by Kevin Ashton
Andrea Perry
Elizabeth Perry
Nancy Pine
Richard Pine
John Pitts
Elizabeth Price
Jamie Price
Kris Puopolo
Tal Goretsky
Sarah Greene
Esther Ha
Alan Haberman
Mich Hansen
Adam Hayes
Nick Hayes
Chloe Healy
Rebecca Ikin
Durk Jager
Anita James
Gemma Jones
Levi Jones
Al Jourgensen
Mitra Kalita
Steve King
Pei Loi Koay
AJ Lafley
Cecilia Lee
Kate Lee
Bill Leigh
Diane Levitt
Maddy Levitt
Roxy Levitt
Gideon Lichfield
Angelina Fae Lukacin
John Maeder
Doireann Maguire
Yael Maguire
Sarah Mannheimer
Sin Quirin
David Rapkin
Nora Reichard
Matt Reynolds
Laura Rigby
Rhonda Rigby
Mark Roberti
Aaron Rossi
Kyle Roth
Eliza Rothstein
Paige Russell
Paul Saffo
Sanjay Sarma
Carsten Schack
Richard Schultz
Toni Scott
Arshia Shirzadi
Elizabeth Shreve
Tim Smucker
Bill Thomas
Bonnie Thompson
Adrian Tuck
Joe Volman
Pete Weiss
Marie Wells
Daniel Wenger
Ev Williams
Yukiko Yumoto
NOTES
PREFACE: THE MYTH
1 In 1815, Germany’s General Music Journal published a letter: The letter was published in Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, or “General Music Journal,” in 1815, vol. 17, pp. 561–66. For full descriptions of the Mozart letter hoax and its consequences, see Cornell University Library, 2002; Zaslaw, 1994; and Zaslaw, 1997.
2 Mozart’s real letters: Mozart’s compositional process is described by Konrad in Eisen, 2007; by Zaslaw in Morris, 1994; and in Jahn, 2013.
3 In 1926, Alfred North Whitehead made a noun: Many scholars have concluded that Whitehead invented the word “creativity” in Whitehead, 1926, within the following sentence: “The reason for the temporal character of the actual world can now be given by reference to the creativity and the creatures.” Meyer, 2005, contains an excellent summary of this scholarship.
CHAPTER 1: CREATING IS ORDINARY
1 A bronze statue stands in Sainte-Suzanne: There is a picture of the statue of Edmond Albius at http://bit.ly/albiusstatue.
2 On Mexico’s Gulf Coast, the people of Papantla: The descriptions of vanilla and the story of Edmond Albius are based on Ecott, 2005, also Cameron, 2011.
3 The modern U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: The first patent issued by what was then called the U.S. Patent Office was granted to Samuel Hopkins, an inventor living in Pittsford, Vermont, for an improved way of making potassium carbonate—in those days called “potash”—out of trees, mainly for use in soap, glass, baking, and gunpowder. See Henry M. Paynter “The First Patent” (revised version), http://bit.ly/firstpatent. The eight millionth patent was granted to Robert Greenberg, Kelly McClure, and Arup Roy of Los Angeles for a prosthetic eye that electrically stimulates a blind person’s retina. See “Millions of Patents,” USPTO, http://bit.ly/patentmillion. Actually, this was probably closer to the 8,000,500th patent issued, as the Patent Office started numbering patents in series only in 1836.
4 economist Manuel Trajtenberg: See “The Mobility of Inventors and the Productivity of Research,” a presentation by Manuel Trajtenberg, Tel Aviv University, July 2006: http://bit.ly/patentdata. Using a multistage analysis of inventors’ names, addresses, coinventors, and citations, Trajtenberg ascertained that the 2,139,313 U.S. patents granted at the time of his analysis had been issued to 1,565,780 distinct inventors. The granted patents had a mean of 2.01 inventors per patent. Trajtenberg’s analysis suggests that the average number of patents per inventor is 2.7. By taking the 2011 number of 8,069,662, multiplying it by 2.01 to get the total named inventors, and then dividing by 2.7 to account for the average number of patents per inventor, I calculated that there were around 6,007,415 unique inventors named on granted patents by the end of 2011.
5 The inventors are not distributed evenly: This analysis assumes that Trajtenberg’s numbers are constants, and so the number of “inventors” scales in exactly the same way as the number of patents, as published by the USPTO and cited above.
6 Even with foreign inventors removed: My own analysis, using USPTO data as cited above, U.S. Census data, and Trajtenberg’s numbers as constants. The USPTO started tracking patents awarded to foreign residents in 1837. The figure of 1,800 is six in a million, so closer to 1 in 166,666, but I rounded up to a clean number to keep both statistics as “1 in” something.
7 In 1870, 5,600 works were registered for copyright: See the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress, 1886: http://bit.ly/copyrights1866.
8 In 1946, register of copyrights Sam Bass Warner: See the 49th Annual Report of the Register of Copyrights, June 30, 1946: http://bit.ly/copyrights1946.
9 In 1870, there was 1 copyright registration for every 7,000: History of registrations taken from Annual Report of the Register of Copyrights, September 30, 2009: http://bit.ly/copyrights2009. The analysis is my own, using U.S. Census data. In 1870, there were 3 registrations for every in 20,000 people, which I rounded to 1 registration for every 7,000 people to match the format of following number, 1 in 400.
10 one for every 250 U.S. citizens: Data about the Science Citation Index from Eugene Garfield, “Charting the Growth of Science,” paper presented at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, May 17, 2007; http://bit.ly/garfieldeugene. The analysis is my own, using U.S. Census data.
11 a typical NASCAR race: The average NASCAR race attendance in 2011 was 98,818, based on data from ESPN / Jayksi LLC, at http://bit.ly/nascardata. The number of U.S. residents granted first patents in 2011 was 79,805, based on USPTO data and Trajtenberg’s constants.
12 five African wildcats: See Driscoll et al., 2007.
13 Dolphins use sponges to hunt for fish: Krützen et al., 2005.
14 human tools were monotonous for a million years: Mithen, 1996, and Kuhn and Stiner in Mithen, 2014.
15 “Despite great qualitative and quantitative”: Casseli, 2009.
16 “The most fundamental facts”: Ashby, 1952.
17 A San Franciscan named Allen Newell: See Newell, “Desires and Diversions,” a lecture presented at Carnegie Mellon, December 4, 1991; the video is available at http://bit.ly/newelldesires, courtesy of Scott Armstrong.
18 “The data currently available about the processes”: Newell, 1959. Available at http://bit.ly/newellprocesses.
19 Weisberg was an undergraduate during the first years: Robert Weisberg’s resume is available at http://bit.ly/weisbergresume.
20 “when one says of someone that”: Weisberg, 2006.
21 Sprengel’s peers did not want to hear that flowers had a sex life: Zepernick and Meretz, 2001.
22 Titles available in today’s bookstores: Titles found at Amazon.com.
23 Weisberg’s books are out of print: According to Amazon.com, where only a Kindle edition of Weisberg’s last, more academic title, Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts, is available “new.”
24 “creativity now is as important in education as literacy”: Ken Robinson, TED talk, June 27, 2006. Transcript at http://bit.ly/robinsonken.
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25 Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod: MacLeod, 2009.
26 The best-known version was started in 1921: See Terman’s own work, especially Terman and Oden, 1959. Shurkin, 1992, offers an excellent review of Terman’s work.
27 “within the reach of everyday people in everyday life”: Torrance, 1974, quoted in Cramond, 1994.
28 open our veins and bleed: Versions of this comment have been attributed to several writers. According to Garson O’Toole, the original is “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader,” from “Confessions of a Story Writer,” by Paul Gallico, 1946; http://bit.ly/openavein.
29 bestselling literary series was begun by a single mother: J. K. Rowling; see http://bit.ly/rowlingbio.
30 a career more than fifty novels long: “Four years before, I had been running sheets in an industrial laundry for $ 1.60 an hour and writing Carrie in the furnace-room of a trailer,” King, 2010. See also Lawson, 1979.
31 world-changing philosophy was composed in a Parisian jail: Paine, 1794.
32 The “man with a permanent position as a patent examiner” was Albert Einstein.
CHAPTER 2: THINKING IS LIKE WALKING
1 Thomas Mann prophesied the perils of National Socialism: Mann, 1930.
2 He made two applications to become a professor: Now the Humboldt University of Berlin (German: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin (Universität zu Berlin). In Duncker’s day it was known as the Frederick William University (Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität), and later (unofficially) also as the Universität Unter den Linden.
3 Both were rejected: This and other Duncker biographical details from Schnall, 1999, published in Valsiner, 2007; see also Simon, 1999, in Valsiner, 2007.
4 He published his masterwork, On Problem Solving: Duncker, 1935. Translation: Duncker and Lees, 1945.
5 “Today the sun is brilliantly shining”: Quotation edited for length and clarity from Isherwood, 1939. The unedited passage is: “To-day the sun is brilliantly shining; it is quite mild and warm. I go out for my last morning walk, without an overcoat or hat. The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends—my pupils at the Workers’ School, the men and women I met at the I.A.H.—are in prison, possibly dead. But it isn’t of them that I am thinking—the clear-headed ones, the purposeful, the heroic; they recognized and accepted the risks. I am thinking of poor Rudi, in his absurd Russian blouse. Rudi’s make-believe, story-book game has become earnest; the Nazis will play it with him. The Nazis won’t laugh at him; they’ll take him on trust for what he pretended to be. Perhaps at this very moment Rudi is being tortured to death. I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleistsrrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the teacosy dome of the Nollendortplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past—like a very good photograph.”
6 an immigrant who’d left the tiny Lithuanian village of Sventijánskas: Detail from Kimble, 1998, in which Sventijánskas is transliterated as “Swiencianke.” Krechevsky was born Yitzhok-Eizik Krechevsky and started using the first name Isadore when he attended school in the United States.
7 The joint paper, “On Solution-Achievement”: Duncker, 1939.
8 Duncker published his second paper, on the relationship between familiarity and perception: Duncker, 1939b.
9 Duncker’s third paper of the year: Duncker, 1939c.
10 He drove to nearby Fullerton: New York Times, 1940.
11 In Berkeley, the University of California awarded: Rensberger, 1977.
12 “If a situation is introduced in a certain perceptual structure”: This is my translation—the Lees translation uses “structuration” instead of “structure.”
13 Psychologists and people who write about creation: Duncker’s On Problem Solving has around twenty-two hundred citations, according to Google scholar: http://bit.ly/dunckercitations.
14 How did Charlie die?: Weisberg, 1986.
15 the Prisoner and Rope Problem: Described in Metcalfe, 1987, cited in Chrysikou, 2006, and Weisberg, 2006.
16 This is the source of the cliché “thinking outside of the box”: See http://bit.ly/outsideofbox. A possible alternative origin story involves a man smuggling bicycles by distracting border guards with a box of sand balanced on the handlebars.
17 It is a summary of a Sherlock Holmes story: “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” in Doyle, 2011.
18 The surprising solution that a snake killed her follows: Doyle may have made a mistake in this story. When Doyle wrote “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” in 1892 it was generally believed that snakes were deaf. This led to much speculation among Holmes’s enthusiasts about what kind of snake Doyle had in mind, or whether it was in fact, a lizard. Later research, starting in 1923, and culminating as recently as 2008, showed that snakes can hear, via their jaws, despite not having external ears.
19 Many people do not think using words: See Weisberg, 1986, and Chrysikou, 2006, for examples of how this has been established.
20 Robert Weisberg asked people to think aloud: Weisberg and Suls, 1973.
21 Six undergraduates talking their way through a puzzle: Weisberg and Suls, 1973. Weisberg’s paper describes six related experiments, one of which was evaluating solutions to the problem rather than solving it; 376 is the number of subjects who participated in the other five experiments.
22 Oprah Winfrey has trademarked it: Winfrey’s Harpo companies own two “live” trademarks using the phrase “aha! moment,” registration number 3805726 and registration number 3728350.
23 Greek general Hiero was crowned king of Syracuse: Vitruvius, 1960.
24 Hiero asked Syracuse’s greatest thinker: Biello, 2006.
25 Galileo pointed this out in a paper called “La Bilancetta”: Galileo, 2011. Translation from Fermi and Bernardini, 2003.
26 Buoyancy, not displacement: This is explained beautifully by Chris Rorres at http://bit.ly/rorres.
27 But let’s take Vitruvius’s story at face value: Vitruvius, 1960.
28 “In the summer of the year”: Edited from Coleridge, 2011. The complete quotation is:
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in “Purchas’s Pilgrimage”: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.” The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least o the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
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p; 29 Coleridge used a similar device—a fake letter from a friend: See Coleridge, 1907, where a letter from a “friend” interrupts chapter 13 of his Biographia Literaria. Bates, 2012, describes the “friend” as “a humorous gothic counterfeit.”
30 Coleridge says the poem was “composed in a sort of reverie”: Hill, 1984.
31 “I was sitting writing at my textbook but the work”: Benfey, 1958.
32 This is a case of visual imagination helping solve a problem: Based on Weisberg, 1986 and Rothenberg, 1995.
33 A sudden revelation has also been attributed to Einstein: Einstein, 1982.
34 In Einstein’s own words: “I was led to it by steps”: Moszkowski, 1973, p. 96. The complete quotation is “But the suddenness with which you assume it to have occurred to me must be denied. Actually I was lead [sic] to it by steps arising from the individual laws.”
35 These psychologists conducted hundreds of experiments: Hélie, 2012, includes references to many of these experiments. Advocates of the “incubation” hypothesis now use the term “implicit cognition.”
36 They showed the subject pictures of entertainers: Read, 1982. “The research was initiated while both authors were on study leave at the University of Colorado.” Cited and discussed in Weisberg, 1986.
37 Other studies into the feeling: e.g., Nisbett, 1977.
38 In one experiment he sorted 160 people: Olton and Johnson, 1976.
39 He designed a different study: Olton, 1979. Cited in Weisberg, 1993.
40 Most researchers now regard incubation as folk psychology: The phrase “folk psychology” is used in Vul, 2007. See also Dorfman et al., 1996; Weisberg, 2006, which contains a thorough review of studies of incubation; Dietrich and Kanso, 2010; and Weisberg, 2013, which critiques attempts to study insight using neural imaging and also analyzes the popularization of incubation by journalist Jonah Lehrer. Incubation is not completely discredited, however; some psychologists are reviving the hypothesis under the name “implicit cognition.” Weisberg, 2014, attempts to incorporate theories of incubation into theories of ordinary thinking.
41 “ ‘Why doesn’t it work?’ or, ‘What should I change to make it work?’ ”: Duncker, 1945. I have adjusted the translation—the Lees translation uses “alter” instead of “change.”