Here’s one slightly silly example of inadvertent inspiration. After settling in my window seat on a flight from the Seatle-Tacoma airport, I caught a brief glimpse of the tailfin of a plane parked at a nearby gateway. It featured a high-contrast portrait of a grizzled man wearing an anorak.

You may know it. I didn’t. (My excuse? I flew almost exclusively on the East coast, and this was Alaska Airlines.) My first thought. Look! They put Jerry Garcia on the stabilizer! They are so hip! Look, Jerry Garcia!

My exclamation caught the attention of a seat mate. No that’s an Eskimo, she gently corrected. And of course it was. Later, I looked it up, and found that, indeed, the smiling fur-framed face belonged not to a rocker but to a locally famous reindeer herder named Chester Seveck, an artist in his own right, but renowned for performing Inuit dances.

Well, the mistake propagated in the cabin like the wave in a stadium. The steward announced the correction on the intercom. The mash-up left listeners with a funny story to tell at my expense. Okay, okay…

But the creative process of playfully, inadvertently, or purposefully transferring one frame of reference to another has yielded dividends of discovery more far-reaching than cracking up passengers in economy class.

Fast Moving Landmark Mash-Ups

Landmark mashups, creative eureka! moments, have proven to be milestones in technology and science that have deeply modified our daily lives.

Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German goldsmith who transferred skills in block printing and copperplate etching to his invention of moveable type,........

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