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108 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

spectrum of bacterial diseases came on the market after 1936, twenty-
five years later.
Rudolph Diesel designed the engine which bears his name in
1897. Everyone at once realized that it was a major innovation. Yet
for many years there were few practical applications. Then in 1935 an
American, Charles Kettering, totally redesigned Diesel’s engine, ren-
dering it capable of being used as the propulsion unit in a wide vari-
ety of ships, in locomotives, in trucks, buses, and passenger cars.
A number of knowledges came together to make possible the
computer. The earliest was the binary theorem, a mathematical theo-
ry going back to the seventeenth century that enables all numbers to
be expressed by two numbers only: one and zero. It was applied to a
calculating machine by Charles Babbage in the first half of the nine-
teenth century. In 1890, Hermann Hollerith invented the punchcard,
going back to an invention by the early nineteenth-century
Frenchman J-M. Jacquard. The punchcard makes it possible to con-
vert numbers into “instructions.” In 1906 an American, Lee de Forest,
invented the audion tube, and with it created electronics. Then,
between 1910 and 1913, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North
Whitehead, in their Principia Mathematica, created symbolic logic,
which enables us to express all logical concepts as numbers. Finally,
during World War I, the concepts of programming and feedback were
developed, primarily for the purposes of antiaircraft gunnery. By
1918, in other words, all the knowledge needed to develop the com-
puter was available. The first computer became operational in 1946.
A Ford Motor Company manufacturing executive coined the word
“automation” in 1951 and described in detail the entire manufactur-
ing process automation would require. “Robotics” and factory
automation were widely talked about for twenty-five years, but noth-
ing really happened for a long time. Nissan and Toyota in Japan did
not introduce robots into their plants until 1978. In the early eighties,
General Electric built an automated locomotive plant in Erie,
Pennsylvania. General Motors then began to automate several of its
engine and accessory plants. Early in 1985, Volkswagen began to
operate its “Hall 54” as an almost completely automated manufactur-
ing installation.
Buckminster Fuller, who called himself a geometer and who was
part mathematician and part philosopher, applied the mathematics of
topology to the design of what he called the “Dymaxion House,” a term
he chose because he liked the sound of it. The Dymaxion House com-