Walter Isaacson has never sounded as excited by his material as he does in The Innovators. It may be that he has the same basic qualifications as many of the people he writes about here: "My father and uncles were electrical engineers, and like many of the characters in this book, I grew up with a basement workshop that had circuit boards to be soldered, radios to be opened, tubes to be tested, and boxes of transistors and resistors to be sorted and deployed."
Isaacson sounds as if he required no hindsight to know what thrilling times he grew up in. With the romanticism that unites so many of the scientists that this book celebrates, he equates the postwar era with Wordsworth's description of those who witnessed the start of the French Revolution: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive."
He also grew up just as the Computer Age began to explode. So he has aural, tactile experience of computer kits that had to be assembled at home, the punch cards needed to run room-size computers at college and the screeches of the first modems via telephone line. By the 1990s, he was helping to run a digital division at Time. A decade later, he was writing books, and his best work as a biographer reveals where his heart lies. Einstein: His Life and Universe, from 2007, is the most supercharged of his biographies, although he admitted to having difficulty explaining the physics. His 2011 Steve Jobs was an instant classic, despite the obvious problem of dealing with a defensive yet worship-inducing subject.
But Isaacson's goal this time is encyclopedic. He means to trace two parallel developments: the very different histories of the computing machine and the much more recent Internet.
If there is one vital point to which Isaacson keeps returning throughout this linear and elegantly streamlined book, it is that no one individual has truly achieved anything alone. All advances require genius, practicality and entrepreneurial ability. Time after time, Isaacson reports stories in which the most advanced work is outrun by cannier innovators who who think about the practical applications of the things they have devised.
This book is slow going at first, when its emphasis is on incremental advances through devices like the programmable weaving loom. Still, Isaacson's gifts as an explicator remain impressive. Treat Boolean algebra as a matter of either/or choices that can be executed by electrical circuits, and you move less dauntingly into the pioneering work being done at Bell Labs, Harvard and, most notably, Iowa State University, where an academic named John Vincent Atanasoff had by 1942 built a nearly functional prototype of a computer.
But Atanasoff, in a mistake oft repeated here, didn't do much to protect his creation's future. He tried to patent it, but only casually. He allowed himself to be visited by John Mauchly, a more gregarious scientist who later appropriated parts of what he saw in Iowa and would go down in history as one of the computer's first inventors. Meanwhile, Atanasoff was drafted into the Navy in 1942 and left behind his machine, which was dismantled when storage space was needed. "His tale is evidence that we shouldn't in fact romanticise such loners," Isaacson says firmly.
So this book leans far more heavily toward success stories. Some of the best of these feature women, including early programmers working frantically during World War II, like Grace Hopper, whose team achieved many great accomplishments and one unforgettable small one. The moth that got caught in one of its electromechanical relays associated computers with the term "bug" forevermore.
The further The Innovators goes, the more familiar its material is to the present-day reader. And the more interesting its exclusions become. When Isaacson gets to the Microsoft, Apple and Google eras, he mentions venture capitalists only when necessary and does not dwell on the huge amounts of money that came to complicate the joys of invention. And whether for aesthetic or moral reasons, social media are entirely absent from this book's timeline. Among possible future biographical subjects, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are clearly the characters whom he finds most simpatico, and they could do worse than to have Isaacson tell their story. As this book so clearly demonstrates, he is a kindred spirit to the visionaries and enthusiasts who speed us so thrillingly into the technological future.
Isaacson sounds as if he required no hindsight to know what thrilling times he grew up in. With the romanticism that unites so many of the scientists that this book celebrates, he equates the postwar era with Wordsworth's description of those who witnessed the start of the French Revolution: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive."
He also grew up just as the Computer Age began to explode. So he has aural, tactile experience of computer kits that had to be assembled at home, the punch cards needed to run room-size computers at college and the screeches of the first modems via telephone line. By the 1990s, he was helping to run a digital division at Time. A decade later, he was writing books, and his best work as a biographer reveals where his heart lies. Einstein: His Life and Universe, from 2007, is the most supercharged of his biographies, although he admitted to having difficulty explaining the physics. His 2011 Steve Jobs was an instant classic, despite the obvious problem of dealing with a defensive yet worship-inducing subject.
But Isaacson's goal this time is encyclopedic. He means to trace two parallel developments: the very different histories of the computing machine and the much more recent Internet.
If there is one vital point to which Isaacson keeps returning throughout this linear and elegantly streamlined book, it is that no one individual has truly achieved anything alone. All advances require genius, practicality and entrepreneurial ability. Time after time, Isaacson reports stories in which the most advanced work is outrun by cannier innovators who who think about the practical applications of the things they have devised.
This book is slow going at first, when its emphasis is on incremental advances through devices like the programmable weaving loom. Still, Isaacson's gifts as an explicator remain impressive. Treat Boolean algebra as a matter of either/or choices that can be executed by electrical circuits, and you move less dauntingly into the pioneering work being done at Bell Labs, Harvard and, most notably, Iowa State University, where an academic named John Vincent Atanasoff had by 1942 built a nearly functional prototype of a computer.
But Atanasoff, in a mistake oft repeated here, didn't do much to protect his creation's future. He tried to patent it, but only casually. He allowed himself to be visited by John Mauchly, a more gregarious scientist who later appropriated parts of what he saw in Iowa and would go down in history as one of the computer's first inventors. Meanwhile, Atanasoff was drafted into the Navy in 1942 and left behind his machine, which was dismantled when storage space was needed. "His tale is evidence that we shouldn't in fact romanticise such loners," Isaacson says firmly.
So this book leans far more heavily toward success stories. Some of the best of these feature women, including early programmers working frantically during World War II, like Grace Hopper, whose team achieved many great accomplishments and one unforgettable small one. The moth that got caught in one of its electromechanical relays associated computers with the term "bug" forevermore.
The further The Innovators goes, the more familiar its material is to the present-day reader. And the more interesting its exclusions become. When Isaacson gets to the Microsoft, Apple and Google eras, he mentions venture capitalists only when necessary and does not dwell on the huge amounts of money that came to complicate the joys of invention. And whether for aesthetic or moral reasons, social media are entirely absent from this book's timeline. Among possible future biographical subjects, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are clearly the characters whom he finds most simpatico, and they could do worse than to have Isaacson tell their story. As this book so clearly demonstrates, he is a kindred spirit to the visionaries and enthusiasts who speed us so thrillingly into the technological future.
©2014 The New York Times