History is written by those who win and those who dominate.

—Edward Said

History is the lie commonly agreed upon.

—Voltaire

History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.

—W. S. Holt

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.

—Cicero

In the Egyptian wing of London's British Museum, I hovered by the Rosetta Stone, waiting for the guards to look away. When a child stumbled over the corner of a lesser relic, distracting the guards, I moved in. Holding my breath, I reached over the steel barrier, stretched out my trembling hand, and ran it across the letters on the Stone. My fingertips gently stroked the cold surface, racing along ancient corners of mysterious symbols: in one motion, I touched more history than fills many men's dreams. With my hand back at my side, I strolled away, ashamed and thrilled, praying against alarms and handcuffs that never came. I didn't wash that hand all day, lost in imagining the important men behind the Stone (see Figure 2-1).

But when the thrill of my museum mischief faded, one frustration remained: the Stone is famous for reasons irrelevant to those who conceived it. The stonecutters could not have imagined their work in a European museum 2,000 years in the future, with hired guards protecting it from hooligans like me. Yet, there it sat, as if its destiny was to be found in a rubble pile by the French, used to decipher hieroglyphics, and, finally, displayed in its true resting place in London. In the solemn, shrine-like atmosphere of the museum, I'd forgotten that the stone is an artifact: it's an object that was part of history but not history itself. ^[17]

Figure 2-1. The Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, circa 1996.

Although the Stone is a more of a discovery than an invention, this gap between how the stonemakers saw their work and how we see it today is meaningful to innovators. To understand innovations as they happen, we need to see how history changes perceptions and re-examine events like the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

Weighing nearly 2,000 pounds, the Stone is a fragment of an Egyptian pillar created in 196 BCE. In its time, the Stone was ordinary, one of many used by pharaohs to communicate with their people. The message on the Stone—the rarely mentioned reason it was made—is a public service announcement, mostly praising the pharaoh ("the new king, great in glory, the stabilizer of Egypt, pious in matters of gods, superior to his adversaries…"). The Stone is of minor interest save two facts:

It's a wondrous thing given our situation, but these facts have nothing to do with the making of the Stone—they're circumstances that developed lifetimes after its creation.

If we had sorted out hieroglyphics through other means, say, discovering an Egyptian-to-Greek translation book in Athens (possible, as the Greeks ruled Egypt for decades), ^[18] or finding another object written in multiple languages, it would have served the same purpose, replacing the Stone in the museum with something else (e.g., "The Rosetta recipe for Egyptian meatloaf"). So while the Stone deserves a first-rate exhibit in the British Museum, its value derives from great circumstances. The best lesson it offers is that ordinary things, people, and events are transformed into legends by the forces of time, all the time. Who knows: if I bury my beat-up third-rate cell phone into the right ditch in Paris, a million years from now, it might be the grand museum exhibit on some alien planet, as the cornerstone to (mis)understanding the human race ("Here, behind space-glass, is the historic Parisian phone").

What does all this have to do with innovation? Well, take one great innovation: the printing press. More than 500 years after his death, Johannes Gutenberg is heralded as one of the most important people in history. He's ranked above Einstein, Aristotle, and Moses in one list of the most influential people of all time.^[19] Despite the fact that the Chinese invented movable type and many print techniques centuries earlier, Gutenberg was the first to succeed with them in Europe. ^[20] Today we can trace the existence of web sites and bestsellers directly to the work in his shop in Mainz, Germany.

However, the deception by omission in Gutenberg's story is that his influence was not felt in his lifetime. He was not a hero of his age, and, like the Rosetta Stone, his intentions were not the same as what we credit him for today. He was not trying to free the world through access to knowledge or pave the way for the Internet age: as best as we can tell, he was simply trying and failing to make a living. ^[21] Like the stonecutters, Gutenberg was a craftsman doing his job, and he couldn't have imagined that centuries after his death, millions of books and web sites would be published annually, nor that they'd often mention his name.

His influence, similar to the impact of the Rosetta Stone, owes as much to circumstance, world politics, and chance as to his abilities as a printmaker. (The Chinese and Islamic civilizations both had the technological ingredients needed to achieve what Gutenberg did well before he was born, but it never came to be.^[22] ) Unlike Michelangelo, da Vinci, or other notables of his time, few records of Gutenberg's life were kept, as his work and life weren't deemed important: it's by a string of fortunate events that we even know his name. ^[23]

His innovations, in his time, were perceived in a radically different way than we see them now, which is a secret all innovators in the present must learn: when the legends we know so well today, from Vincent van Gogh to Steve Jobs to Albert Einstein, were becoming legendary, they were rarely seen as legends.

However, the stories told in schools and books present Gutenberg and other innovators as obvious, logical, and necessary contributors to the world, begging the assumption that if we were alive in their time, we'd see them the same way our history books portray. Or, that time would have stopped if they hadn't accomplished what we know them for. Those glorified accounts present innovation in a distorted way that is impossible to achieve because the neat arcs of progress, clear sense of purpose, and certainty of success are heavily shaped, if not invented, by hindsight.

Why does history seem perfect?

If you take a walk in 21st-century Rome, it's obvious that Romans were masterful builders. There are coliseums (see Figure 2-2), temples, baths, and aqueducts thousands of years old, still standing (and in many cases still working). The problem is that we're biased by what we can't see. These buildings are the minority of what the Romans made: the others fell down or were built over, buried, or in some cases torn apart for materials used in other buildings and are thus lost to history. While the Romans deserve praise for their engineering prowess, they were not perfect engineers—they made mistakes all the time. Their ruling class did live in the glorious marble structures often shown in movies, but most Romans lived in collapse-prone tenements that killed thousands. ^[24]

Figure 2-2. The ever-sturdy Roman Coliseum, built over the remains of Emperor Nero's Golden House after the fire.

Despite the wonderful domes and legendary straight roads, the great fire of Rome in 64 CE burned down two-thirds of the city, including the 800-year-old Temple of Jupiter and the Atrium Vestae, the most sacred shrine in the Roman Forum. ^[25] This means that most of Rome we know today, ruins included, was built to replace the one that burned to the ground.

The lesson I'm hinting at is larger than Rome: examine any legend of innovation, from inventors to scientists to engineers, and you'll find similar natural omissions by history. History can't give attention to what's been lost, hidden, or deliberately buried; it is mostly a telling of success, not the partial failures that enabled success. ^[26] Without at least imagining the missing dimensions to the stories, our view of how to make things happen in the present is seriously compromised.

Recent history has similar problems. Most Americans are taught that Columbus was a hero who navigated dangerous seas to discover the place we call home, who fought for the supposedly innovative belief that the world was round. (This is a bizarre myth because sailors since ancient times knew the world was a sphere— the question was how large.^[27] ) But reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States^[28] or James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me ^[29] reveals other equally relevant, but less flattering truths about Columbus, citing his involvement in genocide, grand incompetence, and rampant greed. Which view, hero or fool, is right? It seems they both are, but telling the truth requires more than the superficial paragraph historic figures like Columbus typically earn in textbooks. Perhaps worse, much like the myth of epiphany, we're fond of reading and writing histories that make us feel better about the present. Once learned, faith in those versions of history is hard to shake, no matter how strong the alternatives.

Consider this: would you buy a book titled Why the Past Is Frustrating, Embarrassing, and Uncertain: A Litany of 78 Labyrinthine Enigmas? It's hard to imagine this title on a bestseller list or surviving a PTA review committee of material for elementary school students ("It will damage their little brains!", I can hear them crying). For all our interest in truth, we look to historians to sort things out, not to confuse or anger us. Holding up the Romans as superhuman, mistake-free engineers, or Columbus as the hero, simplifies the world in the same way as the myth of epiphany: it makes innovation special and separate from our daily experience. The Rosetta Stone, Gutenberg's press, and Roman architecture—all innovations or breakthroughs in their own way—arrived through many failures, chance events, and contrivances of human nature, but those details kill the easy romance we crave.

Don't get me wrong: we should feel wonder when near the Rosetta Stone, Roman ruins, or any stepping stone of innovation, but not because they're magical, otherworldly things (except, perhaps, the Egyptian pyramids, which we're still stumped by and couldn't replicate today). ^[30] Instead, we should be inspired because they connect our personal struggles, glories, fears, and passions with those of the people who made the things we're so quick to put on a pedestal—that's the true power of history.

Even with this goal, there are problems with the process of history that all historians, for all their integrity and altruistic intentions, can't escape: they have biases and desires like the rest of us. Beyond the need to make a living and write things people will buy, every writer, no matter how many degrees or textbooks in his name, has an opinion and a point of view (including yours truly). They can't study every fact or empathize with every perspective. These problems are so serious to innovation and general history that historians have a discipline to study them called historiography. Edward Carr, a prominent historian in this field, wrote in the classic What Is History:

It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is of course untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor and in what order or context…a fact is like a sack—it won't stand up till you've put something in it. ^[31]

The shocking secret, which explains why teachers torture children with endless trivia, is that there is no objective history. But teaching material that is palatable to everyone demands eliminating perspective, opinion, and humanity, leaving limp, soulless, humorless, embarrassment-free facts. Good histories are written by historians who carefully use diverse sources and take positions, but all histories are still based on interpretations and points of view. The good news is that even with accepted facts for events, there will always be new history books every year. The further we move away from an event, the more perspective we have about what happened. Just because we know all the facts about how the Internet was invented, or what started WWII, doesn't mean the history of those things ends. The more facts we compare and connections we make, the richer and more powerful history becomes.

The result is that our interests, as students of innovation, diverge with those of many historians and the general population. We want to understand the challenges of the past as if we were there, trying to innovate in that time with those constraints. We seek tactics to reuse or mistakes to learn from: we don't want convenience—we want truth. And to that end, there's no greater dispelworthy myth in the history of innovation than the idea that progress happens in a straight line.