‘People don’t like change,’ Michael Crichton once told me, ‘and the notion that technology is exciting is true for only a handful of people. The rest are depressed or annoyed by the changes.’ Pity the inventor’s lot then. He is the source of society’s enrichment and yet nobody likes what he does. ‘When a new invention is first propounded,’ said William Petty in 1679, ‘in the beginning every man objects and the poor inventor runs the gauntloop of all petulant wits.’
