SOMETHING THAT KEEPS WORKING WHILE YOU’RE ASLEEP

 

 

People generally agree that the Industrial Revolution began in 1712, that was the year Thomas Newcomen invented the steam driven beam-engine.

But for most of the next century all beam-engines did was stay in one place and pump water out of mines.

For me, the real revolution started 70 years later when James Watt invented the ‘rotative beam engine’.

Previously, Newcomen’s simple up-and-down piston just used reciprocating motion, just back-and-forth: a power stroke, then a return stroke, then another power stroke, and so on.

The real creative breakthrough happened in 1788, when Watt transferred that reciprocating motion into rotary motion.

By having the piston drive a crank on a flywheel, the flywheel kept rotating while the piston returned for another stroke.

So the up-and-down became round-and-round: turning stop-start energy into constant power.

One of Watt’s first uses was to attach a beam-engine flywheel to a spindle that ran 43 polishing machines, all being driven by a single beam engine.

That was when the industrial revolution really began powering factories.

Twenty years later, in 1802, Richard Trevithick saw that rotary motion could be used to move the engine itself under its own power, he built the world’s first steam locomotive.

Converting reciprocating energy into rotary power led to railways, lorries, steamships, factories and, on a human level, rotary power led to bicycles, chainsaws, and the internal combustion engine, which led to cars and eventually aeroplanes.

None of what we know as the modern world would have been possible without turning reciprocating energy into rotating energy.

That’s real creativity, something that outgrows the start-point, something that just keeps growing and growing.

I heard Michael Caine talk about it in a much more down-to-earth way.

He was talking to his friend Vidal Sassoon, who was an amazingly successful hairdresser with lots of famous people as clients.

Caine said “You’re doing alright but you wanna get what my dad calls ‘something that keeps working for you while you’re asleep.”

Sassoon asked what he meant.

Caine said, “Well, as a hairdresser you can only cut one person’s hair at a time, but if you were a singer say, you’d sing the song once but you’d also get a cut every time someone bought a recording of it, that sort of thing.”

Michael Caine says, after that conversation, Vidal Sassoon launched a range of hair care products that grew into a worldwide brand, the Vidal Sassoon brand was bought by P&G for £1 billion.

“Something that keeps working for you while you’re asleep” is another way of describing the change from reciprocal to rotary thinking.

In our world that could be the difference between a series of one-off ads and a campaign.

If you make a single ad, it starts to dissipate as soon as the commercial’s over, there’s nothing to hold it in the mind, it’s like reciprocating motion, start-stop-start again.

But a campaign of ads is like rotary motion, because the residual thought carries on after each individual ad has finished.

Take the campaign “Should have gone to Specsavers”.

They launched that campaign 23 years ago in 2002, every ad has always used the same strapline and a variation of the same joke.

So every ad refreshes the campaign, keeps it going and builds on it.

It’s become so popular it’s passed into the language, it’s yelled at referees, at spouses, at pedestrians, it’s even been shouted in Parliament, and every time someone repeats that line it’s free media that’s worth many millions to the client.

That’s why Specsavers now has 13 million customers and £2 billion in annual revenue.

That’s how we can maximise the effect of whatever we’re doing.

By changing old-fashioned reciprocal thinking into rotary thinking.