"It frequently happens that two persons, reasoning right on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing without any communication with each other"
About this Quote
Innovation isn’t always a lightning bolt; sometimes it’s a traffic pattern. Oliver Evans, speaking as a working inventor in the early American industrial scramble, puts his finger on a quietly destabilizing idea: originality is often less about solitary genius than about shared conditions. When “two persons” arrive at the same machine independently, the romance of invention gets replaced by something more modern and more unsettling - that technology has a kind of gravitational pull. If the problem is the same, the materials are similar, and the constraints are tight, the solution starts to feel inevitable.
Evans’ phrasing does a lot of work. “Reasoning right” isn’t poetic inspiration; it’s competence. He’s valorizing method over mystique, suggesting that the mind, properly trained, will converge. The subtext is also defensive. In an era with weak patent enforcement, slow communication, and plenty of accusations of theft, “without any communication” functions like a preemptive alibi. It anticipates the courtroom drama of parallel invention: no, I didn’t steal it; the times produced it.
There’s a democratic undertone here, too. If invention can happen twice, it can happen anywhere the necessary knowledge and need collide. Evans is effectively predicting what historians of technology later formalized: simultaneous discovery, the way multiple people reach for the same breakthrough when society’s problems and tools line up. It’s a reminder that machines don’t just reflect individual brilliance; they reveal what a culture is ready to build.
Evans’ phrasing does a lot of work. “Reasoning right” isn’t poetic inspiration; it’s competence. He’s valorizing method over mystique, suggesting that the mind, properly trained, will converge. The subtext is also defensive. In an era with weak patent enforcement, slow communication, and plenty of accusations of theft, “without any communication” functions like a preemptive alibi. It anticipates the courtroom drama of parallel invention: no, I didn’t steal it; the times produced it.
There’s a democratic undertone here, too. If invention can happen twice, it can happen anywhere the necessary knowledge and need collide. Evans is effectively predicting what historians of technology later formalized: simultaneous discovery, the way multiple people reach for the same breakthrough when society’s problems and tools line up. It’s a reminder that machines don’t just reflect individual brilliance; they reveal what a culture is ready to build.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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