Twice in the last 200 years, a fountain of new inventions has swamped the Western world with dramatic changes. One gusher peaked around 1800, another around 1900. Now here we are, rolling past the turn of another century.

Are we in another Age of Invention?

I say yes, and here's why. Three factors, as I see it, make inventions come in bunches. When all three coincide, a perfect geyser results. That's where we are now.

Factor One: The Big Idea
Clusters of inventions often break down to many minds working out the many implications of a few powerful core ideas.

In 1800, for example, the core idea amounted to this: A fuel-driven engine in a geared machine could duplicate certain human motions. Wow! What motions, for example? Could a machine make shoes? Could it paddle a boat? Pull a wagon? Weave cloth? Each time a new machine was invented, it gave people ideas for yet another way the core idea might be applied.

In 1900, electricity generated most of the buzz. While scientists were still scoping out what this glamorous mystery force was, Samuel Morse figured out a way to use it. He invented the telegraph and boom! Inventors went crazy thinking up more cool things to do with electricity. Of course they went for the very coolest applications first. Carrying a human voice! Making light! Capturing music! That's why, looking back, we see a brief period of intense inventive productivity. Actually, the inventions kept coming, but they grew ever more trivial because that's all that was left: brushing teeth... sharpening pencils... ho hum...

In recent years we seem to have gotten hold of yet another great core idea: the discovery that virtually every human activity can be mapped as digitized information and processed electronically. The computer is to our age of invention what the steam engine was to the flurry that set off the Industrial Revolution.

Factor Two: The Hot Conversation
The dynamics of great conversation are mysterious to me: The right mix of people, the right mood, the right topics... Suddenly profound things are being said, even by ordinary people. I don't understand it, but I know it happens.

And I'm thinking it can happen on a grand scale too. A few brainy people travel in the same circles, they bump into each other, knock around a few ideas; a conversation heats up; others jump in; a tipping point is reached--Suddenly the conversation ignites and everyone who's taking part in it is smoking.

Implausible?

Think of all those great writers and artists who knew each other in Paris in the 1920s, before any of them were famous. Think of Florence between 1440 and 1490. Think of ancient Athens, a city the size of Tulsa, which produced, in the span of two generations, Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Phidias*, Pericles, Herodotus, and Xenophon*.

You can put it down to genetic serendipity if you like--the idea that just by chance, an inordinately high number of geniuses were born in Athens in one period and never before or since. To me, that's far-fetched. I can much more readily accept that cultural currents coming together can ignite a conversation of incendiary radiance--which means that any Tulsa could turn into an Athens if conditions were right!

Examine the milieu in which the telephone, the light bulb, the airplane, and that generation of innovations were born, and you find that hundreds of people were busy inventing those items. Someone would have invented every one of them, right in that period, even if Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and the others had never been born--because invention was in the air and everybody was talking about those gizmos.

Our current firestorm of invention didn't start with lone geniuses in basement workshops. It started in a few discrete locations, such as Silicon Valley. There, people working at the Stanford Research Institute, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Stanford University itself, and several other think tanks were mingling and meeting and conversing in the 1970s.

Factor Three: The Social Context
Potential inventors are probably born everywhere at about the same rate, but will they actually invent something? Will it "take"? That depends on the social context.

Look at ancient China. Between 600 and 1200, the Chinese invented gunpowder, paper, the printing press, paper money, multiple stage rockets, proto-steam engines, and much more. Why then did China not go through an Industrial Revolution, 600 years before the West?

The example of gunpowder tells the tale. The Chinese used gunpowder for fireworks. They did invent cannons but did not pursue that line. Why? Because China was such a successful, huge, and peaceful empire then. Without one single rival its own size, China didn't have much use for cannons.

Now consider the West. When gunpowder reached this land, numerous sovereign princes were locked in deadly struggles for territory. And European warfare at this time consisted of blocks of men marching toward each other, shooting stuff (or of armed masses trying to bust down stone walls). Every warlord craved devices that could shoot more and heavier stuff, faster and harder. Already, these guys had progressed from simple bows to longbows to crossbows. An invention like the cannon, dropped among this lot, was bound to spread throughout the field.

Or take the idea of labor-saving machinery. China in its golden age ran so smoothly in part because the imperial bureaucracy really controlled the whole society, and because the Chinese state had long kept peace by putting millions to work on big infrastructure projects such as the Great Wall. Once launched, such a policy could not easily be ended. If the ruling powers ran out of labor-intensive projects, they would have to deal with millions of restless malcontents. Labor-saving machinery was the last thing China wanted just then: It was grasping for more ways to keep millions busy, not ways to render them idle.

Eighteenth century England, by contrast, where the steam engine first appeared, was a society full of wealthy private businessmen, each competing with all the others for business survival. Those who lost a step lost their shirts. All who were in manufacturing were looking for ways to make more goods cheaper, so they could edge out their competitors. Steam-powered machinery was just the thing to answer this need. Unlike the Chinese emperors, these guys were not responsible for keeping anybody employed. They weren't the government. The workers replaced by machines were not their children, but free agents responsible for themselves. They could feel they were discharging all they owed to the public good by making cheaper merchandise available to a greater number of people. So, English entrepreneurs embraced steam-powered labor-saving inventions as eagerly as post-feudal European armies had taken to cannons. No one directed it, no one could have stopped it.

As for this latest wave of inventions in the West? Let's face it: This society was ready for the digital revolution. Fundamentally, what computers (and their offshoots) offered at first were convenience and speed. The previous crop of inventions--cars, telephones, airplanes, dishwashers, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and whatnot--all provided some convenience and speed, stimulating the hunger for more. On the eve of the digital revolution, express mail companies were giving the post office competition. Fast food was getting faster. You could order pizza delivered, you could shop for clothes by phone. Yet all of us were running late and feeling pinched by inconvenience the whole livelong day.

What's more, companies could already beat out competitors by improving their ability to process information and communicate both internally and with the world. Yes, this was already an information-based, information-processing culture--it just didn't have technology specifically geared toward doing for information-processing what engines had done for manufacturing. Computers fed cravings that already existed here.

Today, information-processing keeps masses of people employed--it has become an activity in itself, not just the grease that makes our other activities go smoothly. Increasingly, information-processing is what we as a society do.

The inventions of the last 25 years have created an immense conversation, a network of constantly flowing information. Our lives depend on our ability to access this network and take part in it. This may not be true for everyone yet, but it will be soon, just as surely as phones eventually became a virtual necessity for living in Western society.

With earlier inventions such as cars, the newest model was fun to have, but not essential. If the old car wasn't broken, it would do what it always did. With information-processing, the old products stop working because the whole technosphere to which they connect us keeps changing. We have to buy the newest inventions just to stay in the game.

Because the risk of obsolescence is ever-present, newer inventions will keep coming. Anyone in the business of producing information technology for the public has to stay on the leading edge, because that's what all the others are doing. In fact, information technology businesses generally have little of value except their ability to innovate. Even the richest firms would be worthless in a few years if they stopped innovating.

That's why we are in an age of uncontrollable invention. I'm not saying it's good. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying it is. We may be past the initial impulse--the excitement of a great core idea, the synergy of a few hot conversations--but our social structure is hardwired to keep invention going at an accelerating pace. No one has a grip on the lever that can slow it down--and in fact, no such lever exists. This Age of Invention will keep going until the whole social system changes in some big way--which it will. Technology will see to that.