Eureka!

One thing technology can't give us is time for serendipitous discovery. Why we need to reinvent free time

By Nancy Gibbs Monday, Nov. 22, 2010
    • Gerard Dubois for Time

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    Creativity can be an admirable end in itself--but it's also a route to power. The great designer, architect and innovator Buckminster Fuller once marveled at the workings of a tiny piece at the edge of the rudder of a great steamship, like the Queen Mary, called the trimtab. "Just moving the little trimtab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all," he said. "The little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go." Etched in stone at his grave site, it says, call me trimtab--bucky.

    You see this at work every day, maybe not always world-changing interventions but life-changing ones, unremarkable at the time but transformative nonetheless. Some people, some moments, like some inventions, arrive in our lives with a flourish of trumpets. Some slide in shyly, unannounced, and set about changing everything. I had many great teachers and professors and mentors over the years, but it was a young first-grade teacher who saw a crushed little girl, told by the grizzled senior teacher that I had used the word then too often in the first piece of writing I'd ever attempted, who swooped in with her gold star, stuck it atop the page and told me to keep writing. Call me Trimtab, she might have said, as she set me sailing off into second grade, and a whole new world. She didn't invent me. But she invented a writer.

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