Many, many of the stories you read about insight turn out to be quite exaggerated, with everybody at the time understanding something which after many retellings turns into an amazing breakthrough by one person. Hell, it happens all the time at work, with a bunch of people screaming, "We need to do X, we need to do X," for months on end before they give up and just grumble bitterly about it over beer, and then after a mysterious attitude shift in the leadership, the next guy who suggests X (usually someone who hasn't been around long enough to know better) is hailed as a genius.
I actually got to be that guy once. I was randomly venting in a meeting about a chronic problem and the ridiculously easy fix to it, and there happened to be a business guy there who did not want his project held up by the BS problem I was talking about, so he demanded that the fix be implemented. It happened. I was amazed. I didn't cash in on the genius part, though.
The astronomer Freeman Dyson was doing similar work for the RAF (I had heard this story attributed to him)
Two of his calculations weren't acted on because of illogical users.
Very few bombers crashed because of airframe failures as opposed to enemy attacks. Logically it would make sense to make the aircraft weaker but lighter/cheaper/faster the loss of a few % crashing due to breakups would balance being able to escape enemies faster.
Gunners on bombers very rarely hit incoming fighters, it would make sense to remove some or all of the gunners and instead train them as pilots and build more aircraft. The RAF's main problem was losing skilled crews and gunners were just extra wasted human resource when a plane was shot down.
The wrinkle in this story is that both conclusions were eventually discovered by others as well, acted upon, and eventually became the dominant paradigms by the end of the war (Dyson was doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command and claims to have made the suggestion in regards to cutting weight on Lancasters.) Some of the most successful planes in the war embodied this philosophy before Dyson even enlisted. The most successful light bomber in the war was the De Haviland Mosquito, which was made primarily of wood, usually carried no machine guns, and could outrun every other plane in the sky until the arrival of jet engines.
Comments
Many, many of the stories you read about insight turn out to be quite exaggerated, with everybody at the time understanding something which after many retellings turns into an amazing breakthrough by one person. Hell, it happens all the time at work, with a bunch of people screaming, "We need to do X, we need to do X," for months on end before they give up and just grumble bitterly about it over beer, and then after a mysterious attitude shift in the leadership, the next guy who suggests X (usually someone who hasn't been around long enough to know better) is hailed as a genius.
I actually got to be that guy once. I was randomly venting in a meeting about a chronic problem and the ridiculously easy fix to it, and there happened to be a business guy there who did not want his project held up by the BS problem I was talking about, so he demanded that the fix be implemented. It happened. I was amazed. I didn't cash in on the genius part, though.
The astronomer Freeman Dyson was doing similar work for the RAF (I had heard this story attributed to him) Two of his calculations weren't acted on because of illogical users.
Very few bombers crashed because of airframe failures as opposed to enemy attacks. Logically it would make sense to make the aircraft weaker but lighter/cheaper/faster the loss of a few % crashing due to breakups would balance being able to escape enemies faster.
Gunners on bombers very rarely hit incoming fighters, it would make sense to remove some or all of the gunners and instead train them as pilots and build more aircraft. The RAF's main problem was losing skilled crews and gunners were just extra wasted human resource when a plane was shot down.
The wrinkle in this story is that both conclusions were eventually discovered by others as well, acted upon, and eventually became the dominant paradigms by the end of the war (Dyson was doing operations research for RAF Bomber Command and claims to have made the suggestion in regards to cutting weight on Lancasters.) Some of the most successful planes in the war embodied this philosophy before Dyson even enlisted. The most successful light bomber in the war was the De Haviland Mosquito, which was made primarily of wood, usually carried no machine guns, and could outrun every other plane in the sky until the arrival of jet engines.