Survey of seekers and finders in business, science and invention

The most famous American inventors have tended to be the young finders. For example:

• Cyrus McCormick, in his mid-20s when he patented the mechanical reaper.
• Eli Whitney, age 27 when he filed his patent application for his cotton gin.
• Alexander Graham Bell, who patented his invention of the telephone at age 29.
• Thomas Edison, who gets credit for inventing the phonograph at age 30 and the electric light at age 31.
• The Wright brothers, who were ages 32 and 36 when their airplane first flew.

The most prominent exception is Ben Franklin. He unveiled the Franklin Stove at age 35, developed the lightning rod at 44, experimented with kites and electricity at 46, invented the glass armonica at 56, mapped the Gulf Stream at 62, served on the committee that was named to draft the Declaration of Independence at 70 and invented bifocals in his late 70s.

In the modern high-tech world, many innovators follow much the same youthful, conceptual pattern as McCormick, Whitney, Bell, Edison and the Wright brothers. Although the example of Grace Murray Hopper shows that older experimental innovators have their place, breakthroughs in computer software have mostly come from youthful innovators, often at quite an early age. Three examples, in addition to Bill Gates:

• Steve Jobs, age 21 when he founded Apple Computer with 25-year-old Steve Wozniak.
• Tim Berners-Lee, known as the Father of the World Wide Web, who at age 24 developed hypertext links to connect information stored in different documents.
• Shawn Fanning, age 19 when he developed Napster file-sharing software.

Conceptual breakthroughs tend to come later in the broader world of electronics. For example, conceptual innovator Jack Kilby was 34 when invented the integrated circuit -- within a few weeks of taking a job at Texas Instruments. After that, he accomplished little -- an extreme example of conceptual innovators’ characteristic decline.

That pattern applies to the most prominent young American inventors, who made no innovations of equivalent importance after their initial breakthroughs. In many cases, litigation came to replace innovation as their primary concern. In other cases, they became corporate leaders, who commercialized their innovations and those of others.

• McCormick eventually built a prosperous career on his youthful invention, but first he had to defend his rights to the reaper patent, which faced nine legal challenges. In his late 30s, he moved his manufacturing operations to Chicago to be close to Midwestern farmlands. By the time he reached age 50, his company was making 23,000 reapers in a year.
• Whitney fought back fourteen challenges to his 1794 patent, but the effort was futile because the cotton gin was so easy to duplicate. Many people profited from his invention, but not Whitney. In 1798, at age 33, he turned to firearms making.  He soon won a federal contract to supply 10,000 muskets in two years, proposing to manufacture the weapons quickly and efficiently from interchangeable parts instead of crafting them individually by hand.  The idea, which had originated in Europe, had not been implemented on a large scale before Whitney turned his hand to it.  Although the task took six years longer than he had promised, by the time he reached age 40 Whitney had developed manufacturing processes capable of producing standardized parts that could be assembled as working muskets.
• Alexander Graham Bell, after his breakthrough at age 29, focused on developing telephone service nationally and internationally. He also contributed to schools for the deaf and, at age 53, invented a four-sided tetrahedral kite that carried a man aloft in a brief controlled flight in 1907.
• After the invention of the electric light and phonograph in his early 30s, Edison turned his laboratory’s attention to work on movies and other projects, though most of the work on movies was done by his assistant, William Dickson, starting when Dickson was 27 and Edison was 41. In his 40s, Edison waged and lost a battle over whether the nation’s power system should have alternating current or direct current.  His later projects included a potential substitute for rubber, a storage battery, and a technique for processing low-density iron ore.
• The Wright brothers focused on protecting the rights to their invention rather than improving on it. After their 1903 triumph at Kitty Hawk, they played only a minor role in the development of aviation.

Youthful computer innovators have followed similar patterns, whether they faded from the scene or, like Gates, became a corporate titan, rather continuing as a cutting-edge innovator. Berners-Lee, for example, has continued to nurture the development of the Internet, but has made no dramatic breakthroughs as he did as a young man. Fanning was stymied by lawsuits. Jobs, as head of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, became a visionary corporate leader who recognized, encouraged and marketed outstanding technological innovations by others. These have included:

• The computer mouse, developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, and the use of its associated point-and-click technology in the Apple Macintosh, introduced when Jobs was 28.  Apple’s engineering and design teams that developed the Mac were first led for two years by Jef Raskin, then in his late 30s, and for two years by Jobs himself.
• The computer-animation films of Pixar, which Jobs co-founded when he was 31 from the remnants of a failed Luscasfilm computer-graphics division.
• Apple’s hugely popular iPod music player, developed by a team led by engineer Tony Fadell, who was about 30, and launched when Jobs was 46.

Drug research is a field where older, apparently experimental innovators are at least as prominent as young geniuses such as Lewis Sarett. Elizabeth Hazen and Rachel Brown are prime examples, but persistent experimentation also brought success for many other researchers. Maurice Hilleman, for example, developed 40 vaccines from his 30s or earlier to his 60s. Other pharmacology innovators who follow the career pattern of seekers are listed here in order of their ages when they filed their patent applications:

• John C. Sheehan, 58, penicillin synthesis, 1974.
• Percy Lavon Julian, 51, cortisone synthesis, 1950.
• Robert R. Williams, 46, synthesis of vitamins to fight malnutrition, 1932.
• Baruch S. Blumberg, 44, and with Irving Millman, 46, a blood test in 1969 to detect the hepatitis B virus, based on Blumberg’s discovery of an antigen to the virus in 1963.
• Graham John Durant and Charon Robin Ganellin, both 40, but also John Colin Emmett, 34, leaders of the research team that discovered Tagamet in 1974.
• Ernest H. Volwiler, 40, but also Donalee L. Tabern, 34, pentothal, 1934.

Copyright © 2007 by Colin Stewart. All rights reserved.