Innovation.

We tend to rewrite the histories of technological innovation, making myths about a guy who had a great idea that changed the world. In reality, though, innovation isn’t the goal; it’s everything that gets you there. It’s bad financial decisions and blueprints for machines that weren’t built until decades later. It’s the important leaps forward that synthesize lots of ideas, and it’s the belly-up failures that teach us what not to do.

When we ignore how innovation actually works, we make it hard to see what’s happening right in front of us today. If you don’t know that the incandescent light was a failure before it was a success, it’s easy to write off some modern energy innovations — like solar panels — because they haven’t hit the big time fast enough.

Worse, the fairy-tale view of history implies that innovation has an end. It doesn’t. What we want and what we need keeps changing. The incandescent light was a 19th-century failure and a 20th- century success. Now it’s a failure again, edged out by new technologies, like LEDs, that were, themselves, failures for many years.

For example ...
A movie projector flashes 24 images across the screen each second to create the illusion of motion — kind of like a flipbook. The directors James Cameron and Peter Jackson propose kicking that number to 48 or even 60 frames per second. It’ll change the way we experience movies: colors will appear brighter, images sharper, motion smoother. Steven Poster, president of the International Cinematographers Guild, says the effect can be “almost holographic in quality.” Proponents say it’s what 3-D was supposed to feel like — a kind of immersive reality.


Read the rest at the New York Times Magazine.