The award for the most hideous TV moment of 2012 goes to NBC — and their coverage of the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. ‘Apparently there’s going to be a tribute to someone called Tim Berners-Lee.’ ‘If you haven’t heard of him, we haven’t either,’ giggles co-anchor Meredith Vieira. Then, with no evident irony, ‘We could look him up on the web.’
The recognition given to inventors is a strange thing. It isn’t helped by the fact that, with rare exceptions, they are not the most telegenic of people, putting their efforts into inventing things rather than explaining them. (George Stephenson, inventor of the steam locomotive, had an additional problem: so impenetrable was his Geordie accent that on trips to London he was accompanied by an interpreter.)
And inventors almost always have difficult personalities. Everyone I have met who worked with Steve Jobs always describes the man in prophetic terms — but their last sentence is always the same: ‘Personally, he was an asshole.’ The curious fact is that his reputation stands higher than that of Bill Gates, despite the philanthropic gulf that separates them.
But at least they are all acknowledged as great men. My suspicion is that if there were an accurate evaluation of the most important inventors of the last 500 years, many of them would not rate a Wikipedia entry.
Among all the highly visible Brunels and Turings and Jobses, much innovation consists of banal, incremental improvements in the everyday stuff of life whose effects are neither visible nor immediately realised. There are also many inventions which are relatively useless at the time of their conception, but which prove invaluable when combined with some later technology — by which time the inventor is dead or all but forgotten.
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