Revisionist historians have made their point: Columbus did not “discover” America in 1492. You can’t discover what has already been there for centuries even though it might be twenty thousand leagues under the sea.
When boat builders figured out that sailing crafts could go a long way, and cartographers figured out that there were no dragons on the earth’s edge, Christopher convinced Isabel that he could head west in order to go east. When his armada of three vessels pulled up on foreign shores of a new world, the native people on the beach discovered Europeans for the first time.
Perhaps the most significant example of this subject was another Italian by the name of Galileo Galilei. To understand the remarkable nature of this discovery, you need to remember that everybody believed the earth was flat. Or some folk held that it was geocentric with stars and planets circling the earth like that Greek Ptolemy said it was. In 1543, a Polish fellow, Copernicus, asserted it might be heliocentric with the sun as the center. Fifty years later, while peering at Jupiter’s four moons through a telescope, Galileo discovered that Copernicus had hit the right nail on the right head.
Isaac Newton was barking up the same tree when he figured out the laws of gravity by observing objects falling. Nothing unusual about falling objects, but what in tarnation brings them down to earth in the seemingly same manner.
It’s just a matter of paying attention. A researcher in London returned from his vacation in Scotland to discover that the petri dishes in his lab were covered with a strange kind of fungus-looking material. Rather than just clean up this apparent mess, Alexander Fleming unearthed the miracle drug we know as penicillin. Paying attention paid off!
Our son was working in the labs of Eastman Chemical Company trying to figure out a different kind of plastic. When he was rambling through some old files of experiments that were deemed worthless, he became intrigued. When he reconsidered the notion, it led him to rediscover some secret ingredients for what would become Tritan, the company’s next generation of co-polymer and its economic boom in the industry.
And don’t forget the printing press. Gutenberg figured out the puzzle of movable letters and numbers. He happened to be that “type” of fellow who could see the obvious in what everyone thought was oblivious. Have you been paying attention to the words you are reading? It’s all in a font known as Georgia. Right between your eyes and under your nose. Eureka!