He ranked the engineer as first among equals, a sort of super-citizen who could master virtually every activity essential to the smooth functioning of a modern nation.  What distinguished the engineer from other experts was his breadth. Bush saw the engineer as a pragmatic polymath; the engineer, he once wrote, “was not primarily a physicist, or a businessman, or an inventor but [someone] who would acquire some of the skills and knowledge of each of these and be capable of successfully developing and applying new devices on the grand scale.”

—     Endless Frontier by G. Pascal Zachary

Developing the display presented many problems.  Some of them were unexpected.  Already in 1978, the Wright-Patterson team reported discovering what it called “display fascination” to a DARPA conference on biocybernetics.  Extensive testing and a body of anecdotal evidence showed that “crew members often become enthralled or ‘drawn into’ their display,” so that it becomes difficult for them to interrupt or change the focus of their attention.  The lure of the display could potentially present problems during operations.  The air force was worried that it took test pilots consistently longer to redirect their attention from the display to the real world than from the real world back to the display.  It was as if the operators would default into the machine.


—     Thomas Rid, “Rise of the Machines”

The first stage of innovation, Myhrvold says, was a golden era sparked by 1830s patent law changes that made the process of reviewing and granting patents much more rigorous. This reduced the likelihood that more than one patent would be granted on the same basic idea, making each patent much more valuable, and encouraging a parade of great lone inventors from Samuel Morse and George Westinghouse to Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. The parade continued into the early part of the 20th century with inventors like the Wright brothers, Bakelite creator Leo Baekeland, Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land and television pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth.

But by that time Myhrvold’s second stage, the era of corporate-controlled innovation, was already under way. At the turn of the century, companies such as General Electric, DuPont and AT&T began hiring scientists and engineers by the hundreds in an attempt to come up with more breakthroughs before outsiders could disrupt their monopolies. These companies’ labs kept the rights to new inventions to themselves, blanketed their fields with filings and overpowered the lone inventors with legal assaults. By the 1920s, corporations moved to gain a majority share of U.S. patents for the first time.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401437/the-invention-factory/