Come Hiller high wa­ter

When Stephen Hiller was nine­teen he de­signed and built the first coax­ial he­li­copter in his par­en­t’s dri­ve­way in Berkeley. He called it the Hiller-copter. Several years later, in 1947, he co­founded a com­pany where he got to build all sorts of crazy vari­ants of all things copter, in­clud­ing the Floating Platform (below), where the op­er­a­tor stood up above the cen­ter of a sin­gle gi­ant ro­tor, and leaned the con­trap­tion in the di­rec­tion he wanted to fly.

Yes, that’s right. In the 1950s a twenty-some­thing cre­ated the fly­ing Segway.

He also de­signed the Rotorcycle, a fold­ing portable he­li­copter de­signed for mil­i­tary use. For a num­ber of re­ally good rea­sons, like its slow speed and zero pro­tec­tion from the el­e­ments or en­emy fire, the US Army de­cided that it was­n’t re­ally good for pro­duc­tion use.

I call it a fly­ing scooter.

Hiller was un­doubt­edly a ge­nius, but in 1946 a mag­a­zine pro­file de­scribed him as “so ut­terly hu­mor­less that he never makes a joke and looks be­wil­dered when any­one else does.”

The orig­i­nal mis­fit nerd.

Original is prob­a­bly a bad word to use. Misfit nerds and ge­niuses ahead of their time have been around since maybe the dawn of recorded his­tory or ear­lier, and even rel­a­tively well-ad­justed nor­mal in­tel­li­gent peo­ple have been on the fore­front of tin­ker­ing with what­ever the lat­est in sci­en­tific or tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ments hap­pened to be. We used to do all sorts of crazy ex­per­i­ments in air travel, just as we used to do all sorts of ex­per­i­ments with other forms of tech­nol­ogy, and to­day our ex­per­i­men­ta­tion con­tin­ues to be in com­put­ers, and in Internet-based com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and civic tech­nol­ogy is a small sub­set of that kind of in­for­mal tin­ker­ing. Eventually, I won­der, if the cor­po­rate struc­ture is in­evitable, where no one builds their own portable air­craft from a home kit any­more be­cause it’s all just Boeing and Lockheed now and the only prof­itable ven­ture is com­mer­cial air­lin­ers and mil­i­tary craft.

I used to build my own com­puter, but now I just buy shiny prepack­aged goods from Apple. We have some peo­ple at the edges, tin­ker­ing with glasses and watches and other portable, light­weight, open source gad­gets, but in ten years Pebble is a pub­licly traded Fortune 500 com­pany and the Arduino Corporation ren­o­vates the shell of what used to be Cisco’s cam­pus in San Jose. So it goes.

A small civic tech­nol­ogy startup cre­ated by for­mer Code for America fel­lows has grown, over twenty years, into a medium sized soft­ware com­pany build­ing bet­ter prod­ucts for gov­ern­ments. They had small of­fices all over the coun­try, but then they moved every­one to Redwood City for some rea­son. Its CEO, the only re­main­ing founder, is pub­licly charm­ing, but none of her em­ploy­ees like her. They are ag­gres­sive with their sales. The soft­ware, bloated from years of mis­cel­la­neous de­vel­op­ment, be­gin to show rough edges as the com­pany cuts some cor­ners, lock in their clients and elim­i­nate their com­pe­ti­tion. They be­come the vil­lain. So it goes.

I was talk­ing up some of this Hiller-ity to fel­low civic techies (name drop­ping Laurenellen McCann and Justin Grimes) which soon veered else­where, but I’ll try to re­con­struct some of their salient points with em­bell­ish­ments:

1. All this has hap­pened be­fore, and all this will hap­pen again. We don’t nec­es­sar­ily tread new ground, us tech­nol­o­gists. Generations of tin­ker­ers have done what we have, learned what we are re-learn­ing now, im­ple­mented styl­is­ti­cally older ver­sions of the same thing. We are re-in­vent­ing UI el­e­ments peo­ple came up with in 1968. We may be doomed to make the same mis­takes for ever.

2. The folly of Christopher Columbus was his be­lief that he was the first to dis­cover a thing when in re­al­ity many oth­ers were there be­fore him. Quite a few, ac­tu­ally, as he stum­bled onto civ­i­liza­tions thou­sands of years old. We do this in tech­nol­ogy: we “discover” things, we claim “first!,” but in re­al­ity we are tread­ing the same well-worn paths. It is just our first time on that trail, so we brag to our friends about this fan­tas­tic trail we just dis­cov­ered and what a beau­ti­ful view there is at the end of it. It is new to us. But we for­get about the ones that blazed the path we’ve only now dis­cov­ered for our­selves.

Oh, there was also a re­ally good point about Robert Frost. I learned that he did­n’t ac­tu­ally take the path less trav­eled. He just wished he did. That part of the poem every­one keeps re­peat­ing is taken com­pletely out of con­text.

The ba­sic na­ture of our in­stincts don’t change all that much. A thou­sand years ago, a Viking sol­dier van­dal­ized the Hagia Sophia, scratch­ing “Halfdan was here” into a wall. And we might have ful­filled our ul­ti­mate dream of con­stant self-ex­pres­sion, if only the orig­i­nal cave painters could see Instagram now. And if the pur­vey­ors of scrolls and po­tions could see the myr­iad of apps, ful­fill­ing our hu­man need for some­thing: at­ten­tion, com­pan­ion­ship, love, fame, food, ex­cite­ment, mean­ing; we cre­ate and recre­ate them again and again.

Sixty years from now. Yo 2.0 is sim­u­lated on a vin­tage iPhone 9s from the an­cient 2020s, placed be­hind a plate of trans­par­ent alu­minum in the Smithsonian. A mu­seum tech­ni­cian has care­fully re­placed the orig­i­nal phone dis­play with a holo­pro­jec­tor, since no one makes screens that has pix­els any­more. People used to in­vent so much stuff for com­put­ers, sur­mises the vis­i­tor, a mas­ter’s can­di­date in ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence ad­min­is­tra­tion. He re­flects on how dif­fer­ent things are now. We still make soft­ware for self-ex­pres­sion, soft­ware for talk­ing to friends, soft­ware for find­ing mates, and soft­ware to man­age busi­ness logic, but now all of it de­signed by ro­bots, be­cause it’s more ef­fi­cient that way. The in­ter­faces are al­ways the same, beau­ti­ful and func­tional but ster­ile. The ro­bots that cre­ate them are main­tained by a few gi­ant cor­po­ra­tions, and they’ve op­ti­mized and stan­dard­ized nearly every­thing. Only a few peo­ple know how to write a pro­gram any­more; all of them are crazy.

So it goes.