Fig. 3

Historical inventiveness as the rate of innovations per billion people per year. Population data is from (Kremer 1993). The first seven data points from the left are counts from (Timeline of Historic Inventions 2017), while the last two data points are calculated from (Youn et al. 2015), assuming that 2% of patent applications actually see any real use. The 2% ratio is derived from 40,000 U.S. triadic patents (Triadic patent families 1984–2014 2017) and 1.76 million patent filings in the U.S. (Total number of patents in force worldwide tops 6 million 2008). Triadic patent families are patents granted in the U.S., the EU, and Japan. It is presumed that triadic patents represent the most realistic proxy for real-world innovations