 My name is Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch, some time fellow at New America Foundation. And today I'm going to talk about how tinkerers invented the Information Age. So the thing about the Information Age, as we live in, is actually built by tinkerers. Amateurs, small town, experimentalists, and I'm going to tell us how. The Information Age begins with the telegraph, but then, of course, the telephone. Invented, as we all know, by Alexander Graham Bell. Now, first of all, Alexander Graham Bell himself was an inventor, a tinkerer, a small-time guy. He was, by profession, a teacher of the deaf. For some reason, he began to try to fool around with electronics and try and see if he could produce a machine that could carry a voice over a wire. He eventually did so. And one of the reasons he was able to do so crucially is he didn't understand electronics very well, because the people at the time thought it was impossible to do what he was suggesting. But even the more interesting thing is that many people invented the telephone, and many of them were just amateurs. There was a fellow named Daniel Drobrow, who, after Bell started his company, emerged from the woods and said, I invented the telephone 20 years ago. It turns out, according to him, and 70 witnesses, that he had installed the telephone system in his house 20 years before Bell had invented the telephone. The only thing is he didn't bother telling anybody because he just used it himself. That is the way of the amateur, the tinkerer. Maybe they do it for their own satisfaction. The television has obviously been a pervasive force in our century. It's really difficult to understate the significance of something which Americans spend, on average, over 40 hours a week watching. But very people will know who invented the television. It's not like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, a well-known figure who founded the company. The answer is it was a man named John Lodgy Baird, a Scotsman inventor who was, as all these people were, tinkerer, kind of an amateur, small-time inventor. He was, before the television, famous for inventing a certain kind of sock known as the Baird Undersock, which had a particular ability to absorb dampness. One of his other great inventions, according to him, was an inflatable shoe. But the problem was that it tended to explode after some time. After these he built the first television, and if you see it, it is clearly not the product of a commercial laboratory. The pictures of it show a mess of wire, disc, string. It incorporated a tea chest, part of a lamp. Whatever kind of junk he could find, he turned into a television. But somehow, it worked. You've probably never heard of the inventors of cable television, and that's probably because no one really knows who they were. Around the country in the 1950s, people who were dissatisfied with their television reception began to build tall towers, big antennas, and from them run wires to people's houses. This was the origins of cable television, then known as community antenna television. Most of these inventors were not industrial laboratories or anything. They were small town people, mostly in rural Pennsylvania, rural Oregon, who simply had the idea that we could create a community antenna for everybody and sell the service. So that's why I've never heard about the inventors of cable television, it's because they were tinkerers. Broadcasting, which led to the mass media, was probably the most profound information technology of the 20th century, one that changed the way we consume information. But very few people know who actually invented the concept of broadcasting. Once again, the reason is it was a completely amateur operation. As early as 1908, there were amateurs experimenting with using radio technology to send signals to other radio listeners. It was small time. One of the stations in 1910s bragged that they may have as many as 1,000 listeners. But it was significant because when that model was copied, the radio station was invented. The personal computer in the late 20th century was something whose impact can hardly be overstated. All of us use computers all the time, but you might not know exactly where it came from. Again, it was the invention not of IBM or some other giant company, but of people mainly in Silicon Valley and other areas, but Silicon Valley was a hotbed who were just playing around in their spare time. A chief among them and very famous now is Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. The thing that needs to be understood about the Apple, one of the very first amateur built personal computers, put together by the way with balsa wood and random components from whatever place it could get. The thing to understand about the Apple is the number one constraint was price. Steve Wozniak was trying to build a machine that normal people could afford, that is actually he could afford, so that the components would be something like $1,000. This never entered the imagination of a company like IBM, which was selling mainframes for enormous sums of money. And so it never have entered their mind to wanna build a personal computer. It took a tinkerer, it took an amateur to build something like a personal computer, which would then go on to change all of civilization. The famous story is a story of the internet, which invented by government researchers in the 1960s. But the real question is how did Americans get online? Who invented this idea of dialing in, getting online, all that stuff? That again was tinkerers and amateurs. Starting in the late 1970s, early 80s, there was a phenomenon known as the bulletin board system. Who invented these things, nobody knows, probably some teenager. But people realized you could use modems, call into someone else's computer, host an online system. These were the ancestors of American online compu serve, which later became internet service providers, which later led to the mass internet. When you survey all these tinkerers, you realize they'd have an unbelievable influence, not only on the economy, but on all of our civilization, of who we are and what we do. These people in garages are addict who invented things. And it's important to try and understand, what is the advantage of the tinkerer? Why is it that there's such a disproportionate number of small-time inventors who have changed the course of information technology? Well, my explanation is that the tinkerer is often in a position to pursue a more pure type of invention than a large corporate laboratory. The reason is the tinkerer is by his nature, or her nature, only interested in the idea in itself. Typically they're not interested in the commercial application or what it might do for them, they just are trying to do something they think might be interesting. That's one reason. Second reason is being so far outside the mainstream, being so far from the day to day of business. The tinkerer's advantage is often he's not trying to improve on what exists before, but trying to come up with something completely different. And so, for example, in the personal computer, it wasn't as if they were trying to build a better mainframe, they're trying to build something completely different. Third and finally, the tinkerer is often trying to reduce things to a very personal level. He doesn't have any resources, so he's trying to create something that will work for a normal person. He doesn't have the resources to build a $100 million machine or something. He's building something that he can build with his own materials. And those inventions actually sometimes have more of an impact because they're things that are affordable to everybody.