Invention and Innovation

A Brief History of Hype and Failure

By: Vaclav Smil

Narrated by: Tim Fannon

From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, 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. He then looks at three different types of inventions.

Inventions that failed to dominate as promised:

Airships

Nuclear fission

Supersonic flight

Inventions that turned disastrous:

Leaded gasoline

DDT

Chlorofluorocarbons

Inventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial):

Travel in vacuum (hyperloop)

Nitrogen-fixing cereals

Nuclear fusion

Finally, 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.

©2023 Vaclav Smil (P)2023 Recorded Books

Not quite as good as some of his other books

The narration was good but the content not quite as good as his other books.

Innovation on timeline

In the latest book the author analyzes optimism and hype associated with innovation through a number of clearly presented use cases. Highly recommend!

Similar to other books, but a different view

This book is Mostly a rehashing of concepts better told in Vaclav’s other books. Notwithstanding, the book is much more concise, and for that reason I liked it a lot.

Don’t give up!

The author is a very knowledgeable skeptic. This book is a great listen for anyone, like me, who hopes for technology to solve our current and future problems. It’s going to be a lot harder than you’d think by reading much of the coverage of scientific breakthroughs. But don’t give up. We’ve made amazing progress in the past and we have to keep trying.

lmm

Very informative and alarming at my misconceptions of the science we have achieved thus far.