Pearls of ingenuity

The German thinker reckoned it to be one of the “finest inventions of the human mind”. Capitalism’s cornerstone tool seems such an elementary concept, but it wasn’t codified until 1494 when a Franciscan friar and mathematician called Luca Pacioli put a name to it.

It’s one of 200 innovations over the last 600 years that Steven Johnson, the American ideas man, considers in his enthralling thesis, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Johnson, who became a publishing sensation with his book Everything Bad is Good for You, sets out a coherent thesis about where all our great developments — including Gutenberg’s printing press; the Periodic Table; penicillin; air-conditioning; the oral contraceptive; and ether — originated, and debunks a couple of misconceptions along the way.