This image comes to mind again because we seem to be getting more and more comments on a variety of articles in the vein of, “That’s not new, XYZ company did that years ago,” or “It’s just a simple combination of A and B. Anyone can do that.” I wonder if Picasso heard that.
We showed you one man’s design for a possible Moto Guzzi sport bike, the other day and while the design is in no way high art, it is what one person saw in his own mind, and with the help of an existing image of an Aprilia as a start, he changed and rearranged it until a different image emerged so he could show others what he was thinking. The comments about the Aprilia soon followed.
The very next topic, the Grail Engine brought similar comments referring to an earlier aero engine called the Gnome as its precursor, something which the Grail designers themselves acknowledge. Does the fact that earlier designs and ideas were used in the design of this engine, make it nothing new? I wonder.
Look at the long list of past builds and designs over in the right hand column on this website. It’s an impressive list filled with derivatives of something that already existed, but with a lot of thought and no small amount of effort, became something new. Are all of those accomplishments less worthy of our attention as a result?
If you carry this “it’s not new” idea to its logical conclusion, even Charles Taylor would be subject to the same criticism, after all, he used a wheel, a gas engine or two, a gyro and all sorts of preexisting technology. Anyone could do it, right? … So why didn’t they?
There’s certainly nothing wrong with showing how previous ideas are related and contribute to a particular new work, it can help us understand how the new idea came about and enable us to grasp a sometimes complex operation. Unfortunately, being too quick and insistent in this “hey, it’s not new” commentary, makes it appear to be a bit more than a simple historical reference.
Hey, what’s new?
Ever since the earth was formed, everything we see, everything we have, is some combination, rearrangement or modification of things already here. Some people constantly look for new combinations where others insist on seeing only what already exists. The ability to see new combinations and even more, the drive to actually bring them into being so others can see them, too, and benefit from their existence, is a quality not present in everyone. I strongly believe that those focused on pointing out that every new attempt is simply a rehash of old ideas, would accomplish far more, if they tried, instead, to create something new themselves. They might stumble on to something wonderful, or in the very least, develop a new appreciation for the work these others are trying do.
B50 Jim says
Truly new ideas are extremely rare (how ’bout anti-gravity propulsion?) — what makes the difference is how well innovative people apply older ideas and make something useful. I the years following World War II the Japanese began building an industrial colossus by adapting and improving products and techniques that already existed in markets elsewhere. Their main innovation was to apply the concept of continuous improvement, itself the idea of the American J. Edwards Deming, who shopped the idea around to American manufacturers with little luck. The Japanese knew a good concept when they saw it, however, and by the early 80s they were eating the Big Four’s lunch. They had a few innovations, but their success was based on applying existing concepts and making them work better. It’s a simple thing but it often meets stiff opposition within entrenched organizations. There was no overwhelming reason the English motorcycle manufacturers couldn’t have built bikes that didn’t leak, didn’t break, started easily (with electric starters, no less) and ran reliably, but it took Honda to put all those concepts into practice. The English were entrenched in a mindset and a system that discouraged innovation, while the Japanese embraced and celebrated it.
So that’s the difference — those who say “We’re doing all right now” as opposed to those who say “Let’s see what we do with this.” The “Let’s see” crowd will win out every time!
Robert Garrett says
A perfect read for a Monday morning. The tools that we use and need are already in existence, waiting for us to find the right combination.
I was musing over this same subject when thinking about the prevalence of electric cars pre-Texas oil boom the other day. I was thinking that all we were really waiting for was the forehead slap that accompanied the Ah-ha! moment.
Carolynne says
Interestingly I was listening to a radio program just the other day about how in todays complex technology, being first was is not necessary the best. The speaker was taking about Steve Jobs and that he was never first at anything and all his ideas came from other people. What was put forward in this program was that the first attempt at anything new will have all kinds of flaws, it can take years to work out a new technology and it is the later developers who take those ideas and improve on them fixings the issues are the ones who dominate.
kim says
Keep in mind that engineers are usually 25 years ahead of what is feasible in terms of materials and production costs; The dohc MV Agusta sportsbike is but one example, early applications of the Wankel engine another. In the end materials – like it happened with carbon fiber – will go down in price enough to be widely used, just like manufacturing costs have come down too thanks to computer technology.
Btw, same thing goes for designers; The look of the NSU Ro80 car was a decade or two ahead of its time, but many of its features were eventually used on cars from other manufacturers, proving that being ahead of the time can be as commercially bad as being behind them.
And then there are inventions that – unbeknowst to their creators – appear in more than one place. Occasionally at the same time, like it happened with jet engines in Germany & England respctively, but sometimes separated in time as well.
HoughMade says
This article is great and all, but I thought the same thing years ago.
Paul Crowe - "The Kneeslider" says
I think the majority here have long thought this way as well. It’s just a few observations for those who don’t.
HoughMade says
I was trying to make a “ha, ha”….trying to, at least.
Carolynne says
I giggled
Racetrack Style says
same here
Paul Crowe - "The Kneeslider" says
I knew that … before you even wrote it. … 🙂
Or should I just say … DOH! I’m usually quicker than that.
Jim Abbott says
And how strange is it that the U.S. Congress, at the turn of the last century, tried to abolish the U.S. Patent Office because it felt that everything had been invented already. HAH! Jim A.
GuitarSlinger says
Simply put ; There Is Nothing New Under the Sun . A different twist perhaps . A variation here or there . Maybe a different blend of ideas .An evolution of an old thought or design But the basic fact remains that Nothing Comes from Nothing and Nothing is therefore entirely Original .
The problem comes in when something is a direct and blatant copy of another , rather than influenced or inspired by something else . My standard being ; If it brings something new to the party : or genuinely advances a former design /idea then its as original as its ever going to get . If though , its a pathetic pastiche of ideas/thoughts or worse yet a blatant copy claiming to be original ….. well …… then we’re head first into Lies & Pretension , with any and all criticism warranted and valid
kim says
Or – as I pointed out above (didn’t read it, did you?) – two people separated by geography or time both get the same idea.
Racetrack Style says
Fine Art on The Kneeslider – good way to start the week. Great article and comments.
The way the mind forms ideas is fascinating. A part of a ‘new’ design could have been captured by the mind’s eye long ago without the person consciously contemplating an existing part at that point in time. Only later, a person pulls the stored piece of the puzzle from deep within their mind. It is wild to realize that what you thought was a new idea was actually stored away for awhile in some form or another, small or large. Subliminal awareness
Hooligan says
Can anyone supply numerical proof of how many times the wheel has been re -invented?.
I like the Art connection.
Artists and Engineers are cut from the same cloth.
Both can think with some visionary zeitgeist “it would would work if you turned it upside down” The conceptual thought process for both disciplines is the same. As is the actual making it..
As a fan of Art I am a fan of the process of how you get to the end result you want.
GuitarSlinger says
As to your ” Artists and Engineers are cut from the same cloth ” comment . Up and until the early 20th Century Arts & Sciences were considered to be of the same ilk , different genres . Which is to say you’re spot on . The fact is there is more ‘ Art’ in the Sciences than most scientists today will admit to …. as well as as much ‘ Science ‘ in the Arts than most artists will own up to . They are in essence … one in the same with different goals . The ‘ separation of Arts & Science ( engineering being a ‘ science ) is by far the single most destructive element in both endeavors today along with the Educational systems teaching them .
Paul Crowe - "The Kneeslider" says
The art / engineering connection was discussed here
Idealgiant says
Good use of the word “ilk,” what a greatly/greatly under used word.
sfan says
Paul, I love it when, from time to time you step back and go philosophical. After all, alone on a bike, ideally un-rushed on a country road, can be a perfect opportunity for deep and reflective thought.
There is a new, provocative, persuasive and brief book on the subject of free will by Sam Harris that I recommend to anyone interested. The implications for creativity and innovation, for example, are that nothing is really new, rather it is the effect of creative re-combinations, extrapolations or applications of prior causal experiences (or genetic programming). Incremental innovation is rather obvious. Disruptive innovation is a result of the application on of ideas from one domain, like handlebars and a bicycle seat, in another domain, artistic representation of a bull.
Preparing for a meeting this week, I discovered the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ “a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature”.[1] It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science fiction author Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as “the theory of inventive problem solving”,[2][3] and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.”
B50 Jim says
In 1917, the artist Marcel Duchamp turned a porcelain urinal on its back, scrawled “R. MUTT 1917” on it and named it “Fountain”. Of course it scandalized the Art Establishment… but touched off the avant-guarde art movement. Porcelain urinals hung by the thousands in mens’ rooms across America, but Duchamp literally turned it on its back and used it in a way for which it never was intended. That was his statement — there is very little art in a utilitarian piece of plumbing, but look at it with new eyes and you’ll see it in a different light. Whereas urinals were hung on walls like artworks, Duchamp took on off the wall to make it a piece of art. It could have been anything — although Duchamp said America’s only real art was its plumbing and bridges — the point of the exercise was to envision new uses for existing objects. The very thing we’re talking about here.
bbartcadia says
Often something is considered art only because someone well known says it is and it becomes accepted and often copied and named as a new movement whether any talent is involved or not.
B50 Jim says
Duchamp had talent — but “Fountain” wasn’t intended as “Art”. Its purpose was to make us see the world in a different light. Remember, in 1917 Europe was in the throes of a hideously deadly and destructive war. The slaughter was beyond appalling. The war was deadlocked with the antagonists dug into trenches, sometimes mere yards apart, and fighting over the same few miles of ground. The military leadership on all sides, its mind firmly stuck in 19th-century concepts of martial glory, threw wave after wave of men into the meat grinder of mechanized war to no advantage. Duchamp, highly aware of the carnage, tried to say that we need to look at old things in a new ways. Unfortunately, he was reaching the wrong audience. I believe art was the farthest thing from his mind. That his creation began a movement was accidental.
Giorgio says
Can we assume that fantasy is the ability to remix experience? And that the more you know, the more you can play with your knowledge? Is this true also for engineers? 😉
coho says
“If you learn the rules, you can break them more effectively” applies equally to artists and engineers.
Fred M. says
I think what bothers some of us is the blurring of the lines between a Photoshop styling exercise and actual engineering; a Photoshopped image that melds parts from multiple bikes together is a far-cry from a concept bike or a production-ready bike design.
I don’t intend to slight the Photoshop artist, or even suggest that I have anything approaching their talent. But I think that a bit more credit is due the people who go beyond simply styling and really engineer something.
Marvin says
I think there is room here for artists, artisans and engineers.
mattg says
I like this post.
As a practicing art director the quest is to find elemental reference and apply it in a culturally relevant way to a problem. In art school everyone goes on about “their style” and originality but the art is in meaningful synthesis.
I went to engineering school for one year but I was terrible at measuring:) I’m much happier to do something fun and won’t collapse or explode.
OMMAG says
Good point and nicely done.
I am a big fan of reinventing, reviving and and simply trying new ways to use things that are already around. Picasso was a master of reduction. That was his genius. He was also a talented master of creating alternative perspectives. That was his art.
The ability to understand how things work is a matter of intelligence and the ability to see and create solutions based on that understanding is a matter of talent.
There’s something valid in any effort to create so long as credit is given where it is due.
Tom says
There is something a friend of mine and I refer to as “Junkeye.” We sit around, staring at a pile of junk and scrap metal. Until we see what we can make. I saw a bit of chrome and a curved piece of metal a couple of months ago in the pile, and so I used some scraps, made copper sheets for a shade, and welded and copperplated parts, and made myself a very nice little lamp for my lathe. Last week, I saw an old oil furnace, and a lawnmower frame, and now I’m working on making a foundry out of it. Next in line are a sandblasting cabinet (Oil drum, left over lighting fixtures and some extruded metal.) And then, maybe a pulse jet (More lawnmower parts, and a tube from a coal power plant steam turbine.)
Most people think we’re nuts, and ask why we bother, when you can just go out and buy these things. The answer is of course first off, we’re poor!
Second, why not? Are we making huge strides forward in innovation? Not always. But we have made some things that you don’t see everyday, out of ideas that you DO hear everyday. Most people you see making money off inventions aren’t doing anything “new.” They’re just combining existing tech in ways other people slap their forehead for not thinking of first. Because it was SO OBVIOUS IN HINDSIGHT. So… is it foresight? Or JUNKEYE?
Nortley says
Behind many great inventions stands a good junk pile.
HigherRPM says
And the junk pile yeilds art… Engineer as creator…
Cobalt says
Funny that you gave one of Picaso’s works as an example. My high school art teacher liked to say (sarcastically), “Who do you think you are, Picaso?”
I agree whole-heartedly with you. Technology and art continually builds off of itself. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen huge jumps in technology. Cell phones and computers are good examples. Yeah, they progressed quickly, but they started out gaudy and slow. It was constant tweaks to existing technology that brought them to where they are today.
Adrian van den Hoven says
I agree with everything you say except your conclusion that everything is a “recombination” of things that alreay existed. Although some historian of science may well be able to prove that not only the first steam engine but also the first internal combustion engine had predecessors, since the early eighteen hundreds we have lived through several qualitatitve shifts in technology that no one before ever experienced!! Adrian
Paul Crowe - "The Kneeslider" says
I stand by my statement that innovations are a “combination, rearrangement or modification of things already here”
I would suggest two resources which you’ll find extremely fascinating. The first is the television series Connections with James Burke, first aired in the late 1970s. It’s educational, entertaining, and in my mind, perhaps the best technical documentary series ever done. After the first series became such a hit, there were two follow ups, Connections 2 and Connections 3. He shows you how the innovations we take for granted came into existence in a sometimes circuitous, but nevertheless connected, route, the steam engine is among them. It didn’t just pop up out of nowhere.
The second is a book by Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. The book delves into the increasing speed of technical innovation, eventually resulting in, what he calls, the singularity. Whether or not you accept his ideas about the singularity, the point relevant here, is how very slow progress is in the early stages of exponential growth, yet later the changes are breathtaking. It makes the appearance of some technology seem so different, the steam engine or internal combustion engine in your examples, as to seem almost out of place, yet they’re a natural result of the speed of change and should not only be expected, but can almost be predicted. Again, you don’t have to buy in to the “singularity” hypothesis to see how technical advance accelerated over the years.
Richard says
I must clarify my argument:
I have absolutely no problem with improvement of technology based on existing technology, actually it is an absolute necessity and the only thing which has given technology the advancement it has attained in the last three centuries. What has also been extremely important in this advance, has been the scientific attitude of doubt over every information you receive, which must be scrunitized and checked.
I contest the term “revolutionary”, because there are no figures or technology claimed for the Grail engine which deserve the title (in my humble opinion).
Also, the claim that it will do 100 mpg, is hiding behind numbers. The only statistic that actually informs something about true consumption is “grams of fuel per HP/h”.
If these figures are anywhere near those of the Napier Nomad, I will execute a standing ovation.
An other detail, if you blow air through a crankcase which is busy lubricating the moving parts, you almost invariably have a mist of oil everywhere. How is it that oil will not contaminate the combustion?
“Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence” Carl Sagan
Paul says
We’ve got to be careful with basing “new” off “old”. If we just take an old idea and make it better, we may completely miss a “new” idea that we’ve overlooked.
While the progression of old ideas in new ideas may make some outstanding contributions to our world, it is the ability to take that old idea and add new technology to it. The iPhone, while an awesome product, is just a combination of the latest and great technologies.
Real innovation comes from a challenge that requires “sub”-innovations so that the finished product is completely or mostly new.
The electric car, for example. The innovation is just the electric car, but the social change, the infrastructure change and the policy change. You don’t reinvent the electric car, you reinvent the world in which its used.
Paul Crowe - "The Kneeslider" says
The world doesn’t need to be reinvented. As B50 notes below it usually doesn’t work very well, but I would go further and say it is almost guaranteed to go very wrong.
The world changes as a result of billions of individual decisions, freely made in response to specific circumstances, like whether or not to buy an electric car, to use your example. Reinventing the world, especially with “policy change” is forcing all of those decisions to be made in one specific way. Not good.
B50 Jim says
Deliberately reinventing the world to accommodate new technology usually doesn’t work very well — the world changes in response to widespread use of new technology. Nobody would have installed those miles of fiber-optic cable unless the computer revolution hadn’t demanded the greater data-carrying capacity fiber-optics provide.
Consider the bicycle. In the late 19th century, streets and roads ranged from merely adequate to deplorable. However, with the widespread adoption of the safety bicycle as a mode of transportation, municipalities began improving streets, upgrading them from bone-shaking brick and wood-block paving to smooth concrete surfaces. Also, in response to cyclists’ need for reduced friction, roller-bearing technology progressed much faster. Nobody deliberately built better roads and manufactured ball bearings in concert with bicycles, they did it because the need arose. There’s a difference. When motorized transport arrived, good municipal streets already were in place. Manufacturers found new uses for the ball bearings that already were being made. In response to the greater mobility and freight-hauling capability of motor vehicles, rural roads began changing from dirt and mud paths to better gravel roads and paved highways. Again, the need drove the response. When electric vehicles reach the tipping point into the mainstream, the infrastructure will follow suit; charging and/or battery-swap stations will crop up in response to the need — and the desire for the profits that will result.
tim says
those who can do… those who cant talk trash, haters gonna hate…lol
Grumpy Relic says
The piano is a tool. It was also invented. It allows us to hear all the different songs that have that have been created and copyrighted each year. Since 1946, the “top 100” adds up to over 6000 songs and they are still writing them – all different. Then there’s the classical stuff and the ones that didn’t make the top 100. All can be played within the same old 88 keys.
Want to be creative? think of what you can do with a slot screwdriver. screwdriver, chisel, weapon, punch, paint mixer, scraper, funnel, pry bar…
B50 Jim says
A slot screwdriver’s main use is to wreck slots in screws. The answer? Torx. Another modification of something that already existed — the Allen wrench.
Mystic says
Great metaphorical start. I love this article for the way it was introduced.
As we grow from youngsters we develop the ability to think creatively in abstract ways. We use this to solve puzzles. Many ideas are the combination of things we know. There are times when there is a real a-ha! moment. I see websites where new products are put on display daily and from time to time there is a product that bewilders me with it’s simplicity and brilliance.
The internet has made the world smaller, ideas more readily available and given those that create new products an incredible resource.
Thank you for the inspiring articles.
Doug says
I think all ideas come from inspiration. And because we live in the same time you see a lot of the same ideas, it’s evolution. But there has to be a line between inspiration and just taking someone else’s design and calling it yours. It feels like today is more about marketing then originality or even skill. What’s your opinion of this? http://bunnybikeco.blogspot.com/2011/05/ole-picasso.html