Amateur Hour: Jack Hitt Talks About an American Tradition In "Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character," Jack Hitt investigates the tradition of American amateurism in various fields, from politics to astronomy to bird watching. He writes, "American professionals have had to grow up right alongside their striving, awkward, amateur cousins in the same way that the first attempts at gentry in the Old South had to contend with their toothless cousins named Fishbait or Elrod, sleeping in the bushes outside the mansion." In a recent interview via e-mail, Mr. Hitt discussed the reputation of the Tyrannosaurus rex, Benjamin Franklin's role in the mythology of amateurism, the relationship between pros and amateurs, and more. Did any particular experience with amateurs lead you to write an entire book about them? Definitely - the time I spent with the Kansas City Space Pirates. They are a group of amateurs centered around a guy named Brian Turner, a computer consultant who spends his weekends fiddling with power beaming. Imagine a fuel-less airplane powered by a ground-based laser juicing on-board solar cells. Hanging out with Turner and his team made me realize that this legendary American character, the garage tinkerer - whose time is always said to have dimmed a generation or two ago - is actually a kind of cyclical figure, typically showing up right around the time we've convinced ourselves that our moment in history has grown too sophisticated and complex for anything of importance to get invented in a garage or a dorm room. Hello, Mark Zuckerberg. Was Benjamin Franklin America's founding amateur? In almost any way that you can imagine, yes. We all grow up learning of the practical backyard inventor - the guy who fiddled his way into creating the energy-efficient Franklin stove, the lightning rod or even the earliest odometer so he could measure his carriage rides. But there are many other ways. You write that "there's just something fundamentally American about heading off to one's garage to reinvent the world." And is it really uniquely American? Back to Franklin: On a more Freudian level, he bolted his Boston apprenticeship in 1723 (the equivalent then of dropping out of college). He ran away, eventually, to Philadelphia to create a new version of himself. Some historians argue that the immigrant story retraces this plot line and that, ultimately, all Americans struggle in some way to recapitulate this essential Franklin narrative. Why might we look back at this time in history as one of the golden ages of amateurism? My argument about the cycle of amateurism is that it often cranks back up when the economy goes sour and people drift off to that backyard temple of ingenuity. Hewlett-Packard was formed in David Packard's garage in 1938 at the height of the Depression. Is it a coincidence that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hid out in a Cupertino, Calif., garage during the dog days of Gerald Ford's "whip inflation now" economy in 1976 and improvised the first desktop computer? The April jobs report for 2012 saw an increase of 119,000 new employees. Only 4,000 of those derived from large firms. Small businesses and startups were responsible for 58,000 of those jobs. One theory of amateur success says that outsiders are not burdened with the "curse of knowledge." When is knowledge a curse? Expertise can elevate you to see new things or it can bury you beneath a mountain of conventional wisdom. Here's an example. When the modern Tyrannosaurus rex first stood up in 1910 at the American Museum of Natural History, the curators had to chisel the tail bones to bend them into the tail-dragging Godzilla-esque posture that every expert simply knew to be true. Several generations later, along came a self-taught paleontologist, Jack Horner. He looked at the fossil evidence and noticed that the ocular cavity in the brain suggested the Tyrannosaurus rex had poor eyesight, while the olfactory area revealed one of the most sensitive schnozes in evolutionary history. Its legs were built for walking, not running, and he probably moved like a bird - tail and head parallel to the ground. Various mass kills of singular species showed that the only bits of evidence of any other species present were the teeth of the Tyrannosaurus rex, suggesting he was there to scavenge on dead flesh. Almost overnight, the iconic predator of all paleontology and the Cretaceous Period's menacing beast of prey became ... a waddling buzzard. In astronomy, you note that NASA and other major organizations and universities are "the primary leaders" in exploration. So what do amateurs really offer in an established, well-financed field like that one? Are they just having fun or can they make substantial contributions? A few years ago a data download of a million Hubble images of new galaxies needed sorting - a decade-long project for an average astronomy department. But the Web site GalaxyZoo attracted some 150,000 amateurs who provided the necessary sifting - at one point categorizing some 70,000 images per hour - making multiple confirmations totaling some 50 million in the first year. In other cases, amateurs find and confirm supernovas and exoplanets. A great deal of astronomy is time-consuming scut work - almost impossible to do on the much sought-after massive telescopes on Chilean mountaintops; so armies of amateurs get to it.