3.2.1. Innovation and control over the future

Each major step in technological and scientific evolution brings about inevitable changes in the way the world is approached, in the way the unknown is managed. Optical instruments such as glasses, microscopes and camera obscura played a major role in the revolution of scientific thought in the 17th Century, even in pictorial representation. This imbalance is still present. The 20th Century is often characterized by the dematerialization of many technologies. For example, the laws governing inventors’ rights have had to adapt to these changes. It is especially since the last war that the question of the protection of intellectual property has become more complex. This is particularly because of two rapidly developing fields – first, computer software, and secondly, biological engineering and the study of life sciences.

For computer science, innovation has entered an era of unimaginable openness a few years ago, due in large part to the growing appetite of large computer firms. To face the virtual monopoly of a few software and operating system creators, several “inventors” have released “free” software, such as Linus Torvald’s Linux operating system. A new form of network innovation has emerged, with software being constantly improved by a community of amateur or professional computer scientists linked by the Web. In the United States in particular, Christophe Lécuyer recently reminded us, “large companies are nevertheless increasingly competing with new innovation players, universities, and start-ups” [LÉC 15].

As for biological engineering, can we speak of openness when the Supreme Court of the United States, by a decision on June 16, 1980, accepted that genetically modified bacteria be patented? Putting living organisms on the same level as any product of human ingenuity, the lawmakers in the United States posed a new social problem for which the ethics committees of various countries had to rule in order to establish new limits to the patentability of innovation.

Nothing is ever taken for granted when it comes to innovation and the protection of creation, whatever it may be. Enacting laws to protect the inventor is one of the indispensable actions to promote innovation, but over-legislation risks closing the door to potential inventors or coming into conflict with moral rules of social life and respect for other countries.

Here we reach the limits of the historian’s or engineer’s competence. Some read into the growing weight of legal protections, an announced death of the spirit of innovation, or even the “end of the future” [GIM 92]. Others, on the contrary, think that humankind will always find the resources necessary to imagine new solutions in order to solve the problems that darken the planet’s future.

3.2.2. Technology, innovation and culture

The term “technology” can be applied to many sectors, such as trade, plastic arts or sport. We understand it here as the set of processes and methods used in the production of technical objects. We will also focus here on technological innovation. However, if we want to be interested in innovation as an element of our culture, it is necessary to think of this approach as an almost universal aspiration of humankind towards novelty, which clearly differentiates us from other living beings, which has its source in the very origins of early Homo sapiens, who made the first deliberate tools.

More precisely, in the field of machines and technical objects in general, innovation refers to two distinct notions: first, a process; then, its result. Innovation is the process that will lead an individual or group to develop a new object or concept. The term also refers, in everyday language, to the very result of this design work: we are talking about the great innovations that are the steam engine, nuclear electricity and the global positioning system (GPS). In relation to invention, the term innovation is generally reserved to an invention that has succeeded. Invention is the creative act by which an idea takes the form of a real object; innovation adds the social character due to its diffusion in the form of a product into society.

The two notions of technical culture and innovation culture are essential factors (but not the only ones) for the control of these upheavals which affect not only the Western world, but all human societies. They constitute a real cultural challenge for civilization.

3.3.1. A variable focal analysis

Many authors – sociologists, philosophers and historians – have studied this innovation in progress. However, these reflections generally have a hard time reaching the level of the student, the technician and, of course, the ordinary citizen. To understand this complex process of innovation, which involves not only technical elements, but also the scientific, social or legal environment, it is essential never to lose sight of the concept of “technical system” described by Bertrand Gille [GIL 78]. It is in this spirit that courses have been set up, particularly at the Université de technologie de Compiègne [University of Technology of Compiègne], where two complementary dimensions have been used to grasp the innovation process as closely as possible and put it into practice in a professional approach. To do this, applying reasoning to a specific object offers the opportunity not to leave the technological reality while questioning its environment. Abraham Moles, in his introduction to the Théorie des objets [Theory of Objects], describes it as:

A universal mediator, revealing the Society in its progressive denaturation, constructor of the daily environment, system of social communication, more charged with values than ever before, in spite of the anonymity of industrial manufacturing [MOL 72].

So to follow Abraham Moles’ suggestion, let us take the object as a marker of this evolution and in order to really understand how things change, let us provide ourselves, virtually of course, with instruments of observation with different focal points: a wide angle to understand, over time, the consequences or causes of these micro-evolutions in human society, and a macro lens to observe at a given moment in our history, how and why certain technical objects, such as bicycle derailleurs, computer software or scanners evolve.

If I reflect for a moment on the “Sirius point of view”, I realize that major technological upheavals, for example, generally affect and are induced by a set of key sectors such as energy, materials and communication. At the beginning of our history, it was the domestication of the horse or the ox for energy, ceramics for materials, and writing for communication. At the end of the Middle Ages, it was the mill, iron and the printing works.

Today, it is the very clever person who will be able to identify the great upheavals to come. Digital technology, with its various variations such as the mobile Internet or connected objects, appears as the major change, but the fields of bio- or nanomaterials, such as that of flexible solar cells, are perhaps the bearers of the greatest revolutions to come.

The material traces left by civilizations are generally not what is most important to their contemporaries. What will allow an object to survive mortals is either its resistant materials (concrete, bronze, glass), or its symbolic or religious use (relics, temples), or particular climatic or physical conditions (permafrost, hot deserts), or an uninterrupted use (kitchen utensils, clothing). Except for those objects whose function is aesthetic or ritual, any object can be considered as a technological object. It was designed and manufactured with authentic technical know-how, in a tradition that reveals the “state of the art” of its time. Let us recall this sentence by Gilbert Simondon about the English needle of the 18th Century:

There would be no exaggeration to say that the quality of a simple needle expresses the degree of perfection of a nation’s industry. […] Technical ensembles are reflected in the simplest elements they produce [SIM 89].

Technical objects, whatever they are, are the clues allowing us to continue our investigation, with an objective of historical knowledge or with a view to innovation. Simondon’s English needle refers to these two dimensions. In a “macro” dimension, the simple state of perfection of this tiny object – the nuance of its steel, its manufacturing technique – is indicative of England’s technical system on its way to the Industrial Revolution, well ahead of the other European countries at the end of the 18th Century. In its “micro” dimension, the object is part of its own genealogy, between coarse iron needles, descended from the older forged nails, and future finer needles, less aggressive for the thread, forecasting the phonograph needles to come a century later or the fine stainless needles of surgeons.

Technical objects are invaluable “pieces of evidence” for those eager for knowledge. They were, alongside the “wonders of nature”, among the first “curiosities” collected and presented in the cabinets of the 17th and 18th Centuries and allowed, at the cost of inevitable – and often fertile – errors, to understand that technical competence, knowledge of materials, and practical knowledge was shared by all humanity and was not only reserved for the so-called civilized world.

This curiosity, essential to the pleasure of knowledge, can only be enriched by good observational practice. Today, we realize how much this last quality deserves to be further stimulated, used to better understand the world, its evolution and that of the objects that surround us. Museums of art or archaeology also contain incomparable corpuses of discovery. How better to penetrate the content and atmosphere of a 19th Century forge than to examine, for example, the interior of the great Fourchambault forge, painted by François Bonhommé in 1839–1840? What would we know of the construction techniques of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance without the detailed and precise representations of Pieter Bruegel’s paintings, such as his breathtaking Tower of Babel (circa 1563), of which we can now explore the smallest details on Google Arts & Culture?¹

I do not know what our students will remember about it when they are adults, but we can only rejoice to see what is included today in the Technology Class 6 course objectives, three major themes from three complementary dimensions. For engineering: design, innovation, creativity; for the socio-cultural dimension: technical objects, services and changes induced in society; for the scientific dimension: modeling and simulation of technical objects. Thus, students can begin:

To compare and comment on the evolution of objects from different points of view: functional, structural, environmental, technological, scientific, social, historical, economic… [MIN 15].

3.3.2. Objects in their surroundings

Technological historians have long focused on two paths often presented as opposing or at best complementary: a technological history of techniques, “internalistic”, which “consists of highlighting the logic proper to the evolution of techniques” [DAU 79], and a global history of techniques, which proposes to analyze techniques within given technological systems [GIL 78].

Generally speaking, the first path would be that of technicians and the second that of economists. In this simplistic vision of the history of techniques, where should we insert more original approaches like that of Gilbert Simondon [SIM 89], who proposed a philosophical approach to the evolution of technological systems, or that of Lynn White, who from the technological history of the stirrup showed the impact the evolution of a simple technical object can have on the economic and social development of medieval Europe [WHI 69], or that of David Edgerton, who argued for a “history of technology in use” based more on objects than on techniques [EDG 13]?

For a long time, roughly during the period from the middle of the 17th Century to the middle of the 20th, we made the distinction between sciences, which help us to understand the world, objects, which allow us to act on matter or measure it, and techniques, which constitute the essential know-how to build or manipulate objects.

In the context of the 19th Century, the distinctions were clear. The internal combustion engine, for example, is a technical object – the engine itself – which is based on a scientific principle – thermodynamics, Carnot’s laws – and which uses various techniques – metallurgy, sealing systems and mechanics. If we want to understand how the internal combustion engine was created and how it developed, it is necessary to look at the evolution of science, of technology or of objects themselves. Today, it is often very difficult to establish clear boundaries between these entities. Neurosurgery and nanotechnologies intimately mix technologies, sciences and objects, which themselves often become immaterial or virtual. Similarly, if we want to imagine what innovations are likely to change our future world, it is essential to take into account the different facets of this evolution.

The first internal combustion engine, the coal gas engine developed by Étienne Lenoir in 1861, is based on the structure of the steam engine but its principle is resolutely new. The components of the future engines vary over time with the evolution of techniques and materials. Their performance is improved both by scientific research (understanding phenomena helps improve efficiency) and by the emergence of new techniques (lighter materials, high-performance lubricants that extend engine life, etc.). Technical objects are thus the result of a small number of major innovations and an endless chain of minor innovations.

In a sense, objects evolve in the manner of a family genealogy. Each object has multiple ancestors, whose marriage was often quite fortuitous; just remember that the Jacquard mechanical loom, the electronic tube and the calculating machine are all ancestors of our computers. Each object itself carries equally unexpected descendants.

The technical object can thus be considered as a “being” in itself, with its own ancestry and its own filiation, within what Guy Deniélou, President and Founder of the Université de technologie de Compiègne, called the “mechanical kingdom”. He then reveals the history of successive innovations and allows us to approach this path of technological thought. This history is nourished by a technological history of innovations, an indispensable stage of analysis, but which is deliberately placed in a dynamic perspective, constantly seeking to question the sequence of innovations and the many reasons that allowed them.

In a second stage, we can focus more on the user than on the creator. Every object is inevitably inserted into a human–machine system which has its intrinsic development. Mechanization, followed by automation, inevitably have consequences on the people in charge of implementing given techniques. This aspect is at the heart of a social history that has been widely studied elsewhere. The originality of the approach I have had the opportunity to develop about riveters (people who rivet) and riveter tools is to dig deeper into the very heart of the techniques involved, even if it means dismantling the fine building put in place by contractors to, in general, increase productivity, but without forgetting the practices of the workers themselves, who often demonstrate a “masked” creativity [JAC 98].

3.4.1. An innovative approach, with small steps and big jumps

These two innovation approaches are well known and studied by technological historians, and taken up by management specialists, as “incremental” and “breakthrough” innovations. However, they are not necessarily shared by engineering students, future technologists or even high school students. Introducing this knowledge into technical or general training would, however, make it possible to bring an innovation culture into the normal thinking process of those who will be able to design and manufacture the technical objects that we are called upon to use, as well as of all the citizens who handle these new tools on a day-to-day basis.

This fairly general process has been studied in some detail by many historians of technology and science. Thus, Thomas S. Kuhn’s classic writings [KUH 72] on scientific revolutions and normal science highlight the blockages that hinder the emergence of new paradigms: scientific, technological, or sometimes psychological blockages. See also the S-curves representing the succession of innovations in a given field.

For half a century, computing has been on this path, after the development of the great calculators of World War II and the principles laid down by John von Neumann and Alan Turing: sequential principle, binary structure and electronic technology. Who could have imagined, while we were witnessing the great adventure of the conquest of space, that the grandchildren of this generation would use smartphones on a daily basis, from a very young age, each of which turns out to be more powerful than all the computers used to land a man on the moon?

Innovation, which is present everywhere, comes up against many obstacles before bringing about major changes: technological, scientific, and also economic and psychological obstacles. How many years did we have to undergo the dictatorship of the cathode ray screens, archaic descendants of the Crookes tube of 1869, before the LED screens opened wide the doors of the nomad computing? How many centuries did it take for the heliocentric system to be accepted by everyone? Why wasn’t a calculating machine invented in the early days of watchmaking, when all the necessary techniques and principles were available? It was only until a young 19-year-old from Auvergne named Blaise Pascal wanted to relieve his father’s burden as tax collector that the first calculating machine was developed.

In the world of objects, we can find a multitude of examples of this evolution at two speeds. I will dwell for a moment on the case of the sextant. Until the 16th Century and since antiquity, the measurement of latitude at sea was done with rather rudimentary angle measuring instruments, such as the sea astrolabe or the various types of quadrants. The cross-staff, or Jacob’s staff, was the most sophisticated instrument used during the great discoveries of the late 15th Century. Since antiquity, navigation on the high seas has been made thanks to these instruments, including the hourglass, which itself was inherited from the Egyptians. However, in little more than a century, between 1595 and 1730, three important steps followed one another: the Davis quadrant (shortly before 1600), the Hadley octant (around 1700) and the Ramsden sextant (around 1730).

Once developed, the sextant of the 18th Century would hardly evolve. The sextant that we can buy today from a specialty retailer will be the same as it was three centuries ago, except for its materials. In a word, the sextant reached, as soon as it appeared, a stage of technological and functional maturity such that only minor improvements would be made in the following centuries.

3.4.2. Families of objects to understand evolution

To encourage innovation, many external factors have been used over time: intellectual property protection, economic facilities, patent disclosure, etc. However, it is probably even more difficult to encourage this innovation by developing people’s creative minds. To do this, it is first and foremost important to understand how, from the idea to the object, the project becomes concrete in the mind of the inventor and that of the innovator. It is interesting to take a magnifying glass and observe, for example, through series of objects kept in museums, how successive advances have made it possible to perfect the shapes, functions and ergonomics of technical objects. To take an example that the public can discover at the Musée des Confluences [Museum of Confluences], one can grasp, through the series of simple microscopes of the Giordano collection presented there, how one goes step by step, from the microscope that you have to hold in your hand in front of your eyes and which requires an accomplished know-how, such as the microscopes of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek or Christiaan Huygens of the 1670s, to the laboratory microscopes of the 1820s, both more powerful and practical. Methods such as lens polishing, perfected glass making, micrometric adjustment of specimen position, or solving the problem of chromatic aberrations are constantly improving the performance of new microscopes. Each instrument, each part of an instrument is the subject of improvements, often minimal, but the addition of which will make the rudimentary initial object an instrument that can be used on a large scale, and whose scientific impact will be considerable. The approach which consists of analyzing through the menu the minute details which differentiate an apparatus from its neighbor, based above all on observation, can be applied to the study of any technical object. It is thus a powerful analysis engine for future technicians or engineers.

Provided that we promote the twofold approach mentioned above through relevant perspectives, the museum, like the school, can help us to extract all useful lessons from these objects. Just as, in natural history museums, species are arranged in such a way that the evolution of the living world is touched with the finger, technical or scientific museums can, through the exhibition of coherent series of manufactured objects, enable future technologists or engineers, as well as the curious, to grasp the path of technological thought. The electric batteries or bridges presented “as a family” at the Musée des arts et métiers show us, for example, the progress made step by step in the chemical principles of accumulators or the compressed or suspended structures of metal bridges.

From the inventor who develops objects in his garage which, unfortunately, will never pass through the door of a store, to the factories whose purpose it is to develop new inventions, such as the Menlo Park laboratory created by Thomas Edison in 1876, the moat is gigantic. In the late 19th-Century climate, the question of rationalization applies not only to the production of objects, but also to the production of inventions. How to understand the creative process, how to analyze it, to model it and reproduce it on a large scale? It took the work of sociologists or psychologists in the 20th Century to see the emergence of heuristics, the science of innovation. The question has already been extensively dealt with and analyzed in particular by Abraham Moles and René Boirel in the 1960s, and the art of inventing has practically become a science in itself: “From a science of values, heuristics becomes a methodology of discovery” [MOL 70, BOI 72].

With hindsight, the formalization of this detailed analysis of technological innovation highlights three important elements for understanding the evolution of techniques and objects. First, technology transfer is not a 20th-Century invention but a constant phenomenon in the process of technological progress. Many major innovations are the work of men and women who, out of personal interest or natural open-mindedness, have been able to recover, in another field of knowledge, a technological solution applicable to their problem. Secondly, the evolution of technical objects generally responds to a series of laws, invariants that make it possible to understand the sequence of innovations and to predict the progress to be made. Thirdly, this creative spirit which has always animated people has implications not only for technological progress itself, but also for scientific progress and its impact on societies. The idea that technological progress is the result of science is being undermined by countless examples. Often, the phenomenon is even the opposite. These are the technological innovations that offer scientists or engineers new tools that open the way to original discoveries. The example of simple microscopes, cited above, is instructive in this respect. It was Leeuwenhoek’s microscope that enabled the discovery of micro-organisms, as the telescope enabled Galileo to discover Jupiter’s satellites. Thanks to these innovations placed in the hands of enlightened men and women, great progress can be achieved.

3.4.3. The laws of evolution

Machines and technical objects are certainly evolving, but in what way? Are there laws governing this evolution and can we foresee what would be the driving forces behind this movement? The question is interesting from a historical point of view, but it is crucial for those who are trying to unravel the mysteries of innovation on the move. Invention and technological evolution are, for the ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan, intimately linked:

Between the autonomous invention and the pure and simple borrowing from the neighbor, the gap is not considerable […]. The impeller is invented or borrowed only if one is in a condition to use it; an ordinary observation which must be laid at the basis of any construction of technological evolution [LER 45].

From Johann von Beckmann at the end of the 18th Century to André-Georges Haudricourt, Franz Reuleaux and Charles Frémont, many authors have tried to dismantle the mechanisms of innovation, in a technological aim, whether industrial for most of the oldest authors, or stemming from a human science, as André-Georges Haudricourt or François Sigaut assert [HAU 88, SIG 91]. For most 19th-Century technologists, these “technological thinkers”, the reference to the evolution of the living is explicit but used as a means to explain the evolution of technical objects. They apply to the world of techniques and the methods developed by naturalists and not a “theory of evolution” in its entirety. In doing so, they put into practice a fundamental principle, that of analogy, which is part of the basic methodological tools of the engineer [VER 93]. In a way, Gilbert Simondon extends this approach in his Mode d’existence des objets techniques [Mode of existence of technical objects]: “It is from the criteria of genesis that we can define the individuality and specificity of the technical object” [SIM 89]. To this end, it identifies a certain number of laws of evolution of technical objects, including the process of concretization – that is, the evolution from the abstract to the concrete – the autonomy of internal functioning, the tendencies towards the simple, the small, the closed, etc.

Gilbert Simondon’s theoretical and methodological contribution was propagated by Yves Deforge [DEF 85], who applied and verified its content on a larger sample of objects, notably in his Technologie et génétique de l’objet industriel [Technology and Genetics of Industrial Objects]. In it, he develops a method of genetic approach to technical objects, based on the concepts of families and lineages, themselves defined from the function of use and the principles implemented in the objects. It also highlights the exceptions and limitations of these laws, linked, for example, to the characteristics of recent developments in our economic and industrial system. Yves Deforge’s essential contribution was to specify the principles and methods through an education for engineers, designed as creative process training. The long time of the history of societies can thus explain the questions raised by the analysis of the short time of the evolution of objects.

3.4.4. Innovation in human history

By observing from afar, the Earth and the history of the beings who inhabit it, we are struck by two phenomena. On the one hand, in a given place, particularly fertile moments of innovation alternate with periods of calm, which are also generally times of development and deepening. The advent of the fire, the carved tool or the steam engine corresponds to these moments of important mutation, when new objects or techniques cause economic, social and cultural upheavals. On the other hand, on a wider geographical scale, we see that the innovative character of a society will move from country to country and will be inscribed both in space and in time.

We know that various animal species have a real propensity to solve problems related to their vital needs. Thus, primates, or some birds, shape rudimentary tools to feed or protect themselves. However, only the Homo sapiens species will, over time, be part of a permanent search for novelty, progress and transmission of knowledge, with the comfort it can gain and also the inevitable impact on its environment, the planet and other living species. Would creating be “unique to humankind?” In any case, the great technological acquisitions of prehistory – notably tools and fire – have singularized Homo sapiens as the species that will shape the Earth through its successive innovations.

By keeping the objective set on this long history, we see emerging, in our old Europe, some periods of profound change, which we sometimes describe a little too quickly as revolutions: the Neolithic, the invention of mechanics five centuries before our era, the “industrial revolution of the Middle Ages”, to use Jean Gimpel’s term [GIM 75], the industrial revolution or the changes following the advent of electricity at the end of the 19th Century. These “creative moments” correspond to periods when, because of favorable climatic or economic conditions, the people of a region bring major improvements to a machine or a technique – the water mill, the spinning mill and the electric motor – which will provoke a cascade of other innovations, generating in turn an imbalance, a crisis, a redistribution of the cards between the actors of a country or between neighboring countries. These changes, more or less brutal, are followed by longer periods where a new balance will slowly be established on these new foundations.