This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
On May 27, 1931, Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard and his assistant, Paul Kipfer, became the first humans to enter the stratosphere, in an experimental balloon invented by Piccard. They reached an altitude of 15,785m and were the first humans to look upon the curvature of the Earth. It was also the first successful demonstration of the pressurised cabin, opening the way for modern air travel.
Piccard's achievement was a moonshot before people were taking moonshots. To make it happen, Piccard came up with a daring new design for an aviation technology then 150 years old -- the hydrogen balloon. Piccard himself raised the money, and he also piloted it, nearly killing himself and Kipfer in the process: a jammed valve meant the balloon could not descend; it drifted into the Alps before crashing there.
Almost 30 years later, in 1960, Jacques Piccard, Auguste's son, did a reverse moonshot. He piloted a submarine co-designed by his father to the bottom of the ocean, 11 kilometres down to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. More people have been to the Moon than have been to Challenger Deep; James Cameron, who reached it in March this year, was the third.
Everyone likes a moonshot these days -- at Google X, the search giant's R&D wing, Astro Teller is "Captain of Moonshots." A Bloomberg Businessweek article described Google X as a "factory for moonshots, those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things." Google's moonshots include driverless cars, Google Glass and space elevators.
Steven Levy reintroduced the term during an interview with
Larry Page, Google's CEO. Since then, it has become the slogan du jour among entrepreneurial circles, replacing such David Brent-esque descriptions as "disruptive" and "game-changing". (So long, old friends.) And it's moving into the mainstream: from March to June this year, "moonshot" was uttered 1,394 times in mainstream media; in the previous six months, it appeared just 283 times. One can see the appeal: who wants to admit to working on small problems when you could work on moonshots?
Except some of the most successful moonshots in history were not moonshots. They did not require generous amounts of capital, nor massive leaps of faith. Auguste Piccard did not set out to enable modern air travel, nor to be the first person in the stratosphere.
In fact, the problem he was trying to solve was quite small. It was that the atmosphere absorbed most of the cosmic rays he was trying to study by the time they reached sea level.
His solution was simple: he would rise until there was no atmosphere. The world-changing invention that followed from that solution was the by-product. His design didn't cost much, nor was it a leap of faith: Piccard trusted scientific principle and his calculations. Likewise for his deep-sea bathyscaphe. Jacques Piccard wanted to study the biology of the deep, but few fish survived the trip to the surface lab. So he took his lab underwater. A small problem led to a moonshot solution.
So too in business: Richard Branson didn't dream of owning a fleet of 747s. In 1979, a Puerto Rican airline cancelled a flight he was booked on.
He found out how much it would cost to charter an aeroplane, hawked tickets to his fellow passengers and announced its departure by writing "Virgin Airways" on a blackboard. Likewise in design:
Thomas Heatherwick, on whom I report this issue, starts his projects with simple questions: "Can a London bus use 40 per cent less fuel?" Or: "How can every country in the Olympic Games take part in making and lighting the cauldron?" The results are spectacular.
Moonshots often work, especially when you're in a struggle for geopolitical and ideological domination and need a PR win, or have the unlimited, taxman-untroubled revenues that Google does. They should certainly be encouraged. But don't ignore the mundane, solvable problems lying in front of you. Follow them through, and they might take you to the Moon too.
Tom Cheshire is associate editor at Wired. His book about the Piccard family, The Explorer Gene*, was published on 5 September, 2013 by Short Books*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
