Gary Starkweather almost single-handedly invented the laser printer when no one else believed it was possible, through sheer, bull-headed determination. That single product alone repaid Xerox’s entire investment in the acclaimed PARC facility.

There was one particular technical problem that threatened to derail the project, even after all the others were solved. As Starkweather said, “I would sit and write out a list of all the problems that were difficult. One by one they would all drop away, but the mirrors would still be left.” The problem was, laser printing required that mirrors be fabricated to a ridiculous level of precision, a process that would cost ~$10,000 per mirror, far beyond even outrageous measures of feasibility.'

“For more than two months he wrestled with the puzzle… One day he was sitting glumly in his optical lab. The walls were painted matte black and the lights dimmed in deference to a photoreceptor drum mounted nearby, as sensitive to overexposure as a photographic plate. Starkweather doodled on a pad, revisiting the rudimentary principles of optics he had learned as a first year student at Michigan State. What was the conventional means for reflecting light? The prism, of course. He sketched out a pyramid of prisms, one on top of the other, each one smaller than the one below to accommodate the sharper angle of necessary deflection. He held the page at arm’s length and realized the prisms reminded him of something out of the old textbooks: an ordinary cylindrical lens, wide in the middle and narrowed at the top and bottom. ‘I remember saying to myself, “Be careful, this may not work. It's way too easy.” I showed it to one of my lab assistants and he said, “Isn’t that a little too simple?”’…

The lens scheme was foolproof… And it permitted the polygonal disks to be stamped out like donuts – not at $10,000 apiece, but $100.”

(From the fantastic, "Dealers of Lightning")

What jumped out at me was his willingness to almost absentmindedly play with the problem through doodling. Doodling seems childish, or at the very least, unreasonably “artsy,” and yet, breakthroughs often come out of the tip of the pencil. As Bill Burnett, Executive Director of the Product Design Program at Stanford, says, “If your pen keeps moving, your brain keeps moving.”

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.