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Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
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About Loonshots: How To Nurture The Crazy Ideas That Win
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. LoonshotsHow to Nuture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, cure Diseases, and Transform IndustriesBy Safi BahcallSt. Martin's PressCopyright © 2019 Safi BahcallAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-18596-9ContentsTitle Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, Epigraphs, Prologue, Introduction, PART ONE: ENGINEERS OF SERENDIPITY, 1. How Loonshots Won a War, 2. The Surprising Fragility of the Loonshot, 3. The Two Types of Loonshots: Trippe vs. Crandall, 4. Edwin Land and the Moses Trap, 5. Escaping the Moses Trap, PART TWO: THE SCIENCE OF SUDDEN CHANGE, Interlude: The Importance of Being Emergent, 6. Phase Transitions, I: Marriage, Forest Fires, and Terrorists, 7. Phase Transitions, II: The Magic Number 150, 8. The Fourth Rule, PART THREE: THE MOTHER OF ALL LOONSHOTS, 9. Why The World Speaks English, Afterword: Loonshots vs. Disruption, Acknowledgments, Glossary, Appendix a. Summary: The Bush-Vail Rules, Appendix b. The Innovation Equation, Illustration Credits, Source Notes, Endnotes, Index, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1How Loonshots Won a WarLife on the edgeHad there been prediction markets in 1939, the odds would have favored Nazi Germany.In the looming battle between world powers, the Allies lagged far behind Germany in what Winston Churchill described as the "secret war": the race for more powerful technologies. Germany's new submarines, called U-boats, threatened to dominate the Atlantic and strangle supply lines to Europe. The planes of the Luftwaffe, ready to bomb Europe into submission, outclassed those of any other air force. And the discovery of nuclear fission early that year, by two German scientists, put Hitler within reach of a weapon with almost unfathomable power.Had the technology race been lost, Churchill wrote, "all the bravery and sacrifices of the people would have been in vain."By the time Vannevar Bush, dean of engineering at MIT, quit his job, moved to Washington, and talked his way into a meeting with the president in the summer of 1940, the US Navy already held the key to winning that race. They'd had it for eighteen years. They just didn't know it.To find that key and win that race, Bush invented a new system for nurturing radical breakthroughs.It was the secret recipe for winning the secret war.THE DORCHESTERIn late September 1922, two ham-radio enthusiasts at the US Naval Air Station just outside Washington, DC, set up a shortwave radio transmitter on the edge of the station overlooking the Potomac River. Leo Young, 31, from a small farm town in Ohio, had been building radio sets since high school. His partner, Hoyt Taylor, 42, a former physics professor, was the Navy's senior radio scientist. They'd come together to test whether high-frequency radio could help ships communicate more reliably at sea.Young rigged the radio's transmitter to operate at 60 megahertz, 20 times higher than the level for which it had been designed. He jacked up the sensitivity of its receiver using a technique he'd discovered in an engineering journal. Equipment suitably tweaked, the two turned on the transmitter, loaded the receiver onto a truck, and drove to Hains Point, a park directly across the Potomac from the naval air station.They placed the receiver on the stone seawall at the edge of the park and aimed it at the transmitter across the river. The receiver emitted the steady tone of a clear signal. Suddenly, the tone doubled in volume. Then it disappeared completely for a few seconds. Then it came back at double volume for a moment before settling back to the original, steady tone. They looked up and saw that a ship, the Dorchester, had passed between the receiver and the transmitter.To the two engineers, the doubling in strength was an unmistakable sign of something called radio-wave interference: two synchronized beams adding together. When the hull of the Dorchester reached a "sweet-spot" distance from the line of sight between transmitter and receiver,
