In the long sweep of human history, certain key innovations were so dramatic in their impacts that they changed our world forever. What do we know from historical studies and archaeology of the topics chosen for five key chapters of this book?

This chapter reads César Aira’s work as an intervention in Argentine literature at the end of the twentieth century, which – since its irruption in 1981 – called for new reading protocols based on a fundamental operation: the transformation of the concept of fiction into invention. The radicalness of this invention – which embodied an unprecedented way of writing in Argentine literature – constitutes a point of inflection in storytelling.This phenomenon is described from diverse and converging points of view: the development of a singular economy; writing as the art of continuum and as a form of contemporary art; the imagination of worlds of the present by means of a general theory of documentation. The hypotheses put forward draw on a transversal reading which, while considering the whole of his books (more than a hundred), focuses on key texts which are representative of the diverse profiles of his works: the parable of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Argentina, between Ema, the captive and Shantytown; the aporias of vision and the machines of thought from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter to Marble; the fables of the writer in the contemporary world, between Varamo and Parménides.

Many signs in urban areas are bilingual in Chinese and English. It cannot escape the notice of even the most casual bilingual observer that many such signs are woefully (and sometimes hilariously) mistranslated. Mistakes can result from wrong segmentation, wrong word choice, wrong grammar, or inappropriate style, which is particularly important in Chinese. Mistakes can also result from missing crucial information or lack of understanding of English. There are also the ‘innovative analogies’, which give rise to non-existent English words. Also frequently observed are inconsistencies, wavering between the two strategies of pinyin transliteration and meaning translation. The inclusion of mistranslated signs can be pedagogically useful in more than one way. Studying mistranslated signs is an exercise in contrastive analysis. Through detailed analysis of the causes of the mistakes, such signs can be used as negative examples in the teaching of both Chinese and English. They can also be useful to the study and practice of translation.

Times are changing as our global ecosystem for commercializing innovation helps bring new technologies to market, networks grow, and interconnections and transactions become more complex around standards, all to enable vast opportunities to improve the human condition, to further competition, and to improve broad access. The policies that governments use to structure their legal systems for intellectual property, especially patents, as well as for competition—or antitrust—continue to have myriad powerful impacts and raise intense debates over challenging questions. This chapter explores a representative set of debates about policy approaches to patents, to elucidate particular ideas to bear in mind about how adopting a private law, property rights-based approach to patents enables them to better operate as tools for facilitating the commercialization of new technologies in ways that best promote the goals of increasing access while fostering competition and security for a diverse and inclusive society.

The epilogue considers the afterlives of “matter” and “making” in the Elizabethan period. Through brief readings of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, the epilogue demonstrates that both ideas continue to guide literary practice during this period. At the same time, however, the economic and political position of the Elizabethan poet differs markedly from the place that earlier court writers had occupied in the sphere of cultural production, and this shift in position motivates a gradual turn, in Elizabethan literary theory, away from notions of “making,” which draw attention to the material process by which literature is constructed, and towards notions of “authorship,” which hold instead that literature is produced by an autonomous figure whose type of work is categorically distinct from other kinds of labor. “Authorship” thus emerges from an ideological shift predicated, not upon a fundamental difference in literary technique, but upon a change in the conditions under which early modern poets worked.

The word ‘making’ does too much work. This chapter teases apart the etymological senses of three words that are sometimes employed interchangeably as synonyms for making. They are ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’, and ‘Production’. To list them in this order is to list them in a sequence that is broadly, but not strictly, chronological. Invention indicates the initiation of the making process, Creation describes the development stage, and Production describes the presentation or publication of the created thing. This chapter argues for a return to those original etymological distinctions as a way of distilling different significations from our undifferentiated talk of ‘making’. Perhaps it is not a return that is called for, so much as a fresh acknowledgement of etymological distinctions that still survive just below the surface of our discourse. That survival explains why, for example, one can ‘produce’ a rabbit from a hat, but one cannot ‘invent’ a rabbit, or ‘create’ a rabbit from a hat.

This final chapter offers theoretical reflections on rupture and creativity and on the need to struggle for epistemological independence in postcolonial Africa.

This chapter continues the biography of Wabeladio Payi. In contrast to the previous chapter, it focuses on his arrival in Kinshasa in the early 1980s and on how he managed to convince academics and scientists that he had something new to say to both artists and scientists. It also explores the times when Wabeladio was accused of being ‘mad’.

At the beginning of 1845 members of parliament and newspaper leader writers celebrated the inventiveness and prosperity of Britain while also acknowledging that the ‘Condition of England Question’ cast a long shadow: ‘The people deteriorate.’ Leading writers such as Carlyle and Disraeli explored this question in their writings, often drawing upon documentary evidence in open letters to the newspapers or pamphlets framed as ‘letters’. Private letters also proliferated. Although leading figures in public life had secretaries who either wrote their employers’ letters to dictation or transcribed them in letter or copy books, senior professionals such as judges, generals, bishops and ministers of state, including prime ministers, generally wrote several letters each day, using a dip pen and inkstand while resting their paper – often a quarto sheet folded once – on a desk or table, or on a portable writing ‘slope’ or ‘desk’ when travelling. The letters of Augustus Welby Pugin and Edward FitzGerald provide examples of correspondence binding together communities of friends and colleagues through the universal penny post.

Chapter 2 covers issues surrounding the assignment of IP (i.e., fixing its ownership as a prerequisite to transacting in it), and contrasts ownership with licensing of IP. It specifically covers the assignment of rights in patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets, including within the employment context (i.e., shop rights , individuals hired to invent and works made for hire). The Supreme Court decision in Stanford v. Roche is considered at length. The chapter concludes with a thorough discussion of the issues presented by joint ownership of IP.

Makerspaces and the Maker Movement provide a place and a pedagogy for the development of inventive talent. We describe the key components of Maker pedagogy, including tinkering, failing, sharing, and diversity of people and perspectives. The authors then provide a lifespan perspective on the development of inventive talent, from young Makers’ discovery of the tools and materials of making, to the adolescent learning and mentoring process, to the acquisition of expertise as an engineer, a designer, or developer.

Chapter Three moves from the front to the middle of the brain, believed to house the rational faculty that assessed forms and ideas, and put them together in novel ways. The chapter explores a persistent early modern connection between fathers, daughters, and the production of new knowledges — one that found expression in the popular emblem of Truth, the daughter of Time (Veritas temporis filia). After analyzing how this figure was used to embody scientific and religious innovation, the chapter then considers the revival of an ancient myth about the potter Dibutades’ daughter, a girl who traces her absent lover’s form and (according to early modern revisions of her story) invents the art of painting. These two daughters help frame the chapter’s analysis of two Shakespearean ones, All’s Well That Ends Well’s orphaned Helen and The Tempest’s island-bound Miranda. After briefly considering how Helen uses her physician-father’s art to produce her own ambitious project, the chapter finishes with a reading of The Tempest. The chapter argues that Miranda’s beating mind challenges her father Prospero’s rough, old art, and that her brainwork signals intellectual progress and the changes, based on observation, that were emerging from new scientific and philosophical ideas.

The definition of the drum kit – and consensus regarding its appropriate study – have changed dramatically over the course of the instrument’s history. This chapter is a rough guide to unpacking that history, and in doing so it treats the drum kit not as a fixed object, but a theoretical concept. What follows is a discussion of the drum kit in theory divided into three parts: (1) the invention and changing status of the instrument; (2) the trajectory of drum kit studies within the wider field of musical instrument scholarship; and (3) a discussion of the ‘drumscape’ as a theoretical tool. Building on Kevin Dawe’s concept of the ‘guitarscape’, the drumscape is a lens through which to consider how the drum kit has been written about, thought about and talked about; the power and agency of the drum kit in culture and society; and what kind of experience it is to play the drum kit (an experience involving both the mind and the body). Viewed through the lens of the drumscape, the seemingly simple term ‘drum kit’ can be understood from at least four different but related perspectives: the drum kit is a technology, an ideological object, a material object, and a social relationship.

This chapter explores the role science and technology played in ideas and writings on international relations between 1920 and 1950. The chapter highlights the pervasiveness of notions such as the technically driven global integration, the 'machine age', 'scientific warfare', and 'cultural lag' in the interwar years, and argues that internationalist engagement with science and technology was broader and deeper than historians have hitherto appreciated. It contextualizes these motifs within the international politics of their time, and shows how they traversed the Second World War, changed but still intact, into the postwar years, where they were incorporated into new of theories of international relations (dealing with, for example, atomic weapons).