The spirit of play

Forbes , September 20, 1998

IN THE HOLLYWOOD VERSION, Otto Wichterle would be the villain—an obsessed inventor who defied nature and wouldn't listen to reason, who combined technological hubris with political pig-headedness. His creation served vanity, not "vital needs." He pursued it out of pleasure and pride. In the movies, he would come to no good end.

In the real world, however, no comeuppance put Dr. Frankenstein in his place. Wichterle, a Czech chemist who died Aug. 18 at age 84, was not a villain but a hero. Sure, they laughed at him and called him mad.

A government commission considered his theories "idle talk without practical importance." Specialists deemed his techniques "absurd and unrealistic" and his goal "ridiculous." But 100 million people today share Wichterle's vision—quite literally.

In 1961 Wichterle invented soft contact lenses, one of the most improbable technologies around. You have to be a little nuts to think sticking plastic in someone's eye is a good idea. And the history of contact lenses was, until recently, the story of a few obsessed visionaries. If glasses can do the job, why get involved with anything as dangerous and hard to fit as a lens right smack on the eyeball? It's a crazy idea.

Wichterle wasn't crazy, but he was stubborn. Stubborn enough to oppose the communist government—his political views twice cost him his job and, with it, his research laboratory—and stubborn enough to persevere with no equipment or support. After losing the post in which he had invented the crucial polymer, he developed the lenses themselves on his kitchen table, using a machine improvised from a phonograph and an erector set. Experts scorned his "spun-mold" casting technique, but it worked. Within five months, Wichterle and his wife produced 5,500 lenses, enough to get the Czechoslovakian government to open experimental production lines.

Wichterle made little, if any, money from his invention. (The government sold the patent to a far-seeing Pennsylvania optometrist for a mere $330,000, and, after an intermediate transaction, Bausch & Lomb bought it for $3 million.) Although he was recognized internationally, Wichterle's politics cost him the professional status he might have gained at home; only after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 did he receive the honors he deserved.

His achievements, in other words, don't fit the conventional explanations for how progress happens. He didn't work for money, fame, prestige or comfort. He wasn't doing his duty or responsibly providing for his family. Nor is there evidence that he had primarily humanitarian motives, although inexpensive, mass-produced contact lenses were one goal of his research. Rather, Wichterle seemed driven by the love of his work and the desire to prove his critics wrong—the purest of motives, and the most self-centered.

The contact lenses with which Wichterle blessed the world are testimony to the power of play—the things we do for their own sake, for the joy, challenge and satisfaction they bring. Play is the missing ingredient in the usual account of progress. In the grip of sociologist Max Weber's turn-of-the-century theories, social critics imagine that capitalism and technology depend on stolid puritan virtues, on repression and self-denial, on a society of obedient, unquestioning workers.

Progress, in this view, is purely rational and predictable. "The nature of change in the techno-economic order is linear in that the principles of utility and efficiency provide clear rules for innovation, displacement and substitution," writes the sociologist Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, which has been widely influential on both the left and the right. There are no obsessed inventors in such theories—only fear that the pleasures of imagination will undermine the social order.

Bell's mechanical view of innovation—a society of orderly drones—can create nothing new. Fortunately, the spirit of play is as stubborn as Otto Wichterle, prevailing even in difficult circumstances. To its happy inspiration—and the mad inventors under its spell—we owe the wonders of our civilization.