David Byrne’s Sleeping Beauties: When Great Ideas Wake Up

I have always loved those moments when two completely different worlds suddenly collide and somebody sees something everyone else missed. Maybe it is an old invention, a forgotten artist, or an idea that seemed useless at the time. Something is fascinating about discovering that people were sometimes looking in the wrong direction all along. That is what grabbed me about David Byrne’s Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up.

Sometimes an idea disappears because nobody is ready for it. Then, years or even centuries later, somebody takes another look and realizes that the supposedly old idea might have been pretty damn good after all.

Byrne calls these “sleeping beauties,” borrowing the term from a 2004 scientific paper about important research that was initially overlooked. His examples range across science, technology and the arts, from continental drift and solar panels to the submarine, which took 244 years to find practical use. In the arts, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music was largely forgotten for a century, while artists such as Vermeer, Caravaggio and Goya endured long periods of obscurity before later generations rediscovered their work.

That is where Byrne’s personality makes the book work. Publishers Weekly praises his quirky sense of humour and conversational approach. He can be discussing the history of art one minute and then suddenly ask of Caravaggio, “Why was he such a crazy asshole?” It is hard to imagine many history books taking that route.

But underneath the humour is a bigger idea: great ideas do not necessarily win because they are great. Timing, culture, money and politics can all get in the way, and sometimes what an idea needs most is someone willing to look at it differently.

That person is often an outsider. Someone from another discipline, an amateur, a young person or simply somebody who has not learned all the rules yet. They see an old problem from a different angle and start asking the question everyone else stopped asking: why?

That may be my favourite part of the whole concept. We tend to think of history as a straight line, with the best ideas naturally rising to the top. It isn’t. History is full of wrong turns, missed opportunities and brilliant things that nobody noticed the first time around.

And that makes Sleeping Beauties feel particularly relevant now. We have never had more information or more new ideas, yet we are constantly told that whatever just happened must be the most important thing ever. Maybe the trick is to stop looking only for what is new and start paying attention to what we forgot. Sometimes the next great idea isn’t waiting to be invented. It is already here, waiting for somebody to wake it up.