The Innovators

After writing a biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the journalist Walter Isaacson took a step back and surveyed the entire history of the progress of digital technology. Published in 2014, The Innovators provides an overview of the most important people and inventions that have led to the way we use technology today, the interconnectedness of the web, the pervasiveness of smart devices, and the speed with which the world is absorbing it all.

The core argument of Isaacson’s book is the idea that innovation – or at least successful, widely adopted innovation – doesn’t come from individuals working alone. Rather, teams of people working together are responsible for innovation. Our modern-day “giants” have all come from more than one person: Larry Page and Sergei Brin developed Google together, Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak were the duo behind Apple, and Microsoft was the creation of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. That’s why the book’s subtitle focuses on the necessity of collaboration: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.

The Innovators opens with two chapters about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She was the first person to describe how a set of programming algorithms could run a calculating machine. Together with Charles Babbage, she designed the theoretical frameworks that eventually were used as the jumping-off point for the code-breaking machines England developed by Alan Turing in WWII. By illustrating how each technological innovation is actually an improvement on, or a reinvention of, something that came before it, Isaacson makes his case that there is a continuity to this history – a dependence on past inventions without which future innovations would be impossible.



The book is organized around the groups of people responsible for ten different innovations: computers, programming languages, transistors, microchips, video games, the internet, the personal computer, software, online connectivity, and the web. In each case, the book spends about a chapter painting quick and usually overwhelmingly positive portraits of the collaborators behind the technology. The sense the reader gets is that a set of charmingly awkward nerds and stress-free hippies managed to put together the modern world as we know it.

Still, the book is very short on the actual science and engineering of computing, offering barely any explanations on how or why these things work in the ways that they do. Instead, Isaacson is trying to give a broad overview of the way one innovation flows into the next, and also to restore credit to sometimes forgotten figures – for instance, the women responsible for programming the first punch-card computers, or to the surprisingly modest Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet. Although Isaacson makes a big deal out of comparing the different and sometimes opposing skill sets of the teams he profiles, no particularly compelling pattern emerges. Instead, what is confirmed is that no one person tends to have all the key talents that make for a technological breakthrough – but two or more people together do. Sometimes these complementary groupings happen on a personal level, and sometimes it is a case of a bigger collaborative environment like Bell Labs, the birthplace of transistors or XeroxPARC, which developed the graphical user interface.

Isaacson spends a lot of time tracing the way technologies – and the companies or businesses that are built to create them – evolve into one another. For example, one such path begins with Herman Hollerith, an official for the US Census who was trying to find a way to use punch cards to automate tabulating census data. He ended up building his Hollerith Electric Tabulating System into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. This, in turn, eventually became the company International Business Machines, or IBM, the behemoth that gave rise to Microsoft when it commissioned Gates and Allen to develop some software for their new personal computers.



Like most broad overviews of a particularly technical or detail-oriented subject, The Innovators has been both praised and criticized for the way it tracks technology. Reviewers have generally hailed Isaacson’s book as a good starting place or primer for those who are interested in getting a non-specialist sense of the history of computing. His treatment of the women involved in the process, who have tended to get extremely short shrift, has also come in for a lot of praise. On the other hand, detractors have pointed out that this history is very focused on the “winners” of innovation and is written in a way that suggests that they not only won but were also right to win. Isaacson ignores those whose work didn’t get adopted on a mass scale, and he is so overwhelmingly positive and optimistic about the technology that we have ended up with that legitimate concerns about breaches of privacy, the problems of the dark web, and the misuse of social media by those wanting to mislead are all left out of the book altogether.