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150 Creativity

would he nevertheless have been stimulated to think about the transmutation
of species? Without World War II and the resulting influx of refugee European
scientists desperate to stop Nazi Germany from taking over the world, would
the atom bomb have been invented? If Watson had not been assigned a desk
in Crick’s office at the Cavendish Laboratory, would their collaboration have
been delayed or prevented? The role of externalities grows even more promi-
nent when we scale along the dimension of collectivity.

SCALING FROM INDIVIDUALS TO COLLECTIVES

Discoveries, inventions and works of art are often associated with single
individuals. It is common knowledge that Edison invented the electric lightbulb,
Darwin thought of natural selection and Picasso founded cubism. Some crea-
tivity researchers argue that these single-name attributions are inaccurate and
that they obscure the collective nature of creative achievements. Many seem-
ingly lone geniuses will on closer examination be found to have interacted inten-
sively with at least one other person, even in cases where posterity has found it
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convenient to elevate one member of such a couple over the other. Scientific
discoveries are often made by large research teams and technical inventions are
products of industrial research and development laboratories with many work-
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ers. Edison employed hundreds. Likewise, a style of painting is not created by
a single person. The 19th-century French impressionists painted, talked and
traveled together, exchanging techniques, ideas and aesthetic judgments in their
search for a new art. Groups, teams, organizations and communities are the
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true agents of creativity, or so the claim goes.
Although the focus on the collective aspect of invention is a useful cor-
rective to the past tendency to overemphasize lone geniuses, the contem-
porary prevalence of teamwork is not an intrinsic or universal feature of
creative work but a historically recent trend. Before the modern era, art-
ists, inventors and scientists often worked in relative isolation. They were
few and scattered. Travel was difficult and dangerous, postal communica-
tions slow and unreliable and there was no system for publishing prelimi-
nary results. The life of Gerardus Mercator, the cartographer who invented
the mapping technique that we now call Mercator’s projection, illustrates
this situation. Dissemination of his revolutionary cartographic invention
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depended on whether he could travel from his home town, on horseback
and in winter, to book-and-map fairs elsewhere on the European continent.
Bandits, floods, famine, religious strife and warfare were potential obstacles
to this primitive form of dissemination. Even Martin Luther had to publish