fraud, British inventor Kane Kramer came up with an idea. He would develop a method to transmit music digitally across phone lines, and an in-store machine would custom print each album. But then it occurred to Kramer that a cumbersome machine might be an unnecessary step. Instead of producing an analog record, why not keep the music digital and design a portable machine that could play it? He developed the schematics for a portable digital music player, the IXI. It had a display screen and buttons for playing the tracks.
Kramer not only designed the player, he foresaw a whole new way of selling and sharing digital music with unlimited inventory and no need for warehouses. Paul McCartney was one of his first investors. The main drawback of Kramer’s music player was that, given the hardware available at the time, it only had enough memory to hold one song.
Seizing on Kramer’s promising idea, Apple Computer’s engineers incorporated a scroll wheel, sleeker materials and, of course, more advanced memory and software. In 2001 – twenty-two years after Kramer’s idea – they debuted the iPod.
Steve Jobs would later say:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while; that’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
Kramer’s original invention
Apple’s subsequent iPod
Kramer’s idea did not come out of nowhere, either. It followed in the footsteps of the Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player. The Walkman was made possible by the invention of the cassette tape in 1963, which was itself made possible by reel-to-reel tapes in 1924, and so on back through history, everything emerging from the ecosystem of innovations before it.
Human creativity does not emerge from a vacuum. We draw on our experience and the raw materials around us to refashion the world. Knowing where we’ve been, and where we are, points the way to the next big industries. From studying his collection of gadgets, Buxton concludes that two decades typically pass before a new concept dominates in the marketplace. “If what I said is credible,” he told the Atlantic magazine, “then it is equally credible that anything that is going to become a billion dollar industry in the next ten years is already ten years old. That completely changes how we should approach innovation. There is no invention out of the blue, but prospecting, mining, refining and then goldsmithing to create something that’s worth more than its weight in gold.”
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To rescue the crippled Apollo 13, the engineers at NASA mined and refined what they already knew. The craft was hundreds of thousands of miles away, so any solution had to draw on materials within the astronauts’ reach. The NASA engineers had an inventory of everything on board the craft, they had the experience gained in earlier Apollo missions, and they had the experience of running many simulations. They drew on all that knowledge while crafting their rescue plans. Gene Kranz wrote afterwards:
I was now grateful for the time we had spent before the mission … developing options and workarounds for all conceivable spacecraft failures. We knew that when the chips were down we could use the command module survival water, condensed sweat and even the crew’s urine in place of the [lunar module] water to cool the systems.
The engineers’ collective experience gave them the raw materials they needed to solve problems. Working round the clock, they brainstormed ideas and tested them out on replicas of the spacecraft used for training: under immense time pressure, they ad-libbed on their data.
Across the spectrum of human activities, pillaging existing ideas propels the creative process. Consider the early automobile industry. Before 1908, building a new car was laborious. Each vehicle was custom built, with different parts assembled in different places and then painstakingly brought together. But Henry Ford came up with a critical innovation: he streamlined the entire process, putting the manufacture and assembly under one roof. Wood, ore, and coal were loaded in at one end of the factory, and Model Ts were driven out the other. His assembly line changed the way the cars were built: “Rather than keeping the work on assembly stands and moving the men past it, the assembly line kept the men still and moved the work.”6 Thanks to these innovations, cars drove off the factory floor at an unprecedented rate. An enormous new industry was born.
But just like the iPhone, Ford’s idea of the assembly line had a long genealogy. Eli Whitney had created munitions with interchangeable parts for the US Army in the early nineteenth century. This innovation enabled a damaged rifle to be repaired using parts salvaged from other weapons. For Ford, this idea of interchangeable parts was a boon: rather than tailoring parts for individual cars, parts could be made in bulk. Cigarette factories of the previous century had sped up production using continuous flow production – moving the assembly through an orderly sequence of steps. Ford saw the genius in this, and followed suit. And the assembly line itself was something Ford learned about from the Chicago meatpacking industry. Ford later said, “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.”
The mining of history happens not only in technology, but in the arts as well. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the consummate Romantic poet: passionate, impulsive, with a feverish imagination. He wrote his poem “Kubla Khan” after an opium-induced dream. Here was a poet seemingly in conversation with the Muses.
But after Coleridge died, the scholar John Livingston Lowes painstakingly dissected Coleridge’s creative process from his library and diaries.7 Poring over Coleridge’s notes, Lowes found that the books lining the poet’s study “rained … their secret influence on nearly everything that Coleridge wrote in his creative prime.” For instance, Lowes traced lines in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” about sea creatures whose every track / Was a flash of golden fire to the doomed explorer Captain Cook’s account of fluorescent fish creating an artificial fire in the water.8 He attributed Coleridge’s depiction of a bloody Sun to a description in Falconer’s poem “The Shipwreck” of the sun’s sanguine blaze. In passage after passage, Lowes found influences living on Coleridge’s shelf; after all, when Coleridge wrote the poem, he had never even been on a boat. Lowes concluded that Coleridge’s fiery imagination was fueled by identifiable sources in his library. Everything had a genealogy. As Joyce Carol Oates has written, “[The arts], like science, should be greeted as a communal effort – an attempt by an individual to give voice to many voices, an attempt to synthesize and explore and analyze.”
As Kramer’s schematics were to Jonathan Ives, and Whitney’s rifle was to Henry Ford, Coleridge’s library was to him: a resource to digest and transform.
But what about an idea, invention or creation that represents a leap forward unlike anything in seven hundred years? After all, that is how Richardson described Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Even in a work as original as that, we can trace its genealogy. A generation before Picasso, progressive artists had started to move away from the hyperrealism of the nineteenth-century French establishment. Most notably Paul Cézanne, who died the year before Les Demoiselles was painted, had broken apart the visual plane into geometric shapes and blotches of color. His Mont Sainte-Victoire resembles a jigsaw puzzle. Picasso later said that Cézanne was his “one and only master.”
