Even the Most Beneficial Innovations Don’t Sell Themselves

Many people believe that, if an innovation has obvious benefits, it will sell itself and that it will be quickly adopted. In fact, most innovations, even those with the most obvious benefits, get adopted at a very slow rate.

The following example of an innovative way of controlling scurvy demonstrates how an obviously beneficial innovation catches on very slowly.

Controlling Scurvy in the British Navy. (1)

Traveling long distances was dangerous in the early days of sailing and food was a specific challenge. Refrigeration on long voyages was not an option and fresh food, especially fruits and vegetables, would rot unless eaten early on in the trip. On voyages lasting a few months or more, many sailors would developed Scurvy due to a deficiency of vitamin C in their diets.

Scurvy was a terrible disease, causing symptoms from malaise and lethargy to open wounds, loss of teeth, jaundice, and eventually death. Magellan, the 16th century explorer, said this of scurvy during one of this voyages: “But above all other calamities this was the worst: in some men the gums grew over the teeth, both lowers and uppers, so that they could not eat in any way and thus they died of this sickness.” (2)

Dava Sobel’s description of Scurvy in her excellent book Longitude is even more depressing:

The oceangoing diet…, deprived them of vitamin C, and their bodies’ connective tissue deteriorated as a result. Their blood vessels leaked, making the men look bruised all over, even in the absence of any injury. When they were injured, their wounds failed to heal. Their legs swelled. They suffered the pain of spontaneous hemorrhaging into their muscles and joints. Their gums bled, too, as their teeth loosened. They gasped for breath, struggled against debilitating weakness, and when the blood vessels around their brains ruptured, they died.

More sailors died from scurvy than from war or any other causes of death. “For instance, of Vasco de Gama’s crew of 160 men, who sailed with him around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, 100 died of scurvy.” (2)

In 1601 James Lancaster, an English sea captain conducted an experiment on his voyage to India. Lancaster set out to evaluate the effectiveness of lemon juice to prevent scurvy. He served three teaspoons of lemon juice every day to the sailors on one of the three ships under his command. The other three ships served as a control group with the traditional diet lacking in fresh fruit or vegetables. Most of the sailors who consumed the lemon juice stayed healthy throughout the entire voyage. The sailors on other three ships were not as lucky; out of the 278 sailors on the other ships, 110 had died from scurvy by the halfway point.

The results were so dramatic that one would think that the British Navy would immediately adopt this invention and require lemon juice on all of their ships as a method to prevent scurvy. They didn’t.

About 150 years later, in 1747, a British Navy physician, James Lind, being aware of Lancaster’s results, conducted another experiment. “To each scurvy patient,.., Lind prescribed either two oranges and one lemon or one of five other diets: A half-pint of sea water, six spoonfuls of vinegar, a quart of cider, nutmeg, or seventy-five drops of vitriol elixir. The scurvy patients who got the citrus diet were cured in a few days.” (2)

Again, the results were obvious: citrus can cure Scurvy in just a few days. Again, with even more evidence of the benefits of citrus in preventing and curing Scurvy, one would think that the British Navy would finally adopt this innovation. But again, they didn’t.

It took another 47 years for the British Navy to adopt this invention, which they did in 1795, 194 years after Lancaster’s experiments. As soon as the Navy required citrus on all of their ships, Scurvy was immediately wiped out in the British Navy. It took almost 200 years to adopt this innovation, despite documented success, repeated experiments, and a dramatic toll on the navy’s sailors.

What’s even more appalling is that it took another 70 years for the British Board of Trade to adopt similar measure on all merchant ships, which led to an immediate eradication of scurvy. One can only imagine how many lives could have been saved had Lancaster’s innovation of the citrus diet been adopted immediately. It is not clear why it had not been. What is clear, though, is that even an innovation with the most obvious benefits does not always get adopted immediately. Sometimes, it takes hundreds of years and perhaps even hundreds of lives.

______________________

(1) Mesteller, 1981
(2) Everett Rogers, “Diffusion of Innovations”, 1995
(3) Bull N Y Acad Med. 1967 April; 43(4): 346.

Advertisement