Inspiration, Perspiration and Eurekas

Some of the world’s great creative breakthroughs are reputed to have begun with a ‘eureka experience’ of sudden insight. Archimedes, archetypically, while taking his bath two millennia ago, is said to have perceived the principles of displacement and flotation, jumped out of the tub, and run naked through the streets with a cry of “Eureka!”—Greek for (roughly speaking) “I’ve got it!”. Johannes Gutenberg, casually watching a wine press during the grape harvest in the 15th century, supposedly got the idea for the printing press. Isaac Newton, seeing an apple fall from a tree in the 17th century, apparently visualised the law of gravitational attraction. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whilst reading a passage in a book about the “Khan Kubla” in the 18th century, fell into an opium-induced sleep, and when he awoke, claimed that he immediately produced the poem “Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream.

Closer in time, Alexander Fleming, while culturing Staphylococcus bacteria in a Petri dish in the early 20th century, quite by accident spotted the presence of a bacteria-killing mould, Penicillium, which became the source of the first antibiotic drug penicillin. Henri Cartier-Bresson, chancing in Paris upon a photograph of African boys running, taken by the sports photographer Martin Munkácsi, decided to take up photography in earnest in 1932. “I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me”, he wrote. “I felt it like a kick up the backside: go on, have a go!” James Watson, while playing with cardboard models of bio-molecules in Cambridge in 1953, suddenly saw how the two halves of the structure of DNA fitted together, and solved the biomolecular mechanism of heredity. “My morale skyrocketed”, wrote Watson in The Double Helix.

The further back in history we go, the slimmer is the evidence for these eureka experiences. There is nothing at all in the case of Archimedes, except hearsay; only one rather doubtful letter from Gutenberg; no written statement about the apple from Newton, only remarks made to others in old age; and there are various early drafts of “Kubla Khan”, which contain versions of the insight story that describe the experience in very different ways, whilst the poem itself contains influences and even phrases from other writers.

Yet, such anecdotes cannot be discounted as simply false, because there are numerous reliable accounts of flashes of inspiration by both scientists and artists. Moreover, they chime with our personal experience: we all know that good ideas can spring unheralded from casual conversations, chance associations, leaps of imagination, and irrational inputs such as dreams.

On the other hand, eureka experiences are by no means the whole story. A great idea may have seemed to have come ‘out of the blue’, but in every such experience the mind seems to have prepared itself by long study. The individual concerned was deeply immersed in thinking about the problem that he or she eventually solved. Fleming, for example, had been working in the bacteriology department of a London hospital for some two decades before he made his breakthrough with Penicillium mould in 1928. During the first world war, he had become interested in finding antibiotics to treat sepsis in the wounds of servicemen. After the war, he began an active programme of research; in 1922 he discovered the antibiotic enzyme lysozyme in nasal mucus, tears, and saliva. Fleming’s discovery of penicillin is a classic example of Louis Pasteur’s dictum: “Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind.”

Andrew Robinson is author of Sudden Genius Click to buy