The Economist: Ideas People

Collected works for The Economist & EIU: 2008 – 2015

The internet is now everywhere. Spread across the planet like a neural blanket are hundreds of billions of microprocessors and switches connecting us to information and to each other like never before. Facebook has one billion ‘friends’. Over five billion mobile phone connections span the globe. The earth is one gestalt entity made up of millions of people working with and against each other, connected to make a larger whole.

But this is nothing compared to what is in our heads.

A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. One single synapse contains around 1,000 molecular-scale microprocessors and switches.

And there are roughly 125 trillion synapses in the human brain. That’s about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

The human brain is arguably the most incredible creation in nature. Its power is awe-inspiring.

This is why we revere those people that tap into the power of their minds to create new ideas. Ideas that shape and change the world we live in.

 Here are three examples.

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1836: the Industrial Revolution was over seventy years old. Per capita income had increased tenfold; the world population sixfold. Yet the revolution’s single greatest commodity—which would underpin the workings of the entire modern world—was only available direct from one source: London streetseller John Henry Belville.

The new industrial world depended on a definitive accurate time. Keeping the time is only half the equation. To meet rail and shipping schedules and co-ordinate production businesses needed to ensure their clocks were set to the same time as everyone else. If your business wasn’t in line-of-sight of the Greenwich one o’clock ball, you couldn’t check the time again for a full day.

John Henry Belville’s idea was simple: don’t take people to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Take the observatory—and the time—to them.

Every morning John Henry would set the Greenwich Mean Time on a chronometer (it belonged to the Duke of Sussex and had a gold case, though John Henry had it silver plated to hide its value from rogues and pickpockets) and took to the streets of London, charging punters a penny to look at his watch.

Wealthy clients subscribed to this simple daily service. As a result the 1840s railway ran on schedule a remarkable 93% of the time. So successful was his solution that the Belville family had no serious business competitor until after 1908.

The chronometer eventually passed to his daughter, Ruth. Known as the Greenwich Time Lady, Ruth would continue to sell the time on the streets of London until retiring in 1936, aged 84.

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December 19th, 1943: the World was at war, and bomber pilot Charlie Pratte was in trouble.  

After a ferocious dogfight with Japanese Zeros over the shimmering Pacific, Charlie turned for home with over 330 bullet holes honeycombing his B-24 Liberator, Belle of Texas. She’d lost an engine, the belly gun, the radio, ailerons and—more worryingly—had no brakes. Waist gunner Joe Hyson felt the wind streaming through his hair from numerous holes in the sidewalls and cockpit.

Charlie needed to come in ‘hot’. A brakes-out landing with a plane travelling over the 110mph landing speed calls for 10,000 feet of runway. The Funafuti runway was just 6,000 feet long. At its end were rocks and sea. And Belle of Texas was clocking over 140mph.

Then Charlie had what he described as ‘pure blessed inspiration’.

Wrestling with the failing controls, Charlie instructed his team to dig out three parachutes and buckle them to the waist- and tail-gun mounts. As soon as the wheels touched the ground the crew threw the parachutes out of the rear windows, causing enough drag to stop Belle of Texas less than twenty feet from the end of the runway. No bomber had ever been stopped this way before.

‘Hap’ Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces commended Pratte, describing his actions as ‘an achievement of a high order—unique, as far as I know, in operational history’.

The ‘parachute stop’ became standard practice for emergency brakes-out landings for the next 30 years, saving countless lives.

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1992: For decades well-meaning missionaries had been trying to lift the highland tribes in Papua New Guinea out of ‘the poverty, destitution and savagery of the Stone Age’. Their work yielded little success until Donna Allen, an Auckland school teacher working with IEA, an education charity, noted something peculiar.

“They understood what we were saying,” she says, “but not why we were saying it. They were so eager to follow our train of thought, but they just couldn’t make the same leaps that we did. They understood point A, fine. Point B, yes. But how we got from A to B? A complete blank.”

Donna’s mission was transformed. Supplying new knowledge wasn’t enough. She needed to give them the critical thinking skills that would help them to build their own store of knowledge.

A fan of Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono, Donna had been teaching de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats method of critical thinking to business school students in New Zealand. Could this framework for thinking be applicable in Papua New Guinea?

It didn’t just change them. It empowered them.

Tribes could assimilate developed world technologies and amass greater knowledge without abandoning their traditional customs. The Six Thinking Hats brought greater strides in leadership, education and innovation than the past 2,400 years.

“Suddenly we had tribes sharing, questioning, and absorbing information in a new way,” Donna says. “They could always see that we were trying to help; now they could understand why we were trying to help without feeling threatened. To see that breakthrough was incredible.”

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What do these stories tell us?

That ideas change the world. The power of ideas is not new. But in our modern globalised world—where change is the only constant—ideas are now more important than ever before.

From John Henry Belville to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos a simple, powerful idea can drive business and create new markets. It can reshape the way we do business. From Charlie Pratte to IVF pioneer Professor Lord Robert Winston, ideas can change, create and save lives. From Donna Allen to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ideas can shape the way we think and act as communities and change societies. 

With an idea, a single person has the power to change the world.

If ideas are the building blocks of the modern world, consider the importance and value of its architects.

We call them the Ideas People.