Does our future depend on a lone genius or collaborative discovery?

As part of a recent discussion with some friends, we debated whether truly groundbreaking innovation comes from the inspired individual working either alone or in complete control of the process, or whether a group of collaborative individuals can produce better results. It is an interesting dilemma to consider. On the one hand, I have witnessed that in problem-solving situations, groups of students and workers almost always get to a more elegant solution faster as a group than individually. That said, our understanding of motion and higher mathematics comes from Newton. The nuclear age rests on the shoulders of Einstein and Niels Bohr. All of our modern electrical systems owe their existence to Faraday and Tesla. In order to start to understand whether there is an answer to this question, I decided to take a look at some of the most important advances in human history and categorize them as to whether they were the result of a "genius" or whether they came through planned or accidental collaboration. The results are interesting.














I want to note that the list of advances comes from an Atlantic article from the end of last year. I do not hold it up as the singular list, but it contained most of the advances I would have expected. After the top eight, I think that the ordering is somewhat irrelevant, but other than the top ten, my analysis did not pay much attention to order. Also, as I looked into each issue, I did not do a full historiography of the topic, but looked at a source or two to get an idea. If the source unequivocally mentioned a person as the inventor or discoverer, then I took that for now. If the source mentioned several people who input or made no immediate mention of an individual, I took that for collaboration.


As a process story, although some fit very easily into one category or another (such as electricity or the Internet), many required a bit of discernment. Most notably, determining whether something was a true collaboration or a series of work by lone authors. I separated one from the other based upon whether the first, last, or major advancement was of a lone author or resulted from a collaboration (even if it is a collaboration through reading the writings of others). Not surprisingly to me, the top four and six of the top ten were the result of lone geniuses.

Next, for some of the older developments, it was impossible to know if some one individual had invented the technology or made the discovery, or whether it took shape over hundreds of years with the input or many. On the other hand, although people like Bell, Tesla, Ford, and Pasteur had labs or staff that performed functions for them to advance the work, I considered those individual achievements as long as there was no evidence that another participated as an equal in the discovery. Admittedly, these are not exact analyses, but my guess is that any inaccuracy created by the former is matched by the inaccuracy in the latter, and will not significantly affect the overall result.

Lastly, before discussing the overall picture, it should be noted that some of the names mentioned previously: Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and some other geniuses of science and mathematics (Planck, Bernoulli, Clausius, Descarte, Kepler, Kelvin, Hooke) do not appear on the list although their scientific discoveries certainly led in part to many of the listed discoveries.

The overall result is that about half came from collaborative ventures, and about half came from "lone genius" efforts. One one side, it appears that advances of high value - the printing press, green revolution, and communications - all came from works of genius, while destructive ones - gun powder, oil drilling and refining, paper money - came from collaborative work. That oversimplifies greatly because although the green revolution allowed us to feed the world, it also expanded populations greatly - a burden we have yet to understand how to handle. Also, sanitation systems and anesthesia have had some of the greatest impacts on the length and quality of life of anything on the list, and they came from collaborative efforts.

One thing that does strike me is the absence of individual scientific or technological achievement in since around 1950. As populations have grown, and educated, developed populations continue to expand, the "lone genius" has lost some value. We still celebrate Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and even Mark Zuckerberg...but we do so more for their personality than for their individual technical achievement. We see them as the genius among geniuses that garnered the publicity, but rarely do we want to elevate them to the status of a Newton or Einstein.

I wonder if this reluctance is a matter of the time we live in or a reflection on the past. Do we have no more Newtons or Einsteins because they never really existed in the first place...perhaps they are just products of history? Or can a Newton or Einstein not get voice in this modern cacophony where achievements of comfort and entertainment get greater praise than achievements that truly improve quality of life or move science forward. In the past, science was the work largely of the wealthy who had the resources and education to devote time to the endeavor. Since Faraday, we have opened science more to all. In doing so, however, the work becomes separated from those who have the platform to publish and promote.

The ultimate answer to the question has a significant impact on public policy. Should we be providing outlets for those with true aptitude for excellence in science and technology, and give them the freedom to pursue thought and exploration? Or should we continue to funnel resources to large institutions and corporations where collaboration mitigates risk of not finding a solution to a particular problem? We currently have no public policy incentive to develop the next true geniuses, and given that many of the advances that have provided us the quality of life we currently enjoy have come from those geniuses of the past, perhaps we need to think about letting the pendulum (discovered by Galileo) swing back toward cultivating freedom of thought.