Invention and Innovation Quotes

“Every modern refrigeration system has the same four parts: compressor, condenser, expansion valve, and evaporator, and the Perkins cycle became the foundation of new industrial refrigeration projects. In 1855 came the first ice-making plant, in Cleveland; in 1861 the first meat-freezing plant, in Sydney.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“But could not we come up with a manageable number—say, a score or two—of the most desirable items based on the two overriding needs: to improve the fundamentals required for dignified life of the world’s population, and to do so without excessive impacts on the biosphere? In physical terms, this means securing adequate supplies of food, water, energy, and materials needed to lead healthy lives with decent life expectancies; in mental, social, and economic terms it would mean ensuring the opportunities for education and employment and providing generally accessible, good-quality health care; and all of that should be done while leaving sufficient resources for the long-term survival of other species—even as the total number of the human species is still increasing.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“And the historical corrective goes even further, as the energetic and material foundations of modern civilization go back into the five decades before the beginning of World War I and, to a surprisingly high degree, to a single decade, the 1880s. That decade saw the invention and patenting, and in many cases also the successful commercial introduction, of so many processes, converters, and materials indispensable for modern civilization that their aggregate makes the decade’s record unprecedented, and most likely unrepeatable. Bicycles, cash registers, vending machines, punch cards, adding machines, ballpoint pens, revolving doors, and antiperspirants (and Coca Cola and the Wall Street Journal) could be dismissed as the decade’s minor inventions and innovations.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Much has also been written about a reverse manifestation of exponential change, about the impressively declining cost of solar photovoltaic cells leading to near-miraculous breakthroughs in solar electricity generation. The latter claim has been particularly popular: I encourage you to check those breathless reports of constantly and rapidly falling photovoltaic (PV) cell prices, and you will see how, if they were the only determinant of the actual cost of PV generation, we would soon be arriving at almost the same place where nuclear generation claims began in the mid-1950s, with solar generation being too cheap to meter, indeed, being absolutely a free give-away. In reality, detailed US data for residential PV systems (twenty-two panels) show that the module cost is now only about 15 percent of the total investment. The rest is needed to cover structural and electrical components (panels must be mounted on supports on roofs or on prepared ground), inverters (to change the direct current to alternating current), labor costs, and other soft costs. Obviously, none of these components, from steel and aluminum to transmission lines, permitting, inspection, and sales taxes, is tending to zero, and hence the overall costs of installation (dollars per watt of direct current delivered by the panels) show a distinctly declining rate of improvement: between 2010 and 2015 they fell by 55 percent, between 2015 and 2020 by 20 percent. And these costs do not include the additional outlays that will have to be made with the increasing share of intermittent sources (solar and wind) in overall electricity generation.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“During the past decade, observant readers have seen many news items about stunning breakthroughs in battery designs, but I cannot find any ever-accelerating growth in the performance of these portable energy storage devices in the past fifty years. In 1900 the best battery (lead-acid) had an energy density of 25 watt-hours per kilogram; in 2022 the best lithium-ion batteries deployed on a large commercial scale (not the best experimental devices) had an energy density twelve times higher—and this gain corresponds to exponential growth of just 2 percent a year. That is very much in line with the growth of performances of many other industrial techniques and devices—and an order of magnitude below Moore’s law expectations. Moreover, even batteries with ten times the 2022 (commercial) energy density (that is, approaching 3,000 Wh/kg) would store only about a quarter of the energy contained in a kilogram of kerosene, making it clear that jetliners energized by batteries are not on any practical horizon.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“More important, that much-admired post-1970 ascent of electronic architecture and performance has no counterpart in nearly all other aspects of our lives: rapid exponential growth has not marked the advances in either fundamental economic activities on which modern civilization depends for its survival—ranging from crop yields to efficiency gains in energy uses, from transportation speeds to the ability to design and complete large engineering projects—or the critical determinants of health and quality of life, including the rate of new drug discoveries and gains in longevity.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Between 1993 (Pentium) and 2013 (the AMD 608), the highest single-processor transistor count went from 3.1 million to 105.9 million, the final total being actually a bit higher than prescribed by Moore’s law (doubling every two years would bring it to 99.2 million). But progress has slowed. In 2008 the Xeon had 1.9 billion transistors and a decade later the GC2 packed in 23.6 billion, whereas a doubling every two years should have brought the total to about 60 billion. As a result, the growth of the best processor performance has slowed from 52 percent a year between 1986 and 2003 to 23 percent a year between 2003 and 2011 and eventually to less than 4 percent between 2015 and 2018. As with all cases of growth, an S-curve has been forming, and the period of very rapid exponential growth is history.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“We have plenty of information to contrast the post-1960 advances in computing capacities and speeds with the gains in all other key sectors of modern economies, and the verdict is clear. Rapid exponential growth has been an admirable reality in the advances of solid-state electronics and its applications in devices and designs ranging from personal computers and mobile phones to communication and Earth-observation satellites and data and image processing, but there has been no evidence of any ever-faster innovations in nearly all other sectors of modern economies, from food production to long-distance transportation.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Forecasts of completely autonomous road vehicles were made repeatedly during the 2010s: completely self-driving cars were to be everywhere by 2020, allowing the operator to read or sleep during a commute in a personal vehicle. All internal combustion engines currently on the road were to be replaced by electric vehicles by 2025: this forecast was made and again widely reported as a nearly accomplished fact in 2017. A reality check: in 2022 there were no fully self-driving cars; fewer than 2 percent of the world’s 1.4 billion motor vehicles on the road were electric, but they were not “green,” as the electricity required for their operation came mostly from burning fossil fuels: in 2022 about 60 percent of all electricity in general came from burning coal and natural gas.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Like every tokamak, ITER has central solenoid coils, large toroidal and poloidal magnets (respectively around and along the doughnut shape). The basic specifications are a vacuum vessel plasma of 6.2 meter radius and 830 cubic meters in volume, with a confining magnetic field of 5.3 tesla and a rated fusion power of 500 MW (thermal). This heat output would correspond to Q ≥ 10 (it would require the injection of 50 MW to heat the hydrogen plasma to about 150 million degrees) and hence would achieve, for the first time on Earth, a burning plasma of the kind required for any continuously operating fusion reactor. ITER would generate burning plasmas during pulses lasting 400 to 600 seconds, time spans sufficient to demonstrate the feasibility of building an actual electricity-generating fusion power plant. But it is imperative to understand that ITER is an experimental device designed to demonstrate the feasibility of net energy generation and to provide the foundation for larger, and eventually commercial, fusion designs, not to be a prototype of an actual energy-generating device.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“In the1920s the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington hypothesized that star energy comes from nuclear fusion and proton-electron annihilation and insisted that star interiors provided an environment hot enough to allow for such reactions. Finally, during the 1930s advances in nuclear physics made it clear that nuclear reactions drive solar radiation, and by the end of the decade it became clear how they proceed. The simplest possible sequence begins with the fusion of two protons to form heavy hydrogen (deuterium) and was suggested first by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1937 and properly quantified by Charles Critchfield and Hans Bethe soon afterward. This reaction also produces a positron and a neutrino, and the deuterium fuses with another proton to produce an isotope of helium and releases an order of magnitude more energy than the first reaction.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“As might be expected with modern media reporting, every news report of some notable research advance has been commonly seen as moving us “closer” to the holy grail of nitrogen fixation in cereals—but “closer” remains elusive. “Substantial progress” reported in one year has no consequences five years later.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“And it is one thing to genetically modify grain corn for animal feeding and another to tinker with wheat, the staple of nutrition and one of the foundations of Western civilization. As a result, genetically modified wheat varieties have been developed and tested, but none is commercially produced in North America, Europe, Asia, or Australia. In the US, Canadian, and Australian cases there is an additional obvious concern: these countries are major grain exporters and would not be able to send their wheat to most of the world’s countries that do not accept any genetically modified food.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“nitrogen is the most common growth-limiting factor for all plant species, and yet evolution furnished only a small number of them with the means to alleviate this constraint.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Another side effect of fertilization that is receiving more attention is the generation of nitrous oxide by bacterial decomposition of nitrates. Not only is N2O a greenhouse gas but, on a hundred-year time scale, it has a nearly three hundred times higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas. But because of its relatively small emissions, N2O is responsible for only about 6 percent of recent anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Their benefits are indisputable: I have calculated that no less than 40 percent of the global population receive their dietary protein (directly from crops and indirectly from animal foodstuffs) from harvests that got nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; in China, the share is about 50 percent.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Our understanding of the world and our well-being rest, to an insufficiently appreciated degree, on the scientific and engineering advances made between 1867 and 1914. Those decades saw the invention and commercialization of internal combustion engines, electricity generation and electric lights and motors, the inexpensive production of steel, the smelting of aluminum, the introduction of telephones, the first plastics, the first electronic devices, and a rapid expansion of wireless communication. We also came to understand the spread of infectious diseases and the nutritional requirements for healthy growth (above all, the need for adequate protein intake), as well as the need for indispensable plant nutrients in securing abundant and affordable food supply. The”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“during the second decade of the twenty-first century Airbus received more orders for new jetliners than Boeing in all but two years.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Maximum speed was restricted to M 2.2 in order to use conventional aluminum alloys (flights above M 2.2 require titanium and special steels because of thermal limitations). The first test flight of the French prototype was on March 2, 1969; M 1 was reached briefly for the first time on October 1, 1969, and M 2 was sustained on November 4, 1970. Extensive testing of both prototypes followed, and commercial operations began on January 21, 1976, with concurrent flights from London to Bahrain and from Paris to Rio de Janeiro.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“During the late 1950s, Britain and France—having lost their colonial empires, been denied US support for their ill-conceived Suez military action, and relegated to secondary roles by the superpower rivalry between the US and the USSR—were developing, independently, supersonic aircraft designs, and eventually decided to join forces. The formal cooperation treaty was signed on November 29, 1962, and the Concorde venture was launched, intended to reclaim some of the old great power glory.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“The first commercial jetliner, the ill-fated British Comet (whose four deadly accidents were not caused by jet engines but by stress around square window frames that eventually led to catastrophic decompression), entered its brief service in 1952 at M 0.7, and the first successful and widely adopted jetliner, Boeing’s 707, began its scheduled flights in October 1958 at M 0.83.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“While Wilbur watched, Orville Wright made the first powered flight, or rather a short hop of 36 meters lasting twelve seconds, above the sandy beach at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Then they switched places and completed three more short flights: the last, and the longest one, lasted fifty-nine seconds. Remarkably, almost four years went by before anybody else could fly a heavier-than-air machine for more than a minute.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Among the great twentieth-century advances I cannot think of a better example than the first patent for a solid-state electronic device, granted to the German physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld first in Canada in 1925 and then in the US in 1926.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“By 2020 there were some 1.8 billion air-conditioning units in operation, with more than half of them in just two countries, China and the US. But this is only a fraction of the potential total because among the nearly three billion people living in the world’s warmest climates, fewer than 10 percent have air conditioning, compared to 90 percent in the US or Japan.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“By 1929 GM had delivered its millionth refrigerator, by 1932 (even though the country was in the middle of the century’s greatest economic recession) the total was up to 2.25 million units, and then, despite the continued economic crisis followed by World War II (with industrial mobilization for military production), the share of US households owning a refrigerator rose from just 10 percent in 1930 to nearly 60 percent in 1945 and to 90 percent in 1952.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“The first reports of adverse effects came during the late 1950s as both agricultural applications and large-scale DDT spraying to control mosquitoes, tent caterpillars, and gypsy moths became common.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“As the substitution progressed, the average BTEX share rose from 22 percent to 33 percent of volume by 1990, and up to 50 percent in premium gasolines. This led to new health concerns, and the EPA eventually set the BTEX limit at 25–28 percent of gasoline volume, but concerns about the mixture’s health effects remain. Fortunately, there are no worrisome adverse effects caused by burning a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, and crop-derived ethanol (in the US overwhelmingly from corn, in Brazil from sugar cane) became the leading antiknocking additive. The rise of US ethanol began in earnest in 2005 when the Energy Policy Act set the minimum volumes of biofuels to be blended with transportation fuels, and in 2020 blends of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent ethanol (known as E10) accounted for more than 95 percent of all fuel used by the country’s gasoline vehicles.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“In 1970 unleaded gasoline only had about 3 percent of the US market. By 1975 this figure had increased to 12 percent, and starting in 1979 the US EPA required all refineries to lower the average lead content in leaded fuels: it fell to just 1 g/gal by 1980, 0.5 g/gal by 1985, and 0.1 g/gal by 1988. At the same time, increased awareness of the health costs of exposures to lead—with studies showing adverse impacts on IQ in children and on hypertension in adults—accelerated the complete phase-out of leaded fuel. In 1985 unleaded gasoline had 63 percent of the market; by 1991 it had 95 percent.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“A technical fix for photochemical smog became possible in 1962 when Eugène Jules Houdry patented a way to remove the pollutants from vehicle exhaust just before their emission into the atmosphere by deploying catalytic converters. Platinum was used as the rare metal catalyst; it would be poisoned by lead’s presence in exhaust gases, and this made the introduction of effective catalytic converters (mandatory in all cars starting with the 1975 model year) dependent on the availability of unleaded gas. Eventually these devices made a decisive difference as the precontrol emissions of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide were cut by 96 percent and those of nitrogen oxides by 90 percent.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure

“Other known alternatives included vapor-phase cracked refinery liquids, benzene blends, and gasoline from naphthenic crudes (containing little or no wax). Why did GM, well aware of these realities, decide not only to pursue just the TEL route but also to claim (despite its own correct understanding) that there were no available alternatives: “So far as we know at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these results”? Several factors help to explain the choice. The ethanol route would have required a mass-scale development of a new industry dedicated to an automotive fuel additive that could not be controlled by GM. Moreover, as already noted, the preferable option, producing ethanol from cellulosic waste (crop residues, wood) rather than from food crops, was too expensive to be practical.”
― Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure