California historian Kevin Starr rates gold rusher Lester Pelton’s water turbine—the first notable improvement on a thousands-year-old technology—as the seminal invention in mining, the state’s once seminal enterprise. The turbine, created in the 1870s, ran six times faster than a conventional water wheel, and begat hydroelectricity, which in turn begat industrial achievements throughout the following century. In Pelton’s turbine, many of the themes of California as the great incubator of ideas can be found.

There is, for example, the immigrant theme. Once, we drew most of our immigrant inventors from east of the Sierra. Pelton was from Ohio, one of a long line of Californians who re-imagined his possibilities here. By mid-20th century, European refugees were reconstructing Hollywood and deconstructing the atom. Today, Asian and Latin American immigrant innovators chase a thousand different specks of California gold dust.

There is, for example, the fortune-seeking theme. Pelton’s invention was a practical one, designed equally to solve a problem and make a buck. California, Starr writes, has always been “open, flexible, entrepreneurial, unembarrassed by the profit motive.” The $3 billion that state voters recently approved for stem cell research is expected to produce medical miracles and economic ones, too.

There is, for example, the one-thing-leads-to-another theme. When he invented his water turbine, Pelton could not anticipate how electricity (Movies! The Internet!) and great waterworks (Big agriculture! Los Angeles!) would shape the state’s future. Another example: Early experiments in aviation, in the form of John Montgomery’s 1883 glider, took off here and later launched Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and the generous defense contracts that lit the way for the electronic age.

California’s greatest invention is itself, and not merely as the reductive Shangri-la myth so beloved of East Coast detractors. True, we’ve had our share of P.T. Barnums. We’ve also plumbed our own disillusionment more deeply than anyone anywhere else, in the novels of Nathanael West, in film noir detective stories, in the follow- the-money exposés of Carey McWilliams and Mike Davis, and in Joan Didion’s unsentimental essays.

But our self-invention is also of the down-to-earth sort. California not only attracted creative minds, it devised a remarkable public university system to nurture them. Who better, then, to select 25 of the brilliant ideas of the past quarter-century than the faculties of its two most generative campuses, UCLA and UC Berkeley?

Inevitably, because the two faculties are themselves first-order engines of discovery, the results reflect many of their achievements. But many do not. Their selections include the enabling (venture capital, search engines), the promising (sensor technology), the pop cultural (iPods, The Simpsons), and the off-the-beaten-track (mountain bikes).

Like this project, most inventions today are invigorated by collaboration. (Tales of the lone inventor have often been exaggerated.) We trust you will find the results a source of fascination and reflection, and in another California tradition, we expect and hope you will quarrel with them. Send us your own list at Bear Bites.

Kerry Tremain, Editor California
Jack Feuer, Editor UCLA Magazine

		25 brilliant ideas	|