The Power Of Tweaking

Inventions are amazing things, they bring us new capabilities and make new technologies available and most importantly they allow people to use the phrase "paradigm shift" unironically (/end sarcasm).

It seems to me though that inventions are only fifty percent of the job. The rest comes from the necessary tweaks and improvements to the technology or device and it is a process that often can take decades.

This is where the rest of us in the various STEM fields come in. We tweak and revise and improve on original technologies and ideas until they are polished up all nice and shiny.

To best understand this concept it will be necessary to go through a number of representative examples.

The Automobile

The first automobiles were simple affairs. No windshields, simple bodies, simple engines, simple brakes and even the human interface was in development.

Over the past 100 years constant improvements have brought us the sleek, efficient and almost autonomous vehicles that we drive today.

Let's think about the first car. It had no windshield so bugs would get into your eyes and mouth. This is no good so let's add a windshield.

Great, now the view is obscured when it rains. Thus we need windshield wipers.

Still not good enough because the windshield gets dirty when it is not raining so we need to add a windshield washer fluid spray device.

At night we can't see so we need to add headlights. Good but they are too bright for oncoming vehicles so we need a dimmer switch.

The first engines were quite weak so they needed constant improvements to increase their power and fuel efficiency. The improvements continued on to today where we have massively powerful and efficient engines with turbochargers or superchargers and sometimes even electric motors instead of the internal combustion engine.

The Airplane

As for the car, the first airplanes were also simple affairs that were built of wood and fabric. The engines were under-powered and the controls were primitive.

Modern airplanes are now sleek, large and very fast. The engines have been improved steadily and they are now large and efficient behemoths that power airplanes at great speeds across the skies.

For the pilot, airplanes can fly themselves and even land themselves if needed. Navigation aids have improved to the extent that pilots can bring planes in at night and in snowstorms or rainstorms with safety guaranteed.

Aircraft safety has also improved. Although air accidents and fatalities still occur airplane safety improvements over the decades has caused the accident rate to steadily decrease. Accidents are now uncommon and noteworthy events.

The Mobile Phone

The first mobile phones were large clunky things that were deservedly called 'bricks'. They were also expensive items that only world leaders, bankers and stock brokers could afford.

Those phones were improved and got smaller in both size and power consumption. Their sound quality and data transmission rates have also improved markedly with the advent of 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G technology being developed.

Cell phones used to be status symbols but the cost of cell phones has steadily dropped to the point where most people have cell phones instead of land lines. The computing power of these devices has also increased to the point where current phones have more computing power than desktops computers of 10 years ago (maybe even 5 years ago).

Windows OS

There are many operating systems out there and as an example let's look at Microsoft's Windows OS.

I had the dubious pleasure to be one of those people who got to use Windows 3.1 when it was new. It was a great improvement because it replaced text-based systems like MS-DOS. Even so, I do not need to say that it left a lot to be desired.

The interface was clunky and it crashed very often gifting the world the much-used Blue Screen of Death meme (BSOD). Even to this day I save my files and save them often because of the unreliability of these old operating systems (old habits die hard).

The latest, Windows 10, is a vast improvement over those old versions. Crashes of the entire OS are now uncommon (although they still do occur) and crashes tend to be limited to just the termination of the individual offending application or process.

The OS still has its detractors but the point of this post is that Windows OS along with the other major ones, Apple OSX and the various Linux OS distributions, have improved greatly over their first incarnations.

Closing Words

Successful inventions are comparatively rare and inventors need to receive their well-deserved praise for coming up with new things that improve the lives of their fellow humans.

Having said that, I think that we also need to recognize the contributions that come from the army of quiet and hard-working STEM professionals out there that take those first crude inventions and revise and tweak them until they become the polished and refined objects that are a pleasure to own and operate.

Thank you for reading my post.

Post Sources

[1] History of the car.
[2] History of the airplane.
[3] Aviation safety.
[4] History of the mobile phone.
[5] Microsoft Windows.
[6] The Blue Screen Of Death.