The Most Powerful Idea in the World Quotes

“The brain is evolutionarily hard-wired to do its best daydreaming only when it senses that it is safe to do so—when, in short, it is relaxed. In Kounios’s words, “The relaxation phase is crucial.5 That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers.” Or during Sunday afternoon walks on Glasgow Green, when the idea of a separate condenser seems to have excited the aSTG in the skull of James Watt. Eureka indeed.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Almost all modern legal practice is derived from one of two distinct traditions. The first, the so-called civil law tradition, is a direct successor to the jurisprudence of the Roman Empire, and it dominates most of the legal systems of continental Europe; the second is the institution known as the common law, used in Britain and its former colonies. The divergence between the two dates from the eleventh century, when the only surviving copy of the complete reworking of Roman law known as the Codex Justinianus was discovered in an Italian monastery and percolated throughout Europe.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention

“Aztec peasants, Babylonian shepherds, Athenian stonemasons, and Carolingian merchants spoke different languages,2 wore different clothing, and prayed to different deities, but they all ate the same amount of food, lived the same number of years, traveled no farther—or faster—from their homes, and buried just as many of their children. Because while they made a lot more children—worldwide population grew a hundredfold between 5000 BCE and 1600 CE, from 5 to 500 million—they didn’t make much of anything else. The best estimates for human productivity (a necessarily vague number) calculate annual per capita GDP, expressed in constant 1990 U.S. dollars, fluctuating between $400 and $550 for seven thousand years. The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE3—$543—is virtually identical to the number in 1600. The average person of William Shakespeare’s time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer’s.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“It’s still running today. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty-year increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers—not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age); calories consumed; prevalence of infectious disease; average height of adults; percentage of lifetime spent disabled; percentage of population living in poverty; number of rooms per person; percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education; illiteracy; and annual hours of leisure time—the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. And the phenomenon isn’t restricted to Europe and North America; the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years—twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. The nineteenth-century French infant4 would be at significantly greater risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Incised in the stone over the Herbert C. Hoover Building’s north entrance is the legend that, with Lincoln’s characteristic brevity, sums up the single most powerful idea in the world: THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED THE FUEL OF INTEREST TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“The Encyclopédie itself promised “to offer craftsmen the chance to learn35 from philosophers, and thereby hopefully to advance further toward perfection.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“A few thousand Europeans, no matter how inventive their work in chemicals, or metallurgy, could not create an Industrial Revolution unless they could inspire (or borrow, or even steal) from one another;”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“any increase in national wealth—doesn’t accumulate by itself, independent of the larger economy, but rather is almost entirely dependent on decisions made by individuals seeking some sort of economic advantage.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Smith argued that two conditions were necessary for labor to produce the maximum amount of wealth: perfect competition among sellers—everyone pursuing his or her selfish interest, the famous “invisible hand”—and the complete freedom of buyers to substitute one commodity for another.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“One lesson of the Luddite rebellion specifically, and the Industrial Revolution generally, is that maintaining the prosperity of those closed communities—their pride in workmanship as well as their economic well-being—can only be paid for by those outside the communities: by society at large.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“The Albion Mills was London’s first factory, and its first great symbol of industrialization; its construction inaugurated not only the great age of steam-driven factories,* but also the doomed though poignant resistance to them.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Even so, Watt was nothing if not fair-minded. He may have resented the time Murdock spent inventing rather than on the company’s real business, which was installing, and collecting royalties based on the continued performance of, the Watt engines.* He was, however, just as often delighted by the inventions he made on behalf of Boulton & Watt, including a compressed air pump and a cement that would bond two pieces of iron, calling Murdock “the most active man and best engine erector I ever saw.”41 His value was never, however, to be higher than when Watt enlisted his talents on what came to be known as the sun-and-planet gear.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“IT IS NO ACCIDENT that “wheels of industry” is such a cliché description of a manufacturing economy, since the application of force in the form of rotational motion is by far the most important component of useful work. In late eighteenth-century Britain, the wheels that mattered most were the ones turning the mills that ground the nation’s grain, and the ones that spun the nation’s cloth. Most of them used water; some used wind. None used steam.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Boulton’s strategic plan was on schedule. He had discerned an opportunity; had exploited it;* and was soon enough unsatisfied by it. By the end of 1782, he had identified the next conquest for the steam engine, an arena whose potential dwarfed that of the mining industry: wheels.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“IN 1930, JOSEPH ROSSMAN, who had served for decades as an examiner in the U.S. Patent Office, polled more than seven hundred patentees, producing a remarkable picture of the mind of the inventor. Some of the results were predictable;6 the three biggest motivators were “love of inventing,” “desire to improve,” and “financial gain,” the ranking for each of which was statistically identical, and each at least twice as important as those appearing down the list, such as “desire to achieve,” “prestige,” or “altruism” (and certainly not the old saw, “laziness,” which was named roughly one-thirtieth as frequently as “financial gain”). A century after Rocket, the world of technology had changed immensely: electric power, automobiles, telephones. But the motivations of individual inventors were indistinguishable from those inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“every time the brain calculates the area of a rectangle, or sight-reads a piece of music, or tests an experimental hypothesis, the neurons involved are chemically changed to make it easier to travel the same path again. Kandel’s research seems to have identified that repetition forms the chains that Polanyi called tacit knowing, and that James Watt called “the correct modes of reasoning.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“By the 1990s, Ericsson’s research was demonstrating2 that the same phenomenon he had first discovered among concert violinists also applied to the creation of innovations: that the cost of becoming consistently productive at creative inventing is ten thousand hours of practice—five to seven years—just as it is for music, athletics, and chess.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“But the real fascination for Usher was Leonardo’s straddling of two worlds of creativity, the artistic and the inventive. No one, before or since, more clearly demonstrated the importance to invention of what we might call “spatial intelligence”; Leonardo was not an abstract thinker of any great achievement, nor were his mathematical skills, which he taught himself late in life, remarkable. His perceptual skills, on the other hand, developed primarily for his painting, were extraordinary; but they were so extraordinary that Usher could write, “It is only with Leonardo25 that the process of invention is lifted decisively into the field of the imagination”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“The hands of a pianist, or a painter, or a sushi chef, or even, as with Thomas Newcomen, hands that could use a hammer to shape soft iron, are truly, in any functional sense,”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Stephen Pinker of Harvard even argues that early humans’ intelligence increased “partly because they were equipped23 with levers of influence on the world, namely the grippers found at the end of their two arms.” We now know that the literally incredible amount of sensitivity and articulation of the human hand, which has increased at roughly the same pace as has the complexity of the human brain, is not merely a product of the pressures of natural selection, but an initiator of it: The hand has led the brain to evolve24 just as much as the brain has led the hand.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Newcomen spent ten years experimenting with solutions to the problem of maintaining a regular and stable motion in his engine. None of his solutions was more innovative than his so-called plug rod.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“The discovery of the power of injected water was luck; understanding and exploiting it was anything but. Newcomen and Calley replaced18 the accidental hole in the cylinder with an injection valve, and, ingeniously, attached it to the piston itself.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“not being either philosophers17 to understand the reason, or mathematicians enough to calculate the powers and to proportion the parts, very luckily by accident found what they sought for.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Many more learned their science in the most practical way: as apprentices to artisans who were more likely to be literate than ever before in history.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“The messy truth turns out to be that the innovative culture that blossomed in eighteenth-century Britain depended both on individuals looking out for their own interests, and on recognizing a national interest in innovation.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“Human character (or at least behavior) was changed, and changed forever, by seventeenth-century Britain’s insistence that ideas were a kind of property. This notion is as consequential as any idea in history. For while the laws of nature place severe limits on the total amount of gold, or land, or any other traditional form of property, there are (as it turned out) no constraints at all on the number of potentially valuable ideas. The result was that an entire nation’s unpropertied populace was given an incentive to produce them, and to acquire the right to exploit them.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

“invention inevitably followed a four-step sequence: Awareness of an unfulfilled need; Recognition of something contradictory or absent in existing attempts to meet the need, which Usher called an “incomplete pattern”; An all-at-once insight about that pattern; and A process of “critical revision” during which the insight is tested, refined, and perfected.”
― William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention