Progress is not a straight line. It happens in fits and starts, is limited, and then breaks free. Consider that the advances made in art and architecture in Renaissance Italy took place over a few decades. Physics was revolutionized in Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. After the Second World War, the United States launched a series of technological advances that created our new global economy.

 

To understand these surges of fertility, you must look at both individual creativity and the environments that encourage this crucial resource. Historically speaking, both can be in short supply, yet pockets of innovation have unpredictably appeared throughout history. How does this happen?

 

On an individual level, creative people are not constrained by the status quo. They think like outsiders. Sometimes this is encouraged by an unusual upbringing. Amherst, N.S., native Willard Boyle is a case in point.

 

Some years back I had the pleasure of sitting with the retired physicist at a Manning Innovation Awards luncheon at The Halifax Club. Boyle, who is not a big man, told me about growing up in northern Quebec, where his father was a doctor. He spent a lot of time in the bush fishing with the rough characters of the camps and was home schooled by his mother. “I only have my Grade 12,” he joked, meaning he only went to registered schools for 12 years. He emerged with a doctorate in physics from McGill.

 

Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, Boyle was at the forefront of many technological advances at the famous Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. He collaborated with brilliant researchers. With Don Nelson he co-invented the first continuously operating ruby laser, and with David Thomas he filed the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser, now used in compact discs.

 

Boyle later became the director of space science and exploratory studies at Bellcomm, a subsidiary providing support to the Apollo space program at NASA. There he helped work out where the astronauts would walk on the moon.

 

One day in the fall of 1969, after returning to Bell Labs, Boyle and his colleague George Smith were challenged by their boss, Jack Morton, to match research on magnetic bubbles as a way of storing information. The story goes that they worked out a way to handle pockets of charge in a silicon matrix. Their theory included “moving charge around.” To describe the process they coined the term“charge-coupled device” (CCD).

 

Their colleagues were skeptical, but technicians produced a working model of the device, verifying the theory. The CCD was later used to develop image sensors, computer memory, and electronic filters and signal processors. Digital cameras, video cameras, camcorders, and large telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, all rely on the CCD.

 

Bell Labs was financed by an early monopoly on telephone service and inhabited by generations of brilliant minds. Still, its process of producing great work was uneven and unpredictable.

 

Boss Jack Morton was known for his love of ideas and for encouraging innovation, including the development of the transistor. He also wrote a seminal management book called Organizing for Innovation. Yet according to author Michael Riordan, Morton never saw the potential of the microchip. This contributed to Bell falling behind.

 

Today Boyle is retired and lives in Wallace, N.S., on the province’s north shore. His breakthroughs continue to benefit our lives, and he is receiving deserved recognition. Late in 2009 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the CCD.

 

I got to know another genius from Bell Labs back in the late 1960s. While Boyle studied the properties of matter, the late Claude Shannon’s investigation of digital logic and his subsequent “mathematical theory of communication” helped move electrical engineering from the analog into the digital age.

 

Shannon’s work laid the mathematical groundwork for digital computers, digital storage devices, and digital transmission (think the Internet). He also designed and built chess-play, maze-solving, and mind reading machines and laid out the theoretical foundations of cryptography, portfolio theory, and even juggling.

 

A maverick who toiled long hours alone, Shannon spent his childhood tinkering with radios and building things. When asked what it had been like to work in the nurturing environment of Bell Labs, he replied, “They didn’t encourage me, but they tolerated me.”

 

When it comes to innovation and innovators, there are no hard and fast rules. Stuff happens. Bell lost its monopoly, and Bell Labs was broken up and compartmentalized. The glory years of the Apollo Program are history. Embroiled in unproductive wars, the U.S. seems to have lost its way.

 

Yet talent will out. The mining camps of northern Canada and tinkering at home both helped develop the independent streak creative thinkers need.

 

David Holt is a writer and consultant. He can be reached at dholt@eastlink.ca.