Invention and Innovation

Tour the history of human invention—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts—in this history book from the New York Times-bestselling author of How the World Really Works.

A BILL GATES RECOMMENDED BOOK: “Every Smil book that I own is marked up with lots of notes that I take while reading. Invention and Innovation is no exception.”

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil, author of New York Times bestsellers How the World Really Works and Energy and Civilization. In Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm.

Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation, and looks not only at inventions that failed to dominate as promised (such as the airship, nuclear fission, and supersonic flight), but also at those that turned disastrous (leaded gasoline, DDT, and chlorofluorocarbons). And finally, most importantly, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.

Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.

I Inventions and innovations: a long history and modern infatuation 1

II Inventions that turned from welcome to undesirable 19
Leaded gasoline 23 
DDT 36
Chlorofluorocarbons 49

III Inventions that were to dominate –- and do not 63
Airships 66
Nuclear fission 79 
Supersonic flight 93

IV Inventions that we keep waiting for 107
Travel in (near) vacuum (hyperloop) 109
Nitrogen-fixing cereals 123
Controlled Nuclear Fusion 135

V Techno-optimism, exaggerations, and realistic expectations 151
Breakthroughs that are not 152
Myth of ever-faster innovations 160
What we need most 171

Further reading 185
Index 209