50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

Play the word association game with Silicon Valley, and your mind is unlikely to go to canned

food. Silicon Valley stands for cutting-edge technology,

the old ideas that changed the world. Nobody would say the tin can is cutting-edge technology,

although the more literal-minded might make that claim for the can opener.

Yet in its day, canned food was as revolutionary as anything now being pitched by Bay Area

startups, and its story reveals how surprisingly little some deep dilemmas around innovation

have changed in the last 200 years or so.

To start with, how do we incentivise good ideas? There's the lure of a patent, of course,

or first mover advantage. But if you really want to encourage fresh thinking, offer a prize.

Self-driving cars are a current example. In 2004, the Defence Advanced Research Projects

Agency, DARPA, offered a million dollars to the first vehicle to find its way across

a course in the Mahave Desert. The result was pure wacky races, vehicles caught fire,

flipped over, crashed through fences, and ground to a halt because they were confused by tumble

weed. But within a decade, self-driving cars were reliable enough to let loose on public

roads. The DARPA prize was hardly the first, however.

In 1795, the government of France offered a prize of 12,000 francs for inventing a method

of preserving food. It was eventually claimed by Nicola Appere, a Parisian grocer and

confectioner credited with the development of the Buion or Stock Cube. And less plausibly,

the recipe for chicken Kiev. Through trial and error, Appere found that if you put cooked

food in a glass jar, plunged the jar into boiling water, and then sealed it with wax.

The food wouldn't go off. Why was the French government interested in preserving food?

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