Читать книгу Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism - Harry Bingham - Страница 10

Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.

– THOMAS EDISON

Entrepreneurs are, by and large, straightforward people. Whereas with the large companies I have spoken to there has been a certain amount of bureaucracy involved in securing an interview, entrepreneurs did not mess about, even if it was to say no.

In thinking about my chapter on invention, however, I found myself stumped. It wasn’t that people were refusing to talk to me; it was more that I was uncertain who to ask. I wanted to find inventor-entrepreneurs; people who could spout patents and new technologies and visions of the future and have utterly novel ways of attacking old problems, not simply tweaking existing designs to make them work better. Furthermore, I wanted companies that were still in start-up mode. Although there are dozens of big, inventive technology companies who’d have been happy to show me around, they have existing technologies to trade off, existing brands and dominant market positions. I wanted to talk to the people who had started out with an idea and nothing else. No money, no market position, no brand, no sales force. But how was I to find such people?

Then I realized I was being a twit. I live close to Oxford, home to one of the world’s great universities and the hub for scores of high-tech businesses. Almost certainly the people I wanted to meet were living right on my doorstep and before long I found exactly what I was looking for. An Oxfordshire-based company, Reaction Engines Ltd is a young start-up that boasts a small but select group of engineers and technologists. Their website baldly summarizes the corporate mission: ‘to design and develop advanced space transport and propulsion systems’.

Now, I feel my duty to my readers very keenly. Rocket scientists aren’t exactly two a penny, even in Oxfordshire, but at the same time I wasn’t going to be happy with a common or garden rocket scientist, the sort that makes nose cones for NASA or the type that spends zillions of pounds tweaking the guidance systems for nuclear missiles. No. As I saw it, my readers deserved a proper rocket scientist, the sort who wants to take tourists into space, revolutionize rocket design, mess around with ridiculously dangerous fuels and plant colonies on Mars.

Reaction Engines ticks those boxes, and then some. To get cheap access to space, you need single-stage, reusable rockets. As it stands today, in the absence of such a technology, the cheapest available commercial launch costs around $100 million. A single launch of the NASA space shuttle costs about $700 million. Because booking cargo space on board a rocket is so expensive, a satellite becomes incredibly expensive too, because a vast amount of quality assurance has to be done to make sure that the satellite will function precisely as intended for a very long time. If the cost of access to space were to fall, then the amount of over-engineering and quality assurance involved in making satellites would also fall. The cost of communications would come down. Atmospheric monitoring would become cheaper and simpler. And so on. In a small but real way, the world would become a better place.

The trouble is that there’s simply no way to load enough fuel on a rocket to carry it into space and bring it back again. The fuel load becomes so heavy that you have to add more fuel to lift the extra fuel and before you know it the maths has spiralled off into infinity and the job just can’t be done.

The fuels involved, however, aren’t hydrocarbons – even jet fuel doesn’t pack enough of an energy punch. Rockets burn a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Since there’s already a whole lot of oxygen in the atmosphere, if you can find a way to capture some of it on the way up, then you need to carry a whole lot less to start with, and all of a sudden the maths becomes doable again. What you need, in fact, is a hybrid, an engine that’s half ‘air-breather’ and half rocket,^* able to switch from one mode to the other as soon as the outer atmosphere is reached. Reaction Engines reckons it has just such a hybrid and it’s busy with the detailed work of going from concept through to manufacture-ready design. The engine is called the SABRE and would power a launch vehicle to be known as SKYLON.

While I was beginning to think that the company’s technologies might just about be strong enough for me to present to my reader, I still had doubts. Cheap satellites and colonies on Mars are all well and good, but was this company ever going to produce a genuinely iconic, era-defining product? Did its stuff look cool, as well as sound cool? Did it have other interesting projects or was this just a one-idea outfit?

Well, there too and no matter how high I was determined to set the bar, the company made the grade. Its air-breathing rocket is, in principle, capable of travelling through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds – that is, at speeds of around Mach 5.5, so fast that Concorde would seem like very third rate transport. A hypersonic aircraft capable of carrying 300 passengers should be able to fly from London to Sydney in around two and a half hours, except that, as the company literature glumly admits, it might be better to set aside four hours to allow for air traffic control delays. If such an aircraft were chased by an F-22 fighter plane with afterburners on full (an impossibility, in fact, since an F-22 doesn’t have the range), you’d have time to pass through customs, ride a cab to your hotel, take a shower, order dinner, dispose of your soup, and be halfway through your kangaroo à l’australienne before the fighter plane was even radioing ahead for a landing slot.

As for looks – well, Reaction Engines’ rockets look like an 8-year-old boy’s idea of the coolest thing in the entire world. Imagine a very elongated cigar shape, pointed at both ends and with just enough wing to nudge you into noticing that there are hardly any wings there at all, and you have the design exactly. If the jumbo jet was the transport icon of the twentieth century, then Reaction Engines might just be developing the transport icon for this one.

As for the fertility of its ideas, it was hard to fault the company there either. Not being an engineer myself, I don’t understand half the things the company does, but I do know that when the ‘Current Projects’ tab on a company’s website lists eight major projects, the last but one of which is entitled simply ‘Orbital Base Station’, then I know I’ve found a winner. I made some phone calls, and before too long I was on my way to see the company’s managing director and chief technologist.

His name was Bond, Alan Bond.

If I was expecting something out of an old Sean Connery movie, then the business park where the company had its head-quarters was hardly disappointing. Showing my identity documents at the gate, I drove slowly through a campus where the signs all said things like ‘FCS Forensics’, ‘ABSL Space Products’, or ‘Culham Electromagnetics and Lightning’. One large and windowless building was adorned with a sign that simply read ‘nuclear fusion’. All that was needed to complete a Connery-era stage set was a mag-lev monorail, some tanks full of bubbling liquid and lots of bad guys in easily identifiable bad-guy suits.

Alas – or fortunately, depending on taste – these thoughts were quickly dispelled. Alan Bond came bounding to meet me at the door to his offices. ‘What’s the time? Eleven. Ha! You’re just in time for cake.’ In a scene that was more Wallace and Gromit than Doctor No, the company’s finest bundled into a conference room to raid the tea trolley and carry away piles of stodgy baked goods. Over tea and (in Bond’s case) a squidgy appley-creamy thing, he started to tell me about his career and his company.

His interest in space began at the age of about 4, when he first encountered the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ nursery rhyme. He asked his father – a fitter – what stars were and his father took him outside to introduce him to the concept of outer space. The boy was entranced. At age 8, he came across the exploits of Dan Dare, ‘Pilot of the Future’. A lifetime’s obsession was born.

He studied maths, joined the aerospace company Rolls Royce and began to learn what real engineering was all about. Still in love with the idea of space, he managed to get himself assigned to the most interesting projects going. He worked on the RZ2 rocket engine that powered Blue Streak nuclear missiles and (later) satellite launchers. He became section leader of the cryogenic performance office, which meant messing around with the complex thermodynamics of burning liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen.

He was good enough at what he did that for four years he found himself working for a British weapons programme, which he can’t say much about even now and couldn’t talk about at all at the time. He also worked with the British Interplanetary Society to design a plausible unmanned starship. Since the design involved helium-based nuclear fusion, and since a shortage of helium on earth was to be overcome by sending robot factories to Jupiter to extract the stuff from the Jovian atmosphere, and since those factories were to operate for twenty years while suspended from hot air balloons, then it’s probably not unfair to suggest that the notion of ‘plausible’ in interstellar transport design is still somewhat elastic.

To his relief, his stint at the weapons programme ended. Bond messed around in the world of nuclear fusion for a while, then became closely involved with a British Aerospace/Rolls Royce programme to design an air-breathing, single-stage, reusable satellite launch vehicle, named HOTOL. It was the project which Bond had been dreaming about. In the inevitable way of such things, the engineers worked hard, drew up designs, came across problems…and the government and the project’s two commercial backers got cold feet and withdrew. It was Bond’s moment of truth, the equivalent for him of those lumps of glittering stone brought to Knox D’Arcy by a trio of wild-eyed miners.

He had two choices. He could do what he’d spent his life doing up to this point, working with some of the world’s most technologically advanced companies and agencies, doing the things that they wanted him to do. Or he could do what he had wanted to do ever since he’d first encountered Dan Dare: he could strike out on his own to design and build a spaceship. Reason and good sense pointed in one direction. Passion and conviction pointed in the other. There was no contest. Bond had money in the bank from having sold a crucial patent to Rolls Royce. Using that cash, and in the company of two rocket-scientist colleagues, Bond set up Reaction Engines.

For a while the company lived hand to mouth, selling bits of consultancy, living off capital, but at the same time managing to revise the old HOTOL design in a number of crucial respects. The difficult thing about building an air-breathing engine is that air heats up as it’s compressed. At Mach 5.5, the heat generated is sufficient to melt any normal engine. Bond’s design gets around this problem by using liquid hydrogen to cool the air. In a cunning move, the heat stolen from the air is then used to power other bits of the engine. The result is stunningly efficient. Provisional calculations suggest that the thrust to weight ratio is about fourteen times, or about three times better than regular jet engines and about seven times better than scramjets (another innovative propulsion technology currently in development elsewhere). Private investors began to get interested and funded further work. The European Space Agency has donated money too. By 2012, the company hopes to be well beyond the proof-of-concept stage for every element of their design. From that point on, they’ll be busy with the slow and expensive business of turning engineering drawings into cost-effective, space-going reality.

I don’t know if that rocket will ever fly. I hope it does, but slipping the surly bonds of earth isn’t easy, cheap, or riskless, to put it mildly. I do know, however, that Alan Bond is an extraordinary individual, one of the few authentic geniuses I’ve ever met, perhaps the only one. If SKYLON flies, Bond (who is no spring chicken and may not live to see it happen) will become one of the most famous inventors in world history. If it doesn’t – well, he’ll still be a genius and rocket scientists of the world will always know it.

But his company is not a company. He is not an entrepreneur. He does not, if truth be told, belong in the pages of this book.

To be sure, Reaction Engines is, legally speaking, a limited liability company registered at Companies House. It has a board and sets of accounts and everything that the law requires. But companies are there to make money. Reaction Engines is there to build something amazing. In due course, if it gets it right, it’ll create a huge amount of value. Some people will get rich off the back of it. But none of those involved with it today care about the money. Bond himself doesn’t give a damn. Even the private investors who have part-funded the project are doing so because they want to do something extraordinary, not in the expectation of any near-term return. Investors whose motivations are coldly commercial have stayed away from the project and will continue to stay away until the technology is a lot closer to being proven. A former colleague of Bond’s told him sadly that SKYLON would ‘fly higher and faster’ than anything Rolls Royce could plausibly invest in. That phrase could be used to summarize the position of industry generally towards any genuinely cutting edge research. High and fast is not where money is reliably made.

From high and fast to noisy and slow.

Not long after seeing Bond, I met up with a man called Paul Luen, the CEO and founder of a small, innovative marine safety company, Martek Marine. Like Bond, Paul Luen came from a fairly humble background. Like Bond, he got an excellent degree in a tough discipline (chemistry, in Luen’s case). Like Bond, he ended up knocking around in the kind of companies that could make use of intelligence and drive. Unlike Bond, however, Luen had an interest in making money. He worked in sales, not product development. When the opportunity arose to invest money in the company he was working for, he borrowed £10,000 and made the investment. He worked hard selling gas-detection equipment to industrial users. The company had a handful of customers in the shipping business, but not many; its focus lay elsewhere.

Then Paul noticed that the shipping industry was gradually tightening up its somewhat antiquated safety rules. The new rules would impose higher standards on, among other things, gas detection procedures. Paul believed that the company could develop equipment designed specifically for the marine market, and that it could make a lot of money in the process. His boss didn’t see things the same way and before too long Paul and two of his colleagues had quit to set up in business on their own. They invested £6,000, which was pretty much all the spare cash that they had. They worked for six months on no pay. The company started out with no products, no sales agents, no brand, no finance, and no reputation. It did, however, have plenty of competition. The area that Paul was keen to enter was one dominated by large, established companies, well known to shipping firms around the world.

The tiny start-up had to design and manufacture a range of entirely new products, for a market that had never previously existed, and beat a host of well-resourced competitors as it did so. A ridiculous challenge, of course, and yet one that Paul’s team met with style.

Their first major product was something called Bulksafe, a system designed (literally) to ring alarm bells if water started entering the ship’s hold. Detecting water is not, in itself, a particularly tricky business but, like any vaguely technical product, this one had to meet a whole slew of further parameters. The system needed to be maintenance free. It had to be corrosion proof. It should be able to operate in dusty conditions (because the ship’s hold might, for example, be full of coal). It needed to be proof against chemical contamination. It should be able to withstand tough handling. It had to be something that you could install quickly, cheaply, and without starting to mess around with the ship’s hull. It had to be something that would meet all the new safety regulations and carry a lifetime warranty. When the new regulations were finally published, at the end of a long consultation process, Paul’s team was ready. Ages before its competitors were in position, Martek Marine launched Bulksafe. No other product could do what it did. Orders started to flood in.

The same thing happened with a gadget called MariNOx, a system designed to monitor emissions from marine engines. Within just three weeks of the relevant regulations being published, Martek had MariNOx on the market and, again, its competitors were nowhere. People came to Martek because they had the first available product. They stayed because it also had the best one.

By now, the company has won fistfuls of awards for its innovations and export prowess. Perhaps more to the point, the company has grown fast and profitably, without taking on a single penny of debt along the way. By 2012, the company is aiming to have sales of £20 million and an operating profit of £4 million, the largest single slice of which will be Paul’s. I spoke to the company when panic about the recession was at its highest, but Paul told me that both sales and profits were growing; the only downside was that some of its new product launches would need to be put back by a matter of months.

If Reaction Engines was the perfect example of a highly inventive company, then Martek Marine is a textbook example of a highly innovative one. Its products have all been developed from scratch. It’s always been first to market. It’s always taken and held a position of market-leadership. Yet the most striking thing for me in talking to Paul was simply this: product development was the easy bit. The international bodies responsible for regulating safety at sea had issued consultation papers indicating the likely drift of regulation. Paul and his team looked at options for meeting those requirements. They created a concept and spent time talking to a dozen or more consulting engineers about implementation. They outsourced much of the prototype work and any machining tasks that they couldn’t sensibly take on themselves. And they developed a product.

In one sense that product was entirely innovative because it solved a hitherto unsolved problem. In another sense, they simply took existing concepts and bits of expertise, and assembled them intelligently into one simple-to-use package. The way Paul spoke about it all, invention of this sort is a business process like any other; one that needs thoughtful and attentive management, but no more or less than anything else. Martek Marine doesn’t have a single engineer with Alan Bond’s genius. It never will because it doesn’t need to. What the company needs to succeed is a tenacious grip on what its customers want today or may need tomorrow. The rest of it is simply a matter of management. Indeed, if the company had wanted to outsource its product development – that is, outsource all the genuinely creative work involved in designing a new product – it could easily have done so. Consultancies exist which offer exactly that service. You can find websites where different bidders compete to solve a given product development challenge. Even innovation can be specified, outsourced and put out to tender. Just put ‘product development solutions’ into Google, if you don’t believe me.

If that seems to take all the fun, all the sexiness out of entrepreneurial innovation – well, it shouldn’t. It doesn’t really matter whether an entrepreneur is engaged in a technically led business or not. All entrepreneurship is innovative always. It cannot not be. When Paul and his colleagues started Martek, they started with nothing: three blokes and an idea, sitting in a pub. They didn’t know how to start a company, plan a product, get it certificated, organize manufacturing, retain sales agents, arrange logistics, rent premises, budget cash flows, compile tax returns, or anything else. In the first months and years of a start-up’s life, no problem has ever been solved before. If something needs to be done, then someone has to figure out how to do it. Sometimes that’s a phone call to a known expert. Sometimes it’s something that can be worked around. Other times it’s something to do yourself. Whatever the solution, there is never an established precedent, no one whose job it is to take care of the issue except you.

Indeed, speaking to Paul, I realized that for him creating a product had been straightforward; creating the company had been the challenge. Take, for example, the matter of marketing. Shipping is a global industry and Britain no longer has a significant merchant navy. If Martek wanted to sell its kit, it needed distributors in Singapore, Taipei, Oslo, Rotterdam, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro and a whole host of other places besides. That meant somebody – often Paul – climbing onto a plane and looking for local agents. How do you find the right kind of sales agent in Taipei? How do you know you can trust him? What kind of contract should you sign? What kind of income split makes sense? What kind of literature do you need to supply with the product? If you’re part of an established company, then all these questions have answers. There are existing agents, existing contracts, and a body of experience. When change happens, it tends to be incremental, building patiently on the lessons of the past.

An entrepreneur has no such comfort – and no such shackle. Martek’s success demonstrates that more often than not it got the answers right. But not always. No sooner had it launched its products, than rival producers in India simply copied them. The products were securely protected by patent, but all a patent really means is that you have a right to sue. Indian courts can easily take ten years to come to a verdict and the ultimate recovery of funds is highly improbable. Paul didn’t know all that to begin with and spent a few thousand pounds finding out. A more established company would have known that; it would have had a procedure in place telling it what to do.

I left my conversations with Alan and Paul reminded of a basic truth. Entrepreneurs are only rarely and accidentally inventors. Ford did not invent the car. Hoover did not invent the hoover. Rockefeller did not invent any oilfield or oil transport technology. Carnegie was no technologist, nor is Lakshmi Mittal, his modern-day counterpart. Paul Getty, it’s true, did invent the John Paul Getty Special, but that hardly qualifies him for induction into the inventors’ Hall of Fame. Knox D’Arcy, Gerry Lambert, Richard Branson, and Warren Buffett invented nothing. Mr IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, invented nothing. Michael Dell and Michael Bloomberg invented nothing. Retail billionaires Walton, Sainsbury, and Albrecht (in the United States, the UK, and Germany respectively) invented nothing. They’re not unusual. Most entrepreneurs never do.

Indeed, if we tend to think of invention and entrepreneurship as running hand in hand, that’s partly because there have been one or two major historical exceptions to the rule (notably Edison) and because the modern software industry has made a number of inventive types very rich indeed. If you put the software industry aside for a moment, then not one of the richest people in the world made their money primarily or even largely from invention. Even in software, few people would suggest that Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Paul Allen have been the most inventive people around. Their skills have been in turning their perfectly acceptable, but not highly innovative, products into the dominant brands of their respective markets. In fact, if you comb the lists of the world’s richest people for genuine inventors, then the only two names that truly qualify are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Google twosome – and it’s not a coincidence that the software industry is one where the gap between initial idea and market-ready product is an exceptionally narrow one.

Yet to focus on a lack of invention is to miss the point. For one thing, innovation doesn’t have to be about invention, in the Patent Office sense of invention. Richard Branson of Virgin reinvented long haul air travel, without needing to build a different sort of plane. He simply understood that business travellers were human too, that humans can get bored but like pampering, and he arranged his airline around those insights. Two American entrepreneurs, Herb Kelleher and Rollin King, reinvented short haul air travel via almost exactly the reverse insight: that radically simplifying air travel could hugely lower costs and thereby attract customers. Two sharply different business models. Two hugely successful challenges to the incumbents. Innovation without invention.

It’s this sense in which entrepreneurs most typically innovate. It’s what they do. There is no pre-existing structure so they cannot not innovate. Yet many of the entrepreneurs I met (Paul Luen included) are compulsive innovators in another respect as well. They innovate because existing structures bore them. The joy of creating something entirely new is far deeper than the pleasure of running something already established. It’s an attitude which in many cases will cause them to leave successful businesses before they should, nudge them into over-investing in risky projects. It’s the attitude which makes them what they are. It’s also the attitude which has turned the crazy inventions of others into products that work and sell and fill our homes. It may one day be the attitude that takes Alan Bond’s genius and makes it fly.