Cover of Tweaker
I loved this piece on Tweakers - no not the meth addicts (as the Urban Dictionary points out is the name for these poor unfortunates) but the other kind. The kind who are never satisfied and look to improve even those things that are working.
Annals of Technology
The Tweaker
The real genius of Steve Jobs.
by Malcolm Gladwell November 14, 2011
Excerpt
One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.
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