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BOSTON:
The 20th century will definitely be remembered as one
of the most monumental in the history of mankind. It
was marked by people's triumphs over
nature, but also their dark side, as murderers
in two brutal world wars. It bore both great people --
Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa to Albert Einstein for
example -- as well as wicked ones, such as Adolf
Hitler and other tyrants.
The
century witnessed unprecedented advances; from the
revolution in communication technology to
sophisticated innovations in medical techniques.
Revolution in the development of new materials and the
diffusion of information technology has altered what
people produce and consume. Progress in transport and
communication has kept people moving at a quick pace
and made the world forever a smaller place. Such
progress has helped to fulfill human obsessions to
cross new frontiers, even into space.
The
creation of powerful drugs, diagnostic tools and
medical procedures have reduced mortality rates and
enhanced the quality of life. A newborn in America in
1900 had a life expectancy of 47.3 years. Today, it is
almost double. One of the latest developments -- the
Human Genome Project -- aims to specify the location
and structure of all the 100,000 or so genes in the
human body, while cloning practices have made the
future both challenging and hazardous.
Those
innovations occurred for many reasons, including
greed, ambition, conviction and accident. However, two
primary impulses above all seemed to spur them. The
first was the ambition to conquer time, with the goal
to spend the shortest time in every activity. The
second was due to an obsessive desire to get the most
out of every activity with minimum effort. This is
called efficiency.
Less
than a half century after the Wright brothers flew
their fragile biplane Flyer at 6.8 miles per hour,
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier flying at 670
miles per hour on Dec. 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North
Caroline, the United States.
And when the legendary Titanic left
Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, it was
supposed to dock at New York the following week. It
was one of the fastest passenger ships at that time.
Today, with the supersonic Concorde, it takes only
three hours to reach London from New York.
Not
only has traveling time been reduced dramatically, the
speed of communication across distance has also
increased magnificently. On April 7, 1860, the first
Pony Express rider left St. Joseph in Kansas carrying
mail for California. It took him days to deliver the
mail, and the chances that all the letters were
received by the right persons were slim because the
route was hazardous. In the early 20th century, it
took weeks to deliver a message from Boston to
Jakarta. Today, the invention of computers and fiber
optic networks, with their ability to make
unimaginable amounts of data instantly accessible to
millions of people, has enabled one to send and
receive messages instantly from anywhere in the world.
As
the world moves forward to explore the opportunities
of the information age, the time required to process
information becomes a decisive factor in every
activity. Today's
desktop computers, weighing less than 20 kgs, have the
same capabilities as the early supercomputers that
weighed tons and were the size of a big room.
These
fascinating achievements will not be complete without
a revolution in how people put the inventions and
innovations to work. In his Principles of Scientific
Management, published in 1911, Frederick Taylor
offered solutions for improving industrial efficiency,
from piecework incentives to time cards and
worksheets. The validity of Taylor's ideas and their
extension is an unstated assumption in almost all
companies in the world today, making it difficult to
discuss any other mode of running a business. As the
modern management guru, Peter Drucker, stated, Taylor
is a "social philosopher of industrial
civilization".
Certainly,
Taylor was not the only laborer on the farm. The
brilliant Henry Ford spent six years experimenting
with moving assembly lines before installing the
now-famous one at Highland Park, Michigan, in 1913.
The perpetual flow of parts and materials typical of
the assembly line became characteristic of how
industry and the economy at large operated and still
prevails in today's highly automated forms.
Edward
Deming then introduced methods of how to control the
quality of industrial process and produce the best
results. By refining Taylor's complex management
approach, Deming, regarded as the father of quality
control, successfully built up the Japanese industrial
manufacturing base in the 1960s and 1970s. Deming's
System of Profound Knowledge in his book the New
Economics, essentially states that improvement in the
grade of products and services can be achieved if
proper technology is implemented optimally within each
operation.
This
process will eventually boost efficiency and benefit
everybody -- stockholders, suppliers, employees and
customers. These
extraordinary people have not only successfully,
although not completely, conquered both time and space
constraints, but have also designed the most efficient
ways to organize our work and produce the most out of
it. The question now is, where will the inventions and
innovations of the 21st century lead to?
In
his 1899 novel, When the Sleeper Wakes, H.G. Wells
predicted supersonic aircraft would fly from London to
New York in two hours. He also foresaw that in
the 20th century color television would
bring viewers images from around the world
instantaneously and hypnotism would replace drugs and
anesthetics in medicine. In the latter, he was wrong.
Long
before his time, Julius Verne, in his Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, predicted the
submarine and also forecasted that a rise in the
population would lead to automated baby-feeding
machines. Again Verne was both right and wrong.
No
one can predict the future accurately. As the
physicist Niels Borr said, "Prediction is
extremely difficult, especially about the
future." The main difficulty with forecasting the
future is that it hasn't yet happened. But
whatever the future
brings, all inventions and innovations should be
aimed at enriching human lives. Revolutions in
science and technology have immeasurably enriched our
material lives. In
less than a century since 1870, per capita income has
increased 25-fold in Japan, 11-fold in Germany and
nine-fold in the U.S. If we are to realize the
enormous potential of a society living in peace and
harmony with its environment and each other, people
must first learn to use science and technology to
enrich all people's lives.
Edison
once remarked "let the public throw bouquets at
inventors, and in time we will all be happy". But
not all people are happy. Today, around 20 percent of
world population or 1.2 billion people still live in
poverty. Some people and some countries get richer
while other people and other countries get poorer.
Inventions and innovations are neutral, they do not
bring unfair results. It is up to people to use them
to promote the prosperity of all mankinds.
Einstein
is widely claimed as the smartest person who ever
lived, Edison was the greatest inventor of the 20th
century with 1,093 U.S. patents and Ford was the
inventor of the mass market system. But it is Bill
Gates who is the richest person in the world. He is
neither the inventor of Windows -- in 1979 Xerox
Corp's Palo Alto Research Center already employed
personal computers with fancy graphics displays and
mice -- nor its mass marketing system, two determinant
factors behind Microsoft's success. There is something
wrong with the way the inventions are economized.
And
today, many company executives earn thousand times
more than low skilled workers. Low paid workers at a
shoe factory in Tangerang, West Java, can never
imagine wearing the shoes that they produce since the
costs are as much as their monthly wages. This creates
a large inequality between people and a big gap
between people and the products they produce.
The
question, therefore, is not only who gains from making
innovations economical, but also how we can share
them. A remarkable example is Henry Ford. When he
introduced his Model T car in 1908, Ford stated that
"it would be so low in price that no man making a
good salary would be unable to own one". Ford
triumphed because he made automobiles efficiently,
created a market for them by paying his workers US$5
per day -- a tremendous amount at that time -- and
pricing his cars cheaply.
When
the 21st century dawns, the world most incredible
innovation would not be the spurring growth of
E-commerce or smaller, faster and cheaper computers.
It would be human beings realizing the fundamental
essence of the 20th century's innovations and use them
to enhance the living standards of all people around
the world.
This
may sounds too illusory, even hopeless, but it is
still worth thinking about
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is published by The Indonesian Institute. Our messages are
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