Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Orteig didn’t invent incentive prizes. Three centuries before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic by plane, the British Parliament wanted some help crossing the Atlantic by ship. In 1714 it offered £20,000 to the first person to figure out how to accurately measure longitude at sea. This was called the Longitude Prize, and not only did it help Parliament solve its navigation problem, its success launched a long series of incentive competitions. In 1795 Napoléon I offered a 12,000-franc prize for a method of food preservation to help feed his army on its long march into Russia. The winner, Nicolas Appert, a French candy maker, established the basic method of canning, still in use today. In 1823 the French government once again offered a prize, this time 6,000 francs for the development of a large-scale commercial hydraulic turbine. The winning design helped to power the burgeoning textile industry. Other prizes have driven breakthroughs in transportation, chemistry, and health care. As a recent McKinsey & Company report on the subject said, “Prizes can be the spur that produces a revolutionary solution . . . For centuries, they were a core instrument of sovereigns, royal societies and private benefactors alike who sought to solve pressing societal problems and idiosyncratic technical challenges.”