How to Fly a Horse Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Kevin Ashton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Jacket illustration by Christoph Niemann

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ashton, Kevin.

  How to fly a horse : the secret history of creation, invention, and discovery / Kevin Ashton.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53859-6 (hardcover) —

  ISBN 978-0-385-53860-2 (eBook)

  1. Creative ability—History. 2. Inventions—History.

  3. Success— History. I. Title.

  B105.C74A84 2015

  609— dc23

  2014030841

  v3.1

  FOR SASHA, ARLO, AND THEO

  A genius is the one most like himself.

  —THELONIOUS MONK

  Work your best at being you. That’s where home is.

  —BILL MURRAY

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PREFACE: THE MYTH

  CHAPTER 1

  CREATING IS ORDINARY

  CHAPTER 2

  THINKING IS LIKE WALKING

  CHAPTER 3

  EXPECT ADVERSITY

  CHAPTER 4

  HOW WE SEE

  CHAPTER 5

  WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAINS OF CONSEQUENCE

  CHAPTER 7

  THE GAS IN YOUR TANK

  CHAPTER 8

  CREATING ORGANIZATIONS

  CHAPTER 9

  GOOD-BYE, GENIUS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  About the Author

  PREFACE: THE MYTH

  In 1815, Germany’s General Music Journal published a letter in which Mozart described his creative process:

  When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. When I proceed to write down my ideas the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.

  In other words, Mozart’s greatest symphonies, concertos, and operas came to him complete when he was alone and in a good mood. He needed no tools to compose them. Once he had finished imagining his masterpieces, all he had to do was write them down.

  This letter has been used to explain creation many times. Parts of it appear in The Mathematician’s Mind, written by Jacques Hadamard in 1945, in Creativity: Selected Readings, edited by Philip Vernon in 1976, in Roger Penrose’s award-winning 1989 book, The Emperor’s New Mind, and it is alluded to in Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 bestseller Imagine. It influenced the poets Pushkin and Goethe and the playwright Peter Shaffer. Directly and indirectly, it helped shape common beliefs about creating.

  But there is a problem. Mozart did not write this letter. It is a forgery. This was first shown in 1856 by Mozart’s biographer Otto Jahn and has been confirmed by other scholars since.

  Mozart’s real letters—to his father, to his sister, and to others—reveal his true creative process. He was exceptionally talented, but he did not write by magic. He sketched his compositions, revised them, and sometimes got stuck. He could not work without a piano or harpsichord. He would set work aside and return to it later. He considered theory and craft while writing, and he thought a lot about rhythm, melody, and harmony. Even though his talent and a lifetime of practice made him fast and fluent, his work was exactly that: work. Masterpieces did not come to him complete in uninterrupted streams of imagination, nor without an instrument, nor did he write them down whole and unchanged. The letter is not only forged, it is false.

  It lives on because it appeals to romantic prejudices about invention. There is a myth about how something new comes to be. Geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole. Poems are written in dreams. Symphonies are composed complete. Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks. Businesses are built by magic touch. Something is not, then is. We do not see the road from nothing to new, and maybe we do not want to. Artistry must be misty magic, not sweat and grind. It dulls the luster to think that every elegant equation, beautiful painting, and brilliant machine is born of effort and error, the progeny of false starts and failures, and that each maker is as flawed, small, and mortal as the rest of us. It is seductive to conclude that great innovation is delivered to us by miracle via genius. And so the myth.

  The myth has shaped how we think about creating for as long as creating has been thought about. In ancient civilizations, people believed that things could be discovered but not created. For them, everything had already been created; they shared the perspective of Carl Sagan’s joke on this topic: “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In the Middle Ages, creation was possible but was reserved for divinity and those with divine inspiration. In the Renaissance, humans were finally thought capable of creation, but they had to be great men—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and the like. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, creating became a subject for philosophical, then psychological investigation. The question being investigated was “How do the great men do it?” and the answer had the residue of medieval divine intervention. A lot of the meat of the myth was added at this time, with the same few anecdotes about epiphanies and genius—including hoaxes like Mozart’s letter—being circulated and recirculated. In 1926, Alfred North Whitehead made a noun from a verb and gave the myth its name: creativity.

  The creativity myth implies that few people can be creative, that any successful creator will experience dramatic flashes of insight, and that creating is more like magic than work. A rare few have what it takes, and for them it comes easy. Anybody else’s creative efforts are doomed.

  How to Fly a Horse is about why the myth is wrong.

  I believed the myth until 1999. My early career—at London University’s student newspaper, at a Bloomsbury noodle start-up called Wagamama, and at a soap and paper company called Procter & Gamble—suggested that I was not good at creating. I struggled to execute my ideas. When I tried, people got angry. When I succeeded, they forgot that the idea was mine. I read every book I could find about creation, and each one said the same thing: ideas come magically, people greet them warmly, and creators are winners. My ideas came gradually, people greeted them with heat instead of warmth, and I felt like a loser. My performance reviews were bad. I was always in danger of being fired. I could not understand why my creative experiences were not like the ones in the books.

  It first occurred to me that the books might be wrong in 1997, when I was trying to solve an apparently boring problem that turned out to be interesting. I could not keep a popular shade of Procter & Gamble lipstick on store shelves. Half of all stores were out of stock at any given time. After much research, I discovered that the cause o
f the problem was insufficient information. The only way to see what was on a shelf at any moment was to go look. This was a fundamental limit of twentieth-century information technology. Almost all the data entered into computers in the 1900s came from people typing on keyboards or, sometimes, scanning bar codes. Store workers did not have time to stare at shelves all day, then enter data about what they saw, so every store’s computer system was blind. Shopkeepers did not discover that my lipstick was out of stock; shoppers did. The shoppers shrugged and picked a different one, in which case I probably lost the sale, or they did not buy lipstick at all, in which case the store lost the sale, too. The missing lipstick was one of the world’s smallest problems, but it was a symptom of one of the world’s biggest problems: computers were brains without senses.

  This was so obvious that few people noticed it. Computers were fifty years old in 1997. Most people had grown up with them and had grown used to how they worked. Computers processed data that people entered. As their name confirmed, computers were regarded as thinking machines, not sensing machines.

  But this is not how intelligent machines were originally conceived. In 1950, Alan Turing, computing’s inventor, wrote, “Machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy. Both approaches should be tried.”

  Yet few people tried that second approach. In the twentieth century, computers got faster and smaller and were connected together, but they did not get “the best sense organs that money can buy.” They did not get any “sense organs” at all. And so in May 1997, a computer called Deep Blue could beat the reigning human chess world champion, Garry Kasparov, for the first time ever, but there was no way a computer could see if a lipstick was on a shelf. This was the problem I wanted to solve.

  I put a tiny radio microchip into a lipstick and an antenna into a shelf; this, under the catchall name “Storage System,” became my first patented invention. The microchip saved money and memory by connecting to the Internet, newly public in the 1990s, and saving its data there. To help Procter & Gamble executives understand this system for connecting things like lipstick—and diapers, laundry detergent, potato chips, or any other object—to the Internet, I gave it a short and ungrammatical name: “the Internet of Things.” To help make it real, I started working with Sanjay Sarma, David Brock, and Sunny Siu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1999, we cofounded a research center, and I emigrated from England to the United States to become its executive director.

  In 2003, our research had 103 corporate sponsors, plus additional labs in universities in Australia, China, England, Japan, and Switzerland, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology signed a lucrative license deal to make our technology commercially available.

  In 2013, my phrase “Internet of Things” was added to the Oxford Dictionaries, which defined it as “a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data.”

  Nothing about this experience resembled the stories in the “creativity” books I had read. There was no magic, and there had been few flashes of inspiration—just tens of thousands of hours of work. Building the Internet of Things was slow and hard, fraught with politics, infested with mistakes, unconnected to grand plans or strategies. I learned to succeed by learning to fail. I learned to expect conflict. I learned not to be surprised by adversity but to prepare for it.

  I used what I discovered to help build technology businesses. One was named one of the ten “Most Innovative Companies in the Internet of Things” in 2014, and two were sold to bigger companies—one less than a year after I started it.

  I also gave talks about my experiences of creating. My most popular talk attracted so many people with so many questions that, each time I gave it, I had to plan to stay for at least an hour afterward to answer questions from audience members. That talk is the foundation of this book. Each chapter tells the true story of a creative person; each story comes from a different place, time, and creative field and highlights an important insight about creating. There are tales within the tales, and departures into science, history, and philosophy.

  Taken together, the stories reveal a pattern for how humans make new things, one that is both encouraging and challenging. The encouraging part is that everyone can create, and we can show that fairly conclusively. The challenging part is that there is no magic moment of creation. Creators spend almost all their time creating, persevering despite doubt, failure, ridicule, and rejection until they succeed in making something new and useful. There are no tricks, shortcuts, or get-creative-quick schemes. The process is ordinary, even if the outcome is not.

  Creating is not magic but work.

  1 | EDMOND

  In the Indian Ocean, fifteen hundred miles east of Africa and four thousand miles west of Australia, lies an island that the Portuguese knew as Santa Apolónia, the British as Bourbon, and the French, for a time, as Île Bonaparte. Today it is called Réunion. A bronze statue stands in Sainte-Suzanne, one of Réunion’s oldest towns. It shows an African boy in 1841, dressed as if for church, in a single-breasted jacket, bow tie, and flat-front pants that gather on the ground. He wears no shoes. He holds out his right hand, not in greeting but with his thumb and fingers coiled against his palm, perhaps about to flip a coin. He is twelve years old, an orphan and a slave, and his name is Edmond.

  The world has few statues of Africa’s enslaved children. To understand why Edmond stands here, on this lonely ocean speck, his hand held just so, we must travel west and back, thousands of miles and hundreds of years.

  On Mexico’s Gulf Coast, the people of Papantla have dried the fruit of a vinelike orchid and used it as a spice for more millennia than they remember. In 1400, the Aztecs took it as tax and called it “black flower.” In 1519, the Spanish introduced it to Europe and called it “little pod,” or vainilla. In 1703, French botanist Charles Plumier renamed it “vanilla.”

  Vanilla is hard to farm. Vanilla orchids are great creeping plants, not at all like the Phalaenopsis flowers we put in our homes. They can live for centuries and grow large, sometimes covering thousands of square feet or climbing five stories high. It has been said that lady’s slippers are the tallest orchids and tigers the most massive, but vanilla dwarfs them both. For thousands of years, its flower was a secret known only to the people who grew it. It is not black, as the Aztecs were led to believe, but a pale tube that blooms once a year and dies in a morning. If a flower is pollinated, it produces a long, green, beanlike capsule that takes nine months to ripen. It must be picked at precisely the right time. Too soon and it will be too small; too late and it will split and spoil. Picked beans are left in the sun for days, until they stop ripening. They do not smell of vanilla yet. That aroma develops during curing: two weeks on wool blankets outdoors each day before being wrapped to sweat each night. Then the beans are dried for four months and finished by hand with straightening and massage. The result is oily black lashes worth their weight in silver or gold.

  Vanilla captivated the Europeans. Anne of Austria, daughter of Spain’s King Philip III, drank it in hot chocolate. Queen Elizabeth I of England ate it in puddings. King Henry IV of France made adulterating it a criminal offense punishable by a beating. Thomas Jefferson discovered it in Paris and wrote America’s first recipe for vanilla ice cream.

  But no one outside Mexico could make it grow. For three hundred years, vines transported to Europe would not flower. It was only in 1806 that vanilla first bloomed in a London greenhouse and three more decades before a plant in Belgium bore Europe’s first fruit.

  The missing ingredient was whatever pollinated the orchid in the wild. The flower in London was a chance occurrence. The fruit in Belgium came from complicated artificial pollination. It was not until
late in the nineteenth century that Charles Darwin inferred that a Mexican insect must be vanilla’s pollinator, and not until late in the twentieth century that the insect was identified as a glossy green bee called Euglossa viridissima. Without the pollinator, Europe had a problem. Demand for vanilla was increasing, but Mexico was producing only one or two tons a year. The Europeans needed another source of supply. The Spanish hoped vanilla would thrive in the Philippines. The Dutch planted it in Java. The British sent it to India. All attempts failed.

  This is where Edmond enters. He was born in Sainte-Suzanne in 1829. At that time Réunion was called Bourbon. His mother, Mélise, died in childbirth. He did not know his father. Slaves did not have last names—he was simply “Edmond.” When Edmond was a few years old, his owner, Elvire Bellier-Beaumont, gave him to her brother Ferréol in nearby Belle-Vue. Ferréol owned a plantation. Edmond grew up following Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont around the estate, learning about its fruits, vegetables, and flowers, including one of its oddities—a vanilla vine Ferréol had kept alive since 1822.

  Like all the vanilla on Réunion, Ferréol’s vine was sterile. French colonists had been trying to grow the plant on the island since 1819. After a few false starts—some orchids were the wrong species, some soon died—they eventually had a hundred live vines. But Réunion saw no more success with vanilla than Europe’s other colonies had. The orchids seldom flowered and never bore fruit.

  Then, one morning late in 1841, as the spring of the Southern Hemisphere came to the island, Ferréol took his customary walk with Edmond and was surprised to find two green capsules hanging from the vine. His orchid, barren for twenty years, had fruit. What came next surprised him even more. Twelve-year-old Edmond said he had pollinated the plant himself.

  To this day there are people in Réunion who do not believe it. It seems impossible to them that a child, a slave, and, above all, an African, could have solved the problem that beat Europe for hundreds of years. They say it was an accident—that he was trying to damage the flowers after an argument with Ferréol or he was busy seducing a girl in the gardens when it happened.