The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great

Just as it always has, America still cultivates visionary innovators who do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity. In this book, you ll find out how tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to imagine new systems and subvert old ones, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day.

Think tanks and companies have recognized the benefits of tinkering and have done their best to harness and institutionalize it, but they lack either the resources or the will to truly allow it to flourish. And as anyone who has overpaid for a simple smartphone repair knows, the complexity of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. But ours is a nation that achieved its strength through the accomplishments of its innovators, and the tinkering tradition remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American society and culture.