As a cognitive scientist, I am deeply concerned with the study of insight and problem solving – particularly of ill-defined problems, that is problems where the nature of the solution or even the problem itself is unclear or debatable. Most problems seen outside the confines of a class-room are ill-defined problems and so those things that help us solve them are immeasurably valuable.
One way to assist in the solution of ill-defined problems is the retention of previous solutions for analogous problems, such as old technology.
However, old technology, especially technology that has been wholly eclipsed by modern innovation is quickly become eroded – we are forgetting our inventive past.
This is not a new problem, despite the accelerating pace of invention – the Dark Ages are defined by this collective amnesia, Europeans forgot how to repeat the feats of engineering performed routinely by the Romans – roads, aqueducts (specifically keystone arches) and most forms of sanitation and hygiene disappeared as those responsible for remembering how to do those things disappeared.
The story of the printing press is similar – history’s most famous Alsatian, Gutenberg was the inventor of movable type, not the printing press. Chinese inventors and several different cultures in the Arabian peninsula experimented with printing but found it intractable as a mechanism for archiving, and so the technology died out.
A more contemporaneous example is the recovery of satellite imagery collected prior to the Apollo missions. A cadre of enthusiast scientists have converted a former fast-food restaurant into a photograph recovery lab. These photos are stored as analogue data on reams of tape. Only a handful of machines exist that are capable of reading these tapes – several had to be cannibalized to get a single one into working order.
Not only is the technology itself endangered, the knowledge of its inner-workings was also rare, only a handful of NASA scientists are still around with sufficient know-how to repair and operate the tape-reading machines. The tapes being recovered retain some of the most detailed images of the moon ever captured – moreover, they capture images of the moon prior to humanity landing there.
This case and another case of a scientist re-purposing a childhood toy (Shrinky Dinks) to create useful and cheap bio-medical tools are documented in the most recent issue of MIT Technology Review.
The process of invention is considered by many to be the introduction of existing (often well-established) ideas into a novel context and exploring its implications. If we do not have a collective memory and respect of and for past solutions, how often are we spending weeks in the lab to save a day in the library?
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