Juice by Schwartz Evan I.;

Author:Schwartz, Evan I.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2004-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

REACHING INTO HISTORY

This behavior—of moving from base to target and sometimes back and forth repeatedly—reaches far back into history. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, observed that birds, when they spread their wings, used the air as a “wedge to raise them up.” He used the mechanical concept of a wedge as the base to understand behavior in the natural world. In turn, he used the flight of birds as the base to conceive of his target: a flying machine. Brainstorming an example of a rotating wedge, da Vinci conceived of a mechanical analogy: that of a screw boring into wood, lifting material out of the way as it turns. From that observation, he conceived of an “air screw.” His famous sketches of a helicopter-like apparatus feature screw-like rungs lifting a cone-shaped basket into the air. “If this instrument made with a screw . . . [is] turned swiftly,” he wrote, “the said screw will make its spiral in the air and it will rise high.”5

Da Vinci’s conception of an air screw as a flying machine was unworkable, but it was a breakthrough analogy nonetheless. It would be left to future inventors to conceive of an even better analogy, that of a rotary wing, a concept that led to the development of the propeller.

Johannes Gutenberg, by contrast, was able to put his analogy into practice. Gutenberg, a fifteenth-century German metalworker, was searching for a system for mass-producing the Bible. At that time, monks hand-carved wooden plates for each page they wanted to print. They inked the plate, laid a piece of paper on it, and rubbed it until an impression was made. It beat copying manuscripts by hand, but it wasn’t an efficient way to reproduce books. Although the Chinese are known to have invented movable type earlier, Gutenberg didn’t know about it. He set out to reinvent aspects of printing, as often happens in the world of invention.

In his revolutionary creation of a printing press, Gutenberg applied two analogies. He took the first one from the stamps and wax seals used for embossing emblems or characters on paper. He saw that if he were to line up many of these stamps in rows, he’d be able to rearrange and reuse them. When he miniaturized the characters and fashioned them out of metal that could be positioned in rows, he became the first European known to create movable type.

What remained was to replace hand rubbing with a way of rapidly printing page after page from the same plate. Gutenberg stumbled into this more interesting analogy at a wine festival. There, amid the drunken revelry, he saw a hand-cranked winepress that was used to extract juice from flat beds of grapes. That was the inspiration for creating a hand-cranked machine that rapidly pressed blank pages against a flat bed of easily arranged characters.6 Nearly six centuries later, we use that analogy every time we refer to the media as “the press.”

Gutenberg’s isn’t the only media invention that originated from analogies that recall the world of agriculture.

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