📑 From the clinical trial to role-playing games, why do some ideas arrive so late?
I confess, as a boy, to wearing a Leonardo da Vinci T-shirt. Da Vinci was my idea of cool, and the attraction lay not in the Mona Lisa’s smile or his sketches of natural phenomena. It was the …
Tim Harford reflects on the ideas that were behind their time. He posits some reasons why this occurs, such as the ignorance of the complexity involved, that eureka moments are often overblown or that the cliché of the frustrated inventor is a lot rarer than we realise.