What The Magnificent Ambersons Can Teach Us About Technological Change

I remember reading Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons years ago and finding it a rather slight, tepid tale--so much so that I found it hard to understand why Orson Welles, after giving us his ferocious epic Citizen Kane, picked it for a follow-up (and suspected that it was because slight and tepid was what he wanted after the sheer hell he went through making his first movie).

Still, some bits of the novel have stuck in my mind, not least those which had to do with the emergence of the automobile. As men like Eugene Morgan toiled on the vehicles the broader public tended to look at them ironically--an attitude epitomized by the way idiot vulgarians would yell "Git a hoss!" at anybody with a car, and delighting especially in the sight of some motorist stuck repairing a malfunctioning vehicle. However, the technology progressed, and the world changed greatly, leaving the "Git a hoss!"-yelling oafs looking foolish.

Tarkington depicted the shift with some nuance, with this striking me as especially the case in the scenes regarding Aunt Fanny's investment in the headlight manufacturer. She was impressed by a demonstration of the technology, but Morgan, who at this point was growing wealthy from having got into the automotive revolution "on the ground floor" explained that while the headlight in question worked "well enough in the shop" on the road it could only stay lit if a car was going at high speed (twenty-five miles an hour minimum, fifty miles an hour for full illumination)--which meant that the light failed if the motorist drove at all more slowly, and greatly limited the practical usefulness and salability of the technology. Morgan acknowledged that work to improve it continued, but that for the time being she had best eschew putting her money into the company. However, Fanny went ahead and put her money into the company anyway, and ended up broke.

It is as striking a dramatic illustration as I can remember in a major novel of how amid a time of technological flux people go from dismissing a technology altogether to being utterly credulous as a great deal suddenly seems possible--and how at such a moment the word "startup" can seem synonymous with "gold mine." It is a striking illustration, too, of how what works "in the shop" may not be ready for the street just yet, or any time soon, or even ever--with the innovation in question perhaps likely to come out of a different shop, a different startup, than the one that initially caught the eye, because even if it came along later it ended up being the one that made the thing work, or at least cut the deals that got it to market when it became workable.

The more sophisticated technology-watchers, of course, understand this, and indeed NASA developed an excellent system for judging these matters with which I think everyone who cares about these issues should acquaint themselves. Of course, to go by what passes for "science" journalism," which consistently, overwhelmingly, shows and promotes to its audience Fanny's unsophistication rather than Morgan's astuteness, few bother to do so--or in any other way come to understand what Tarkington was able not just to explain but to dramatize in his novel a century ago.