Sometime in the early nineties I invented the wireless internet. My invention consisted of a drawing on a paper napkin of my Apple PowerBook with a small satellite dish, about the size of 1/2 a lemon, in place of the telephone port. Wavy lines represented the information being sent through the air to an equally unscientific rendering of a satellite, high in the napkin’s top corner. That was about all I could do, so I didn’t send it in to the patent office or anything. I was satisfied with my great idea.

Years later I invented (designed) the graphite iMac. I was actually on the phone ordering (settling for) the tangerine model when I invented the 3rd generation, transparent grey beauty. The person who was taking my order and I started talking about the available colors — she had decorated her entire house in white, black and red or pink and so was very pleased with her strawberry machine. I longed, aloud, to Apple, on a phone call that was probably recorded and then played at the next design team meeting, for a “clear grey iMac.” I had waited through Bondi blue, and for as long as I could through the 5 assorted fruit flavors. It seemed that Apple and I were just out sync, and I revealed to them my dream vision.

And it’s not just me. A good friend of mine invented the CD-Rom well before CD-Roms were in use. He was simultaneously gratified and disappointed to see one for the first time a public library.

Of course, these aren’t exactly inventions. It seems likely that there were enough clues in the world, enough of the components of these incipient objects already in use, that the “invention” was less an invention than the vision of a slightly modified existing object or combination of objects. It also seems that if I was thinking it, or my friend was thinking it, so were lots of other people and chances were good that some of those people were scientists.

Maybe this phenomenon, less invention than premonition or intuition, makes us not so different from fish. Researchers found in a study a few years ago that some schooling fish, when separated and allowed to swim as individuals in a tank, all swam the same route. What appeared to be collective decision making was only a number of individuals, independently making exactly the same decision.

It’s a relief, in a way, to be more like fish than another of the world’s simplest organisms, Homer Simpson:

Homer’s idea of invention is of the unique, inventive mind seizing upon the brilliant, original idea, here the forced combination of processes (automation, fluorescence) and objects (butts, boogers). In my — I should mention much more successful — experience of invention, it’s less the combination of the unique mind and the original idea than it is an experience of being tuned in to a sort of collective understanding as to where we could go next. This may well be the experience of actual inventors, too — again like schooling fish, whose eyes on the sides of their heads allow them to see only what each other are up to not what’s directly in front of them.

So as a test case, I’ll offer up one of my latest inventions and wait to see whether it proves to be an original idea or a prediction of what’s already in the works — still under wraps but just around the corner. It's a reality TV show called Citizen’s Arrest. (I invented this one while driving.)

I’ve got more that I’m not quite ready to let out just yet. And of one them, let’s just say it will forever change the way you practice oral hygiene …