Elon Musk’s “flying” Tesla Roadster, which the tech titan unveiled on Thursday, is simultaneously an extraordinary engineering feat and a vanity project with little practical value. That is, no consumer will need a car equipped with rocket thrusters to drive up walls and perform acrobatics in the air.
But here’s what’s fun about technological progress: The world would be far worse off if people invested only in research and development that could generate immediate market value.
Consider, for instance, the laser, first operated in 1960 by Theodore Maiman at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California. His goal was to produce a single wavelength of light, which critics panned as “a solution looking for a problem.” The academic journal Physical Review Letters rejected Maiman’s write-up of his achievement.
Today, lasers are woven into modern life in the familiar journey from improbable to unremarkable. Imagine going to the store without being able to check out with a barcode scanner. High-speed internet was made possible by laser-transmitting fiber-optic cables.
Think also about the experiments by Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell in the 1940s into how the nuclei of atoms behave in a magnetic field. At first, the experiments were purely academic ventures. Within a few decades, however, the researchers’ discoveries became the foundation for magnetic resonance imaging, better known as MRI. The technology is now a workhorse of modern medicine, helping to detect cancers, cardiovascular diseases and much more.
Americans in the 1950s had no obvious commercial need for government scientists to start launching hunks of metal into low Earth orbit, mostly because the Soviets were working on the same thing. Those missions eventually laid the path for satellite imaging and communications, which today we consider so essential to daily life that any threat to satellites is properly considered a grave national security concern.
Nor did Americans need a computer that was good enough at playing chess that it could defeat Garry Kasparov, the world’s best player, in 1997. Yet IBM created one anyway, a key milestone on the road to artificial intelligence. Today, that technology is revolutionizing countless industries in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Whether Musk’s ultra-cool vehicle demo marks another sneakily transformative moment remains to be seen. It may end up leading to minimal changes in how we live our daily lives, or this week might be remembered as the dawn of a new era of flying cars. A growing U.S. economy makes such gambles possible. When they pay off, they pay off for everyone.
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