A review of Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators"

A review of ‘The Innovators’ by Walter Isaacson

The computer and its allied devices such as mobile phones, tablets and wearable devices have become indispensable parts of our lives. We exchange information in real time that would have been achieved in weeks or even months using the traditional postal services. Businesses have expanded and economies grown due to the advent of computers. The Internet and its applications such as E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Instagram to name a few have become valuable tools for purposes ranging from networking to marketing. If you have ever wondered how these wonderful and highly useful devices and applications have come about, ‘The Innovators’ by Walter Isaacson is a must read for you.

Collaboration

In this book that seems to be a biography of hackers, geniuses, geeks and inventors, Walter Isaacson emphasized how innovation is characterized by collaboration. In “The Innovators,” Isaacson provides a narrative of the inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs who have given the world computers and the Internet. Isaacson begins his narrative in the 1840s with Charles Barbage who built an Analytical Engine and Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron. He pointed out how the two have contributed to the “digital revolution” and how Charles’ Analytical engine was never produced due to no government funding and failed collaboration between Charles Barbage and Ada Lovelace.

Isaacson noted that Innovation happens in stages, it’s a process. According to him, a brilliant idea may be born due to individual brilliance but it takes a team to turn it into reality. One needs a team of engineers to share ideas and work collaboratively to turn out a revolutionary product and again a team of marketers to derive economic benefits from it. Throughout “The Innovators,” it is apparent that the great companies that have contributed to the digital revolution came about as a result of collaborative creative process. Isaacson reiterated the significance of collaboration by pointing out that John Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State University, could never get his punch card operator working while working alone. On the other hand, the group of engineers, mechanics and programmers at the University of Pennsylvania, led by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, got ENIAC up, running and solving problems. They could legitimately lay claim to the title of inventors of the electronic digital computer. Isaacson concludes that “Only in storybooks, do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a light bulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.”

The narratives of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Steve Job and Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and Sergey Brin all show the power of collaboration

The contribution of women to the digital revolution

Isaacson gives a vivid account of females who pioneered programming. Ada Lovelace who wrote a program for Charles Barbage’s Analytic Engine to generate Bernoulli numbers, Grace Hopper who wrote the first compiler and a host of other women who were the original programmers of the ENIAC computer. He recounted how human computers were mostly women and was a job reserved for women and connected it to the increasing number of women in programming.

Conflicts

Isaacson lays out some conflicts of the digital era. He recounts several court cases concerning patents. He also emphasizes the effect of such conflicts by recounting how Apple and Samsung spent huge sums of money on court cases more than they spent on research and product development. Placing intellectual property in the public domain, where it can be freely shared, as it was by inventors of the Internet and the Web, he notes, increases the likelihood of innovation. On the other hand, protecting intellectual property, the path followed for hardware, electronics and semiconductors, provides financial incentives, capital investment and market competition that can promote research and development.

Social life

Isaacson touches on the social life of the innovators, engineers and entrepreneurs in “The Innovators”. As one would expect, these individuals are nerds with very high IQ but low EQ. This trait makes them bad managers unable to establish good social relations with others. On the contrary, Isaacson recounts how some of these nerds are equally very good in management and has led to the success of their projects. He also touches on the ego of the characters and how it affects their works.

Innovators are unconventional and different

Almost all if not all the innovators and geeks as narrated by Isaacson were not conventional people. They do not follow the status quo. Isaacson recounts how Bill Gates decided to skip courses he is enrolled in and take other courses and only show up during exams. Isaacson noted that these geniuses are arrogant and it’s a common trait amongst them. The unconventional nature of Allan Turing, Robert Noyce, William Shockley, and Steve Job among others are not left out of Isaacson’s “The Innovators”. These accounts make the book interesting to read yet factual.

In his introduction of this book, Isaacson noted that he started writing “The Innovators” a decade ago. This is evident in how the book is well organized. One would think a biography of a bunch of people in one book would be boring to read but Isaacson took a different approach. The biographies are well organized and represents historical events of when and how the digital revolution started, major inventions that were made and the breakthroughs that make today’s devices a reality. I think he applied the concept of collaboration in this project as he laid out throughout his book. He however concluded with uncertainty on whether progress in artificial intelligence will ever reach the state where machines become smarter than humans and can program themselves to be even smarter.

Reviewed by Theodore Elikem Attigah