NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.
Ridiculing good new ideas
Great advances are often met with resistance and mocked by people who think that someone must be a nut for not thinking like others.
In 1905, Orville and Wilbur Wright tried to interest the United States War Department in their new invention, a practical airplane, but they were repeatedly turned down. The War Department initially thought that they were crackpots, and later deemed the airplane to be of no military significance.
Lord Kelvin said, “Radio has no future” and “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” Thomas Edison claimed, “They never will try to steal the phonograph; it is of no commercial value.”
More examples of underestimating what is possible:
“There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.”
— Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corp (1977)
“Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.”
— Bill Gates (1976)
“What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
— Michael Dell, on Apple in 1997. Apple is now worth more than Microsoft, IBM, HP, and is over ten times as valuable as Dell.
“Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.”
— Henry Morton, President of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on Edison's incandescent lamp (1880)
“Fooling around with alternating current [AC] is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.”
— Thomas Edison (1889) Almost every home and business is now powered by AC.
“The phonograph has no commercial value at all.”
— Thomas Edison (1880s)
“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
— Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office (1878)
“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a means of communication. The device is of inherently no value to us.”
— Western Union internal memo (1876)
“It's a great invention, but who would want to use it anyway?”
— President Rutherford B. Hayes, after seeing a demonstration of Alexander Bell's telephone
“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”
— Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube (1926)
“Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.”
Editorial in the Boston Post (1865)
“Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.”
— Dennis Gabor, Hungarian-British electrical engineer and Nobel Prize-winning inventor of holography (1962)
“The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated.”
— Dr. Alfred Velpeau, French surgeon (1839)
“That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done [research on]. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
— Admiral William Leahy, advising President Truman on atomic weaponry (1944)
“The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most.”
— IBM telling the eventual founders of Xerox that the photocopier market was not large enough to justify production (1959)
“Television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
— Darryl Zanuck, Hollywood studio executive (1946)
“No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free.”
— King William I of Prussia, commenting on trains (1864)
“That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.”
— Scientific American magazine (1909)
“The horse is here to stay, the automobile is only a fad.”
— Advice given by a bank president to Horace Rackham, who ignored it and invested $5000 in Ford stock, later selling it for $12.5 million, equivalent to $312 million in 2011 dollars (1903)
“So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'”
— Steve Jobs
Mark Twain said, “A man with a new idea is a crank—until the idea succeeds.”
Frank Zappa wisely noted that “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.”
A chemist who did what was considered impossible urged others “to think outside the box and not be inhibited or intimidated about sharing ... new and unconventional ideas.”
Michel Mirowski, the sole member of his family to survive the Holocaust, later became a physician who invented the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). Great idea, right? Yes, but rather than initially being praised for his brilliant breakthrough, “a critical editorial was published in Circulation by the leader in the field at the time [1972]. The editorial galvanized the cardiology community to reject the ICD and consequently ostracize Dr. Mirowski and his colleagues. Fortunately, Dr. Mirowski and his team persevered and eventually witnessed the first patient implanted with the ICD in 1980.”
If you study the history of science and technology, you will see that the old guard uses ostracism and ridicule to defend their antiquated positions. One cannot be a truly great scientist or inventor without having ideas that are a step or two ahead of current thinking. The claim to fame of the experts is their mastery of that knowledge base, so they often jealously guard attempts by innovators to expand it.
If you multiply the average number of lives saved by ICDs per year by the number of years ICD acceptance was delayed by the old guard, you will arrive at a death toll that is a direct result of close-mindedness.
Close-mindedness is a recipe for intellectual and economic stagnation. If there is one thing the United States needs now, it is a number of great outside-the-box ideas because inside-the-box ideas won't be enough to save us and restore our prosperity. But who has the courage to propose outside-the-box ideas? Who wants to be ridiculed for proposing something new?
Close-mindedness in healthcare is also a recipe for death. I developed two new ways to curb HIV transmission because the current approaches are woefully ineffective. I contacted the Gates Foundation that is interested in HIV/AIDS, but evidently not new ideas, because they never responded to my letter. As a doctor, I know my breakthroughs would save millions of lives. Why not give me 15 seconds to present them? Why? Because they have big heads, not big ideas. People with lots of money or power often acquire an overblown sense of their intelligence, capabilities, and opinions. They are correct; others are wrong—or so they think.
Our politicians think they are earning their paychecks by investing our money in roads, bridges, trains, and other relics from the 19th century. Our calendars are now in the 21st century; shouldn't our technology be, too?
We could step into the 21st century and put our economy on steroids, as I discussed in another article, but politicians lack the guts and vision to propose novel solutions. The tacit message is: let's just keep doing what we've been doing, even though that is clearly not enough.
Years ago, I thought of another solution that could end our seemingly endless recession and catapult our economy into a new golden age. My idea should appeal to everyone from staunch conservatives to bleeding-heart liberals and everybody in between with common sense, but my plan will inevitably meet resistance by people and politicians who prefer to do things the old way. The old way buried us under a mountain of debt, and no one other than me has a viable solution for quickly digging us out of that hole and ascending a new peak of greatness. Just as it is possible in retrospect to regret the delayed introduction of the ICD (as discussed above) secondary to close-mindedness, people in the future will one day regret not having my proposal implemented sooner.
Corporations stagnate and die when their pace of innovation stalls, leaving them in the dust of their competitors with better ideas. The USA once was a nation of imaginative people with ideas that enabled us to quickly become an economic superpower. However, our pace of genuine innovation has slowed, and our country is slipping down a slope that will carry us to an economic hell. The need for big new ideas is greater than ever, but our businesses think minor tweaks are synonymous with true invention, and our leaders dare not do anything except rehash freeze-dried ideas from bygone American politicians.
“So-called 'peer-review' is an oxymoron: if an idea is actually new, then the existence of peers is obviously impossible, which is why almost all of the truly valuable ideas and inventions have come from people who were totally outside the scientific community, people like Edison, Tesla, the Wright Brothers and a long list of others.”
— Arthur Jones
Studies have shown that most scientists tend to follow the pack with a “follow the leader” mentality. Those people do valuable work by conducting the nuts-and-bolts research that needs to be done, but they aren't the mavericks who generate new ideas.
Most people don't like creative ideas. They say they do, but researchers found that creative ideas elicited strongly negative reactions. They said that creative ideas “can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.” Even when there is a desperate need for change and the creative solution is wholly positive, most folks prefer to cling to the old way of doing things.
We live in an inside-the-box world that often ridicules new ideas. When you penalize something, you get less of it.
There's a price to be paid for conformity, and we're paying it.
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher (1844 - 1900)
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
. . . and thinking for yourself.
Being hidebound shouldn't be a badge of honor, yet many people pat themselves on the back for clinging to the past and old ways of doing things. Such people often smugly congratulate themselves for sniping at innovators, but in doing so, they evince their dearth of intelligence.
“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
— Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address (2005)
Few people have the courage to follow their dreams and break new ground instead of plodding along the well-worn paths of past generations that have collectively taken the world, and us individually, to places we don't want to be. Like a freeway that bypasses the most interesting sights, by staying on what seems to be the fast track that takes us where we want to go, we miss opportunities to discover what's truly great. If you're on the freeway to nowhere and aspire to be an innovator, head for the nearest exit and follow a path that leads to places others never see. No great invention was ever conventional before its value was apparent to lesser minds, so have the fortitude to pursue offbeat ideas.
“The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.”
— Anonymous
“Small minds cannot comprehend big spirits. To be great you have to be willing to be mocked, hated, and misunderstood. Stay strong.”
— Robert Tew
Polymath Nathan Myhrvold remarked that a friend of his said that “you can’t do anything new in the world without being misunderstood.” True. History abounds with examples of how brilliant innovators were scorned and ridiculed. For all the lip service we give to valuing new ideas and those who generate them, we're often allergic to the former and eager to lambaste the latter, preferring to reserve our adulation for cute dysfunctional celebrities and professional athletes skilled at playing children's games. The best way to harmonize with the world and especially those who control it is to meekly accept its myriad imperfections. Spineless people do that, while courageous people pave the way to a brighter future.
An advertising slogan created for Apple Computer in 1997 brilliantly explained how “the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently” who are “crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 - 1860)
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer (1828–1910)
Comment: This explains resistance to the germ theory of disease.
“My guess is that well over 80% of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment. The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters.”
— H. L. Mencken
“Bullies often envy their victims because they are fabulously unique people who can kick ass, and have no need or desire to follow the flock.”
— Paraphrasing Carrie commenting on Bullying: One Boy's Story
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
— Albert Einstein
Comment #157 by Misty Hausmann
March 22 2011 10:50:58 PM
I am stumped and you are the smartest person I know
I am helping my daughter with her homework and I just posted this comment on Facebook:
Why does my 11-year-old need to know the background and facets of all these shapes??? Tetrahedron, Octahedron, Icosahedron and dodecahedron. Seriously! Where is Dr. Pezzi when I need him?
When will she need to use these in her lifetime?
I know this is a little off subject.
Thanks
Misty
REPLY FROM KEVIN PEZZI: Hi Misty!
I used similar information when I built my lighthouse shed, which included a few dodecagon (12-sided polygon) elements in addition to conical, cylindrical, and hemispherical structures. Those basic shapes are pretty straightforward, but mathematically modeling some of their intersections was challenging. It took many days searching online to find the equation I needed; what I had in college wasn't even close.
I am also using similar info in working on an invention in which I am analyzing the vectors of force that act on various 3-dimensional objects.
I found some links that help explain the usefulness of such info:
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecahedron#History_and_uses
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icosahedron#Uses_and_natural_forms
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedron#Octahedra_in_the_physical_world
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedron#Octahedra_in_music
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahedron#Applications