Steven Johnson began his talk on where ideas come from by revealing the significance of coffeehouses in industrial Britain. They were places where intellectuals gathered to spark off each other. Toward the end he told the powerful story of how GPS was invented, illustrating all his points on how ideas emerge. And then, brilliantly, he threw in the fact that GPS was probably used by everyone in the audience that week to do things like . . . find their nearest coffeehouse.
