Western culture recognizes three fields of activity as particularly devoted to the exercise of originality. Artists aim to create original works, scientists seek to discover previously unknown phenomena and technologists strive to invent new devices and techniques. The three verbs create, discover and invent jointly triangulate the application of mind to the production of novelty.

Novelties are diverse in character and consequence. In 1935, when war in Europe seemed unavoidable, Arnold F. Wilkins, a junior scientific officer of the British National Physical Laboratory, was asked by his superior, superintendent Robert Watson Watt, to calculate whether radio waves could be emitted with enough force and precision to boil the blood of the pilot of an approaching enemy aircraft. Watson Watt had in turn been asked this question by a member of the Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence. When Wilkins's calculations showed that this death ray concept was not workable, his superior asked how radio technology could be used to defend Britain instead. In a momentous act of inspiration, Wilkins proposed that perhaps we can detect enemy air planes at a distance by bouncing radio waves off them. Calculations showed that a detection device, unlike the death ray, could work. Five years later, when the bombers of the German Luftwaffe attacked, a string of radar stations along Britain's east coast gave the British Royal Air Force (RAF) advance warning of their approach.