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Flash of Genius: And Other True Stories of Invention
Flash of Genius And Other True Stories of Invention by John Seabrook, staff writer for The New Yorker , is a collection of true stories about where great ideas come from, and is the basis for the Major Motion Picture starring Greg Kinnear releasing October 2008.
"John Seabrook is one of America's finest non-fiction writers….Fascinating, entertaining, beautifully written and often poignant…"―Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation
Where Do Great Ideas Come From?
In Flash of Genius , John Seabrook explores the moment when inspiration strikes in an otherwise average life, and what happens when that idea moves out into the larger culture and takes on a life―and commercial possibilities―of its own. The title piece in this collection is the David v. Goliath story of Bob Kearns, a professor and inventor who came up with something we all use every chance we the intermittent windshield wiper. When Kearns' patents were infringed, he fought General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, and eventually prevailed in a classic American story of never giving up, never backing down.
Seabrook has been fascinated by stories of invention and entrepreneurship since childhood, when he grew up with an uncle who invented something as ubiquitous as Bob Kearns' boil-in-bag vegetables. In Flash of Genius , Seabrook also writes about his family's invention and about thirteen other iconoclastic visions that turned into the stuff of every day.
"John Seabrook is one of America's finest non-fiction writers….Fascinating, entertaining, beautifully written and often poignant…"―Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation
Where Do Great Ideas Come From?
In Flash of Genius , John Seabrook explores the moment when inspiration strikes in an otherwise average life, and what happens when that idea moves out into the larger culture and takes on a life―and commercial possibilities―of its own. The title piece in this collection is the David v. Goliath story of Bob Kearns, a professor and inventor who came up with something we all use every chance we the intermittent windshield wiper. When Kearns' patents were infringed, he fought General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, and eventually prevailed in a classic American story of never giving up, never backing down.
Seabrook has been fascinated by stories of invention and entrepreneurship since childhood, when he grew up with an uncle who invented something as ubiquitous as Bob Kearns' boil-in-bag vegetables. In Flash of Genius , Seabrook also writes about his family's invention and about thirteen other iconoclastic visions that turned into the stuff of every day.
- GenresNonfictionScienceEssays
384 pages, Paperback
First published September 2, 2008
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159 people want to read
About the author
John Seabrook
14 books81 followersJohn Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993. The author of several books including Nobrow, he has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 31, 2017
This title story of this book tells of Bob Kearns, tinkering inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, whose patented invention was stolen by Ford and other big automakers. The story was originally a 1993 “New Yorker” article, but was republished in this book as a tie-in to the 2008 Greg Kinnear movie of the same name. That’s just one story in this fascinating collection, though, which covers topics ranging from Nevada gold mining to the Antikythera Mechanism. The book is quite good—not earthshattering, but interesting, and certainly capable of giving the reader interesting discussion topics so he can avoid politics at the next cocktail party he has to attend.
Kearns was an obsessive genius who was ultimately vindicated in his fight to recover damages from the big auto companies. At the same time, he ruined his life and largely ruined that of his family. This is a cautionary tale, about the dangers of obsession, of trusting big companies, and of involving oneself with lawyers and the patent system. It also raises, as the author, John Seabrook notes, issues that have become more prominent since: patent trolls, the pluses and minuses of the patent system, the expansion of patents beyond actual inventions to “business process” and other stupid patents such as Amazon’s “One Click,” and how best to incentivize flashes of genius. After all, genius benefits society, so it matters to us all—in fact, whether in the form of flashes or concentrated effort by many people, genius is probably the primary economic driver of every society, so any society that does not single out and reward genius is necessarily shooting itself in the foot.
The other issue raised by Kearns’s story, though not discussed here beyond patents, is that of the legal status and social advisability of allowing restrictions on competition. Restricting competition has, in the common law tradition and in modern American law, always been regarded as dubious. It prevents people from making a living, in extreme cases, and prevents them from making an optimum living, in many cases. It can, as with patents, offer incentives, but it can also be used by the powerful to harm both the weak and society as a whole. Thus, the law has always not just strictly limited the length offered by patent protection, but disfavored, limited, and strictly construed non-competition agreements made by employees.
But the modern American system of litigation, expensive, time-consuming and with each side paying its own legal fees, frequently allows big companies to not only abuse the patent system, but also to illegitimately coerce former employees, forcing them to not engage in perfectly legitimate competition by the bogus threat of lawsuits that the employee cannot afford. Only one major state refuses to enforce non-competition agreements: California. While that state has its problems and its own brand of silliness, this strikes me as entirely correct—and certainly employers there don’t seem to be hurting as a result. As far as I’m concerned, this practice should be extended to all fifty states. In a small way, I practice what I preach—as a matter of principle, I refuse to have any non-competition agreements at my businesses.
Other stories here (there are fifteen total) cover topics as diverse as the Svalbard seed vault (recently in the news for flooding, from rain, not global warming, having entered its entrance); to the scrap metal industry (focusing on the rollup by Metal Management, with which I was tangentially connected as a lawyer); to Will Wright, inventor of the computer game Sim City and its successors. In the nature of the genre of “interesting magazine articles” (all these were originally published in “The New Yorker”), no story is exhaustive, and many, I think, have been superseded by events. More is known about the Antikythera Mechanism today, for example, than in 2007. And we still don’t have a commercial tomato that tastes anything like one from the home garden, genetic tinkering or not, though one of the stories heralds its then supposedly imminent arrival.
Of the stories, the one I found most fascinating might not be the one to which most people would gravitate. It’s the story of Chuck and Carolyn Hoberman, inventors, marketers and popularizers of the “Hoberman Sphere.” You may not know it by that name, but you’ve seen them—the colorful plastic framework balls that expand into a much larger sphere. Chuck Hoberman designed the “three-dimensional scissors hinge” (technically, a “Doubly-Curved Truss Structure”) that makes the transformation possible. Here, unlike with Bob Kearns, the focus is not on patents, but on marketing, and the challenges of growing a business from scratch (which is why it interested me, since that is my background as well).
Originally, Chuck Hoberman thought of his device as a utilitarian one—but his wife conceived that it could be a new kind of toy, and drove the conception forward. And that is why you see them everywhere now, from museum gift shops to mall toy stores. On the other hand, I just went to the company’s website, and it not only looks like it’s stuck in 2003 (the date of the original article), but many of the internal links on the site are broken. So what happened? It is hard to tell. Seabrook notes that non-toy projects “didn’t earn Chuck much money, but they did bring him artistic credibility, and that was what he really wanted.” He appears to run a separate design company called “Hoberman Associates” and teach intermittently at Harvard. My guess is that the business has declined—perhaps the original patents have expired and no new ones with a marketable angle have replaced them. Or maybe the Hobermans simply made enough money and moved on—not everyone wants to get richer, or richer (although I certainly do). Or maybe, since the Internet tells me they’re now divorced, Chuck needed Carolyn to captain the business, and it foundered without her. But she now lives in Jersey City and runs a small toy store, so either she loves toys and New Jersey, or whatever money the Sphere made has gone. Either way, it is unclear whether this story ultimately had a happy ending—but I still found it fascinating. In fact, I found all the stories in this book fascinating, and while I’m not sure you should run out and buy a copy, you can do worse than spend your time reading this book if you run across it and have some idle time.
Kearns was an obsessive genius who was ultimately vindicated in his fight to recover damages from the big auto companies. At the same time, he ruined his life and largely ruined that of his family. This is a cautionary tale, about the dangers of obsession, of trusting big companies, and of involving oneself with lawyers and the patent system. It also raises, as the author, John Seabrook notes, issues that have become more prominent since: patent trolls, the pluses and minuses of the patent system, the expansion of patents beyond actual inventions to “business process” and other stupid patents such as Amazon’s “One Click,” and how best to incentivize flashes of genius. After all, genius benefits society, so it matters to us all—in fact, whether in the form of flashes or concentrated effort by many people, genius is probably the primary economic driver of every society, so any society that does not single out and reward genius is necessarily shooting itself in the foot.
The other issue raised by Kearns’s story, though not discussed here beyond patents, is that of the legal status and social advisability of allowing restrictions on competition. Restricting competition has, in the common law tradition and in modern American law, always been regarded as dubious. It prevents people from making a living, in extreme cases, and prevents them from making an optimum living, in many cases. It can, as with patents, offer incentives, but it can also be used by the powerful to harm both the weak and society as a whole. Thus, the law has always not just strictly limited the length offered by patent protection, but disfavored, limited, and strictly construed non-competition agreements made by employees.
But the modern American system of litigation, expensive, time-consuming and with each side paying its own legal fees, frequently allows big companies to not only abuse the patent system, but also to illegitimately coerce former employees, forcing them to not engage in perfectly legitimate competition by the bogus threat of lawsuits that the employee cannot afford. Only one major state refuses to enforce non-competition agreements: California. While that state has its problems and its own brand of silliness, this strikes me as entirely correct—and certainly employers there don’t seem to be hurting as a result. As far as I’m concerned, this practice should be extended to all fifty states. In a small way, I practice what I preach—as a matter of principle, I refuse to have any non-competition agreements at my businesses.
Other stories here (there are fifteen total) cover topics as diverse as the Svalbard seed vault (recently in the news for flooding, from rain, not global warming, having entered its entrance); to the scrap metal industry (focusing on the rollup by Metal Management, with which I was tangentially connected as a lawyer); to Will Wright, inventor of the computer game Sim City and its successors. In the nature of the genre of “interesting magazine articles” (all these were originally published in “The New Yorker”), no story is exhaustive, and many, I think, have been superseded by events. More is known about the Antikythera Mechanism today, for example, than in 2007. And we still don’t have a commercial tomato that tastes anything like one from the home garden, genetic tinkering or not, though one of the stories heralds its then supposedly imminent arrival.
Of the stories, the one I found most fascinating might not be the one to which most people would gravitate. It’s the story of Chuck and Carolyn Hoberman, inventors, marketers and popularizers of the “Hoberman Sphere.” You may not know it by that name, but you’ve seen them—the colorful plastic framework balls that expand into a much larger sphere. Chuck Hoberman designed the “three-dimensional scissors hinge” (technically, a “Doubly-Curved Truss Structure”) that makes the transformation possible. Here, unlike with Bob Kearns, the focus is not on patents, but on marketing, and the challenges of growing a business from scratch (which is why it interested me, since that is my background as well).
Originally, Chuck Hoberman thought of his device as a utilitarian one—but his wife conceived that it could be a new kind of toy, and drove the conception forward. And that is why you see them everywhere now, from museum gift shops to mall toy stores. On the other hand, I just went to the company’s website, and it not only looks like it’s stuck in 2003 (the date of the original article), but many of the internal links on the site are broken. So what happened? It is hard to tell. Seabrook notes that non-toy projects “didn’t earn Chuck much money, but they did bring him artistic credibility, and that was what he really wanted.” He appears to run a separate design company called “Hoberman Associates” and teach intermittently at Harvard. My guess is that the business has declined—perhaps the original patents have expired and no new ones with a marketable angle have replaced them. Or maybe the Hobermans simply made enough money and moved on—not everyone wants to get richer, or richer (although I certainly do). Or maybe, since the Internet tells me they’re now divorced, Chuck needed Carolyn to captain the business, and it foundered without her. But she now lives in Jersey City and runs a small toy store, so either she loves toys and New Jersey, or whatever money the Sphere made has gone. Either way, it is unclear whether this story ultimately had a happy ending—but I still found it fascinating. In fact, I found all the stories in this book fascinating, and while I’m not sure you should run out and buy a copy, you can do worse than spend your time reading this book if you run across it and have some idle time.
March 7, 2019
Wow, what a cut throat society we live in. Patents are challenged and the big companies are usually in control. The inventor is out of luck unless they are willing to put everything on the line and fight. I learned a lot about inventers and how their ideas came into our daily lives.
August 26, 2023
We watched the movie Flash of Genius and enjoyed it. I discovered that is was based on a story in Esquire and I found this collection of Seabrook's articles. Seabrook is an excellent writer, but I'm not interested in the subjects of his other books.
May 13, 2014
This book was the basis for the movie Flash of Genius, starring Greg Kinnear. The characters were portrayed realistically, the story was not only engaging, but it showed what a cutthroat industry industrial espionage has been, and how big corporations may have acted without ethics or heart for a very long time. Despite the US patent office claiming there have been few truly new-concept inventions besides those in the computer industry (accounting for over 60% of the inventions in this century), it includes accounts of "the little guy" who worked from concept, design through production and how those inventions imporved life for the rest of us.
July 18, 2012
A well-written set of articles that one would expect from someone who writes for The New Yorker, but the general themes of invention and innovation were very loosely related to the majority of essays. They were nonetheless entertaining for the most part though in some cases slightly outdated. Either way, the book was enjoyable but in a very different way than I had expected it to be when I first picked it up.
November 25, 2008
A very spotty collection of essays--I couldn't really find much of a thread besides the author blithely letting on "Hey, I get to write for The New Yorker and here's some fascinating, loosely innovative/determined/imaginative people I've researched." The first and main piece was way too long and meandering--and totally uninspiring, dude. Sniff.
January 9, 2009
It was a decent book with a nice collection of well-written stories. The theme, invention, was very strong in a few of the stories, but not all. For instance, I loved the story about the fruit detective because I love learning about gourmet foods. However, left it a little unsatisfactory because it didn't really address innovation and I wanted to learn more.
May 3, 2009
Collections like these are difficult since some of the essays can be great and others weak. But here I found that two thirds of them were very good. However, I didn't realize that Seabrook has had most (if not all) of these essays in the New Yorker. They're good, but New Yorker readers will find this book too familiar.
June 9, 2011
The best of the essays are really insightful, almost like a 40-page TED talk, my favorite ones were the one about the windshield wiper and video games, but some of the essays only tangentially relate to innovation. Because most of them were written 10+ years ago, a lot of them feel incomplete since so much has happened since then.
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November 13, 2008'You've never met anybody like the Fruit Detective.'
November 28, 2010
Excellent stories and resources for anyone interested in inventions and innovations.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews