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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 Ive, 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.”
Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire
Other features of Les Demoiselles were inspired by a painting owned by one of Picasso’s friends: El Greco’s seventeenth-century altarpiece Apocalyptic Vision. Picasso made repeated visits to see the altarpiece and modeled the clustered grouping of his prostitutes on El Greco’s crowding of his nudes. Picasso also modeled the shape and size of Les Demoiselles on the altarpiece’s unusual proportions.
El Greco’s Apocalyptic Vision
And Picasso’s painting incorporated more exotic influences. A few decades earlier, the artist Paul Gauguin had flouted convention by abandoning his wife and children and moving to Tahiti. Living in his private Eden, Gauguin incorporated indigenous art into his paintings and woodcuts. Picasso noticed.
Paul Gauguin’s Nave Nave Fenua
Picasso was fascinated by indigenous art, especially from his native Spain. One day, a friend of Picasso’s slipped past a sleeping guard in one of the Louvre galleries and walked off with two Basque artifacts, which he then sold to Picasso for fifty francs. Picasso later pointed out the similarity between the stolen Iberian sculptures and the faces he had painted, noting that “the general structure of the heads, the shape of the ears and the delineation of the eyes” are the same. Richardson writes, “Iberian sculpture was very much Picasso’s discovery … No other painter had staked a claim to it.”
An Iberian sculpture
A detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
An African mask
A detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
While Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles, there was an exhibition of African masks at a nearby museum. In a letter to a friend, Picasso wrote that the idea for Les Demoiselles came to him the very day he visited the exhibit. He later changed his story, claiming