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Example

Diverse application of deep practical skills creates novel options

Find ideasHistory shows us that during periods of technological change those that apply deep skills at the margins of current applications are more likely to create and explore options successfully.

The diverse application of deep practical skills implicitly creates the ability to find novel options as demonstrated by the early lives of James Watt, Bill Gates, Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers (as documented in Wikipedia):

James Watt, whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the industrial revolution (wikipedia/James_Watt):

  • When he was eighteen, Watt traveled to London to study instrument-making for a year, then returned to Scotland, settling in the major commercial city of Glasgow intent on setting up his own instrument-making business. He made and repaired brass reflecting quadrants, parallel rulers, scales, parts for telescopes, and barometers, among other things.
  • Astronomical instruments arrived at the University of Glasgow, instruments that required expert attention. Watt restored them to working order. He worked on maintaining and repairing scientific instruments used in the university, helping with demonstrations, and expanding the production of quadrants.
  • In 1759 he formed a partnership with John Craig, an architect and businessman, to manufacture and sell a line of products including musical instruments and toys.
  • In 1759 Watt’s friend, John Robison, called his attention to the use of steam as a source of motive power. The design of the Newcomen engine, in use for almost 50 years for pumping water from mines, had hardly changed from its first implementation. Watt began to experiment with steam though he had never seen an operating steam engine. He tried constructing a model. It failed to work satisfactorily, but he continued his experiments and began to read everything he could about the subject.
  • In 1763, Watt was asked to repair a model Newcomen engine belonging to the university. Even after repair, this engine only barely worked. After much experimentation, Watt demonstrated that about three-quarters of the heat of the steam was being wasted – consumed in heating the engine cylinder on every cycle.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft (wikipedia/Bill_Gates)

  • (At school) Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer.
  • One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
  • At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype, Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in Fortran, Lisp, and machine language.
  • The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in Cobol, providing them computer time and royalties.
  • After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school’s computer program to schedule students in classes.
  • At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.
  • In his sophomore year (at Harvard), Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates’s solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years.
  • Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school’s computers.
  • The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company.
  • In the first five years (of Microsoft), Gates personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.

Henry Ford, developer of the mass-produced, low cost automobile (wikipedia/Henry_Ford)

  • At 15, Ford dismantled and reassembled the timepieces of friends and neighbors dozens of times, gaining the reputation of a watch repairman.
  • In 1879, Ford left home to work as an apprentice machinist in Detroit, first with James F. Flower & Bros., and later with the Detroit Dry Dock Co.
  • In 1882, he returned to Dearborn to work on the family farm, where he became adept at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. He was later hired by Westinghouse to service their steam engines.
  • In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. After his promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893, he had enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on gasoline engines. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of a self-propelled vehicle which he named the Ford Quadricycle. He test-drove it on June 4. After various test drives, Ford brainstormed ways to improve the Quadricycle.

The Wright brothers, developers of the first practical fixed-wing aircraft, gained the mechanical skills essential for their (aviation) success by working for years in their repair shop with printing presses, bicycles, motors, and other machinery. Their work with bicycles in particular influenced their belief that an unstable vehicle like a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with practice. (wikipedia/Wright_brothers)