The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014) by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson’s “The Innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution” may be his most ambitious project yet. Unlike his award-winning biographies, “The Innovators” is a thematic history of the Information Age. The whole story is indeed complex and convoluted, beginning with the inspirations of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace in the early nineteenth century and ending with the rise of artificial intelligence in the twenty-first.

Key personalities play a central role throughout the story, but a key theme is that collaboration and evolutionary development is critical to just about every critical innovation of the digital age. In short, “sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other rather than as bolts out of the blue,” Isaacson writes. Or as William Shockley, co-creator of the transistor and one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley, put it, “It takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one new device.” This may be true, but it often makes for confusing reading.

Isaacson tells the story thematically, with a chapter devoted to each major development that came to make up the Information Age: computer, transistor, microchip, video games, personal computer, Internet, software, and so on. Each includes a wonderful cast of characters and marks a key milestone in the development of the digital age.

I found some more compelling the others. For instance, the chapter on the transistor is pivotal to the entire story, according to Isaacson, who claims that it is to the Digital Age as the steam engine was to the Industrial Revolution. Also, the chapter on the microchip is fun because it is arguably the story of the birth of Silicon Valley. Had not the “secretive, rigid, authoritarian and paranoid” Nobel laureate and Bell Labs alumni Shockley wanted to care for his ailing mother in Palo Alto, and thus locate his new transistor company there in the early 1950s, history may well have turned out differently. Shockley’s imperious style led to a defection of key employees, the so-called “traitorous eight,” that left to found rival Fairchild Semiconductor, a move that included the birth of venture capital led by Arthur Rock.

Each chapter stands on its own and can be read independently (the chapter on software alone is nearly 80 pages long). Every chapter includes a cast of at least a dozen key players, sometimes more, which makes the narrative arc difficult to follow at times. In the process, Isaacson illuminates many lesser known men and a fair number of women who played pivotal roles in their respective fields, such JCR Licklider with the Internet and Grace Hopper in early computer programming.

Isaacson teases out several “lessons” from his research. First and foremost is that innovation is a collaborative process. “As brilliant as many inventors of the Internet and computer were, they achieved most of their advances through teamwork,” he says. Next, advances in the digital age have been fundamentally evolutionary, not revolutionary. “The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who proceeded them.” Finally, the composition and co-location of teams matter. The most productive teams, he says, are those that brought together people with a wide array of specialties and complementary styles and put them in close proximity to one another. Moreover, most successful teams involve the pairing of “visionary leaders, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them.” Indeed, Isaacson claims that visionaries who lack good, multidisciplinary teams around them often go down in history as mere footnotes, such as the early computer pioneer John Atanasoff, who built one of the first computers by himself in a lab in Ames, Iowa but lacked the diverse support to make it fully operational.

In closing, “The Innovators” is an admirable collection of short histories on each of the major building blocks of the Digital Age. Isaacson’s insights into the nature of innovation are credible and thought provoking. Although the independent threads never quite come together into a cohesive story, the general reader will find much to enjoy in Isaacson’s treatment of the subject.