In May 1833, Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the irrepressible raconteur genius Lord Byron, met the widowed Charles Babbage, a man who would become her mentor. A scientific and mathematical genius, Babbage created a machine he named the “Difference Engine,” an archaic calculator whose very existence would inspire Lovelace, many years later, to invent the first prototype of a thinking machine, the long-ago ape to an iMac’s homo sapien. Lord Byron, who died when Ada was young and had little actual contact with his only official progeny, thought she had a very “poetical” spirit, inherited clearly from him. Her mother, sensing that this was true, took to instilling in her a love of math and rational thought. Bringing the two sides of herself into one open-minded pursuit of new technology, she is the mother of the personal computer.

THE INNOVATORS, the latest tome from Walter Isaacson, looks at the stories of the revolutionaries, poets and science geeks who combined a variety of interests to cultivate the digital world that we now cannot imagine living without. They include, of course, the big shots like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, as well as a variety of men and women throughout history whose individual pursuits were stepping stones to the modern-day world and all its intelligent machine wonder. 

Isaacson’s mass-media practice of telling a straight-ahead story without a lot of ruffles at the edges keeps THE INNOVATORS moving along at a rapid pace. It is amazing how much information he is able to plow through in this exhaustive but easy-to-read volume. We move quickly through three centuries, encountering along the way little-known digital pioneers like Howard Aiken, the team leader of a group who created the IBM Mark I at Harvard University, and codebreaker Alan Turing, soon to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game. It is quite a thrill ride, surely ready to give goosebumps to anyone to whom this type of visceral history lesson seems like an adventure story. Which it is!

"Isaacson’s mass-media practice of telling a straight-ahead story without a lot of ruffles at the edges keeps THE INNOVATORS moving along at a rapid pace. It is amazing how much information he is able to plow through in this exhaustive but easy-to-read volume."

THE INNOVATORS builds one person’s innovative resume on top of someone who came before. We see how each and every experiment, each and every new idea, lends a little more to the process of growth on a massive scale. With this blueprint-to-blueprint trajectory, the story manages to alight on a topic so revolutionary that I was elated to read about it and see that Isaacson made it an important point to which he would return again and again throughout the book. 

Today the world seems more set than ever to ensure that the arts and humanities are not mentioned in the same breath as  science, technology, engineering and mathetmatics. However, as Isaacson points out (and rightly so), the most innovative innovations of all time were created by a series of misfits for whom these are not separate pursuits. He shows it is that very special union of craft, imagination and scientific know-how that gives birth to the creations that have been shaping a more modern world with each passing success.

If I were an administrator or admissions officer at a liberal arts college, I would give this book to every child and parent who expressed some distress over the idea of studying a variety of topics, instead of delving immediately into the kind of specificity that the corporate world, in its short-sightedness, seems to demand from recent graduates. In this world where we are so obsessed about getting children on a very straight-and-narrow path to their futures (YOU are a scientist, but YOU are a poet) at a young age, Isaacson puts up a warning sign: it is the cultivation and growth of imagination and soul, as well as rational thought and hand-eye coordination, that will enhance a student’s ability to become equipped with all the things one needs to survive in this fast-paced, always-changing world. 

I see it all the time as a writing teacher --- parents who aren’t sure that allowing their kids to explore their ideas through their imagination will be the right thing to ensure good grades on school testing or, even worse, on Common Core testing. But there are two sides of the brain, and, as Isaacson proves again and again with each profile, when they work in tandem, amazing things can happen.

Computer languages, video games, space travel, the Internet, medical breakthroughs --- all of these things and so much more trace their roots back to that day in 1833 when a broad-minded gentleman met a young woman who saw the world as a place much bigger than the ballrooms in which her mother enjoyed spending her hours, dancing and dining. Ada Lovelace is just the beginning of a proud lineage of poets, pirates and physicists who put their heads together and, usually with humanity’s best interests at heart, sowed the seeds of the brave new world in which we are all struggling to live. 

Isaacson celebrates that world, in all its craziness, for being a living, breathing entity in which there is still room for so many new and improved ways of enhancing our everyday lives, and making sure that the legacy we leave for the next generations speaks to the ingenuity and bravery of the generations of big thinkers who have made their mark on the world already.

The story of THE INNOVATORS would make an awesome HBO series, one that could run for years and years, adding new names to it along the way. Congratulations to Mr. Isaacson for making a stand for the marriage of left and right brain! That is an innovation we all should get behind.