Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

Over a hundred editions of the guide were published, and it remained a common staple of British households well into the twentieth century. One musty copy of the book lingered into the 1960s, in the home of a pair of mathematicians living in the suburbs of London. The couple had a young son who was drawn to the “suggestion of magic” in the book’s title, and who spent hours exploring this “portal to the world of information.” The title stuck in the back of his mind, along with that wondrous feeling of exploring an immense trove of data. More than a decade later, he was working as a software consultant in a Swiss research lab, and found himself overwhelmed by the flow of information and the personnel churn in the organization. As a side project, he began tinkering with an application that would allow him to keep track of all that data. When it came time to give his program a name, his mind drifted back to that strange Victorian household encyclopedia from his youth. He called his application Enquire.