>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I’m here to welcome Alec Foege to
the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Alec is here today to discuss his book, The Tinkerers, The
Amateurs, DIYers, and the Inventors Who Make America Great. The US has been a nation of tinkerers
from its very founding. Lately the country seems to be changing from a land of doers to one of
consumers. The once praised innovative aura seems to have fallen aside to corporate goals. Industry
can learn a lot from the history of the pure tinkering mindset and better understand how to recapture
its remarkable power. Alec Foege is the author of Right of the Dial; Confusion is Next, and the Empire
God Built. A former Rolling Stone contributing editor and People Magazine senior writer, he has also
written for the New York Times, Details, Vogue, and many other publications. Please join me in giving
him a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>> Alec Foege: Thank you. First I want to just say thanks for having me here at Microsoft as a company
that was obviously built on tinkering. It’s a real honor to be here. It’s really the perfect place I think to
talk a little bit about the history of tinkering in the United States and the future of tinkering. Which I
believe, I wrote this book sort of to explore the American tinkering spirit. The original idea for the book
came out of the economic crisis of two thousand eight and two thousand nine. At that time a lot of
white-collar workers were losing their jobs in this country. There was a lot of handwringing going on I
guess in terms of people wondering what they did and what they made. You would read a lot in the
press about people who would, had these high-powered jobs and they would go and then and try to find
something to do with their hands. A lot of people began wondering, you know the United States use to
be this great manufacturing hub and these days did we still make things anymore? Did that matter if we
didn’t? Did it matter that we had become primarily a service economy as opposed to a manufacturing
economy? There are also a lot of people talking around that time about whether the United States
could still compete with China and with India, and with other, you know countries around the world that
are really obviously doing their own innovation and doing it quite well.
So I thought about that a little bit and that was kind of the origin for the idea for the book. I think first I
want to talk a little bit about tinkering as I define it in the book. Because obviously there are all sorts of
definitions for it and most of them I found when I first started looking into the word for using as a title
was that most of them were pejorative. I mean, the idea traditionally was that the tinkerers were kind
of crackpots, you know people who sort of puttered around in the basement. They never really got
anywhere and they really never did anything. They weren’t serious about their pursuits. But I don’t
think that was always true and, you know, I think it kind of evolved that way for a variety of reasons that
I’m going to discuss this afternoon. But, you know there’s this notion of that we need to sort of have
this creative space particularly in corporate America today where these new ideas, these forward
thinking ideas can happen so that we can maintain our competitiveness worldwide.
So, I think, I needed to acknowledge kind of that tinkering was something that was actually a positive
thing. I mean, in the contemporary sense I learned that we kind of think of tinkerers as specialists. As
either trained engineers or people who really, you know, they have a brilliant idea or their very well
educated in some sort of high tech pursuit. Therefore they are the perfect person to be a tinkerer. But
in fact I think tinkering is much more of a basic almost innate pursuit. You know there are a lot of
companies these days that are talking about how do we encourage tinkering? How do we teach our
employees to think up new ideas and bring them to the company? But I would argue that everybody’s
kind of born a tinkerer. The way I define it in my book is that a tinkerer in fact a dilettante and I mean
that in a good way. Tinkerers can, typically in historically in the United States tinkerers have been
generalists. Not necessarily people who were trained in a certain field and therefore were trying to
solve a specific problem. In fact they were kind of passionate individuals who had curiosity about
certain topics and pursued them sometimes against all of the odds. So, you know that was a key aspect
of what I want to establish in working on the topic.
Tinkering of course, and the reason, tinkering is a worldwide pursuit. There’s nothing that the United
States owns about tinkering obviously. But there is something intrinsic I think to the American spirit that
kind of ties the past to the present, to the future that continues to make the United States a very fertile
ground for tinkering. Tinkering is looking at the things around us and thinking about new things that we
can make from existing things. I mean so many of the things that we think of as completely new ideas
are usually made of things that already exist. Tinkerers sometimes obviously try to solve problems but
often times they end up solving problems that are completely different from the ones that they set out
to solve. So, that’s okay though because it’s really, there is a personal journey aspect to it. I think that
because of the history of the United States and because of, you know there are number of things of
things, our frontier ethic, kind of our notion of self-reliance, and that understanding of the individual as
sort of a something worth preserving I think also comes into play there. Obviously, and I’ll talk about it
little bit later, there are all sorts of great examples of team tinkering. But it’s really amazing how many
ideas have come out of you know one person saying, well how about try it this way?
As I said before I think that kids don’t need to be taught how to tinker. Obviously the cliché is Tinker
Toys but I don’t know if anybody’s been to a, one of these Maker Fairs. They’re just these fabulous fairs
with all sorts of booths of technologists and scientists, and artists, and musicians. I have young kids and
took them recently to one of these and you don’t really need to explain what to do. They just go up to
things that look interesting and put their hands on them and start trying to do something. I think that
some of that’s been lost in this country in part because of our educational system and the notion of sort
of teaching to the test. That’s something that has, you know I understand that notion we want to
compete worldwide and we want to make sure that we can tabulate how students are doing. But as
everybody in this room probably knows, those skills that you learn about how to do well on a test in
school don’t really, don’t really have much value in the real world once you get out in the job market no
one’s going to ask you to take a test.
I start, in my book talking about my own little tinkering journey which started when I sat on my
Blackberry a few years ago. I was getting into the car and I sat on it. I looked at the screen. I almost
immediately knew something was wrong. It was, you know you sort of got this rainbow effect, can’t see
anything. I realized pretty quickly that the phone was still working. So I naïvely took it off to the phone
store and asked the salesperson I said, well can you fix this? It looks like it just needs a new screen. He
said to me you know I’d love to fix it, in fact that use to be my favorite part of the job but they don’t let
me do that anymore, ha, ha, not just specifically him. They, you know they didn’t let the sales people do
minor fixes on the phones anymore. So I again naïvely said, oh well can I, you know get a new one? I’m
still under contract and he said yeah you can get one for four hundred fifty dollars. I only had a few
more months left on the contract so I figured I’m not going to do that. So I took my phone back and
went home and did a little Google search, or maybe it was a Bing search I forget. Ha, ha, and pretty
quickly I found that a whole series of videos on YouTube mostly that had very detailed instructions on
how to take apart your Blackberry and put a new screen in. In fact some were specific to my exact
model. So I sent away for a screen online for I think it was twenty dollars and I got you know one of
these little toolkits, small screwdrivers and these little plastic pry tools, and followed one of the videos
and within about five or ten minutes had replaced the screen. For me I mean I’m reasonably technically
savvy but you know not especially so. I think the biggest surprise was when I opened the thing up that
there were really just about four or five components. So this notion that I, this was something that was
way out of my league and that I shouldn’t touch this valuable high-tech object with sort of, that idea was
completely shattered because I mean literally I unplugged the old screen and plugged in the new screen.
So for me that was kind of a galvanizing event in terms of my thinking about the book because I realized
that you know we have become this culture that, I mean there’s obviously a lot of pressure to get the
newest device and, you know, I guess manufacturers also kind of encourage us to not open the devices.
We don’t want to void the warranty and, but I learned that it was completely possible I think that
tinkering wasn’t all that different from when I was a kid. That, you know, even somebody who didn’t
have a wealth of knowledge about the device could probably do something with it. Now if I had turned
it into some other wild invention that would have been even more impressive I guess. But I was just
happy to have my phone back.
Now I mentioned before that there had been this notion of the United States not being a manufacturing
hub anymore. In fact, that’s not really true. We make more things than ever in this country but they’re
generally on the high tech side of things. The other part of that is that fewer human beings are required
to make those things but we still make an awful lot of stuff. In fact, in the past few years I think there’s
been a real movement to bring certain types of manufacturing back on to American shores. So, I think
that that’s not something that, I think that’s definitely a misnomer. So that started making me think
well, you know there’s something, there’s a perception problem here about tinkering in the United
States and, you know what, how we think about innovation and how we think about education as it
relates to developing the kinds of minds that are going to create tomorrow’s new innovations and new
products.
So I, just to refine my definition of what tinkering was as I mentioned initially tinkering is not something
that requires a specific set of technical skills. You know there can be a pretty basic well-rounded notion
of knowledge that can allow you to become a tinkerer. As I mentioned, you know the traditional idea of
tinkering is to sort of take whatever is around and build something new with it. It’s helpful, you know
classic tinkerers kind of know just enough about all sorts of things. They might know a little bit about
electronics. They might know a little bit about textiles, or metals, or programming, or paper folding, or
you know cooking. There can be all sorts of skills that you might need but you don’t know that you need
till you need them. What’s, you know I think what’s so great about the era that we live in right now is
with everything that’s online you can become an expert or you can fake being an expert pretty quickly.
Sometimes that’s all that it requires to do really good tinkering. I mentioned before that classic
tinkerers pursue their passion, which simply just means that they are; they might be curious about
something. They have an interest in a certain area. They’re trying to teach themselves how to do
something and in the course of doing that all sorts of worlds can open up and really treat, you know end
up, you can end up treating something very differently from how you originally intended to use it. You
know this notion of competence becomes very subjective.
Right now I’m going to go a little bit into, back into history in a minute but before I do that I just wanted
to talk little bit about some of the things you can see in today’s culture that show that there is sort of a
new, some new seedlings in terms of what’s going on in terms of how we’re thinking as a country about
tinkering. I had mentioned these Maker Fairs before and they’re just, they’re only becoming more and
more popular. I think that I know this year they have a fair number of cities around the country. If you
haven’t been to one I recommend them. They’re a lot of fun for both adults and children. They’re kind
of, I guess they’re a little bit about, they’re kind of like the contemporary version of a craft fair but with
sort of blown up into dimensions that you could never of previously imagined.
Another trend that I’ve noticed is these tech shops that have sprouted up around the country where you
can essentially go in and rent some time and have access to all the latest devices and tools to
experiment with. You know, there was an era not so long ago in this country probably dating back at
least to the early twentieth century and probably a little bit before then were every good household
would have kind of a basement workshop or a tool shop where you would have sort of a general
collection of tools that you could pretty much fix anything with. Up until a certain point in the industrial
age that was kind of true. There was almost a finite number of tools you would need to fix practically
anything. Obviously that changed over time and a lot of the tools you might want to play with today
are, probably wouldn’t fit in your basement or you probably can’t afford to put them in your basement.
So I think this trend of these tech shops and other workshops around the country have really jumped in
and again doing very well and a lot of people are just discovering things about areas of science and
technology that they wouldn’t otherwise had access to.
I think that there’s also a level of whimsy and even humor to tinkering. This photo I like to show was on
the site instructables.com which was a company founded, cofounded by Saul Griffith one of the
contemporary tinkerers I profile in the book. The way this project is ascribed on the site is to, well the
mouse, the computer mouse is hardware but you’re making it out of wetware, I guess is what they call
it. I guess they clean it out; you’re supposed to clean it out before you, I don’t know.
[laughter]
>> Alec Foege: I haven’t tried this one. But you can go on the site and the instructions are there. No
animals were harmed in the making of this presentation though. So, now I’d like to just go back a little
bit too early American history and talk about at least briefly Ben Franklin who obviously was the original
American tinkerer. You know, he was, we all learned in school about his, all his various inventions about
the kite and the key, and you know he invented the lightning rod, and the Franklin stove, and bifocals,
and the odometer, and the harmonium, and all sorts of other things. He was also a source of infinite
wisdom with all of his aphorisms. Now he’s a great role model for tinkerers I guess but the downside of
it I think is that he, you know he became this huge myth even within his lifetime as, you know, some sort
of great man, some genius who came up with just this unimaginable scope of things that changed our
lives. I argue in my book that in fact his most meaningful tinkering project was really the post office
because, and I make that point just because tinkering is a mindset as much as it is something you do
with your hands. If you want to talk about something that dramatically changed the United States it was
mail service. You know, and also this ability to, affordable mail service and mail service that, you know,
you would guaranteed to have a letter delivered anywhere. So that’s one aspect of it that, you know,
when I looked at all of Franklin’s stuff it was really the post office that stood out as kind of the biggest
and wildest innovation always, although not to discount electricity.
But, ha, ha, the other thing I sort of make a point of saying is that Franklin wasn’t really the only tinkerer
of the founding fathers, in fact most of them for tinkerers. George Washington before he became
president was a, I guess you would call; he was the old-fashioned version of an organic farmer. He was
fascinated with the latest cutting edge farming techniques. He always wanted to find the best fertilizer
and the best way to prevent plant diseases, and the best methods for cultivation. He really was pretty
scientific about it. He also had a lifelong passion to build the Potomac Canal. It’s really amazing through
his whole adult life until death he actually, this was something that he fanatically pursued and he tried
to hire engineers to come up with a way to build one. The problem was the United States at that time
there were no trained engineers yet. So he had the write to England and, you know the geography in
England was obviously much different than it was in the U.S. So the way they eventually came up with
doing it didn’t make any sense and in fact when it eventually was realized even part of it the whole thing
collapsed. They had a, it didn’t make any sense. He, again, his lifelong passion but eventually there
were engineers and other canals were built based on that work.
Thomas Jefferson obviously was a huge tinkerer and inventor. He invented the Hillside plow, the swivel
chair, the macaroni machine. James Madison was also a tinkerer. He invented this walking stick that
had a microscope on the bottom apparently to look at organisms on the ground. Unfortunately he was
very short so, I think he was about five feet tall so I don’t know if that’s why it didn’t catch on. But, I also
just because I talk about financial tinkering in the book obviously Alexander Hamilton was a huge
financial tinkerer. One of the first contemporary tinkerers that I interviewed and thought about for the
book was Dean Kamen. Now he’s, Dean Kamen’s quite an interesting guy. He actually got his start as a
tinkerer as a teenager he created these, he used to tinker around with semi conductors and transistors,
and super transistors and created a synchronized music and light device that was fun at parties.
Eventually actually he got a job with the Hayden Planetarium in New York to augment their productions.
He made his fortune as a, as the inventor of the first drug infusion pump which now later became known
as the Baxter Auto Syringe which helps administer to, you know insulin to diabetics. One of his later
devices was the walking wheelchair. He had this idea that he was going to help people in wheelchairs be
able to get up on curbs and walk up steps so that they wouldn’t be too limited. He came up with this
terrifically interesting gyroscopic technology to do that.
Of course what he’s best known for is the Segway transporter which was, actually came out of that
same technology, the gyroscopic technology. If you remember back when the Segway came out I mean
it was hugely hyped and eventually was talked about as the future of transportation. They predicted it
was going to sell millions. Obviously they’re still around thanks to the movie Paul Bart Mall Cop it
became kind of a running joke. You know you still see, I’m told that in a lot of big warehouses there
used to move back and forth across a large floor. A lot of tour guides use them. They certainly haven’t
changed or revolutionized transportation as we know it, yet. But I think that the reason I liked the story
of Dean Kamen is because, you know there’d been all sorts of failures and successes in his career. The
point is, is that you don’t really know where a lot of these things are ultimately going to end up and how
they might impact us as a culture.
One of the things that I love that Dean Kamen has done is he came up with the first robotics. It’s called
the first robotics competition for high schoolers and around the country it’s just a really fascinating. At
one event I sat there for literally an hour watching these basketball playing robots that the, some high
schoolers had made that they could control with laptops, and were amazingly accurate. They could, I
mean literally they made every basket. But you know, so he’s a big thinker these days. He’s got his own
company in New Hampshire called Decker Research that is coming up with all sorts of new ideas to
innovate. But he also believes very strongly in encouraging young people to tinker regardless of what
they ultimately end up doing, with the idea that it’s, again it’s that mindset. It’s not necessarily that
everybody is going to become an innovator or entrepreneur, or somebody who changes the world but
having more of that active, creative impulse I think is valuable to everybody.
Going back in history again I wanted to touch on another archetypal American tinkerer Thomas Edison.
The story that I tell in my book I tell for a reason is about Edison’s invention, well it was of the
phonograph. The only problem was is that when he first came up with the technology as a young man
he thought that the phonograph was going to be the perfect office dictation machine. He designed it
that way. He marketed it that way. He was convinced this would revolutionize office culture. He was
wrong, ha, ha. In fact, if you read about Edison at length this was a project that he came back to
multiple times over a period of at least two decades and never, could never really get it right.
The other thing I like about Thomas Edison is that again it’s a double edged sword. It’s kind of like with
Franklin, you know when, with all the interesting and I guess mind blowing things he did in his lifetime,
you know he became written about and talked about around the world. You know and he was also
again created built up into this sort of almost superhero type figure. At the time people didn’t really,
there were a lot of people who didn’t understand how electricity worked. So, you know when he was
dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park it was because people actually thought that he was into the occult,
ha, ha. I mean they thought that this really was magic. So that probably contributed a little bit to this
myth but, you know if you look at his life and the way that he worked and the lab that he built over time
he failed over and over again, or more correctly all of his assistants failed over and over again, ha, ha.
You know, he was the sort of preeminent great man in terms of this notion of tinkering because he
would have all the great ideas and then he would tell all of his assistance in his lab to figure it out.
He would have all sorts of things, I mean even look at the development of the light bulb. He wasn’t the
first person to come up with a light bulb. But through this whole process of him and his assistance and
going back and forth, and finding just the right materials for the filament, I mean that whole process was
anything but magical. I mean it was ridiculous the amount of hours, ha, ha, that they put into over a
period of years to figure this out. So, so I mentioned that because I think that it de-mythologizes
tinkering a little bit and make it more I guess democratic. Because anybody can do the kinds of things
that he was doing. I mean he had the resources after a certain point and there was certainly a genius
like focus that he had, but it certainly was not easy for him.
So back to the phonograph, I mean years later you know he had tried all different, they’d started with
cylinders, wax cylinders and those had changed to, well it actually started with tin cylinders then to wax
cylinders. He was a real skeptic about flat disks. He just thought that was a terrible idea. He lost fidelity
in it. It didn’t make any sense. I should also note that Edison hated music apparently. He, and of course
he was pretty much death by the time he got older, ha, ha, so it didn’t matter. So he just, he never
really could fathom the phonograph as an entertainment device. As a result never really made any
money off of it and to really, the real injustice in the end was that a company called American
Graphophone which included Alexander Graham Bell was one of its partners was the company that
ultimately was able to make a lot of money off the phonograph as you know something to listen to
music on. So you win some and you lose some and Edison was no exception.
Then I sort of want to jump a little bit because I think most of what my book is about is from the post
World War II era to the present. I talk a lot about the difference between physical tinkering and virtual
tinkering and whether that matters or not. Whether they’re, yeah because obviously, well I mean
software development is virtual tinkering. I mean there’s all sorts of work that you can’t see but that
goes on to do something like that. So for the more contemporary part of my book is start by talking
about a guy who’s really unknown now and during his lifetime was pretty much a government
bureaucrat, so you know he’s not that well known. This guy, Thomas Harris McDonald who came up
with the idea for the interstate highway system in this country and, you know, just the idea that
somebody, that an individual basically came up with that idea is kind of counter to what we think of as
inventing or tinkering. But I argue that it’s sort of a quintessential example of tinkering.
McDonald grew up in rural Iowa and as a kid he would see how the farmers, how much trouble they had
running their wagons and everything over dirt roads. Especially in the spring it would rain a lot. The
roads would get so muddy that in fact sometimes they would just go home for a few weeks until
everything dried up. So when he went to agricultural college and his mentor at Iowa State was a guy
who was a big proponent of the Good Roads movement. What’s fascinating about the Good Roads
movement in this country was that it was actually intended to increase the use of bicycles and it started
in the late eighteen hundreds. So I love the idea that in fact what we, you know modern highways a
result of a movement that was all about bicycles. I mean people didn’t really have cars yet.
He eventually became in charge of the Roads Program in Iowa and then finally moved to Washington
D.C. to become the head of the Bureau of Public Roads. All along the way though he was trying to figure
out like what’s the problem with highways in this growing nation? You know, what, and he knew some
of the problems from his local experience. One of them was that where the roads went in each state
wasn’t necessarily germane to where they went to in the country as a whole. Secondly there was a lot
of corruption locally so it was hard to kind of get roads built properly to last. So he spent years once he
started in Washington promoting sound construction practices and sort of, you know again, kind of
promoting the most cutting edge techniques for road building. But his big innovation, this took all of
this sort of lifetime, half a lifetime’s worth of experience was that at some point he realized that the
highway system was not necessarily a network of roads but in fact it was a network of organizations,
which means that he had to sort of make friends with all these different constituencies and, in fact,
construct a hybrid of federal and state funding to create this network of roads. The network that he
built or that he advised to be built, its real innovation was that you had to build roads where people
were going to go as opposed to where they already needed to be. The only way he was able to come to
that notion was through this sort of organizational building and communicating with people in this sort
of very complex but purposeful, this purposeful approach that ultimately created one of the greatest
highway systems the world had ever seen.
He, I mean he liked to point out that there were only two other great programs at the time of road
building on this level. One was in the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar and the other one was in
Napoleon’s France. So, you know but in a lot of respects the American one was built in a much different
way. So, I mean I think that tinkering and highway building is sort of a good metaphor for what goes on
in the brain with tinkering because it really is a mind set as much as anything else. Because obviously
anybody can sit down with a bunch of spare parts and it doesn’t mean they’re going to actually do
anything with them. You have to sort of have an impulse in your brain to do something with it. I like the
notion of Thomas McDonald as a tinkerer because externally he just looked like another bureaucrat. But
in fact he had this lifelong passion to make something that, to improve something that he saw as a
problem even as a child.
So then I jumped forward and sort of try to look at some other types of tinkering. Some of them worked
out better than others, one of obsessions that this country had particularly after World War II and as we
got into the Cold War era was to, to kind of figure out a way to manage the notion of human nature.
The RAND Corporation is probably the best example of that. The RAND Corporation which was initially
funded by the federal government, its initial mission was to codify human behavior in the pursuit of
peace. So they would bring together all sorts of really, really you know smart Ivy League types to
brainstorm on how they might do that. One of the first approaches they came up with was game
theory. Game theory was the idea that you would apply a mathematical approach to, to human
behavior. The most famous example that is always brought up is the, what they used to call the
prisoners dilemma which is where, this is sort of a problem you’re supposed to solve. It’s a metaphor
for the Arms Race. The police arrest two men for a crime, it might be like stealing a diamond or
something and so they separate them and tell each man if he confesses that he will only do six months
in prison, but if he, but the prisoner who refuses to confess will get ten years in prison. If neither man,
whoops, if neither man confesses then they both get set free assuming that the diamond is not found.
So there was a lot of trying to figure out well what was the most probable, you know how would these
parties most probably react? They kind of scrap that after a while because they decided there really was
no correct answer, ha, ha. In fact in applying mathematics to human behavior may be didn’t make
sense.
The next project they set upon was what became known as systems analysis. Systems analysis is the
idea that you can try to, rather than trying to solve existing problems that you can predict future
problems and then find solutions to those and that will help you stay ahead, you know whether it’s in
the arm race or anything else in terms of national security. So you would say like how many, you know
not that we want a destroyed enemy but how many enemy factories do we want to destroy? You know,
and sort of take it from there. The end result of that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it, again it didn’t,
this was sort of institutionalized tinkering at its youngest level and it never really came out right in that
era.
Another example a couple decades later on was the Park Corporation at Xerox which I’m sure a lot of
you know the story of. Xerox, its headquarters was in Stamford Connecticut on the East Coast and in
Palo Alto they had this R&D site were kind of anything goes. They, engineers were encouraged to do
whatever they thought was of interest. They came up with all sorts of great ways to brainstorm and to
tinker with ideas. One of my favorite ones was what they used to call beat the dealer which was based
on the book by Edward Thorp on how to play blackjack but they used it to sort of brainstorm on ideas.
Essentially the dealer would have an idea and it didn’t matter it didn’t have to relate to technology or
anything. Then everybody else would sit around and bean bag chairs, it was the seventies and they
would essentially try to attack the idea. I mean of course this kind of approach is very well known these
days but back then it was kind of revolutionary. Of course the end result of one of those sessions was
the Alto computer, the first personal computer which famously was misappropriated or whatever you
want to call it by Steve Jobs to help found Apple.
You know I think my point in sort of talking about the Park Corporation is that they had the right idea.
They had the idea that you really have to let people, you know, have this anarchical creative space that
really let their imaginations run wild and not be beholding to shareholders or to investors. The problem
was, was that back at corporate in Connecticut they didn’t take it that seriously and they didn’t, when
they finally came up with the notion of the Alto they just didn’t see a market for it. So it didn’t matter
that Xerox owned Park Corporation all it took was a young guy to walk in and say I know what I can do
with that, ha, ha.
So tinkering is not, it’s not just having the idea obviously. Well now this guy I’m sure everybody knows
who he is. Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft’s first Chief Technology Officer, has done some interesting
tinkering things. I spoke to him for my book. Obviously more recently he’s been known as the author of
the modernist cuisine cookbook and all of the cool, and for all the cool food science projects that he’s
encouraged and been a part of, carbonated fruit is one of my favorite. But he’s done, you know he’s
done some other things as well that I think; he’s done a lot of thinking about how to foster
contemporary tinkering. The main one is his company called Intellectual Ventures. One of their best
known inventions that has come out is the laser bug zapper to help fight malaria. I believe; I know that
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is signed on to this project. What’s interesting about even that idea
was that Nathan told me that the parts used to build the first prototype of this machine were bought off
of eBay. They were just scrapped, from scrapped consumer electronics devices. So I thought that was
kind of neat. That to me is sort of quintessential tinkering. Intellectual Ventures has this interesting
idea of instead of being a venture capital firm they’re actually an invention capital firm. The idea is that
they bring together inventors before they’ve actually invented things and have them talk about things
try to solve some big problems. In a lot of cases allow them still to own those ideas as they develop
them, which seems to be a key component in a lot of contemporary tinkering stories that eventually
result in real products that succeed. I’ll come back to that in a few minutes. But, so Nathan Myhrvold
has come up with some really interesting ideas about how to foster tinkering in our contemporary
society. There’s some other aspects of it that get a little trickier especially when you’re gathering up a
lot of patents which he’s gotten some criticism for. But again, it’s definitely a fresh idea about it.
I want to talk a little bit about financial tinkering. Obviously most people think of financial tinkering in a
negative light based on what happened a few years back. But, you know, I think there is a lot of
innovation on Wall Street. The motivations behind it are sometimes suspect but it’s certainly an area
that should be considered I think in a different way. I mean one of the things that I talk about in my
book is the story of CEOs collateralized debt obligations which are typically blamed for the financial crisis
of two thousand eight. But what I point out in the book even though the end result was pretty horrific
was that the folks who created that product initially, it’s usually credited to two people Bill Demchak and
Blythe Masters who were working at J.P. Morgan at the time, was that they were actually trying to solve
a problem. They were looking for a new way to offset certain types of risk and this seemed like a, you
know essentially what they did was they bought up all sorts of mortgages and put them in what they call
tranches based on the various levels of risk. Then sort of diced them up again and sold them and the
idea, and it originally was going to be that there was less risk in this. The problem was is, well know
there were still real people behind those mortgages and when they started defaulting, it created all
sorts of problems. But, you know that’s not to say that there aren’t future problems to be solved with
the financial tinkering that we haven’t thought of yet. So I mean I personally I understand the reasons
for more regulation in the financial world but I do sometimes get nervous that sometimes it may go too
far because I think that’s an area and particularly in the United States where, you know there a lot of
potential problems that can be solved to the benefit of investors as opposed to the detriment.
Another person I interviewed for the book was, I think I referred to him earlier with the mouse made out
of a mouse is a guy named Saul Griffith. Saul Griffith who’s a younger tinkerer, he’s in his mid thirties
now. He, in a lot of ways he stands in as kind of my notion of what a contemporary tinkerer can really
be. I mean he’s one of the few people I can think of who really qualifies as being a professional
inventor. He actually, he’s originally from Australia. He came to the U.S. to go to MIT for a PhD. He’s
invented all sorts of really interesting things. But he told me that his first tinkering experience was in his
parent’s house when he was a kid. They were teachers and crafts people and he would help his parents
reconstruct seventeen century looms which I thought was interesting because it was a good mixture of
sort of science and craft. I think that all the best tinkering actually is sort of a melding of arts and
sciences. A lot of the people that I spoke to for my book pretty much said that. He went on to do some
fascinating things. He invented an eyeglass maker for third world countries where you could go in and
make eyeglasses on demand very cheaply. He did that when he was still in graduate school. He’s come
up with some fascinating ideas for wind power, a wind turbine that actually floats in the air it’s not
grounded to a pole. So it can go up higher and capture much more powerful gusts of wind. He did
something called elongating rope which I still don’t quite understand but he’s always thinking about
stuff. He also fosters a lot of companies like that instructables.com that I talked about and very much in
the notion of enabling mass tinkering and democratizing it in a way that it really, before the Internet
really wasn’t possible but now is, is eminently possible and makes it open to anybody.
I talked to a few people outside of the U.S. for the book because I thought they had some good
examples of good ideas about tinkering. One of them was Karlheinz Brandenburg who is best known as
the father of the MP3 file technology that started the file share, music file sharing revolution which
helped I guess destroy the recording industry. He did this work over many years in, under the auspices
of what’s called a Fraunhofer Institute in Germany which is a quasi-public private partnership where
they have government contracts, they have private enterprise contracts. There are minimal teaching
requirements. But he started as a very young man with a mission of trying to figure out how to
compress music so you could have high quality music transmitted over a phone line. He ended up with
the MP3 technology.
Another point to make is that he; it actually made him a wealthy man because he had his name on a
number of the patents even though they were being developed in a team like situation. He was the
leader of a lot of the big revelations about how to approach the problem. Obviously the end results
were known pretty quickly. But what’s interesting is because there, he didn’t have any additional
constraints in terms of what the consequences of that technology were, you know, I think it helped
foster in a way that sometimes, you know at the time it seemed like it probably wouldn’t have been as
possible to create that kind of technology in the United States in part because I think the recording
industry was doing everything it could to kind of stop this kind of thing from happening.
I talk about a few other ideas about tinkering. Jeanne Gang is an architect in Chicago whose, she’s best
known for the Aqua building which has these cool concrete balconies that are all different, create this
sort of wavelike effect. But what I talk about is sort of her, the approach in her office where people
work in pairs instead of individually. She sort of works nearby in a slightly secluded office but kind of
hovers around there’s very much an organic workplace that sort of approximates a kind of team
tinkering that I think is really interesting.
I also talk about in the book about the guys who came up with Angry Birds in Finland. These guys were
young programmers and they had certain ideas about the game, but in fact they could afford to develop
it so they were taking all these other jobs over a period of years and they would only work on Angry
Birds when they had the time. So they only did it because they loved doing it. What’s really interesting I
think is that they never market researched it. They purely based it on what they enjoyed about the
game and came up with this crazy idea that, I mean I don’t know I can’t, I’m always fighting, trying to get
my son off of my smart phone to get him off the Angry Birds now so I can play it, ha, ha. But it, they
really took a very different and, I love the idea of tinkering as something that people do when they’re
not doing what they’re supposed to be doing because I think that’s where a lot of great tinkering comes
out.
Another fascinating guy in the book and one of the last people I want to talk about is this guy named
Geaver Tully out in San Francisco who has something called The Tinkering School. It started as a
summer program and now there’s actually a school called Bright Works, a private school that he
cofounded that builds on the idea. Tully was best known for a TED talk he did a number of years back
called Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. On that list were play with fire, own a
pocketknife, throw a spear, deconstruct appliances, break the Digital Media Copyright Act, ha, ha, or as
an option, he had an option for the last one, drive a car. I don’t know; it depends I guess which one you
think is more dangerous. But his whole idea is to immerse kids from an early age in tinkering and doing
things as they learn subjects. So if you’re doing, if you’re starting physics, you know do a physics project
while you’re learning about it.
He inspired me to; I realize in the course of this that my six-year-old son only had toy tools so I got him a
real toolkit and together we started building you know a workbench and a toolbox and things like that. I
realized pretty quickly that with a very little instruction he knew how to use a saw. He knew how to
hammer nails and he, they learn pretty quickly how to not hurt themselves. So I encourage that kind of
tinkering and again it’s another idea of, you know how do we, it’s not so much teaching kids how to
tinker it’s encouraging it because they want to do it. You know don’t have to explain to them, you know
I didn’t have to force my son to learn how to use a saw. That’s, he knew he wanted to learn how to use
a saw.
There are all sorts of other things going on right now that say to me that were in the early days of a huge
tinkering revival. Obviously one of the best-known types of tinkering engines, if you will, are these
companies like KickStarter and a couple are Y Combinator and techstars that are really coming up with
all these different ideas about how to encourage people and essentially crowd source tinkering, which is
something that you could have never done even just a decade ago to get people to come up with their
ideas, post them online. People can weigh in whether they’re good ideas are not. They can donate
money to help you fund those projects and in some cases, you know some of these there’s one called
Quirky and they’ve gotten projects on the shelves of Target and other big retailers just based on this
kind of process. I think that kind of stuff and again I think it’s only the early days with a lot of this. I
think we’ll really revolutionize the way we think about tinkering and how these stray ideas can turn into
really wild projects.
I think one thing that probably everyone’s aware of now is this, what is happening right now is 3-D
printing. I live in Westport Connecticut which has a public library that apparently is on the cutting edge
of this kind of thought. They have actually a maker space within the library. They also invested recently
buying some 3-D printers because in their mind there’s a direct connection between what a library does
and the ideas that you can realize with something like a 3-D printer. They’ve actually had people come
in who, you know just have an idea about something and they can do it up on a CAD program and then
they can come in the library and actually make a, I mean they’re made out, their built out of plastic but
they can actually walk out with a 3-D version of what they imagine in their head. Just to make that leap
in such an elemental form and in such an easy way is just, you know it’s unfathomable in a lot of ways,
it’s just, it’s remarkable.
So I think that, in conclusion I just want to say that, that I think that if I haven’t made it clear already, I
mean my answer the question of have we lost the American tinkering spirit is no. It’s alive and well but I
think there are all sorts of things that we can do to sort of, to enhance our sort of home turf advantages.
You know, again there’s different ways in the workplace and different ways in the way we think about
education that can help the process.
This quote from Alan Kay I think is sort of, I mean it’s actually kind of profound in a way. Alan Kay was
the guy who invented Logo which was originally intended as a programming language for children. It
was supposed to teach kids how computers actually worked but that language was the basis for the
original software in the Alto at Park. You know again it’s, he was trying to do one thing and it ended up
being something else. It wasn’t realized at Park ultimately but it, you know it provided that framework
and that body of ideas that other people could take and take parts from and build something completely
new out of.
So I want to thank you for coming today. I hope this inspires all sorts of tinkering projects in your
futures, thanks.
[applause]
>>: Questions?
>>: It seemed pretty, as you were speaking it kind of made it clear that right now technology we seem
to be polarized between what we believe to be a small group of producers a very big group of
consumers and you always hear this right? Are you consumer or producer, for mobile devices producer
or consumer? Yet tinkerers exist right there in the middle because it’s stuff that they do and so are
doing all kind of [indiscernible]. We think maybe when Basic first came out on the computers you could
tinker without needing to get a computer science degree, right? So…
>> Alec Foege: That’s right.
>>: Where are your sense on the way even with Microsoft and Apple right, and Google in many ways all
being guilty of this where we’ve to polarized it between well it’s a consumption device. This ability to
tinker virtually, you referenced it but you didn’t go too much into that. Can you talk a little bit more
about that because to me that’s the key right there is we tend to over engineer. We love as engineers
to tinker but then we want to give a solution that prevents them from tinkering. So they can say hey we
want a great sketchpad…
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: And then we will quickly say well with developer dollars what picture are you going to use for that
sketchpad because we can give you a canvas of a still life in a canvas of a portrait, we’ll even draw in the
lines and you just fill in the [indiscernible], right?
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: No we want to create, right. You just don’t want to make the paper from scratch, so…
>> Alec Foege: Right, no I think that’s a great question and an interesting point. I think you’re right. I
mean, you know when the first iPad’s came out and the first Tablets came out that was a big criticism,
right was that these were consumer devices. These were not things that were designed for people to
actually create things on. But I think that one of the surprising things and again I think there’s actually a
pretty new idea that’s only starting to sort of, you know kind of take on steam right now that, you know
I do think manufacturers are somewhat to blame. But by the same token, you know I think consumers
are to blame also because if you sort of play into the notion of these devices as exactly what they are
presented as, which is in some cases a totally sealed up device and something that, you know from a
software standpoint is hard to play around with. You know I think that a lot of people could be turned
off.
But again, you know we’re Americans we don’t follow rules do we? Ha, ha, not in, just because
somebody says don’t touch it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t touch it. I think that corporations are
changing to. I mean the notion, you know I think, I’ve heard of Microsoft doing this to some degree, I
mean the idea that software can be designed in a way that people can go in there and try to figure out
some things for themselves. I mean certainly that, from the earliest times of PCs that was the approach.
I mean I have a relative in my family who’s a trained engineer and the idea that he would actually buy a
computer that was done is absurd to him. Of course he would buy the components and he’ll put it
together however he wants to put it, all he needs is the shell and the you know the circuit boards. So it,
a lot of engineers sort of think that way especially when they’re not in the office.
But, you know I think it’s a matter of changing the focus of how we as a culture think about consuming
and what we do with those devices once were done with them. I mean that’s why, you know taking
apart, having your kid take apart a toaster is a great activity on a rainy day, unplug the toaster first. But,
you know the idea of understanding; you know if, it’s funny because I did this when I took apart my
phone to replace the, replace the screen my son kept for weeks afterward saying can we take apart this
phone? Well we’re actually still using that phone but yeah we could take it apart when we’re not using
it anymore.
So you know both in virtual and in physical tinkering this idea that you can, you don’t have to follow the
instructions. I mean if you want to use the device the way it was intended by all means follow the
instructions. But, you know, I think at this point in our evolution as a high tech society we’re evolved
enough that we can know that it’s okay to go into these things and try our own thing. I don’t know if
that answers the question, but a little bit maybe.
Any other questions?
>>: I work at a packaging group and I work with people all over the globe…
>> Alec Foege: Yeah.
>>: Almost every day I’m talking to somebody somewhere and using technology is just really helpful in
that. You talk a lot about tinkerers and a lot of people view them as people that are kind of antisocial,
you know in their own little world or a pocket of people in their own little part of the world.
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: How do you see technology really helping change that game and mixing and bringing ideas from all
over? Like what kinds of tools do you think are going to evolve out of that?
>> Alec Foege: Well I think that, you know as I referred to before one obvious way is just the existence
of being able to go out and see what other people are doing. Because I think you touched on something
key there because, you know, yeah there’s this classic notion as the tinkerer being this sort of isolated
person trying to figure out who knows what. But of course collaboration can be a very important part of
tinkering. So, you know these days there’s all sorts of message boards online and there are all sorts of
how to videos, etcetera. So there’s that aspect of it. I think that, you know, I guess it’s all about
communication ultimately. So any device that exists that allows you to communicate with people
wherever they are and sort of add those ideas into your ideas is ultimately going to push towards that
next level. So I think that, you know I think tinkerers don’t have to be isolated in the way that they’ve
been sort of portrayed in the past. I think that’s why you’re seeing this manifestation in a lot of these
more public activities for tinkerers because it’s kind of a mindset I think that we need to adopt as a
culture as much as we do individuals. Ultimately I think new products will come out of that. Yes.
>> Amy Draves: So one of the things we have here at Microsoft is theater troupe and I’m involved in
that. It’s a community theater so we end up building the sets of making the costumes, and doing all that
kind of thing.
>> Alec Foege: Yep.
>> Amy Draves: It’s interesting because we find that there’s a lot of people come and volunteer help
and have never actually made anything with their hands. Like they’ve never held drills, screwdrivers,
unless maybe a little [indiscernible] here and there, but other than that.
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>> Amy Draves: And we love to get more people involved because they come back and like and they’re,
oh, so I think about things differently now because I can translate from here to here. Do you have any
data or research that you’ve seen that showed that tinkering in the real world, tinkering with your hands
can actually help expand creativity or innovation or anything like that?
>> Alec Foege: I don’t have any specific research although I’d love to know if there is any specific
research because I haven’t, I mean I certainly did look. I can say for my own personal experience as
somebody who tends to sit in front of a computer screen for many, many hours at a time that I find that
I personally whether it’s cooking or anything that getting your hands on is sort of a real release. You
know and it relieves mental stress I would say. So I’m a big proponent of activities like that. Are you
aware of any…
>> Amy Draves: That’s what we’re, I was led to people here that love data. I’d love to be able to make
[indiscernible] data, hey come help us because this will help you be more creative and innovative…
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>> Amy Draves: In your jobs, you know because nobody has a lot of spare time so I can, hey you’ll do
something in your spare time that will actually help your work life too…
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>> Amy Draves: But it [indiscernible].
>> Alec Foege: Right, yeah, it’s a tricky, it’s a little bit of a catch twenty two times because when you,
when you sort of recommend to people to do certain things sometimes that takes the fun out of it. I did
a lot of theater when I was in high school so I, you know I don’t need to be sold the merits of it but it’s,
again I guess it’s a communication issue. I’m trying to think of what kind of data you would be able to
gather together to show that. It may be more like some academic research relating to, you know, sort
of how kids ultimately develop. But, you know it’s, I would imagine the benefit, I mean as you said
everybody who doesn’t it likes it, right, so?
>> Amy Draves: I feel like if that’s all, it’s anecdotal.
>> Alec Foege: Right, well you know maybe we need to as a culture be more influenced by anecdotal
evidence, ha, ha.
>>: I would say the fact that, you know by being exposed to other things I may view a problem as
saying, hey I have a hammer, let’s throw a hammer at it. Where someone’s like, no we actually need a
screwdriver…
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: But all I’ve ever been exposed to is a hammer.
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: So by branching out you learn different, like how to, different ways to attack a problem.
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: That would be how I would actually word it.
>> Amy Draves: Okay.
>>: Or educational kinesiology where physical activity helps them because not everybody has the ability
to moving a labyrinth problem to the right brain and turning it around and coming back.
>> Alec Foege: Hum.
>>: There would be research in that regard in terms of physical activities that that helps stimulate
[indiscernible] in the [indiscernible].
>> Alec Foege: I believe you, ha, ha.
>> Amy Draves: Let’s take one more question so we have time for signing.
>> Alec Foege: Great.
>>: Sure we seem to be in a growing era of more and more people being involved in tinkering.
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: And I, how much of that do you see is really the emergence of different kits and other things that
really holdfast all these other degrees of freedom and limit it to, oh you can change this particular area
and you don’t have to know the deep electronics part or do we know where some of these other things
stop.
>> Alec Foege: Right.
>>: I’m involved in, you know some robotics hobbyists here at Microsoft…
>> Alec Foege: Yep.
>>: And they often said, oh well you know when you get into robotics you’re either good at the, you’re
good at the mechanical part, you’re good at the electrical part, or you’re good at the computer
processing, you know sensory processing software aspect of it.
>> Alec Foege: Right, right.
>>: So you know you usually get good at one of the others and so it seems to me that more and more of
the tinkerers are being exposed to, you know, learning how to do whole new things by basically being
able to adjust this one lever over here and then realizing, oh that was pretty cool let me learn to adjust
the lever over there. Do you see that?
>> Alec Foege: Yeah…
>>: [inaudible]…
>> Alec Foege: I understand why, I see what you’re saying a little bit because there’s this idea of, you
know, you’re moving out into some area but already people are, become specialists again right. They’re
good at one particular thing. But you’re right it probably; there’s probably some additional value to be
had in trying to figure out some of the parts you’re not as good at. In fact maybe taking that part that
you’re good at and applying it somewhere totally different that may realize something else. I mean it
depends what you’re trying to do if you’re trying to create all, you know kinds of robots that have never
been done before or you’re trying to re-create existing types. I mean I think there’s a lot of, even, you
see this at the Maker Fairs to. I mean for whatever reason robots have become the kind of talisman for
the Maker Fairs. I mean there are a lot of robot activities going on and I think it, but I think the notion of
what that means it a larger context is evolving. You know, so I think that you know I would encourage
all the specialists to become generalists a little bit more.
>> Amy Drake: Thank you so much, again.
>> Alec Foege: Thank you guys.
[applause]