Wiener agreed and accepted an advance. By June 1954, he had completed a manuscript. The publisher did not press the matter, and the manuscript was left on the shelf to gather dust. The Wiener Papers were transferred to the Institute Archives of the MIT Libraries in the early 1980s. Some years later, archivist Helen Samuels, working through the papers, found the manuscript and brought it to the attention of Larry Cohen of MIT Press, who decided to publish.
Invention is a short, flawed, and fascinating book.
It is flawed in the sense that it suffers from multiple focusing. In this short book, Wiener wants to do and does all these things. Any one of them might have been given a full-length treatment. Sometimes he does them well, for he could be an excellent writer and could write a clear and pungent paragraph, but sometimes he constructs his discussions out of boilerplate. What fascinates me most about Invention is Wiener's taking up, time and time again, of the role of the individual in invention.