How Hard Could It Be?: Inspired Misfires
Why the most important innovations are often those that appear to be fatally flawed.
Published February 2008
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEI could fill a pretty long book with all the stories of times I thought that an idea was stupid and could never work, only to discover that, in fact, it was pretty inspired. The two bad calls that I'm most proud of? That's easy: eBay (NYSE:EBAY) and Wikipedia.
I became aware of eBay in the mid-1990s, when a friend started using it to buy and sell comic books. I thought it was the stupidest concept ever. I absolutely could not comprehend why people would send money to complete strangers they had found on the Internet. It seemed that there was no protection against fraud and abuse, and the whole arrangement would become a hunting ground for scammers until it fell apart.
That turns out not to be what happened.
I had similar reservations about wikis, which I heard about long before Wikipedia was created. A group of programmers created the first wiki, something called the Portland Pattern Repository. When I heard about it, I thought I must have misunderstood something. Anyone can edit any page? What's to stop some bored kid from deleting your whole website? I just didn't get it. This idea obviously wouldn't work.
There, too, I was completely and totally wrong.
But then I came across a story from, of all things, the history of naval gunnery. It showed me exactly where I had gone wrong in my analysis of eBay and Wikipedia. Moreover, it taught me a fundamental lesson about the nature of technological innovation.
You see, around the turn of the previous century, a junior U.S. Navy officer, William S. Sims, was shipped out to the China station. There, he met Admiral Sir Percy Scott, of the British Navy, who had recently developed a mechanism used for targeting artillery. The system was vastly more accurate than anything any navy had ever had--it increased accuracy by as much as 3,000 percent, according to one estimate. It was called continuous-aim firing.
Imagine you're on a ship at sea, firing one of those big guns at a target on land. Maybe it's a lifeguard hut at Malibu Beach. Now, the sea is not steady. The waves are gently rolling the ship back and forth. If you look through the telescopic sight at the lifeguard hut, it's moving up and down.
Under the old system, you would look through the sight, aim at the target, then wait a few seconds until the ship rolled back and the target came back into view. But you couldn't wait until then to fire: You had to predict when the target was about to be in your sight and fire at that exact moment.
Needless to say, the old system didn't work too well. You couldn't fire very rapidly, given that most of the time you were waiting for the ship to roll to the right spot. Nor was the guess-and-shoot method very accurate. The bottom line was that you hardly ever hit the target. I imagine the lifeguards of the 1800s sitting casually at their stations, sipping virgin daiquiris and applying suntan lotion without even noticing the shenanigans of the British sailors as they run around like the Marx brothers and try to squeeze off a shot.
The British innovation was deceptively simple. The gunner looked through his telescopic sight at the target and then started turning a little wheel on the gun back and forth. The wheel raised and lowered the gun continuously to compensate for the rolling of the ship. As a result, the gun was always pointing directly at the target, and the gunner could fire whenever he wanted. The technology was not complicated, but its impact was substantial. Continuous-aim firing radically improved a gunner's accuracy.
The American officer, Sims, spent several years trying to persuade officials in Washington to adopt continuous-aim firing throughout the Navy. His commanders refused to listen to him.
"Continuous-aim firing is impossible," they replied.
Officials at the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington set up a gun in the local Navy yard that matched the guns used in the fleet and tried to simulate continuous-aim firing. Lo and behold, they discovered that it was really hard to turn that wheel, and you just couldn't do it fast enough to keep up with the roll of the waves. It will never work, they told Sims with authority, before adding some nasty comments about how if there was any problem with the accuracy of firing, it must have been Sims's fault.
The Navy's tests failed, of course, because the bureaucrats in Washington had forgotten Newton's first law: An object in motion tends to remain in motion. The experiment on terra firma failed because the sailors struggled to raise and lower the gun. But on a rolling ship, it's quite easy to raise and lower the gun to compensate for the constant motion, because that's what the gun wants to do anyway.
