Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.” Bell’s volume would be the basis for one of the most famous commonplace books of the late eighteenth century, maintained from 1776 to 1787 by Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather. At the very end of his life, while working on a biography of his grandfather, Charles obtained what he called “the great book” from his cousin Reginald. In the biography, the younger Darwin captures the book’s marvelous diversity: “There are schemes and sketches for an improved lamp, like our present moderators; candlesticks with telescope stands so as to be raised at pleasure to any required height; a manifold writer; a knitting loom for stockings; a weighing machine; a surveying machine; a flying bird, with an ingenious escapement for the movement of the wings, and he suggests gunpowder or compressed air as the motive power.”