Innovation and invention takes time to progress and get absorbed into the daily thought. It is also developed over time based on the influence from the current thinking and is not very radical as hypothesized. This is best illustrated by an example.
Charles Darwin is rightly credited for his theories on evolution and it leads one to believe that he aggregated all the information from his voyages together, got a big a-ha moment and then there was his theory. But it did not quite happen that way. He was influenced by a Geologist called Charles Lyell who influenced much of his theory.
In Geology, it often looked mysterious that there were large caverns, caves, or valleys and it was unknown how these formed. There were theories about Cataclysmic events that may have formed those since it was unconceivable at that time that something like this that would be formed slowly. Charles Lyell was the geologist who proposed that these structures were formed by slow erosion by the rivers, that led to the great structures. Today, we understand that the valleys are formed simply by the erosion by the river but this was not well understood at that time.
Charles had three principles that explained the phenomenon:
- Past forces have same magnitude as today – this seems logical but if you think that big catastrophic events like earthquakes that were used to explain shapes then it becomes understandable.
- There is a continuous cycle of creation and destruction. Destruction of coastline and formation of new rocks by compression that are happening each day at every instance.
- Events occurring in the past have an influence of what we see today.
However, it took about two decades before Lyell’s theory was accepted. Any innovation will take time, even if its obvious, to get accepted. But consider how this influenced Darwin.
Charles and Darwin communicated regularly as can be seen by the link below. Darwin was a geologist and used Lyell’s principles on everything that he saw. Now when he saw the information on the atolls, his observation on the voyage of the Beagle and it is easy to see how you would start inferring that the big changes that we see in evolution from monkeys to humans would really be a small series of changes (small erosion by the river) as well as a cycle of destruction and creation.
Darwin’s innovation was to cross-fertilize the idea from Geology to Natural selection and the ideas of evolution took a while to be acceptable.
Innovation happens in slow steps, takes time to get adopted but in retrospect it appears that it was a great insight that led to a completely novel idea. Be patient and let the ideas move across disciplines.