SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_04: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_01: Play the word association game with Silicon Valley and your mind is unlikely to go to canned food. Silicon Valley stands for cutting edge technology, bold ideas that change the world. Nobody would say the tin can is cutting edge technology, although the more literal minded might make that claim for the can opener. Yet in its day, canned food was as revolutionary as anything now being pitched by Bay Area startups. And its story reveals how surprisingly little some deep dilemmas around innovation have changed in the last 200 years or so. To start with, how do we incentivise good ideas? There's the lure of a patent of course, or first mover advantage. But if you really want to encourage fresh thinking, offer a prize. Self-driving cars are a current example. In 2004, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, offered a million dollars to the first vehicle to find its way across a course in the Mojave Desert. The result was pure wacky races. Vehicles caught fire, flipped over, crashed through fences and ground to a halt because they were confused by tumbleweed. But within a decade, self-driving cars were reliable enough to let loose on public roads. The DARPA prize was hardly the first, however. In 1795, the government of France offered a prize of 12,000 francs for inventing a method of preserving food. It was eventually claimed by Nicolas Aper, a Parisian grocer and confectioner, credited with the development of the bouillon or stock cube, and less plausibly, the recipe for chicken Kiev. Through trial and error, Aper found that if you put cooked food in a glass jar, plunged the jar into boiling water and then sealed it with wax, the food wouldn't go off. Why was the French government interested in preserving food? For the same reason, DARPA was interested in vehicles that could navigate themselves across deserts, with a view to winning wars. Napoleon Bonaparte was an ambitious general when the prize was announced. By the time it was awarded, he was France's emperor, about to launch his disastrous invasion of Russia. Napoleon may or may not have said that an army marches on its stomach, but he was clearly keen to broaden his soldiers' provisions from smoked and salted meat. Aper's laboratory was an early example of an idea we'll encounter often in this series. Military needs spur innovations that transform the economy. From GPS to ARPANET, which became the internet, Silicon Valley is built on technologies first funded by the US Department of Defense. But even when ideas come from the public sector, it takes a culture of entrepreneurship to explore what they can do. Aper wrote up his experiments. His book was later published in English as The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years. Meanwhile, another Frenchman, Philippe de Girard, started applying the techniques to containers made of tin, not glass. Yet, when he wanted to commercialize his idea, he decided to sail across the English Channel. Why? Too much French bureaucracy, claims Norman Cowell of Reading University in the UK. He adds that England's financial system was entrepreneurial. There were venture capitalists prepared to take a risk. Girard employed an English merchant to patent the idea on his behalf, a necessary subterfuge as England was at war with Napoleon. And an engineer and serial entrepreneur, Brian Duncan, bought the patent for the tidy sum of a thousand pounds. A modern day Girard, looking for a place with venture capital and risk-taking attitudes, would surely head for Silicon Valley. For decades, others have tried to emulate its knack for generating ideas and growing businesses, to create an innovation ecosystem in the current parlance. But none have yet quite measured up. We economists can confidently tell you some ingredients for an innovation ecosystem, such as making businesses easy to start and encouraging links with academic research. But nobody has perfected the recipe. One ingredient that's much debated is how best to regulate. Lack of red tape helped attract Girard to England, but canned food was about to demonstrate why rules and inspections do serve a purpose. By 1845, with Duncan's patent now expired, Britain's navy decided to save money by finding a cheap supplier. This proved unwise. After complaints from sailors, naval inspectors started checking the wares. On one occasion, they tested 306 cans and only 42 were edible. The rest contained such delicacies as putrid kidneys, diseased organs and dog tongues. The scandal hit the newspapers at an unfortunate time, when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had just introduced ordinary Londoners to canned delights, hitherto stocked only by luxury food stores. There were sardines and truffles, artichokes and turtle soup. Putrid kidneys were not supposed to be part of the narrative. With quality improving and prices coming down, canned food had seemed set for the mass market. But it took years to rebuild public confidence. That mass market seemed self-evidently desirable. With refrigeration yet to be invented, safe canned food would widen people's diets and improve nutrition. It's not always so straightforward to anticipate how new technologies will play out, and whether regulators should try to speed them up or hold them back, nudge their direction or leave well alone. Will artificial intelligence hugely widen inequality? Should government step in? How? These are debatable questions but some Silicon Valley types are sufficiently concerned about where their innovations may be taking us that they're seriously imagining apocalyptic scenarios. We're skating on really thin cultural ice right now, says a former Facebook manager to the New Yorker magazine, explaining why he's bought land on an island and stocked up on ammunition. Others have bought underground bunkers and have planes on constant standby in case society implodes. These preppers, by one estimate, include at least half the billionaires in Silicon Valley. Progress can be fragile. Nicolas Appert found that out. He invested his 12,000 francs in expanding his canning operation, only to see it destroyed by invading Prussian and Austrian armies as Napoleon's rule collapsed. The world looks more stable now, and the Silicon Valley preppers are probably worrying too much. But if their worst fears are realised, the world's most valuable commodity might yet be canned food.
SPEAKER_04: For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com.
SPEAKER_02: That's Detours, on the Documentary podcast from the BBC World Service.
