杏吧原创

SELF-TAUGHT tinkerers once drove American innovation, and could do so again, Alec Foege argues. I just wish he had made a better case.

Benjamin Franklin was a well-known experimentalist; George Washington tinkered with crops and designed a novel plough; Thomas Jefferson invented the swivel chair. Foege finds similar promise in modern tinkerers like Dean Kamen, who built projectors for rock bands in high school, then invented a string of medical devices before turning to the elegant but overhyped Segway. He also points to Australian-born MIT-trained polymath Saul Griffith, who uses new materials to solve environmental problems, and biochemical engineer Jay Keasling, who devised a novel way to produce the anti-malarial compound artemisinin.

But often Foege veers off target. His chapters on mistakes wander from Thomas Edison鈥檚 business failures to the RAND corporation鈥檚 ill-fated attempts to use systems analysis to win the cold war.

Most disconcertingly, he omits two groups that should be at the heart of any book on tinkering 鈥� the open-source software community, and the 鈥渕aker鈥� subculture riding technologies such as 3D printing and robotics. They are the tinkerers changing today鈥檚 world.