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>> History & Biography is
sponsored by Wells Fargo.
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>> Hello. I'm Walter
Isaacson, and it's an honor
to be celebrating the
National Book Festival's Theme
of Ingenuity.
As a biographer, I've always
been fascinated by the paragons
of ingenuity, from Leonardo
da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin
to Albert Einstein
to Steve Jobs.
And I've found there's a special
connection between ingenuity
and that category of thinking
that Thomas Jefferson
labeled imagination.
I've met and written about a
lot of smart people in my life,
and one thing I've learned is
that smart people
are a dime a dozen.
They don't usually
amount to much.
What matters is imagination,
that ability to,
as Steve Jobs said,
think different.
As Einstein wrote,
Imagination is more important
than knowledge, for
knowledge is limited,
whereas imagination
embraces the entire world,
stimulating progress.
Einstein was merely
a third-class clerk
at the Swiss Patent Office
when he discovered the
special theory of relativity.
And he did it through
thought experiments,
through imagination.
As he looked at patent
applications for using light
and radio signals to
synchronize clocks,
he started to imagine
what would it be
like if I rode alongside
a light wave?
What if I tried to
catch up with it?
And he realized that
clocks would be synchronized
differently, depending
on how you were moving.
There are many keys to
unlocking imagination.
One of them, one that's common
to all the people
I've written about,
is curiosity, pure curiosity.
When Benjamin Franklin first
sailed to England as a young man
in order to buy supplies
and to become a printer
and a book publisher, he
was told by the sailors
that it took a day less to get
over than it did to come back.
Franklin was curious, and
he kept lowering barrels
into the ocean, taking the
temperature of the water.
And thus he was able
to be the first person
to chart the Gulf Stream,
just out of curiosity,
pure curiosity.
His kite flying experiment
is iconic,
and it came out of the curiosity
about why lightning shares
so many similarities
with electrical sparks.
As he wrote in his notebook,
let the experiment be made.
Speaking of notebooks,
my favorite entry
in any notebook is in
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks
where in the margin he writes,
Describe the tongue
of the woodpecker.
Now, who wakes up one morning
and says they need to know how
to figure out what the tongue
of a woodpecker looks like.
What do you do?
Find a woodpecker open?
But Leonardo did, Leonardo
da Vinci, out of curiosity,
out of pure curiosity.
I'm now writing a book
about Jennifer Doudna
and the discovery of the
gene editing technology known
as CRISPR.
It begins also with a
pursuit that was driven just
by curiosity, pure curiosity.
Why do some bacteria have
odd sequences in their DNA?
The answer led not only to
a tool that can edit DNA,
edit our genes but also to
a tool that will enable us
to defeat coronavirus and
future viral pandemics.
The other key to unlocking
imagination is the ability
to connect the arts
and the sciences.
Whenever Steve Jobs
launched a new product,
he ended his slide presentation
with a sign showing the
intersection of two streets,
the liberal arts and
technology street.
And when he launched the
iPhone, he's explained,
We believe that it's technology
married with the humanities
that yields the results
that makes our heart sing.
That's the glory of the
National Book Festival.
It celebrates curiosity.
It allows us to embrace the
arts and the sciences and, thus,
it stimulates our imagination
and leads to ingenuity.
Thank you.