a way to unscramble the resulting electric signals on the receiving end, converting the signals back into continuous sound waves that the ear could process.
In his own lab, Bell built wild and dangerous machines in which the human voice would modulate gas-fueled flames, a crude attempt to enable his students to “see” sound. One of his follow-on experiments involved a human ear cut from a corpse. As he spoke into the ear, he would watch the tiny bones inside vibrate. He attached a piece of straw to one of the bones and rigged the other end of the straw so that it would trace the vibrating patterns on a charcoal slate. All the puzzles and possibilities that Bell created were building up in his mind. If sound waves themselves were powerful enough to move the straw, Bell wrote in his journals in 1874, why couldn’t they control an electrical current? He had arrived at his breakthrough concept.
Bell’s half-successful experiments led him to believe that he had found a way for continuous patterns of electricity to carry almost any type of sound over wires. Edison and others took other paths toward the same end at about the same time, but it was Bell who seemed to understand the potential most deeply. His unique perspective gave him the edge he needed to compete with the more professional inventors. With the assistance of Hubbard, who soon became his father-in-law, Bell in 1876 filed for a patent on his “improvement in telegraphy,” only hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray, cofounder of Western Electric, filed an affidavit stating he intended to build something remarkably similar. Bell’s application would go on to become the single most valuable patent in history.
Bell’s method, however, was anything but a linear progression—the first problem leading to a second, leading to a third, and so on. Instead, his diverse investigations led to an explosion of puzzles, a simultaneous eruption of new possibilities that sent him down parallel paths that he eventually connected. He saw that all these small problems were part of a bigger opportunity that pointed to a new solution. His work with the deaf, his observation of acoustical instruments, and the development of his own instruments gave rise to possibilities that Bell was able to join together in his mind. In retrospect, he seemed destined to be the one to make sense of it all, channeling all this creativity into the telephone. But none of it was predestined, as he would later attest. Aleck Bell got there only because he kept creating the right kind of possibilities along the way.
The better mousetrap, the hopeful niche, the epochal breakthrough, the lucky strike—all kinds of inventions can emerge after a possibility is created. In each case, it’s also essential to exaggerate the potential of the invention—not to fool people but to make the strongest possible case for undertaking the project in the first place. The key to creating radically new possibilities worthy of equally radically new manifestations is to imagine a giant gap between what is there before your eyes and what one day might be. That’s what Aleck Bell did, and it is what Woody Norris is still doing.
Norris was certainly not the only person to conjure diagnostic ultrasound. But he did see just how primitive the stethoscope was. The gap between what was and what could be was enormous, as he saw it back then. Yet he readily admits that when he was building his flashlight-sized ultrasound emitter he didn’t envision the final product or most of the implications of the revolution he had a small hand in starting. “To me, it was just for listening,” he says. “I didn’t even know that they’d one day put pictures on it.”
The careers of Norris and Bell have interesting similarities. Both began as amateur inventors. Both lacked advanced training in their chosen field. Both went about creating possibilities in the realm of sound and hearing. After filing for his seminal patent, Bell spent the next fifteen years developing follow-on improvements to the telephone. Norris, meanwhile, also stuck to problems in the same general area. In 1980, he started American Technology Corporation, based in San Diego, California, to develop and market his inventions.
Shortly thereafter, his work on the radial tracking tone arm led to the creation of another possibility in his mind. He had loved transistor radios from the moment he saw his first one more than a quarter century earlier. But he recognized that these devices were still too big and heavy because the batteries took up too much space and weight. Why not eliminate the batteries, and see how small and light a radio could really be?
The possibility he imagined was this: Adapt the radio transmitter that he had created for the tone arm to create the world’s smallest consumer radio. “Here’s where I came up with the idea,” he recalls. “If you’ve got a guitar, tune two strings to the same note. Pluck one. The other will start to vibrate. Since nothing is free in the universe, the second one had to derive energy from someplace. So the first string has got to be losing energy. What if I did that with an electronic circuit?” Norris was noticing the phenomenon of sympathetic vibration, exactly the same principle that Aleck Bell noticed in his family’s piano, knowledge that led to the invention of the telephone.
Now Norris was going to apply that same knowledge to the creation of another possibility. He knew that electromagnetic waves—radio waves—are a form of low-level energy in and of themselves. Why not use that energy to replace the batteries and actually power the radio? “What if I built a little radio transmitter? I have a little rod that picks up a radio signal.” Just as a guitar string or a piano string steals energy from voices or notes in the air, the rod would be stealing energy from the airwaves.
The result was indeed the world’s tiniest FM radio; it was tuned by pressing a button that scans for the next strongest signal on the dial. Shorter than your thumb, thin enough to clip inside your ear, the device weighed a quarter of an ounce. Norris distributed the product through Technoscout (formerly Comtrad Industries), a catalog company that sold thousands of these FM Sounds branded devices, at about $29 each. This invention didn’t change the world, but Norris had created a new possibility, and it turned out that lots of people wanted this better mousetrap. Invention proved again to be the mother of necessity.13
But that product and others were merely warm-ups to what would become, by far, his greatest invention in sound. Employing the same method that he discovered within himself as a young man, Norris in 1988 created another possibility for a radically new hi-fi system. Everything in the system, he observed, was composed of microelectronics and digital components—everything, that is, except the speakers. In Norris’s mind, even the best and the smallest speakers on the market remained crude, mechanical, bulky, and subject to distortion. He set out not to improve speakers but to eliminate them. As we’ll see when we pick up the story of Woody Norris again in chapter 7, it would take him fifteen years to deliver on this new possibility.
Perhaps the most uncanny similarity between Bell and Norris has nothing to do with sound. Both inventors, oddly enough, suddenly turned from that field toward one that seemed totally unrelated. From the 1890s onward, now wealthy and world-famous for his invention of the telephone, Bell lived year-round at his “dreaming place,” his Victorian estate in Braddeck, Nova Scotia, high on a bluff overlooking the ocean. There, he built and launched multidimensional kites aimed at an understanding of the problems and principles of flight. He was beaten to the solution, of course, by a couple of brothers from Ohio who also started as amateur, part-time inventors. But the possibilities of flight continued to fascinate him for the rest of his life.
A century later, Woody Norris would also take up his own imagined possibilities for flight. If an inventor could find a new way to make sound travel through the air, why not find a new way for objects to do so as well? One day, Norris happened to be on an airplane flying to Hong Kong, sitting next to a man who was saying how cool it was that people could travel around the world in a matter of hours.
“You really believe that?” Norris said.
The man nodded.
“Let me tell you what I think,” Norris said. “This bucket of bolts is screaming through the air in order to stay airborne. In order to get airborne, it has to go the better part of a mile down a runway like a goose trying to get out of the water. It is pure brute force. Then when you land, you are taking your life in your hands. This thing is practically vibrating the luggage out of the overhead racks. The wheels are smoking. What a crude, terrible, mechanical way to get around. Here we are at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and it’s truly embarrassing. I believe in the next five to seven years, we’re going to figure out gravity, and . . . airports will be obsolete. We haven’t even discovered most of the fundamental properties of physics yet. It’s just awful.”
Norris was imagining new possibilities for the airplane itself. The chance conversation helped him verbalize these ideas. Later, he would attempt to realize this possibility. But the mere fact that inventors like him can deploy their thinking strategies across different fields and different technological domains says something powerful about these habits. Inventors know how to ask new questions, pose new puzzles, construct a mental model of the predicament, and create in their minds a wide range of possible solutions. They might try to imagine how big the impact could be. But if everything works as planned, their imaginations will likely fall short.