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Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1981 book The Soul of a New Machine and a much less heralded 2008 film Flash of Genius both raised the question of the fraught relationship between the hard work of invention and the uncertain financial rewards for inventors.

Flash of Genius tells the story of Robert Kearns, a Detroit engineering professor who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, patented it, negotiated with Ford about manufacturing it for their cars, and then discovered that Ford stole the technology. Ford installed it in the early Seventies, and the invention was soon copied by the rest of the industry. From that point on, Kearns decided his life’s work would be suing the automobile manufacturers, sometimes with counsel, sometimes representing himself, sometimes doing all his own research, and sometimes having help from his children. Kearns was ultimately successful, winning a total of $ 40 million from Ford and Chrysler for patent infringement.

Being an individual plaintiff in civil litigation against a large institution with deep pockets is deeply frustrating, as the institution’s standard practice is to stall and take advantage of the law’s complexity. Did Kearns waste the last three decades of his life in litigation? Would have been happier, if not wealthier, if he kept inventing? Kearns, however, saw himself as a champion of individual inventors fighting for just compensation from the large corporations that need their inventions. (Personal disclosure: I was part of the Heather Robertson vs. Thomson Corp. class action that won compensation for freelance authors for the republication of their articles in electronic databases, a fight similar to Kearns’s.) For Kearns, it WAS all about the money.

The Soul of a New Machine tells the story of a group of young programmers and engineers that developed a late Seventies leading edge minicomputer, Data General’s Eagle project. Kidder explained the technology, got close to the individuals on the team, and presented the process by which they built the computer. From “signing on,” agreeing to work virtually around the clock without overtime pay or stock options, to the ultimate launch of the computer, it emphatically was not about the money.

In his conclusion, Kidder writes:

… a group of engineers got excited about building a computer… What’s more, they did the work, both with uncommon spirit and for reasons that, in a most frankly commercial setting, seemed remarkably pure. (p. 272)

The book’s most-quoted passage is:

… yet more than two dozen people worked on it overtime, without any real hope of material rewards for a year and a half, and afterwards most of them felt glad. That happened largely because [project manager Tom] West and other managers gave them enough freedom to invent, while at the same time guiding them toward success.” (p. 275)

What strikes me re-reading the book thirty years later is that for West’s group, building the computer became an end in itself. The computer ultimately was successful and it added considerably to Data General’s bottom line, but the team shared little of the rewards. Ironically, they were working at the same time that Gates, Allen, and Ballmer were launching Microsoft and Jobs and Wozniak were launching Apple. What some people then grasped more clearly than others was that the personal computer industry would create untold wealth, and those who realized it first grasped the most wealth. (That is the story told in Pirates of Silicon Valley, which I discussed in my post of last Dec. 17.)

Gates and Jobs and their partners worked just as hard as Tom West’s two groups – the software designers who called themselves the Micro-kids and the engineers who called themselves the Hardy Boys – but they also had a clearer vision of how their creativity could be lead to huge financial rewards. It turned out to be the micro-computer, not the mini-computer, that would become the most profitable market segment.

By the dot-com boom a little more than a decade after the Soul of a New Machine saga, the IT industry was full of people who were in it primarily for the money, and who had no interest in the beauty of brilliant software writing or technical design. But that’s another story.

Both of the texts appeal to me, but in different ways. Flash of Genius was not a box-office or critical success, primarily because it was a complicated courtroom battle in which the intended heroic protagonist was a quirky and difficult man. Its great virtue, however, is that it made an honest effort to portray the creative process, something that is rarely done in film. The movie managed to show us how an inventor thought in terms of a metaphor (intermittent wipers working like the blink of an eye), how that inventor was obsessed with solving his intellectual problem, how the inventor designed his solution using well-known electronic components (capacitors, transistors, and resistors), and how he kept trying different combinations of the components until one clicked. In the courtroom battle, Kearns made the point about originality cross-examining one of Ford’s expert witnesses, asking whether there was any word in Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities that would not be found in a standard dictionary.

Kidder’s book is a model of clarity in defining and discussing assembler language, machine language, chip design, and showing how the minicomputer combined all these complicated elements. What appealed to me more, however, was Kidder’s role as first-person narrator and participant in the story. After gaining access, Kidder became so closely identified with the design team that he could not portray himself as a silent and unseen observer. Indeed, Kidder’s mere presence was part of manager Tom West’s way of motivating his team:

[West] welcomed a journalist to observe his team, and how it did delight him when one of his so-called kids remarked to me, “What we’re doing must be important if there’s a writer covering it.” (p. 275).

Kidder came to know the team member’s so well not only by watching them at work, but by relaxing with them. The portraits of the team members, for example on a sailing trip with West, are detailed and sympathetic. So it was entirely fitting for Kidder to write in the first person, providing observations of the process and of the characters in his own voice on the basis of his own experience. This intimacy makes it a rewarding experience to reread The Soul of a New Machine three decades after its original publication.

To return to the title, when someone in investment banking says it’s not about the money, recent experience has shown it most definitely is about the money. With technology, it’s not so obvious. Sometimes it actually wasn’t about the money. Regardless, the relationship between creativity and monetary reward continues to perplex and fascinate.

Watching a video compilation of family home movies – a movie within the movie The Iron Lady – the ghost of Denis Thatcher says these words to Margaret. The Iron Lady is the latest in the genre of films about the elderly people who attempt to deal with this sad reality. The movie argues that, politically, there was little Margaret Thatcher would want to have changed. She set out to make a difference and, by God, she did. She had no regrets about her key decisions, for example going to war over the Falklands, confronting the miners, or privatizing much of the public sector.

Her political regrets were over lives lost in military conflict (the soldiers killed in the Falklands War) or political conflict (IRA assassinations, in particular her supporter Airey Neave). At a personal level, while she made clear to Denis when accepting his marriage proposal, that she would not be a typical housewife, the movie still suggests some regret that her political career so dominated her family life.

Nonetheless, for both the historical figure and the protagonist of the movie, Edith Piaf’s “je ne regrette rien” would be the personal anthem of choice.

The Iron Lady thus invites comparison with two overtly political films about aging, Errol Morris’s documentary on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, and the superb Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Kuzuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize winning The Remains of the Day. In both, the protagonists express deep regret. In McNamara’s case, despite his successes as a senior executive modernizing Ford Motors and as Secretary of Defense controlling the hyper-aggression of the generals, his name remains eternally linked to the futility of the Viet Nam War. In The Remains of the Day, the fictional protagonists all have their regrets, Lord Darlington over his embrace of appeasement, and the butler Stevens over his inability to escape the personal and psychic imprisonment of domestic service.

Movies about regret have an intellectual and emotional appeal. Characters can in their minds replay the past and imagine what would have happened had they made different decisions. We in the audience all have regrets about some of the choices we made, and watching characters in movies express regret and show the sadness that comes from regret provides identification with and validation of our own emotions as well as a measure of schadenfreude.

A triumphal movie about an elderly person who expresses no regret would be unlikely to facilitate much connection between protagonist and audience. Imagine Errol Morris trying to make a movie based on an extended interview with Margaret Thatcher. Despite Morris’s interlocutorial skill at both expressing sympathy for and challenging his interviewees, Margaret Thatcher would be far less interesting than Robert McNamara. Morris might show headlines and photos alluding to her controversial ministry, just as he did for McNamara, but he would not elicit the moments of dismay, regret, self-doubt, and sadness that he elicited from McNamara. Likely, all he would have received was a shrill scolding.

The creators of the Iron Lady have necessarily taken a different tack in their attempt to humanize and ironize Margaret Thatcher. They have seized upon the fact that she now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, the movie depicts her as both physically frail and intellectually confused, suffering from the failure of her short-term memory as well as hallucinating through the entire movie about the presence of her deceased husband Denis. The interesting mental mechanism that is evoked is how a person suffering from Alzheimer’s can still channel into her memories, mainly of her triumphs and occasionally of her regrets. The one late life victory Thatcher achieves – only with considerable prodding from her daughter and her handlers – is to divest herself of Denis’ clothing and personal effects and finally to convince herself that he is dead.

At its core, The Iron Lady is a movie about Alzheimer’s disease rather than a movie about politics. The political recollections are too fleeting to deal adequately with her controversial ministry. The movie attempts to depict the mechanisms of a mind remembering, of a mind failing to remember, and of a mind hallucinating to replace the present with the past. It also tries to show what of her character remains and what is lost.

Meryl Streep has received accolades for her portrayal of Thatcher. It has two aspects: the mimicry of the voice, facial expressions, and bearing of the public figure we all remember, and the creation of a victim of Alzheimer’s who happens to live within the body of the former prime minister. Portrayal of people with disabilities requires believably demonstrating the disability while still communicating the person’s essential humanity. When done well, and two instances that come to mind are Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Colin Firth in The King’s Speech, the audience will be riveted.

The critic’s consensus is that Meryl Streep has succeeded at doing this here. But the film critics are more knowledgeable about politics than they are about psychology. It would be valuable to hear what gerontologists and psychologists think about The Iron Lady. Do Phyllida Lloyd’s directing, Abi Morgan’s screenplay, and Meryl Streep’s acting ring true? Have they created a clinically realistic version of Alzheimer’s? With the aging of the boomers, the question is an important one. It matters less what the movie says about the actual Margaret Thatcher’s politics than about the character “Margaret Thatcher’s” dementia. If much of what we all think we know comes from the movies, has this movie taught the right lessons?

My mother-in-law, Dr. Roslyn Herst, lent me the recent autobiography of Michael Bliss, her fellow member of the Toronto Medical History Club. Bliss has had a stellar career as a Canadian and medical historian and political commentator. The autobiography makes clear the secrets of his success: a powerful work ethic, a strong entrepreneurial streak that allowed him to connect with both the Canadian business and publishing communities, and a real talent for story-telling.

While my contact with Bliss is now mediated by one degree of separation, there were a number of occasions in the past when we were in direct contact and several causes we had in common. I’ll mention four: Claude Bissell’s Canadian history course at Harvard, distance running through Toronto’s streets and ravines, the political career of Joe Clark, and the University of Toronto’s so-called ethics review process.

Bliss was one of Bissell’s two teaching assistants and I was a freshman taking the course. I’ve come to know Harvard well enough over the years that I wasn’t surprised at Bliss’s recounting of how, in its snobbishness and self-centredness, it ignored Bissell. I agree with Bliss’s retrospective assessment that Bissell did a competent job telling Canada’s story. The course wasn’t nearly as intellectually exciting as many others I might have taken. But I took it during 1967-68, a crucial time in both Canadian and American history – though for different reasons –and it kept me in touch with the sea-change that brought Pierre Trudeau to power.

Bliss became a runner to reshape and reenergize. I always had a runner’s build, but I was attempting to overcome the debilitation of asthma. We both succeeded in our quests, and crossed paths at several 10k runs over the years. I’m still at it, albeit with reduced distances and slower speeds, as I have the good fortune that my legs have held up. It’s also helped to minimize the damage by combining it with swimming, cycling, and skiing.

I was one of the group that helped Joe Clark win the Conservative leadership in 1976. Bliss was one of those who tried unsuccessfully to keep the party from overthrowing him in 1983. I think we were both attracted by Clark’s thoughtfulness, essential decency, and attempt to formulate a conservatism that transcended rather than repudiated Trudeau’s statism. But we both came to realize that Clark lacked the cunning necessary for political survival. While some of his political achievements, for example slowing Trudeau’s constitutional train long enough for nine of the provinces to come on board, will merit footnotes in history, he will primarily be remembered – here’s the trivia question – as one of the three late twentieth century “summer job” prime ministers.

Research ethics offices at most universities still seem to operate on the medical research model, which ill fits the sort of “elite interviewing” both Bliss and I have done. Our interviews are, in effect, conversations between consenting adults. The interviewees have been interviewed many times before and know why we are interviewing them. The conventions of this type of interviewing – for example, on-the-record, off-the-record, or a mixture of both – are well known. Research ethics offices, by demanding that we produce a standard interview protocol despite the fact that each interview is unique, and by requiring that interviewees be presented with consent forms, are complicating our work without adding any value. We’ve both come to recognize that the best thing to do is provide the appearance of compliance and get on with the work.

While discussing his graduate studies at U of T, Bliss remarked en passant that “I always felt that political science was a misnamed pseudo-discipline – the idea of a science of politics defies comment – and mostly fraudulent.” (p. 108). While I’m not a political scientist, as a product of Harvard’s undergraduate Social Studies program and its doctoral program in economics, and a management scholar who focuses on the public sector, I am certainly a social scientist, and therefore must take issue with Bliss’s diss-missing of a social science. Social scientists construct models and test hypotheses about individual and group behavior using as their data surveys, experiments, and historical records. History is thus of value to us as an important point of departure. Why, then, does Bliss devalue our work?

Yes, some social science produces findings that win ig-Nobel prizes or that belong to what my wife describes as the “no shit, Sherlock” school of research. But other studies can be both surprising and useful.

Concerning political science, Bliss’s bête noire: two extremely important streams of quantitative research involve electoral studies explaining why people vote the way they do, and attempts (from Borda and Condorcet to Arrow and Fishkin) to design systems of collective decision-making that induce participants to reveal their true preferences rather than vote strategically.

Turning to Bliss’s own research, his methodology includes extensive gathering and close reading of relevant documents, interviewing of participants and witnesses, and a skepticism of people’s motives, particularly when attempting to influence or make public policy, that owes a perhaps unacknowledged debt to public choice theory in economics. All these are appropriate, but I wonder if he found leadership studies, particularly those involving the American presidency, relevant to his book on Canadian prime ministers or if he found Erik Erikson’s sequential model of ego development relevant to his biographies. I certainly would have.

I think it would be worth their while for historians to embrace social scientific methodologies just as much as some social scientists appropriate historical data.

Looking at Bliss’s most renowned work, his book on the discovery of insulin and his biography of Frederick Banting, from the narratological perspective that I’ve developed, I compliment Bliss on the wise decision he made to divide the project into two books. The book on insulin is a heroic fable, in which he focused on insulin’s value to society by telling the stories of individuals who benefited from it soon after its discovery. Bliss’s timing was opportune, because there were still people living who remembered the diabetic’s grim sentence to a short and painful life before insulin. Those who remembered created the book’s constituency.

The biography of Banting focuses on the tensions among Banting and his codiscoverers. This is a classic entrepreneurial story, rich in conflict and irony. It is strongly reminiscent of the recent Fincher-Sorkin film The Social Network. Heroic and ironic stories are compelling, but in different ways, and sometimes are best separated.

A final comment. In his discussion of the history of the University of Toronto, Bliss rues the decision to end the distinction between the three year General Arts degree and the four year honours degree. He remarks that, at the time of their establishment, Claude Bissell hoped that the Scarborough and Erindale campuses would both “offer good General Arts degrees to large numbers of students, while the downtown, or St. George campus, evolved into a home for honours undergraduates and a flourishing graduate school” (p. 130).

Over time, the university decided that faculty based at UTSC and UTM, as they are now called, would be held to the same standards of performance in teaching and scholarship as those based at St. George. The logic of this decision ultimately contradicts the differentiation in academic status Bissell and others intended. There are now some unique programs based at the suburban campuses and others that surpass their St. George counterparts. The issue of equal compensation for suburban faculty who meet the same standards as their colleagues downtown remains contested to this day.

To conclude: Bliss’s book was enjoyable and thought-provoking, even when it touched upon the U of T’s inside baseball, and a rewarding way to spend some of my holiday.