As the story goes, the Scottish inventor James Watt envisioned how steam engines should work on one day in 1765, when he was walking across Glasgow Green, a park in his hometown. Watt realized that putting a separate condenser in an engine would allow its main cylinder to remain hot, making the engine more efficient and compact than the huge steam engines then in existence.
And yet Watt, who had been pondering the problem for a while, needed a partnership with entrepreneur Matthew Boulton to get a practical product to market, starting in 1775 and becoming successful in later years.
“People still use this story of Watt’s ‘Eureka!’ moment, which Watt himself promoted later in his life,” says MIT Professor David Mindell, an engineer and historian of science and engineering. “But it took 20 years of hard labor, during which Watt struggled to support a family and had multiple failures, to get it out in the world. Multiple other inventions were required to achieve what we today call product-market fit.”
The full story of the steam engine, Mindell argues, is a classic case of what is today called “process innovation,” not just “product innovation.” Inventions are rarely fully-formed products, ready to change the world. Mostly, they need a constellation of improvements, and sustained persuasion, to become adopted into industrial systems.
What was true for Watt still holds, as Mindell’s body of work shows. Most technology-driven growth today comes from overlapping advances, when inventors and companies tweak and improve things over time. Now, Mindell explores those ideas in a forthcoming book, “The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution,” being published on Feb. 24 by the MIT Press. Mindell is professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT, where he has also co-founded the Work of the Future initiative.
“We’ve overemphasized product innovation, although we’re very good at it,” Mindell says. “But it’s become apparent that process innovation is just as important: how you improve the making, fixing, rebuilding, or upgrading of systems. These are deeply entangled. Manufacturing is part of process innovation.”
Today, with so many things being positioned as world-changing products, it may be especially important to notice that being adaptive and persistent is practically the essence of improvement.
“Young innovators don’t always realize that when their invention doesn’t work at first, they’re at the start of a process where they have to refine and engage, and find the right partners to grow,” Mindell says.
Manufacturing at home
The title of Mindell’s book refers to British Enlightenment thinkers and inventors — Watt was one of them — who used to meet in a group they called the Lunar Society, centered in Birmingham. This included pottery innovator Josiah Wedgewood; physician Erasmus Darwin; chemist Joseph Priestley; and Boulton, a metal manufacturer whose work and capital helped make Watt’s improved steam engine a reliable product. The book moves between chapters on the old Lunar Society and those on contemporary industrial systems, drawing parallels between then and now.
“The stories about the Lunar Society are models for the way people can go about their careers, engineering or otherwise, in a way they may not see in popular press about technology today,” Mindell says. “Everyone told Wedgwood he couldn’t compete with Chinese porcelain, yet he learned from the Lunar Society and built an English pottery industry that led the world.”
Applying the Lunar Society’s virtues to contemporary industry leads Mindell to a core set of ideas about technology. Research shows that design and manufacturing should be adjacent if possible, not outsourced globally, to accelerate learning and collaboration. The book also argues that technology should address human needs and that venture capital should focus more on industrial systems than it does. (Mindell has co-founded a firm, called Unless, that invests in companies by using venture financing structures better-suited to industrial transformation.)
In seeing a new industrialism taking shape, Mindell suggests that its future includes new ways of working, collaborating, and valuing knowledge throughout organizations, as well as more AI-based open-source tools for small and mid-size manufacturers. He also contends that a new industrialism should include greater emphasis on maintenance and repair work, which are valuable sources of knowledge about industrial devices and systems.
“We’ve undervalued how to keep things running, while simultaneously hollowing out the middle of the workforce,” he says. “And yet, operations and maintenance are sites of product innovation. Ask the person who fixes your car or dishwasher. They’ll tell you the strengths and weaknesses of every model.”
All told, “The sum total of this work, over time, amounts to a new industrialism if it elevates its cultural status into a movement that values the material basis of our lives and seeks to improve it, literally from the ground up,” Mindell writes in the book.
“The book doesn’t predict the future,” he says. “But rather it suggests how to talk about the future of industry with optimism and realism, as opposed to saying, this is the utopian future where machines do everything, and people just sit back in chairs with wires coming out of their heads.”
Work of the Future
“The New Lunar Society” is a concise book with expansive ideas. Mindell also devotes chapters to the convergence of the Industrial-era Enlightenment, the founding of the U.S., and the crucial role of industry in forming the republic.
“The only founding father who signed all of the critical documents in the founding of the country, Benjamin Franklin, was also the person who crystallized the modern science of electricity and deployed its first practical invention, the lightning rod,” Mindell says. “But there were multiple figures, including Thomas Jefferson and Paul Revere, who integrated the industrial Enlightenment with democracy. Industry has been core to American democracy from the beginning.”
Indeed, as Mindell emphasizes in the book, “industry,” beyond evoking smokestacks, has a human meaning: If you are hard-working, you are displaying industry. That meshes with the idea of persistently redeveloping an invention over time.
Despite the high regard Mindell holds for the Industrial Enlightenment, he recognizes that the era’s industrialization brought harsh working conditions, as well as environmental degradation. As one of the co-founders of MIT’s Work of the Future initiative, he argues that 21st-century industrialism needs to rethink some of its fundamentals.
“The ideals of [British] industrialization missed on the environment, and missed on labor,” Mindell says. “So at this point, how do we rethink industrial systems to do better?” Mindell argues that industry must power an economy that grows while decarbonizing.
After all, Mindell adds, “About 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are from industrial sectors, and all of the potential solutions involve making lots of new stuff. Even if it’s just connectors and wire. We’re not going to decarbonize or address global supply chain crises by deindustrializing, we’re going to get there by reindustrializing.”
“The New Lunar Society” has received praise from technologists and other scholars. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University who coined the term “Industrial Enlightenment,” has stated that Mindell “realizes that innovation requires a combination of knowing and making, mind and hand. … He has written a deeply original and insightful book.” Jeff Wilke SM ’93, a former CEO of Amazon’s consumer business, has said the book “argues compellingly that a thriving industrial base, adept at both product and process innovation, underpins a strong democracy.”
Mindell hopes the audience for the book will range from younger technologists to a general audience of anyone interested in the industrial future.
“I think about young people in industrial settings and want to help them see they’re part of a great tradition and are doing important things to change the world,” Mindell says. “There is a huge audience of people who are interested in technology but find overhyped language does not match their aspirations or personal experience. I’m trying to crystallize this new industrialism as a way of imagining and talking about the future.”