Up to a point, he was right. After all, if we were to transport a Victorian into the 21st Century, the only thing that would come as a genuine surprise would be powered flight. Practically every other innovation of the past cenury is simply building on breakthroughs they would have been familiar with.
However, where Duell's analysis was flawed was that some patented ideas were unworkable. Even when they met a need, there was nothing to say that that need couldn't be met better, simpler, quicker or more cheaply. This is why scientists and engineers continue to study the patents Duell granted years ago. And why the US Patent Office has grown substantially; it now grants a quarter of a million applications a year.
There are three important lessons HR practitioners can learn from this.
First, at a time when we are all being encouraged to be forward-looking, we mustn't forget that taking an analytical look back can yield valuable insights: a project that foundered a decade ago might point to a need that still remains to be met; and employee data from the 1990s may highlight some fascinating long-term trends impossible to see at the time it was collected.
Second, early innovations - with a modern twist - might still be relevant. In 1991, the British inventor, Trevor Baylis, saw a TV programme about AIDS in Africa. A major problem was educating a large population about it in areas where radios were rarely used, because electricity was non-existent and batteries expensive.
That set Baylis thinking about the earliest recording and playback devices - wind-up gramophones. This train of thought resulted in the Freeplay clockwork radio, combining human elbow grease with modern technology.
Similarly, it had been common at McDonald's for managers to allow staff to swap shifts without having to seek prior approval. This was very popular with employees, but the complexity of bigger restaurants and extended trading hours saw this practice all but vanish. However, the advent of self-service online scheduling enabled us to reintroduce these empowering contracts.
Finally, by harnessing technology, initiatives that may once have been impossible are now not only achievable, but potentially transformational.
US composer Eric Whitacre has been conducting an online experiment by asking fans to submit webcam recordings of them singing along to one of his choral works. These individual videos are then combined to create a 'virtual choir'.
In 2010, Virtual Choir 1.0 featured 185 singers from 12 countries and the resulting video has now received almost three million views on YouTube. Virtual Choir 2.0 followed last year, with contributions from 2,052 singers in 58 countries. Virtual Choir 3.0 is in production, with plans not just to create an online video, but also an AV art installation to tour major cities, enabling visitors to immerse themselves within the performance.
This is a fantastic example of how technology can be used to bring people together to collaborate in the creation of something new and inspirational - the sort of collaboration I believe could be applied within organisations to help identify and seize future opportunities and to further engage employees.
All this has led me to a simple conclusion: the tools and insights that will drive the next wave of HR innovation are already out there, waiting to be brought together. All we have to do is create the environment where HR teams can discover the connections.
As Nobel prize-winning Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi once said: "Discovery is simply seeing what everyone else has seen - but thinking what no-one else has thought."
