Amidst all the hype about "future firms," "innovation management" and "technoleverage," it's easy to forget that innovation starts small. The slightly mad inventor tinkering in his cellar, once a cultural hero in the United States, has been overshadowed by the product development team working in a billion-dollar research park. But Edison started out as an itinerant telegraph operator, and even today, unconventional ideas are likeliest to pop up in disestablishmentarian places-or so David Lindsay is convinced.

In The Patent Files, a collection of columns from the alternative weekly newspaper New York Press, Lindsay proves that the oddball inventor types, the loners nursing their revolutionary gadgets in the face of skepticism, are alive and well. Lindsay's guide to this subculture is the U.S. Patent Office, where "stacks of documents gather the smells of nervous men." The patented ideas that succeed in the marketplace are vastly outnumbered by those that die on the drawing board, Lindsay finds, making the patent files a directory of eccentric, embittered geniuses.