Medici Effect: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics

CHAPTER seven

	Ignite an Explosion of Ideas
	SUBMARINES AND TUBULAR BELLS

IT WAS A CALM EVENING in the summer of 1982. The prolific inventor and engineer Håkan Lans and his wife, Inga, had been sailing through the Stockholm archipelago for the past couple of days, enjoying an unusual spell of beautiful weather. Toward the late afternoon they hooked up to a small island and Lans decided to go for a quiet walk. He climbed to the top of the island and sat down to relax.¹

Until this sailing excursion, Lans’s mind had been occupied with a particularly complex issue. About a year or so earlier he had learned about the U.S. military’s new Global Positioning System (GPS), a constellation of satellites deployed to aid armed forces in navigation ...