Walter Isaacson, a versatile and workmanlike
author, has never sounded as excited by his material as he does in “The
Innovators.” It may be that he has the same basic qualifications as many of the
people he writes about here: “My father and uncles were electrical engineers,
and like many of the characters in this book, I grew up with a basement workshop
that had circuit boards to be soldered, radios to be opened, tubes to be tested,
and boxes of transistors and resistors to be sorted and deployed.”
Mr. Isaacson, who is 62, sounds as if he
required no hindsight to know what thrilling times he grew up in. With the
strain of romanticism that unites so many of the scientists that this book
celebrates, he equates the postwar era with Wordsworth’s description of those
who witnessed the start of the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to
be alive.”
He also grew up just as the Computer Age began
to explode. So he has aural, tactile experience of computer kits that had to be
assembled at home, the punch cards needed to run room-size computers at college
and the screeches of the first modems via telephone line. By the 1990s, he was
helping to run a digital division at Time. A decade later, he was writing books,
and his best work as a biographer reveals where his heart lies. “Einstein: His Life
and Universe,” from 2007, is the most supercharged of his biographies,
although he admitted to having difficulty explaining the physics. (“O.K., it’s
not easy,” he wrote, “but that’s why we’re no Einstein, and he is.”) His 2011 “Steve
Jobs” was an instant classic, despite the obvious problem of dealing with a
defensive yet worship-inducing subject.
But Mr. Isaacson’s goal this time is
encyclopedic. He means to trace two parallel developments: the very different
histories of the computing machine and the much more recent Internet. And he
takes the computer back to when it was a gleam in the eye of Lord Byron, the
poet. Byron is in here for two reasons. He was famously present when Mary
Shelley conceived of “Frankenstein,” with its prospect of a man-made machine
that might develop its own thoughts. But Byron’s real gleam was his only
legitimate child, the daughter who would become known as Augusta Ada King,
Countess of Lovelace, born in 1815.
Ada Lovelace’s
mid-19th-century writings were so brilliantly visionary about the potential of a
general-purpose computer that she is acknowledged as a major tech-world hero.
The United States Defense Department named a computer language after her; there
is an Ada Lovelace Day in October
(this year it falls on the 14th), a nifty Ada Lovelace Google
Doodle and many books about her, including “Ada’s Algorithm,” a new
biography by James Essinger, to be published on Ada Day his month. Most of this
information can be found on Wikipedia, which was jump-started by Jimmy Wales,
who named a daughter Ada in 2011.
If there is one vital point to which Mr.
Isaacson keeps returning throughout this linear and elegantly streamlined book,
it is that no one individual, not even Mr. Wales, has truly achieved anything
alone. All advances require genius, practicality and entrepreneurial ability,
skills that don’t necessarily come in the same package. Time after time, Mr.
Isaacson reports stories in which the most advanced work is outrun by cannier
innovators who pay attention to things like patents, or who think about the
practical applications of the things they have devised.
This book is slightly slow going at first, when
its emphasis is on incremental advances through dated (although amazing) devices
like the programmable weaving loom. Still, Mr. Isaacson’s gifts as an enthusiast
and explicator remain impressive. Treat Boolean algebra as a matter of either/or
choices that can be executed by electrical circuits, and you move less
dauntingly into the pioneering work being done at Bell Labs, Harvard and, most
notably, Iowa State University, where a lone academic named John Vincent Atanasoff had by
1942 built a nearly functional prototype of a computer.
But Atanasoff, in a mistake oft repeated here,
didn’t do much to protect his creation’s future. He tried to patent it, but only
casually. He allowed himself to be visited by John Mauchly, a more gregarious
scientist who later appropriated parts of what he saw in Iowa and would go down
in history as one of the computer’s first inventors. Meanwhile, Atanasoff was
drafted into the Navy in 1942 and left behind his machine, which was dismantled
when storage space was needed. “His tale is evidence that we shouldn’t in fact
romanticize such loners,” Mr. Isaacson says firmly.
So this book leans far more heavily toward
success stories. Some of the best of these feature women, including early
programmers working frantically during World
War II, like Grace Hopper, whose team achieved many great accomplishments
and one unforgettable small one. The moth that got caught in one of its
electromechanical relays associated computers with the term “bug”
forevermore.
As the book gallops forward, Mr. Isaacson must
combine the good, the great and the ugly. They all figure in the story of the
transistor, which featured William Shockley, the scientist who first saw the
potential in silicon and became a Silicon Valley pioneer — but is now remembered
for the racist theories that clouded his legacy. His work on the semiconductor,
with two powerful collaborators, would never have led to such household
popularity had there not been a Steve Jobs-like figure (Pat Haggerty at Texas
Instruments, who shared Jobs’s ability to sell products people had no idea they
wanted) to put these brand-new devices, now called transistors, into radios, and
truly rock the American teenager’s world.
The further “The Innovators” goes, the more
familiar its material is to the present-day reader. And the more interesting its
exclusions become. When Mr. Isaacson gets to the Microsoft, Apple and Google
eras, he mentions venture capitalists only when necessary and does not dwell on
the huge amounts of money that came to complicate the joys of invention. And
whether for aesthetic or moral reasons, social media are entirely absent from
this book’s timeline. Among possible future biographical subjects, Sergey Brin
and Larry Page of Google are clearly the characters whom he finds most
simpatico, and they could do worse than to have Mr. Isaacson tell their story.
As this book so clearly demonstrates, he is a kindred spirit to the visionaries
and enthusiasts who speed us so thrillingly into the technological future.
THE INNOVATORS
How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital
Revolution
By Walter Isaacson
Illustrated. 542 pages. Simon & Schuster.
$35.
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