From emblematic buildings to medical advances: five great ideas that were born scribbled in napkins

“Paper napkins! Who heard such nonsense! What are they for? ” In the 1950s they began receiving the approval seal of the rectors of the label, and to become ubiquitous. Since then, many architects or their relatives would respond to those housewives that paper napkins served to pour ideas. Countless buildings designs around the world began outlined in those pieces of paper Produced to clean up when drinking or eating, including several celebrities, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao museum. The influential architect Frank Gehry said that when he was nominated to design it, he was one night in a nearby bar and began to outline a design in a cocktail napkin, without lifting the paper pen to achieve a fluid design. The practice is so valued in the architecture that there are auctions of napkins. The phrase “Sketch in napkin” is synonymous with the moment of conceptual genesis. But, also outside that circle, there are napkins that made history. The first to use paper napkins were the Chinese, in the second century, but they did not begin to popularize in the West until the nineteenth century, with imports of decorated napkins from Japangetty imagesprobly, you would not recognize the name David H. Shepard. Nor that of its creation, although you have surely seen it, often. Shepard It was the inventor of one of the first machines that read credit card receipts.Su intelligent machine research corporation developed and sold the first systems of optical character recognition to companies such as AT&T, First National City Bank, Reader's Digest and most of the main oil companies. However, He detected a problem. As the optical recognition of characters was first implemented in gas stations, when people used cards to pay, receipts inevitably were stained with fat, oil and other substances.I needed to devise how to combat that contamination of financial data. And he did, in a napkin, during a dinner with his wife at the Waldorf-Actory Hotel in New York, in 1952. Looking for the simplest and most open forms possible, what he drew were those rectilinear numbers that appear on many credit cards. So that the recognition of the data was more reliable, Shepard decided to create a source just for DigitosgettyThe Farrington B numerical source was clearly transmitted when using analog card processing devices from the mid -twentieth century. Today, credit card companies can use any source for the account number, as all relevant information is obtained from the magnetic band or the EMV chip. But, those distinctive digits are still used frequently, because Farrington B is almost a tradition. At the beginning of the 1970s, the American chemist Paul Lauterbur He was already one of the main Specialists in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR). The technique is based on the magnetic properties of hydrogen present in water, which constitutes approximately two thirds of the human body. When hydrogen atoms are put in a powerful magnetic field and bombarded with radio wavesissue signals that provide information about your local environment. Chemists used NMR to determine the structure of organic molecules. But, until then, no one had come up with that it could become a tool that doctors could use to create detailed images of internal organs. From a napkin to a Nobel Prize: Lauterbur received him from King Carlos Gustavo Sweden in Stockholm in 2003Getty A study of cancer fabrics with rats that tried to see if with NMR you could detect tumors. Lauterbur was impressed, but it seemed “too unpleasant” that they had to sacrifice to investigate: it should While reflecting ideas on a paper napkin. Those ideas, conceived between hamburger snack He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2003) for giving doctors the ability to look inside the human body without using harmful radiation. What is curious that in the field of technology, which created so many tools to replace pencil and paper, the napkollet in napkin has also played a role. However, it happened on more than one occasion. The most legendary has to do with the creation of Ethernet, the system to connect devices that preceded the now omnipresent Wi-Fi. And it is still used, because sending cable data is faster, reliable and surely sending them by radio waves. The name “Ethernet” comes from the historical reference to the luminiferous ether, a nineteenth -century theory on a substance that was believed to transport electromagnetic wavesgetty images the system was initially created in 1973 by a group of engineers of the Xerox Alto Research Center (PARC). One of them was Robert Metcalfewho was a communications specialist. He was entrusted with the task of designing and building the network that united high -called computers, which already had graphic capabilities and mouse, and would be considered the first personal computers. The idea, which now seems obvious, but was revolutionary, was connect them to share information and print documents. Metcalfe made the first conceptual sketch on a napkin, drawing a diagram to connect several computers in a local area network. And he labeled it with a word: “Ether!” A young professor drew a simple chart in a napkin in 1974and drew a new address for the US Republican Party. The details of the meeting in which Laffer drew his curve are confused, the paper napkin no longer exists, and one of fabric that was exhibited in the Smithsonian is of doubtful origin. But Laffer's curve continues to emerge in PublicGetty discourse ImageSel professor was the economist Arthur Laffer And the legendary meeting was with Dick Cheneyin a restaurant in Washington DC Cheney was at that time the second in command of Donald H. Rumsfeld, chief of cabinet of President Gerald R. Ford, who had uploaded taxes to control inflation. Laffer wanted to show him why the federal government had to go down. Any contradicted, he said, the reduction would be paid alone, because Fiscal collection would be increased and economic activity would increase. He outlined a curve to illustrate his argument that there is an optimal tax rate that maximizes government income. But that, after that point, the tax increase entails a decrease in public income. High tax rates were counterproductivebecause they discouraged economic activity and encouraged tax evasion to the point that they actually reduced government income. The later called Laffer curve He became famous; The Republican party became the Tax Cutting Party.The curve served to justify the economic policies of President Ronald Reaganbut their tax cuts were not amortized by themselves and caused an increase in public debt. Although the theory has been discredited by several economists, it still has defenders and its attractiveness is lasting among those who advise to contribute less to the coffers of the states. “In the summer of 1994, I, John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Joe Ranft we sat down to lunch,” said the filmmaker Andrew Stanton in one of the trailers of The animated film Wall-e Pixar.Stanton, Lesseter, Docter and Ranft (who died in an accident in 2005) were four of the main directors that would become one of the most successful animation studies in the world. Almost all his films would be nominated and many awarded Oscar Awards. But, that was yet to come: since its creation in 1986, to the premiere of Toy Story in 1995, few knew of their existence. The adorable Wall-E robot was the last idea that emerged during a memorable lunch three decades ago Story was almost finished, “he said.” We thought 'Caramba! If we are going to make another movie, we have to start already. '”And A really fabulous rain of ideas began. “We shuffle a lot of ideas that finally became Bugs Life (bugs: a miniature adventure), Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo (Looking for Nemo) and The last one we commented that day was the story of a robot named Wally”The four diners drew characters in the coffee napkins. The robot would become the protagonist of Wall-E.In the production notes of that animated tape, Stanton said:“ One of the things that I remember that arose from this was the idea of ​​a small robot left on the earth. We didn't have a story. It was a kind of small Robinson Crusoe character: What would happen if humanity had to leave the earth and someone forgot to put out the last robot, and I did not know that he could stop doing what he is doing? ”Wall-e premiered in 2008 And, although it was a risk to the study, because there were not many dialogues, like all the other films designed during that lunch, fell in love with the public and was acclaimed by critics. Hidden City Cafe no longer exists, but appears in a monsters scene, INC ..*By Dalia Ventura