In 1601, an English sea captain did a controlled experiment to test whether lemon juice could prevent scurvy. He had four ships, three control and one experimental. The experimental group got three teaspoons of lemon juice a day while the control group received none. No one in the experimental group developed scurvy while 110 out of 278 in the control group died of scurvy. Nevertheless, citrus juice was not fully adopted to prevent scurvy until 1865.
Overwhelming evidence of superiority is not sufficient to drive innovation.
Source: Diffusion of Innovations
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Jan Galkowski 10.13.11 at 09:21
Another example is the history of the typewriter. Even ignoring earlier developments, when the first American patent was made in 1829, it wasn’t until the invention of touch-typing in 1878 and its teaching that typewriters took off. As the late Dr Harlan Mills observed, even Lincoln wrote to Stanton in long hand.
Igor Carron 10.13.11 at 13:23
The story is a little more complex If I recall. Initially the navy seemed to have understood the connection between lemon and scurvy. As a result lemon were a common fare as they were brought from Sicily. As the Empire extended, lemon got replaced by West Indian lime as it looked the same. Except it is not the same, lime does not contain as much vitamin C. This information got lost because by the time the switch happened, ships were going faster and the issue of scurvy (because of long journeys) was no longer a concern, except … in long research expeditions such that of Scott to the South Pole (1905).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy