Vaclav Smil is guaranteed interesting. He is a numbers man, a scientist and an analyst. His take on any topic is carefully thought out, and so has impact. His latest book, Inventions and Innovations was going to be a bit iffy, because there are already so very many books laughing at failed inventions. I didn’t know how he was going to do anything different or better. I should not have worried.

There are, unfortunately, millions of inventions, fully patented for future embarrassment, that proved to be disasters or just never lived up to their hype, I mean potential. Smil does not wallow there. He’s not in it for the quick laugh. Instead, he divided his book into five chapters along these lines:

-Inventions that turned from welcomed to undesirable
-Those meant to dominate, but did not
-Inventions we’re still waiting for
-Misplaced techno optimism
Thanks to this framing, suddenly, not-so-great inventions are worthy subjects.

So, for example, inventions that were once welcomed include leaded gasoline, DDT and CFCs, while those meant to dominate include airships and supersonic flight. An example of something we’re still waiting for is microbiologists getting grains to manufacture their own nitrogen out of the air, like legumes do. It’s a very thoughtful selection that has implications for all of society. I would expect no less of Smil.

For each one, he explores its origins, applications, and how failure began nibbling at its edges. Eventually, they all failed completely, some by legislation and some by the weight of their unforeseen problems. This is all to the good, except that Smil gets too technical. Between chemistry and electricity, he will probably lose many readers along the way. That, and the unfortunate choice of using only metric measures, will not help make this book attractive to the American market. I would have expected Imperial/US measures in brackets at very least.

His approach is always technical. Take just one example from the book: passenger airliners. The Boeing 707, back in the 1950s, established the best cruising speed to be about 550mph. It turns out that between the drag coefficient, the shape and dimensions of the passenger tube, and the lift to drag ratio which decreases as you add weight beyond the sweetspot, you have an unarguable airspeed target. Everything is worse both above and below that speed.

This was why the much lamented Concorde had a tiny cigar tube of a cabin, unsuitable for claustrophobics on transatlantic trips. It had to trade off space for speed. As it was, it burned three times as much fuel per passenger mile as the gigantic Boeing 747, which could carry five times as many passengers. This meant Concorde could not even cross the Pacific without stopping to refuel. Other Super Sonic Transports have been drawn up, but they all fail. The bottom line in commercial flight is .85 of Mach 1 (the speed of sound) is the ideal speed for airliners, and that is why there have been no increases in it since 1958. That is correct: despite all the innovations over the past 60 years, ideal flight speed was achieved in 1958 and remained unchanged. Science will do things like that.

Smil’s point in all this is that supersonic flight is not the “next natural step” in ever-increasing speed that people think it to be. Pursuing that goal has proven totally fruitless. This kind of perspective changes everything. That’s what readers come to Smil for.

Similarly, Smil attacks Elon Musk’s Hyperloop transporter as a worthless idea. As he shows in a cartoon by William Heath, the vacuum tube transporter goes back to at least 1829, when Heath portrayed it as a failed invention in a drawing crammed with them. In the cartoon, London passengers are boarding the tube for quick hop over to India/Bengal.

Sealing the tube to accommodate all the changes in temperature as well as in air pressure, is currently not possible. Nor is digging a tunnel from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Just the approvals needed would by themselves prevent it from ever happening. And we have lots of examples of digging tunnels for metros. It is incredibly slow and massively expensive. Going from city to city is simply out of the question. Maintaining the vacuum with all the stops, comings and goings and changes in weather and climate is not yet feasible. Dealing with heat generated and keeping passengers comfortable at the same time, is shall we say, challenging. This did not stop Elon Musk from bragging he could do it all by himself in 2013. And yet, in November 2022, he quietly (!) gave up, dismantled his lab and scale model test Hyperloop, and restored the parking lot they occupied. Musk just never gave it proper (Smil) thought.

Another of Smil’s points is that numbers of inventions are actually decreasing, not increasing. Totally new ideas are getting harder to come by. There might be lots of activity inventing new dispensers for old products, but dramatic breakthroughs have slowed to a crawl. Moore’s Law, the doubling of computer chip capacity every 18 months to two years, is coming to its natural end as transmission is now down to one atom’s width in a channel ten atoms wide. This obviously cannot go on much longer. But a totally new concept to replace it is nowhere to be found.

In medicine Smil’s stats indicate that we aren’t making the dramatic breakthroughs the drug manufacturers brag about. For example, the five year survival rate for pancreatic cancer patients has tripled thanks to new meds. But it has tripled from three percent to nine, he says. The curve on that graph is not particularly hopeful. And nothing to brag about.

Similarly, the so-called war on cancer shows results in the range of pitiful. Cancer is much more complex and varied than we give it credit for, and wiping it out is nowhere in sight, despite the bleatings of politicians over the decades. It remains the number two killer of people. Smil simply says “It is unwise to specify outcomes by dates.” It will always cost more, take longer, and change directions unpredictably. When a startup announces it will have a new battery ready in five years that will be an order of magnitude more powerful than anything on the market today, you are permitted to laugh.

The concluding chapter contains all the fireworks. Using the same sorts of calculations and reasoning as on all the other inventions, Smil goes after climate change. He shows irrefutably that Man does not possess the inventions, the history, the resources or the capital to implement the changes needed to avoid disaster. The historical pattern of carbon reduction, which continues to be an annual increase, shows no hope of plunging 30-50% in the next 15 years, any more than airliners will routinely pass the sound barrier or that batteries will store more energy that petroleum of the same mass.

Improvements in batteries, currently in fractions of one percent, give no hope to multiplying storage capabilities in this century, something that both solar and wind systems require, and promise. Smil says “Even if we got batteries whose energy density was an order of magnitude higher than today’s best lithium-ion batteries, their energy density would still be less than a quarter of the energy density of the refined fuels (gasoline, kerosene, diesel).”

Same goes for living forever and uploading a human brain into a computer. We are nowhere near the goals, and are not making anything like the progress needed to imagine them ever being real. Target dates like 2045 are meaningless.

What this means for climate change is that all the international conferences and country pledges will not have the promised effects. There is no precedent for their numbers, and no plans filed that could possibly achieve them. When they return home, delegates will find no one at all who can implement them.

It’s a very dramatic conclusion, because all the stories that precede it give no hint of their relation to the future of the planet itself. Pure Smil, undistilled.

David Wineberg ( )