Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 15

Editor’s note

Drive

Selected for practical perspectives on effort, recovery and sustained work.

DriveTechnology

Tim Berners-Lee built the World Wide Web at a physics laboratory, then persuaded his employer to release it into the public domain in 1993 with no fee and no patent. He could have owned the doorway to the internet.

He wrote the first browser, the first server and the language pages are still written in, to solve a mundane problem: physicists at CERN could not easily share documents. His argument for giving it away was practical as much as moral — a web that anyone had to pay or ask permission to build on would simply not have grown. Competing systems of the era charged licence fees, and are forgotten. He has since spent much of his career arguing that the thing he built has become too centralised.

CERNRead card

Q1672

DriveHealth

When Jonas Salk was asked on television who held the patent to his polio vaccine, he answered that the people did — and asked whether you could patent the sun. Polio had been paralysing tens of thousands of children a year.

The exchange was with the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow in 1955, days after the vaccine was declared safe and effective, and it remains one of the most quoted answers in medicine. Lawyers later concluded the vaccine probably could not have been patented anyway, given the prior work it rested on — but Salk's refusal to try was genuine and characteristic. Polio cases have since fallen by over 99% worldwide. He spent his later years working, without success, on a vaccine for HIV.

Medical historyRead card

Q1673

DriveLanguage

Louis Braille lost his sight at three. At fifteen he took a military code of raised dots meant for reading orders in the dark, cut it down, and produced the system blind people read with two centuries later.

The army system used twelve dots per character and was too wide for a fingertip to read at once. Braille reduced it to six, so a single touch takes in a whole letter — the insight that made reading by hand fluent rather than laborious. His school refused to adopt it during his lifetime; sighted teachers preferred embossed Roman letters, which were far harder to read and impossible to write. Pupils learned it in secret. It was adopted two years after he died of tuberculosis at forty-three.

HistoryRead card

Q1674

DriveLanguage

Sequoyah was a Cherokee silversmith who could not read English or anything else. Over twelve years he worked out a set of symbols for the sounds of his own language. Within a few years, much of the Cherokee Nation was literate.

He was mocked for years; neighbours thought he was practising witchcraft or losing his mind, and his work was once burned. He first tried a symbol for every word, then realised the language could be broken into syllables, and settled on around 85 characters. To prove it worked he had his young daughter read aloud a message she could not have known. Adoption was extraordinarily fast — the Cherokee were soon printing a newspaper in it. He remains one of the very few people in history to have single-handedly invented a writing system that a whole nation adopted.

HistoryRead card

Q1675

DriveLanguage

Korean was written in Chinese characters, which took years to learn and kept literacy with the wealthy. In 1443 King Sejong commissioned a new alphabet simple enough, he said, for a wise man to learn in a morning.

Hangul was designed rather than inherited, and the design is deliberate: the consonant shapes sketch the position of the tongue and lips that make each sound, and letters are grouped into neat syllable blocks. The scholarly class objected fiercely, seeing it as a threat to their standing and to ties with China, and it was suppressed for long stretches. It survived, and South Korea now marks a public holiday for it. Linguists regularly describe it as among the most rational writing systems ever devised.

HistoryRead card

Q1676

DriveLanguage

Hebrew had not been anyone's everyday spoken language for centuries. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda raised his son hearing nothing else, coined thousands of words for things the old texts never mentioned, and lived to hear it spoken in the street.

Hebrew had survived in prayer, scholarship and letters, but not as a mother tongue. Ben-Yehuda's son, born in 1882, is generally described as the first native speaker in generations — an upbringing so isolating that the boy reportedly did not speak until he was four. Ben-Yehuda compiled a dictionary and invented vocabulary for ice cream, bicycle, newspaper, tomato. Reviving a language this way remains essentially unrepeated: it is now the daily language of millions.

Linguistic historyRead card

Q1677

DriveArt

Vivian Maier worked as a nanny in Chicago and photographed the street obsessively for forty years. Almost none of it was printed or seen. The negatives surfaced at a storage auction in 2007, two years before she died unknown.

A young collector, John Maloof, bought a box of negatives for a few hundred dollars while researching a local history book. He found extraordinary street photography — sharp, humane, unsentimental — and started posting scans online. The response was immediate and international. Maier had kept rolls undeveloped, sometimes for decades, and told her employers almost nothing. She has since been exhibited worldwide, and the case raises an uncomfortable question the art world still argues about: whether work its maker never chose to show should be shown at all.

Art historyRead card

Q1678

DriveLiterature

Herman Melville's whaling novel was mocked or ignored on publication in 1851, and sold barely three thousand copies in his lifetime. He died in obscurity working as a customs inspector. It is now called one of the great novels.

Reviewers found it shapeless and strange — a novel that stops mid-story to explain rope, or the anatomy of a whale. Melville's earlier sea adventures had sold far better, and audiences wanted more of those. He wrote for another forty years to almost no readership, took a job on the New York docks, and his obituary misspelled his name. A revival in the 1920s reversed the verdict completely. What ruined it commercially — the digressions, the refusal to behave like an adventure story — is now the reason it is admired.

Literary historyRead card

Q1679

DriveTechnology

James Dyson spent five years making prototype after prototype of a vacuum cleaner with no bag. The 5,127th worked. Every British manufacturer turned it down, so he manufactured it himself.

The idea came from a sawmill, where large cyclones spun dust out of the air. Dyson reasoned the same physics could replace the bag that clogs and loses suction. Manufacturers were not interested — the industry made steady money selling replacement bags, and a machine that needed none threatened that. He launched in Japan first, then in Britain, where it became the best-selling vacuum within a few years. He has since said the failures were the education, and that he learned nothing from the one that worked.

Invention historyRead card

Q1680

DriveTechnology

Margaret Hamilton led the team that wrote the flight software for the Moon landings, and insisted on error-handling everyone told her was unnecessary. Three minutes before touchdown, that code saved the landing.

As the lunar module descended, alarms fired: the computer was being overloaded by a radar left switched on. Hamilton's software was built to recognise overload, shed low-priority tasks and keep the critical ones running — so instead of freezing, it kept flying the spacecraft. Mission Control gave the go. She had argued for that protection against colleagues who said astronauts would never make mistakes. She is also widely credited with coining the term 'software engineering', at a time when writing code was not regarded as engineering at all.

NASARead card

Q1681

DriveMusic

On New Year's Day 1962 four young musicians auditioned for a major London label and were turned down. The label reportedly told their manager that guitar groups were on the way out. They signed elsewhere and became the Beatles.

They drove down from Liverpool through snow and recorded fifteen tracks in about an hour. Decca chose another act instead — a decision now used as shorthand for institutional misjudgement. The famous line about guitar groups is reported by their manager Brian Epstein rather than documented at the time, so treat it as likely-but-not-certain. What is certain is the rejection, and that the tapes survive: the band sound nervous and unremarkable, which is the more interesting lesson. Talent at an audition and talent eighteen months later are not the same measurement.

Music historyRead card

Q1682

DriveTechnology

While a well-funded rival with government money crashed his machine into a river, two brothers who repaired bicycles for a living flew theirs. Their advantage was not money but a wind tunnel and a bicycle-maker's grasp of balance.

Samuel Langley had substantial public funding and built for power. The Wrights, running a bicycle shop in Ohio, understood that the hard part was not lifting a machine but controlling it once up — the same problem as staying upright on a bicycle. They built a wind tunnel, tested over two hundred wing shapes because the published lift tables were wrong, and invented a way to warp the wings to steer. Langley's aircraft failed twice that year. The Wrights flew for twelve seconds on 17 December, and kept flying.

Aviation historyRead card

Q1683

DriveTechnology

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make hand-painted playing cards. Before it found video games it also tried instant rice, a taxi firm and a chain of love hotels, and nearly went under.

For most of its first century it sold cards, including a licensed range that did well but went nowhere. Under Hiroshi Yamauchi the company threw itself at anything that might work — a vacuum-powered toy hand, a photocopying business, packaged food — and lost heavily. Electronic toys and then arcade machines finally landed in the 1970s. The company is older than the aeroplane, the radio broadcast and the Nobel Prize, which makes it a useful reminder that most long-lived businesses are on their second or third idea.

Business historyRead card

Q1684

DriveTechnology

Ships could not work out how far east or west they were, and thousands died for it. A self-taught carpenter named John Harrison spent forty years building a clock accurate enough at sea to solve it — against astronomers who insisted the answer lay in the stars.

Latitude was easy; longitude required knowing the exact time at a reference port, and no pendulum clock could keep time on a rolling, damp, temperature-swinging ship. Harrison, a Lincolnshire carpenter with no formal training, built a series of increasingly refined machines, ending with a watch about the size of a large pocket watch that lost only a few seconds on a voyage to Jamaica. The Board of Longitude, dominated by astronomers backing a rival method, withheld the prize for decades. He was eventually paid after appealing to the king.

Royal Museums GreenwichRead card

Q1685

DriveArt

A bus crash at eighteen broke Frida Kahlo's spine, pelvis and leg. Encased in plaster and unable to sit up, she had an easel built over her bed and a mirror set into the canopy — and painted the only subject in reach.

She had wanted to be a doctor. The accident in 1925 left her with injuries that required around thirty operations over her lifetime and long stretches flat on her back. Her mother had the mirror installed so she could see something; what she saw was herself, and roughly a third of her two hundred paintings became self-portraits. She was direct about why: she painted herself because she was so often alone, and because she was the subject she knew best. Her last major work was finished eight days before she died.

Art historyRead card

Q1686

DriveMusic

At thirty-one, losing his hearing, Beethoven wrote a private letter describing how close he had come to taking his own life, and what stopped him: the work he had not yet made. He went on to compose while completely deaf.

The letter was addressed to his brothers, never sent, and found among his papers after his death. In it he describes the humiliation of a musician who cannot hear, the isolation it forced on him, and his decision that it was unthinkable to leave the world before he had produced all he felt called to produce. He lived another twenty-five years. By the premiere of the Ninth Symphony in 1824 he could hear none of it, and had to be turned around to see the audience applauding. If this touches something in you, it is worth talking to someone you trust.

Music historyRead card

Q1687

DriveArt

Francisco Goya survived an illness that left him deaf, withdrew to a house outside Madrid, and covered its plaster walls with dark, private paintings he never named, never exhibited and never tried to sell.

He was in his seventies, had lived through war and famine, and was painting for no audience at all — there is no evidence he intended anyone to see them. They are unlike anything else of the period: raw, unresolved, closer to the twentieth century than the nineteenth. Decades after his death the murals were transferred from plaster onto canvas, a brutally difficult operation that damaged them, and moved to the Prado. He is the rare artist whose most radical work was made privately, in old age, with nothing to gain.

Museo del PradoRead card

Q1688

DriveArt

Michelangelo was carving marble into his last week, and left behind a sketch inscribed 'ancora imparo' — I am still learning. He had by then been the most celebrated artist in Europe for over fifty years.

He worked on the Rondanini Pietà within days of his death at eighty-eight, reworking the same block so drastically that a previous version's arm still hangs from it. The phrase 'ancora imparo' is traditionally attributed to him rather than firmly documented, so treat the inscription as likely-but-not-certain — the working, however, is not in doubt. He was also chief architect of St Peter's in his eighties, and refused payment for it, saying he did the work for the love of God.

Art historyRead card

Q1689

DriveLiterature

Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960, her books out of print. Thirteen years later the novelist Alice Walker travelled to Florida, found the plot, and paid for a headstone. Hurston is now taught everywhere.

She had been a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, trained as an anthropologist, and wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks. But her insistence on writing Black southern life in its own voice fell out of fashion, and she died working as a maid, her funeral paid for by donations. Walker's 1975 essay 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' brought her back into print almost single-handedly. The headstone Walker chose reads: a genius of the South.

Literary historyRead card

Q1690

DriveLiterature

John Kennedy Toole could not get his comic novel published and took his own life at thirty-one. His mother spent the next eleven years pressing the manuscript on anyone who would take it. It won the Pulitzer Prize.

Thelma Toole was repeatedly turned away before she cornered the novelist Walker Percy, then teaching in New Orleans, and effectively refused to leave until he read it. Percy began expecting to find a reason to stop and instead could not put it down. It was published in 1980, twelve years after his death, and won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1981. The story is often told as a triumph, and it is also a hard one: the recognition arrived far too late for the person who needed it. If any of this is close to home, please talk to someone you trust.

Literary historyRead card

Q1691

DriveLanguage

The Wampanoag language had no speakers left for over a century. Jessie Little Doe Baird taught herself to read it from old documents, rebuilt it word by word, and raised her daughter as its first native speaker in generations.

The language survived only in writing — including a seventeenth-century Bible translation and land deeds written by Wampanoag people themselves, an unusually rich written record for a Native American language. Baird began the work after a series of dreams, took a master's in linguistics to do it properly, and produced a dictionary of more than ten thousand words. Her daughter Mae grew up speaking it. Baird received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. Reviving a language with no living speaker had been considered essentially impossible.

MacArthur FoundationRead card

Q1692

DriveLanguage

By the 1970s few Māori children were growing up speaking Māori. The response was the language nest: preschools where elders looked after the youngest children and spoke nothing but Māori to them all day.

The name means language nest. The first opened in 1982, and within a few years there were hundreds. The insight was that a language does not survive by being taught as a subject; it survives by being the ordinary medium of daily life at the age when children absorb it without effort. Fluent elders were the scarce resource, and putting them with toddlers used them where they mattered most. The model has since been adopted for Hawaiian, Welsh, Irish and several First Nations languages.

Linguistic historyRead card

Q1695

DriveLanguage

Meraki means doing something with such care that something of you ends up in it — cooking, laying a table, finishing a wall. It is the difference between completing a task and leaving a trace.

The word came into Greek from Turkish merak, curiosity or keen interest, and shifted towards the soul or creative energy a person puts into what they make. Greeks apply it to ordinary work rather than art — a plate arranged with meraki, a room painted with it. The implication is quietly demanding: it is possible to do a job correctly and still not do it with meraki, and everyone can tell the difference, including you.

GreekRead card

Q1697

DriveMind

Intending to exercise more changes little. Writing down when, where and how — 'after I put the kettle on, I do ten minutes' — reliably doubles or better the odds you actually do it.

Peter Gollwitzer's idea is that a goal is a wish until it is attached to a cue. Specifying the moment and the place hands the decision to the environment instead of your willpower, so you are not renegotiating it each time. A meta-analysis across hundreds of studies found a moderate-to-large effect, holding for exercise, diet, revision and medical screening. The format matters: an if-then sentence tied to something already in your day works far better than a resolution about intent.

Psychology researchRead card

Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.