Cut Section of the Bat-Signal Script (Patreon)

Meant to upload this on Wednesday, but here is the entire cut section of the script from the Bat-Signal video! I also read it out in the above audio file. Enjoy!

If you believe that his inventions actually worked, then it’s easy to see that Harry Grindell Matthews was ahead of his time. And that was precisely the problem. In a joint interview between Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, and Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, they explained that inventing something too early is just as bad if not worse than being late to the game. The climate needs to be just right for any innovation to take off. 

Think back to his death ray. Matthews was far from the only person working on one at the time. Marconi, Tesla, Edwin R. Scott, and so many others were independently developing a death ray that the New York Times even published an article called The Death Ray Rivals which featured the opening line, “The inventors of a ‘death ray’ multiply every day.” Not because they were copying each other’s idea, but because they all simply had the same idea around the same time!


It’s as if the world went from “No death ray… no death ray… no death ray… BOOM! Death rays everywhere!” And you can find the same trend with nearly every major breakthrough in fields from science, engineering, biology, mathematics, medicine, and so on. Look through history and you’ll find that major discoveries happen from many people simultaneously while working independently of one another.


At the same time all these death rays were being invented, William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas wrote about the phenomenon of simultaneous innovations in a paper titled “Are Inventions Inevitable,” where they compiled a list of innovations and breakthroughs throughout time. For example, five different people simultaneously invented the steamboat, six different people invented the thermometer, and nine different people invented the telescope. That’s just a small sample. The full list will be linked in the description below.


But why does this happen? What is this invisible hand seemingly guiding innovation and progress? Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman calls it the Adjacent Possible. Basically, in any given system, there are a finite number of moves possible. Think of it like a giant mansion where the only way to get to one room is by going through a series of other rooms first.


It is for this reason that, you could not invent a smartphone in 1920, not only because the technology wasn’t there, but also because… who would even think of that? Who COULD even think of that?! It would be incredibly difficult to even conceptualize a smartphone in the 1920s. One would need an entire set of previous breakthroughs and innovations to open doors for new breakthroughs and innovations that not only weren't possible before, but were also unthinkable. And once those doors start to open and the climate is just right, the idea suddenly and rapidly springs to life. The world goes from no smartphones for millions of years to now everyone has smartphones.


But this idea goes a bit further. As Ogburn and Thomas pointed out in their paper, it would be almost impossible to stop innovations. Even if Harry Grindell Matthews died a tragic death as a young boy, we’ve seen that other people were inventing death rays at the exact same time anyway. And because there are almost always a handful of others throughout the world who are innovating in the same way at the same time while independent from one another, Ogburn and Thomas make the radical conclusion that inventions and discoveries are in a sense inevitable.


We can see this idea play out with the Bat-Signal. No matter which Batman continuity you find yourself in, there will be some form of Bat-Signal. Created by tying a mob boss to a floodlight, crudely painting a reflective surface, or any other origin, the Bat-Signal persists. It’s inevitable. And that inevitability is reassuring. In a city where killer clowns and evil psychopaths roam the streets invoking terror and chaos, citizens of Gotham can look up and see a persevering symbol that someone is out there watching over them.