Three legendary innovators
Mika Pantzar · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025
Thomas Alva Edison, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon rank among the most significant American innovators of the early 20th century. Common principles recur in the stories of these legendary figures: each was a generalist, diligently and selflessly devoted to actualizing their visionary ideas, and the organizations they were associated with afforded them ample freedom and opportunities for serendipitous discoveries. Their curiosity spanned multiple disciplines. Von Neumann, for instance, offered mathematically valid formulations for operations analysis and linear programming (optimization), which became commonplace in large American companies after the Second World War. Shannon, in turn, boasted that he was doing ‘useless’ work driven more by curiosity than by instrumental utility. He described himself as a ‘science fiction writer’ whose job it was to think about possible futures. In this respect, Shannon was the complete opposite of Edison, who emphasized the practicality of his discoveries.