Not all inventions are hold equal . Some spring from nowhere to make an entirely new class of engineering science ; others assemble existing ideas to create utilitarian new product . Now , researcher have exhibit that the past century ’s seen a steady growth in innovation by the combination of concept — but less in the way of pure discovery .
You might intuitively expect that to be the case . The years lead to the 20th century learn the nascency of basal new technologies : caravan , cars , light-headed bulbs , telephone and innumerous others . The last hundred years has breed huge progression in IT and communicating , but they ’ve felt more incremental than radical . Still , anecdote is n’t as useful as information — so , asThe Economistreports , Youn Hyejin from the University of Oxford decided to inquire how invention changed by study United States Patent and Trademark Office records .
The USPTO provides every patent of invention with at least one principal class and subclass . So , if you invent an physical exertion machine , it may be assigned the primary category 482 and the sub - class 6 because it order the user ’s drive — give it the code 482/6 . It may , of form , have another code , too , if it also has some other function . All told there are more than 160,000 different code — and records about how they ’ve switch and been assigned date back all the path to 1790 . So Hyejin dig right in , to see how new design throughout chronicle have vary .
She detect that during the nineteenth C almost half of patents were attribute a single code ; these days , that material body has dropped to one - one-tenth . She also found that , while the issue of unexampled computer code and patents develop at the same rate until about 1870 , thereafter the act of letters patent grew way , way faster than the turn of codes . Digging a minuscule deeper , the pace of new combination of codes grew at the same charge per unit as the number of patents . That result , published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface , imply that modern - day invention is a result of combining existing technologies rather than creating young unity from nowhere . Bingo , suspicion was proper .
But asThe Economist point out , things may yet change . Our understanding of biological science is becoming ever more modern and may yet bear advances that natural philosophy and chemistry did in centuries past . The futurity , then , could yield a brave new world of invention — and a lot of new oeuvre create classes at the United States Patent and Trademark Office . [ Journal of the Royal Society InterfaceviaThe Economist ]
Image byLorenzo Schedaunder Creative Commons licence
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