Is it time to reopen technology’s cold cases?

One of the staples of crime drama is the ‘cold-case squad’. This allows programme-makers to add period detail to the scenes set in the past, while the present-day scenes can show implausibly attractive forensic scientists hunting for clues in a creepy location such as a long-abandoned children’s home (an activity obviously best performed during the hours of darkness by two people who separate in mid-search for no apparent reason).

I have often wondered whether it is worth establishing a cold-case squad for technology and science, to investigate those lines of inquiry that went cold 50 years ago but would now repay further investigation; or inventions that suffered from a miscarriage of justice. I was recently talking to a reader about the Microwriter — a six-button typing device that allowed you to type with one hand at astonishing speed. It was invented in the 1970s and failed. Might it be worth bringing it back?

As with criminal investigations, scientific and technological lines of inquiry are prone to get sidetracked or hit dead ends. In both types of investigation there are many path-dependencies, and vital breakthroughs often happen accidentally. Yet few people spend much time investigating scientific cold cases, perhaps because we usually take the Whig view that progress is inevitable, that everything which can be discovered will be discovered in time. With this comes the belief that all failures failed for a good reason.

Undoubtedly, many of the world’s greatest inventions — the wheel, steam power, analgesics, the soft-close toilet seat — would have emerged eventually. But there are so many strange gaps and delays in the history of innovation (the Romans never invented the stirrup, for instance) we cannot be entirely confident that many useful advances might not have been held up for decades, even centuries, by chance events similar to those which accelerated many discoveries.