In 2004, while Saul Griffith was a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he won a thirty-thousand-dollar award that is given each year to a student who has shown unusual promise as an inventor. Griffith was an obvious candidate. Neil Gershenfeld, one of his professors, described him to me as “an invention engine,” and said, “With Saul, you push ‘Go’ and he spews projects in every imaginable direction.” The judging committee was especially impressed by a device that Griffith had created to custom-manufacture low-cost eyeglass lenses, intended primarily for people in impoverished countries.
Traditional lensmaking is a process involving thousands of costly molds. Oversized lens blanks are cast in plastic, and then technicians grind and polish them to match individual prescriptions. Griffith told me, “I wanted to make a machine that would negate the need for that entire factory—to let you print the lenses on demand.” So he built an inexpensive desktop device with which a minimally trained operator could turn a fast-hardening liquid into a finished lens in a few minutes. The machine had a single, universal mold, with an adjustable metal ring—like a tiny springform cake pan—between a pair of flexible membranes, whose degree of convexity or concavity could be controlled by a simple hydraulic system. “Literally with only those two inputs—the shape of your boundary condition and the pressure—you can define an infinite number of lenses,” Griffith explained. That year, he won a five-hundred-thousand-dollar MacArthur Fellowship—a “genius grant”—and the MacArthur judges cited the eyeglass invention as having “the potential to change the economics of corrective lenses in rural and underserved communities around the world.”
But winning prizes turned out to be easier than changing the world, and Griffith’s lens printer has never found a market. “It turned out that we were solving the wrong problem,” he told me recently. “A lens factory is expensive to build and equip, but once you’ve got one you can make lenses cheaply, and then you can deliver them anywhere in the world for a dollar or two in postage.” In effect, Griffith’s invention addressed a problem that had been solved years before, at lower cost, by Chinese labor and global shipping. The real problem with eyeglasses in the developing world isn’t making lenses, he told me; it’s testing eyes and writing accurate prescriptions for people with little or no access to medical care—a matter of politics and economics rather than technology.
Griffith is still an invention engine. His many current projects include an electricity-assisted cargo-carrying tricycle, an inexpensive form of insulation inspired by origami, and an unconventional method of generating power with wind. But his thinking has been deeply influenced by what might be thought of as the cheap-glasses conundrum: the inadequacy of addressing complex societal issues with technological ingenuity alone. Nowhere is this problem more apparent than with his main preoccupation these days: energy use and global warming. The world’s most urgent environmental need, he has come to believe, is not for some miraculous-seeming scientific breakthrough but for a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior. That conviction makes him doubly unusual: an extraordinarily innovative engineer who is trying to think his way around the limits of innovation.
Griffith has an athletic build and a scruffy beard. His hair, which is reddish brown, is usually an omnidirectional mess, and he often looks as though he had dressed from the bottom of the laundry pile. He was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1974. His father is a retired professor, and his mother is an artist and printmaker. He grew up, he says, “in the corners between my father’s tools and my mother’s studio.”
He warned me that he despises clichéd descriptions of inventors’ childhoods—taking things apart to find out how they work, blowing things up and setting them on fire—but that’s the kind of childhood he had. He built a helicopter powered by fireworks attached to its rotors, and when he was six or seven he spent most of a summer trying to replicate Batman’s grappling hook, and eventually succeeded in hoisting himself onto the roof of his house. He said, “That was probably the first time I noticed in myself the obsessive-compulsive, I-will-solve-this-problem gene, or whatever it is.” When he was a little older, his obsession with mechanics became more acute. While drinking a glass of milk, he began to consider the complex neuromuscular choreography involved in lifting the glass to his mouth, and was so overwhelmed that he spilled the milk. A similar reflection drove him from golf, which he played at a very high level as a teen-ager but abandoned after having a paralyzing vision of the mechanical preposterousness of the golf swing.
At the University of Sydney, in the late nineteen-nineties, Griffith became an environmental activist, helping to organize a number of protests. For his master’s degree, he worked on combining recycled fabrics and plastic waste into structural building materials, and his research brought him into close contact with Sydney’s waste stream and the vast amount of paper it contained. (Worldwide, paper constitutes between a third and a half of the contents of landfills.) That got him thinking about alternatives to conventional printing. He read about a paperless technology that was being developed at M.I.T.’s Media Laboratory: electronic ink, the low-energy text-display medium that is used today by the Amazon Kindle and several other digital readers. Griffith decided he wanted to work on it.
By the time he got to Cambridge, in 1998, the fundamental work on electronic ink was over, but he participated in the final stages, and Joseph Jacobson, a co-founder of the company E Ink, became his thesis adviser. Griffith’s Ph.D. research involved machines that assemble and replicate themselves, based on information contained in their components—a concept known as “programmable matter.” Such machines function in a manner roughly analogous to the growth of living things, which build themselves, cell by cell, in accordance with rudimentary instructions contained within each nucleus. Griffith created puck-size plastic components that could fasten themselves to one another in specific ways, and then set them in motion on an air-hockey table. Random collisions on the table, over periods of hours, caused the components to join together and to correct their own assembly errors.
Griffith was a noticeable figure at M.I.T. He travelled everywhere by bicycle and carried his laptop and his books in a pizza-delivery bag. “He looked like a madman, and his office looked like a madman’s office,” Sherry Lassiter, a program manager at the university, told me. “But out of that came the most amazing, thoughtful projects.” Griffith encountered what he described to me as an “unlimited resource”—lasers, electron microscopes, vacuum chambers, a device called a water-jet cutter, and quantities of Lego bricks, a staple in the Media Lab and one of Griffith’s favorite prototyping materials. Griffith told me, “I don’t think most students get full utility from M.I.T., but if you learn where all the dumpsters are, and what labs are open on what nights, it’s just this incredibly fertile environment for doing your own stuff.”
As he tinkered, Griffith became a prime exemplar of “maker culture”—a community of sophisticated do-it-yourselfers who view hardware in the same provisional way that computer hackers view software, and who believe that making, modifying, and repairing things can be an antidote to throwaway consumerism. There was a playful quality to his research. He built a compact electricity generator that a user operated by swinging it around his head, an idea inspired by the bull-roarer, a ceremonial musical instrument used by Australian Aborigines. He built a machine that turned digital designs into three-dimensional objects made of chocolate. During a trip home to Australia, he saw some kitesurfers, and when he returned to Cambridge he and several friends decided to build their own boards and kites in various M.I.T. labs. They developed their surfing technique by trial and error, and became familiar with Boston-area emergency rooms. A video of one of their wind-related adventures (“The Stoopid Thing,” on YouTube) shows one of the group riding a kite-powered wakeboard while another hangs from the kite itself, nearly a hundred feet above the water.