I'm bumping this to the top of the queue because I'm working on a paper about the materiality of ideas and the prospects of progress. I'm going to discuss this material in the body of the paper and include it as an appendix.
In my working paper, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world [1], I took a close look at two cases examined by Bloom et al., Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? [2]. In discussing their conceptual framework they noted (p. 5):
Ideas are hard to measure. Even as simple a question as “What are the units of ideas?” is troublesome. We follow much of the literature and define ideas to be in units so that a constant flow of new ideas leads to constant exponential growth in A. For example, each new idea raises incomes by a constant percentage (on average), rather than by a certain number of dollars. This is the standard approach in the quality ladder literature on growth: ideas are proportional improvements in productivity.
That makes sense to me. It doesn’t take much reflection to understand that this is so. We can count words, for example, but the relationship between words and ideas is not at all clear.
Still, I think it would be useful to consider a real example of ideas, just to get a feel for the phenomenon. The example I choose, however, is not one that could have occurred in the three cases Bloom et al. have examined in detail (chip production, drug discovery, seed yields). Rather it is one I know something about, just barely.
It’s an idea my father had in the mid-1970s. He had spent most of his career working for Bethlehem Mines Corporation, the mining subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel Corporation. At that time he was Superintendent of Coal Preparation and, as such, was responsible for the design of plants that cleaned coal. He referred to his idea as “evaporative cooling”. Judging from how he talked about it, it was one idea in his mind [3]. He was awarded two patents for the idea and the company built a cleaning plant based on it.
Background: Cleaning Coal
Let us work backwards: Steel is made from iron, and iron is made from iron ore which is heated to a high temperature by coke. Coke is made from coal by driving off water and volatile organic material. Before that can be done, however, coal must cleaned of impurities, mostly sulfur-bearing rock. Most cleaning techniques take advantage of the fact that the rock is denser than coal. So, you crush the raw coal until all the particles measure less than, say, an eighth of an inch in diameter. Then you float the crushed coal in some medium – generally, but not always, water – and take advantage of the fact that the rock sinks faster than the coal. There are several ways you can do that, but whichever technique you use, you end up with wet coal when you’re done.
You need to dry the coal. The old drying techniques – drying ovens – leave a lot of coal dust in the air. Coal dust is dirty nasty stuff.
Starting early in the 1970s environmental regulators demanded that the output of coal dust be severely limited. The common method of doing this was to exhaust the dust-laden air through very tall chimneys lined with electrostatic precipitators. The precipitators used charged plates to attract the dust particles and draw them out of the air. They thus used a great deal of electricity in the process. Further, these precipitators sometimes emitted sparks, which then triggered explosions in the chimneys, filled, as they were, with fine coal particles in suspension. It was a messy and expensive business.
Evaporative Cooling
During the mid to late 1970s my father designed a new cleaning plant based on a new process. After doing some testing (in his basement), he discovered that, by using heated water (to about 200° Fahrenheit I believe) for the slurry (crushed coal in water), you could dry the coal through evaporation. The heat in the water was enough to evaporate it off the coal. When the impurities had been removed you simply filtered most of the water out and then dumped the still-wet coal on a conveyor belt. The conveyor then moved the coal to the storage pile. By the time it arrived at the pile the water had evaporated.
No drying ovens. No tall chimneys. No electrostatic precipitators. No explosions. And the air’s cleaner.
To do this, of course, we must heat the water. That costs money. But that one cost allows considerable savings. And there is a specific piece of new apparatus that must be constructed and operated (as we’ll see in the next section). But you no longer need drying ovens, chimneys or precipitators. That eliminates capital costs, operating costs, and maintenance costs. Further it turns out that heated slurry flows through the system more efficiently; so the plant works better.
Two patents
This idea resulted in two patents. While the patents were granted to my father, I assume that he had assigned the rights to them to his employer, The Bethlehem Mines Corporation, which built a cleaning plant based on this idea in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. The two patents:
Method of Cleaning Raw Ore, Patent No. 4,072,539, Feb. 7, 1978.
Abstract: A method of cleaning a raw ore product such as coal is disclosed wherein the ore product temperature is increased up to about 200°-212° F. before water is separated therefrom whereby the moisture content of the cleaned product is controlled. The ore product is passed through a bath of hot water, then surface water is removed before the ore product is moved through an evaporative cooler in a downward direction while being subjected to air at ambient temperature and at an air capacity of between 10,000 and 15,000 cubic feet per ton of ore product.
Method and Apparatus for Drying and cooling Products of a Granular Nature, Patent No. 4,141,155, Feb. 27, 1979.
Abstract: Apparatus and method for drying and cooling products of a granular nature such as coal as they move downwardly through two flow paths by directing ambient air horizontally through the flow paths into a chamber between the flow paths are disclosed. The chamber is partitioned, and air flow is controlled, so that more air flows through the upper part of the chamber as compared with the lower part of the chamber.
Patent 4,072,539 is for the process flow while 4,141,155 is for a specific piece of apparatus used in that flow. Notice that both patents treat coal as a specific example of something to be cleaned and dried rather than as the sole substance at issue. In addition to the abstract each patent cites prior relevant patents, has a short section of background and a somewhat longer section in which we have a narrative of disclosures along with appropriate diagrams.
This is the first diagram from 4,072,539, which is called “a block diagram of the method of the present invention”:
Something like that, along with the accompanying narrative, is what existed in my father’s mind as “evaporative cooling”. To him it is one thing, one thing that then unfolds into various components.
This is the second diagram, glossed as “a diagrammatic illustration of the components of the block diagram”:
This represents the same process but in a bit more detail; it has highly stylized images of specific kinds of equipment and more numerical labels. There is one narrative description that references both diagrams.
The narrative concludes with the following paragraph:
The present invention may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from the spirit or essential attributes thereof and, accordingly, reference should be made to the appended claims, rather than to the foregoing specification as indicating the scope of the invention.
There are seven claims listed.
Notice item 22 in these two diagrams, labeled “evaporative cooler unit” in one and “evaporator” in the other. That is the subject of Patent 4,141,155, which has four diagrams. It is a specific device. Here is one of the diagrams:
The other three diagrams are sectional views of the apparatus in the above diagram. The narrative concludes in a fashion similar to the previous case:
The present invention may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from the spirit or essential attributes thereof and, accordingly, reference should be made to the appended claims, rather than to the foregoing specification as indicating the scope of the invention.
There are eleven claims.
How many ideas do we have here?
Who wants to know and for what purpose?
As I noted at the beginning, in my father’s mind, this is one idea, which he called “evaporative cooling”. All the rest is detail necessary for the physical realization of that one singular idea. If I am correct in this, then it counts as one idea for the purpose of understanding the nature of innovation. That’s what my father contributed to the art (of cleaning coal). As for the detail, given that one insight, any engineer skilled in the art could have come up with a means of realizing the idea (and the wording of the patents all but acknowledges this).
Why, if this is one idea, was it granted two patents? I’m going to give what appears to be a useless answer: Because that’s how these things work. By these things I mean: 1) the mind that generates ideas, 2) the physical world in which ideas must be realized, and 3) the legal requirements of patent law, and 4) the business objectives of The Bethlehem Mines Corporation. I know next to nothing about 3 and 4.
On the first, the nature of the thinking mind, I don’t know just how this idea developed in my father’s mind. I was away from home at college during this period and only talked with him when I was home over Christmas and on other occasions. On one of those occasions he took me down into the basement and showed me the equipment he used to measure the time it took for wet heated coal to dry at room temperature. He needed to know that in order to know whether or not the idea – “evaporative cooling” – was feasible.
But when in relation to those observations did he conceive of the process flow set forth in patent 4,072,539 and the device in patent 4,141,155? I don’t know. Did he conceive of the process flow and the device, first the one then the other, or in tandem? I don’t know. I have no problem imagining all these things going on more or less in the same time frame.
As for the second, the nature of the world in which the idea must be realized, THAT’s what the thinking mind is thinking about. My father had spent his career designing plants to clean coal. He was intimately familiar with the technology. He thought in terms of that technology, and of the nature of coal. The process flow had to be realizable by physical devices, and the devices had to contribute to the process. They went hand in hand. That this new process also required a new device, rather than simply a rearrangement of existing devices, followed from the physical requirements. I would imagine that it was patent law that dictated/allowed two patents. But it is conceivable that the new process would have required two new devices, or three. In that case, more patents. But still only one idea, evaporative cooling.
The fact is, “idea” isn’t a technical concept and so is not suited for technical purposes. On the other hand “proportional improvements in productivity” is a technical idea, one suited for technical arguments in economics. The relationship between that technical idea and the sort of thing I laid out in the case of my father’s idea is at best indirect – and something like that is going to hold for just about any written expression of an idea, whether a patent, technical report, or published article. But it isn’t mysterious or unintelligible. We can live with it.
References
[1] William Benzon, Stagnation and Beyond: Economic growth and the cost of knowledge in a complex world, Working Paper, August 2, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/39927897/Stagnation_and_Beyond_Economic_growth_and_the_cost_of_knowledge_in_a_complex_world.
[2] Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? March 5, 2018, https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf.
[3] Calling on work I did years ago on computational semantics I could rough out a (quasi)technical argument on this point, but I don’t see that any further insight would be gained. Two observations: 1) How often have you held some idea in your mind, whether original or one you’ve acquired through reading or conversation, and felt it to be one thing and yet, when you go to explicate it – in writing or conversation – it just goes on and on and maybe you even have to make a couple of diagrams or three. That’s what I’m talking about. 2) Think about a computer routine that does one thing – sorts a list, or something more complex, such as lights a 3D computer graphics scene. It is one program, performing one function, and yet it may have many component routines.
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