The myth of the prodigious, lone genius discovering truth in isolation is one of humanity’s most preferred stories: Ramanujan discovering advanced mathematics by himself from a single textbook in rural India; Einstein revolutionising physics while working as a patent clerk; Mozart composing symphonies as a gifted child. These romantic narratives of solitary greatness suggest raw genius can transcend any circumstance, that true genius will inevitably find its way to greatness.

By viewing history not through the lens of the man, but the technology they emerged from, we can uncover a more accurate look at the real patterns at play. Genius arises consistently, at a perfect moment – call it the “genius emission zone” – where the new paradigm has enough power to carry those willing to create and master new powers, and before the guardrails come clamping down or the technology reaches distribution.

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Consider Mozart, who by the age of seventeen, had invented the concerto form, and would go on to compose 600 pieces. Most are unaware that Mozart was among the first to ever play a revolutionary new technology – the piano. Mozart was born into the family of a wealthy composer right as a new technology had been invented, learned to master it early, and realised much of its unfulfilled potential – leaving an imprint that meant all future generations would work in his shadow.

One century prior, another genius emission zone appeared just as theatre was becoming commonplace. In an era when few could read, write, or travel abroad, two playwrights dominated the London stage: Thomas Kyd invented the revenge tragedy and Christopher Marlowe brought dramatic verse to the masses with “Doctor Faustus” and “Tamburlaine”. Then, just as the golden age entered its stride, the roommates met a violent end – with Kyd arrested for treason and dying from torture and Marlowe assassinated in a brawl. Their sudden deaths left a vacuum in London’s theatre scene that was quickly filled by their co-author ‘Shakespeare’, who would realise the potential of the medium as its pioneer. [1]

When we take for granted that dramatic verse and piano music were inventions, Mozart and Shakespeare become untouchable.

1. What Conditions Emit a Lone Genius?

There are three different conditions needed in order to set the stage for a period of extreme innovation in a medium, before conditions calcify and experimentation becomes costly.


1. The new technology must be hackable

The technology must be reliable enough to be predictable, but not so polished that it dissuades invention. In other words, enough documentation to enable basic use, but not so much documentation that all paths are pre-determined. For instance, between 1593-94 Francis Bacon kept a notebook with exciting new phrases and slang he had found on his travels; new formalisations of ideas that hadn’t yet found distribution, which would later be written into Shakespeare’s works. Similarly, Ramanujan could hack his way through problems by exploring new approaches that were considered original in 1913. Often, such as in the case of the early web, invention involved picking up tricks shared by friends or on forums.


2. There must be enough of a knowledge gap to reward mastery

The first users should be “technical artists” who seek to tinker. Tinkerers like Steve Wozniak, or J Dilla understood their medium long before the mainstream and were driven to discover features hidden to casual users, in their pursuit to obtain mastery. When attaining this knowledge is difficult, such as when the cost of procuring new equipment is large, the scope to become recognised as a lone innovator rise dramatically.


3. The tinkering community should be competitive

When the in-group is small enough for innovations to spread rapidly, but large enough to sustain progress on regular timeframes, that is when excitement reaches fever pitch and competition ignites the medium. Partnerships like Lennon-McCartney and Watson-Crick were in fact rivalries between each other and between others.

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2. Lone Geniuses and Their Technologies

Art is a history of new tools:

  • Da Vinci (1400s) was among the first to use oil paint when it was invented, enabling far more ambitious paintings than the egg tempura used before that. Da Vinci could experiment with it because he had wealthy backers like the Medici family and the Duke of Milan, who could afford pigments that could cost more than gold.
  • Monet and the Impressionists (1870s) emerged when portable paint tubes were invented, allowing outdoor painting (“en plein air”) for the first time, both supported by very wealthy family and patrons.
  • Abstract expressionists (1930s) like Rothko and Pollock used new synthetic resins and specially formulated acrylics, funded by the Rockefeller and Guggenheim families.
  • Andy Warhol (1960s) mastered silkscreening just as commercial printing techniques became possible in his “Factory”, capturing the iconic repetition and mass production aesthetic, funded by his career as an illustrator.
  • David Hockney (1980s) pioneered photo collage art when instant cameras became more affordable and reliable.


Media is a history of new visual immersion techniques:

  • Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton (1910s) appeared just as film cameras became light enough to be moved around and film stock could capture expressions.
  • Walt Disney (1920s) used early “sound-on-film” rigs that weren’t possible before, and pioneered animations with sound.
  • Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock (1940s) would apply radio to film ten years later when microphones had developed sufficiently.
  • Marlon Brando and James Dean (1950s) pioneered method acting once sound and video became sensitive enough to capture nuanced performances.
  • John Carmack (1990s) developed 3D gaming engines just as PC graphics cards became capable of real-time 3D.


Music is a history of new sound:

  • Elvis and Chuck Berry (1950s) appeared when magnetic tape made studio recording affordable, while the new 45 rpm single format allowed for mass record distribution.
  • The Beatles (1960s) evolved alongside the wave of advancements in multi-track recording, constantly pushing its boundaries and setting new records in distribution. Their producers Geoff Emerick and George Martin were prolific technical inventors.
  • Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones (1980s) mastered the Yamaha DX7 synthesiser and LinnDrum machine just as they became technically mature.
  • Kanye (2000s) follows J Dilla’s art of sampling that ushered in the golden age of sampling, while Radiohead mastered digital production.


Literature is a history of new perspectives:

  • Gothic writers (Shelley, Stoker 1800s) channeled emerging scientific concepts - electricity, blood transfusion, mesmerism - into new forms of horror.
  • Modernists (Joyce, Woolf 1920s) developed stream-of-consciousness as new typography and printing could handle experimental formats.
  • Dickens and Austin (1840s) emerged when steam-powered printing presses enabled mass readership magazines, becoming content influencers.
  • Beat Generation (Kerouac, Ginsberg 1950s) pioneered the portable typewriter revolution.

Science and mathematics are stories of new equipment enabling better empirical results that allow for confident conceptual progress. Now, the biggest advances in understanding in fields like theoretical physics are driven by the development of new equipment like LIGO and LISA.


Maths is a history of better models:

  • Euler (1740s) pioneered graph theory and topology once calculus could represent sufficiently abstract relationships between numbers.
  • Maxwell (1860s) unified electricity and magnetism only after the mathematical tools of vector calculus became available.
  • Einstein (1905) developed relativity at a time when light speed measurements raised contradictions with Newtonian mechanics. He famously argued that even Newton couldn’t have made this leap earlier - the conceptual tools didn’t exist.
  • Ramanujan (1913) received early education through the colonial British school system in Madras and used an early global postal system that landed his talent precisely where it was recognised.
  • Quantum mechanics (1920s) developed after spectroscopy revealed atomic energy levels.
  • Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics (1940s) became possible once particle accelerators could test quantum predictions.


Science is a history of better results:

  • Galileo (1610s) discovered Jupiter’s moons using the first telescopes with magnification.
  • Darwin and Wallace (1858) both developed natural selection theory by applying Malthus’s population principles to Lyell’s geological timescales. They also relied on improved specimen preservation techniques and quality fossil records.
  • Bell and Gray (1876) filed telephone patents on the same day, after news of certain electronic component miniaturisations.
  • Tesla vs Edison (1880s) competed over the electrification revolution when generator technology was sufficient to power neighbourhoods.


In the Digital Age:

  • Tim Berners-Lee (1989-91) invented the World Wide Web when home computers reached critical mass and TCP/IP networks were becoming more widespread.
  • Marc Andreessen (1993) created Mosaic browser when GUI interfaces became standard and networks could handle image transfer.
  • Larry Page and Sergey Brin (1998) developed PageRank when the web had enough links to make ranking meaningful.
  • Network speeds could handle remote computing and video files in 2005, the same year YouTube and AWS were launched.
  • Jobs at Apple (2007) launched the iPhone when touch screens became precise enough and mobile processors sufficiently powerful.
  • Satoshi Nakamoto (2008) launched Bitcoin when distributed systems could handle the Proof-of-Work protocol.
  • Fei Fei Li and Ilya Sutskever ushered in deep learning when GPUs became powerful enough to stack neural networks developed in the 1940s.

3. The Meme-fluencers

The winners of history leverage memes, whether they know it or not. Time inevitably compresses complex collaborative efforts into singular figures not because it’s accurate, but because these stories have higher copy-fidelity. We constantly are running a species-wide distributed compression function – where the narrative gets shrunk, at the cost of nuance.

Richard Dawkins proposes that memes are strong when they have (1) longevity (they persist across time), (2) fecundity (they spread rapidly), and (3) copy-fidelity (they maintain their essential form). The “lone genius” narrative is perhaps the most successful meme in innovation history – it’s simple, sticky, and idealistic.

Consider the business-genius archetype: Steve Jobs “invented” the iPhone (while Fadell and Forstall architected and engineered the device), Sam Altman “created” ChatGPT (while thousands of researchers laid the groundwork), Thomas Edison “discovered” the lightbulb (while systematically absorbing others’ patents and aggressively marketing others’ ideas as his own), Elon Musk “created” electric cars and reusable rockets (while his engineers did the heavy lifting). These are historical lazisms; memetic simplifications that persist because they represent strong, unsurprsing patterns.

The victims of this compression are predictably those further down the power hierarchy - research assistants, frontline engineers or female collaborators who provided essential breakthroughs. Watson and Crick became the faces of DNA’s structure after swiping Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography without her knowledge, claiming a Nobel prize for themselves. Einstein’s first wife Mileva Marić contributed to his early work on special relativity. Ada Lovelace’s insights into computational thinking were initially attributed to Babbage. Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars were credited to her supervisor Antony Hewish. Lise Meitner’s insights into nuclear fission were credited to Otto Hahn, who received the Nobel Prize.

These tropes work because they resonate with fundamental archetypes, Jung’s include “The Hero” (lone genius), “The Sage” (technical prophet), “The Rebel” (outcast vindicator).

The tragic variants are particularly powerful: Vincent van Gogh selling but one painting during his lifetime, Socrates and Alan Turing dying censored and imprisoned, Boltzmann dying by suicide a year before his atomic theory was proven correct. These stories of posthumous vindication are especially memorable because they combine multiple archetypal elements - the unrecognized genius, the martyred truth-teller, the prophet proven right too late.

TL;DR: Many geniuses evolve the medium, but there’s only space to remember 1 / log(t + 1).

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Bibliography:

[1]

To put into perspective quite how basic English was in 1600, Shakespeare is credited with inventing the words ‘eyeball, undress, addicted, and lonely’.