Friedrich Serturner and The Harsh Truths About Innovation and Trailblazing
Twenty-year-old Friedrich Serturner wasn't a doctor when he started his pharmaceutical experiments. Even by 1803 standards, he wasn't anywhere close to having a license to practice medicine. Hell, he hadn't even passed the test to be a pharmacist assistant yet. But in the back of his boss’s pharmacy shop, he passed around doses of a new crystalline powder he had isolated from opium - the first time anyone anywhere got an alkaloid extracted from a plant. Friedrich asked three 17-year-old friends to be his test pilots. Of course, the teenagers took Friederich’s drug. They knew it'd come from opium. They knew Friedrich was unsuccessful so far getting the dosage correct. What they may not have known was that his new drug killed all the stray dogs he gave it to. But Friedrich was sure this time would be different.
Mice and dogs provided what Friedrich called ‘in exact’ results. In comparison, people could be counted on to tell you what they were feeling as the powerful white powder kicked in. One by one, they swallowed the drug, which Friedrich named Morpheus because the crystal powder made him sleepy, and Morpheus was the king of dreams. Later, the scientific community tore Friedrich and his wonder drug apart; it would be renamed to Morphine. Friederich’s friends told him they felt happy and lightheaded with the first dose. Then 15 minutes later, he dosed them again. The extra Morphine made them drowsy and fatigued this time, but he kept giving them more. After another 15-milligram dose, his friends got confused and dazed. This was when they started falling asleep uncontrollably and when Friedrich thought of the dogs; the dogs would fall asleep before they died.
Now, it might be a good time to mention that an adult dose of Morphine is about 10 mg. Friedrich and his friends took almost 100 milligrams. When Friedrich knew his homemade powder was making them dangerously sleepy, he passed around vials of vinegar and had them do shots. His friends vomited, woke up with headaches and refused to continue the experiments. At this moment in history, a pharmacist apprentice nearly killing a group of teenage friends would advance medicine and chemistry in three giant steps.
Friedrich would be the first chemist to ever isolate and identify the active greedy in a plant. He'd be the first to grade alkaloid extract, meaning little white crystals that we associate with Morphine, nicotine, strychnine, etc., and he would be the first to invent a painkiller that could be accurately dosed. Of course, given the circumstances of his experiment and lack of education, his invention was ignored, and his research paper was rejected. But Friedrich was a trailblazer, and he would try again, and again, and again for validation and credit until the day he died.
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Examples of trailblazers come in two different flavors: a woman like Amelia Earhart pushes a new technology to the edge, or Steve Jobs or Howard Hughes runs a company that invents the technology for her to push. Today, we're focusing on the inventor trailblazer, the men and women who have vision, who sought further than the rest of us and profited off it. Because we want to ask one simple question with lots of moving parts - Is it better to invent something outside the mold and risk being ignored or to buy a tried-and-true mold and get cranking? Experimenter or craftsman? Basement laboratory or factory assembly line? To answer this, we are busting three innovation myths today.
Myth One: Tech adoption is guaranteed. If you make a better handle for a hammer, you'll see it on the store shelves within your lifetime. If you invent a new painkiller, science will embrace you, right?
Joe: I've got to start with a question about this. I have read history, and I know they had medicine and alchemists pretty much as far back as we've been humans. So, what is Friedrich doing that we don't have already? Like, why is this important?
Todd: That's a great question. A lot of things back then were given in liquid form like a juice or were given in a way to smoke, which is kind of funny to think of. But the problem with this was the dosage. So, you couldn't give the exact dosage to people, which could be lethal. This meant you needed to be super conservative about who to give it to you because it's bad for business to be killing people. I think one of the biggest things here is that Friedrich was the first guy to dose effectively. The funny part was that he was never allowed to touch the pills, mix the pills, or prescribe anything.
Joe: What is the stock boy doing inventing science in the back room? That's wild.
We want to start with the inception of Morphine, the idea that if you are a trailblazer like Friedrich, the moment you drop rubber into a pan and make vulcanized rubber or invent a 52-step process to make a painkiller, then you will immediately have a ticker-tape parade. People will take your drug out into the street, it'll be a movie, and you have a victory wave. It is the idea that you gain the fruits of your invention and get the accreditation you deserve for it.
In preparation for this episode, I wanted to find out if we can all be trailblazers. Can everyone listening invent something and see it get adopted within our lifetime? How likely are we to get that parade or see the fruits of our labor come true? And part of this started because America is the hotbed of invention. I tried to prove that wrong, but America actually is the hotbed of invention. We'll start with how likely is your stuff to be invented or how likely is your invention to be adopted? So, we're going to start far back. We're going all the way back to Ethiopia 2.6 million years ago. Here, we find the first stone tools by the old dawah from Ethiopia and then quite a long time later, we get to the first handles on tools. If you're talking about inventions, the handle is the first big hot thing. Neanderthals made those; They were using bitumen to glue handles onto their tools, and that was potentially 70,000 years ago, possibly as far back as 100,000 years ago.
So, you make a stone chisel and then two million years after that, you have a handle for that chisel. That does not sound right to me. That is such a slow adoption. And if you want to get into funny territory, screws were invented 50 years before the screwdriver. I can only assume everybody was using emergency tools like pain tops and things like that for screws. So basically, what we're saying is that you can invent something that is groundbreaking and is a market improvement on what's available, but it could take a long time before it gets adopted.
Moving forward in this. I have a Harvard Business Review article that we're going to link off to. It was about how many decades it took for new technology to get into at least half of all households. Their chart shows that in 1990 we got cell phones, but it took until 2005 for 50% of people to adopt them. According to this chart, it took about 30 years for telephones to be adopted into everyone's house, and it took a little bit more time for electricity to get adopted in radios. What we're saying is that you can invent something fantastic, and it may not achieve full market penetration. It may not even be adopted in your lifetime, but you have a much better chance of it being adopted in your lifetime because you live in a time where we are willing to grab onto technology faster than before. If you put out an app or technology, there is a good chance you might see it on shelves in a couple of years, at least.
Myth Two: If inventing a new technology doesn't guarantee success, at least we'd know to invest in a brilliant product if we saw it. We would have never turned down Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg when they first started looking for investors.
Have you ever heard of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point? Supposedly there is a bell curve that people in marketing follow. They say that new technology comes out, and it's like a trailblazer or an innovator that invents it. And it's innovators like the inventor who take that invention and grab it like a torch and start running with it. Then the trendy early adopters of the next ones pick it up. So, the start of this curve is the early adopter who sees the potential and then takes off from there. The hard thing about trailblazer success is that people have to hear about your invention, which was hard in pre-internet days. You throw yourself at the mercy of whoever heads the thing, like Friedrich needing to connect with big names in medicine. There's a reason why Marie Curie was working in France. It was the Hub of medical achievement; he had to appeal to French medicine.
Nowadays. If your invention isn't widely adopted, sometimes the reason is simply because we will feel like idiots using it. Have you ever heard of Dvorak keyboards? If you look at the top left of the keyboard, the first six letters are QWERTY, which is why all standard keyboards are called QWERTY keyboards. Now, the QWERTY keyboard, the setup of it was invented to make it slower for people to type, not faster. It's the same QWERTY setup as what was on old typewriters, and everyone knows if you've used an old ink typewriter and you type too fast, the hammers will gum together. So, they invented QWERTY so that people wouldn't be able to go faster and do that.
There's a special type of keyboard instead of spelling QWERTY at the top left. It spells out Dvorak. It allows people to type at double the speed. So why don't we all switch? Because there is a lag and technology called the competency lag where people won't adopt an invention if they don't feel competent; they don’t want to suck at something for a while, so they don’t adopt it. I think it's the same reason why some people will never drive a stick shift, to avoid getting embarrassed, even if it was temporary. This may be why trailblazers are different – they are not afraid to be humiliated. They are willing to fall into that adoption curve and hope that it actually picks up in their lifetime.
Myth Three: Poor Friedrich getting ignored. Fortunately for us, America is the fertile crescent of innovation. If we invent something useful, we will be rewarded, right?
I want to talk about this pharmacist in Westphalia and the French medical community that had ignored Friedrich at that time. I mean, of course they were adopting things that they thought would work, but why aren't inventors taken seriously sooner like in America? If somebody says they are working on a patent, we take you dead seriously, but almost no other country has that history with them. Why is America so big on invention? We're going to answer that, but first, we need to answer the first part: why is it so important for this pharmacist in Westphalia to adopt Morphine for us? Why is it so important for us to find a trailblazer or an early inventor and put money into their invention?
So, I found this Forbes article, and it talks about the market share of a new invention and overlaps that with the new users for an invention. So, if you could imagine the bell curve we talked about earlier, 13.5% of people are early adopters. They're the ones who are coming out with new things; It's a person who's going to have a guy from Intel with the newest technology. A lot of it is unnecessary, but sometimes it's Morphine. This is where the bell curve gets big and goes high - when it's not super new, but it's new enough. Now, everybody adopts it on the downward slope of the bell curve, which is called the late majority. This is 34% of people. They're the ones who adopt things after it's safe and after it's been tested. Then there are the laggards, which is about 60%.
When we talk about invention and innovation, if you're going to put money into something accordingly, you want to put money when it's hitting a tipping point on the curve and investing in that curve. Basically, if you invest too early, you're not going to make it and then vice versa. The market share gets to the early majority, and when it transitions to that sweet spot where almost everyone's heard of it, that’s when the late majority starts to adopt it. The market takes care of itself here, and growth becomes its own sort of system. You see this with invention; there's a race for the patent.
Usually, someone did something early, and then someone else improved it and then three companies are racing to get it to this point. Now, the reason you want to invest in an invention at the early adopter and early majority stage is that you don't have to worry about whether the growth will drive itself. If you invest when it's still just innovators and inventors, that technology could crash, and it could be the clap-on lamp where it's stupid, and nobody actually wants it. But if you see something passing that early adopter phase, you could make a lot of money. That's where you can count on if it’s going to pick up. The late majority will also want it and your shares here.
There are four reasons I want to walk through in case we ever invent something and need to market it. The reason why you would want to invest in a company and the reason why you'd want to invest in a new invention early. First off, there's reduced competition. If you invest during the early adopter phase or you are the product during the early, you get approximately 6.4X more users and revenue than having invested in an established innovator. So, if you get on board the train before the early majority picks it up, you triple the money you make. That's why you want to be first.
But the thing is, early adopters and innovators want to be the ones that champion. And that's what this article talks about is good old-fashioned word of mouth leaders who were doing the marketing. They, you basically end up printing your own money. That's what phone apps did at the start when phone apps were a new thing on Android phones. They were printing their own money because they didn't have to be that good. They just had to be talked about. To summarize why you want to be the first person to get their hands on a new invention or any trailblazer is that you get behind companies that are accelerating through the growth curve; you end up locking out competition. They spend less money on advertising; they spend less money to make money and make future successes easier because they write a growth wave that happens naturally. The question you need to ask yourself is, would you rather be a bush that sprouts up in a forest that's already full of growth, or would you want to be the weed that sprouts up in a freshly plowed field like Friedrich was?
Joe: Friedrich, the man that invented Morphine and saved millions of lives, was literally supposed to be one of these lost Einstein's, and he just got lucky.
Todd: Friedrich had tough times towards the end of his life. He was desperate and frustrated. He had to figure out a way to get back in good with the Germans. So, he had his wife run the pharmacy while he did experiments 24 hours a day.
Joe: Trying to impress the very government that took away his accolades and his Doctorate.
Todd: He was an Einstein. He was ahead of his time. Though shot taking, most of his stuff was proven to be true years later. He had a very blue-collar common-sense approach. If he was an academic, he would have gotten so much more respect and imagine if he had more financial support?
Joe: What he's limited to is speculating about these sciences. What if he had the time, ability, and money to prove everything, which is why I think they were mad at him. I think he was looked at as a poor back-of-the-shop experimenter who didn't write well. In that day, being a scientist was such a gentlemanly thing, and they didn't see Fredrich as a gentleman, likely because of his socioeconomic class. They figured he didn’t have money for an education, so he didn’t deserve the attention.
Todd: This reminded me, Frederick was trying to please the German government like a kid would be trying to get the respect or love of their parents – and to do it, he abandoned chemistry and drugs altogether. No more pharmacy, and he started working on bullets and gunpowder science for the Hanover government. And it worked. They didn't end up using a lot of his inventions, but they had awarded him as a patriot for research on firearms and ammunition. So got recognition, which is something that he really always wanted.
Joe: That is devastating in two ways. One, you take a man of medicine and tell him his ideas are garbage because he's not a gentleman, and then you have him pull away from it to invent firearms and ammunition. That is horrible.
Todd: His later years were just bitterness and pain. He became a total recluse hypochondriac. He really lost his way and lost his sense of worth because he was so depressed. He started using more Morphine, and the side effects got worse and worse. So, he became a full-on drug addict.
Joe: Wow.
Todd: He died in Hamlin on February 20th, 1841. The tragedy in this is that the full potential of his discovery wasn’t very far away. The invention of intravenous medicine was just a few years later. So, he died a broke drug addict just short of his windfall.
Final Thoughts
As humans, we haven't always adopted the best technology for us, nor were we especially speedy at adopting new scary tools. But we have gotten faster now. It took us decades for us to adopt phones into our houses and only a few years for the cell. Compared to early man, those of us in the internet age aren't just early adopters; we're lightning adopters.
The online market is flooded every day with copycat inventions of things that already exist and competitors nobody asked for. So, if you aspire to be a technology trailblazer, bear in mind the challenges ahead. But if you manage to break the mold in a useful way, you will be rewarded.
In 1831, The French Academy of Sciences awarded Fredrich the Montyon prize, recognizing Friedrich as a benefactor to humanity. The same prize was awarded to Jules Verne and Louis Pasteur. It also came with a purse of 2,000 francs and a taste of the professional recognition Friedrich deserved so badly. He was able to enjoy the fruits of his invention for nine years - nine years knowing his work with Morphine had been recognized and was saving lives before he died at age 57, addicted to Morphine and suffering from the side effects of the very drug he discovered.
Just a few years after Friedrich’s death, Morphine would be combined with a new invention, the hypodermic needle. And a few years after that, America's bloodiest war would begin. Serturner, the original Mr. Sandman, would take away the pain of millions of surgery patients and Civil War victims.