A monk publishes a paper on heredity in 1866. Hardly anyone reads it. Four decades pass before science calls Gregor Mendel's work a breakthrough. David Byrne, once the frontman of Talking Heads, wants to know why that happens and whether the next one can be spotted early. His book is Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and Why They Wake Up. Timothy Farrington reviews it in the Journal's Fall Books section, and he likes the stories more than the theory.
The phrase isn't Byrne's. In 2004 a Dutch scholar, Anthony van Raan, published a six-page paper in a journal that measures the impact of science. He called research that sits almost uncited for years, then suddenly draws attention, a sleeping beauty. His own paper was noticed quickly. It gathered citations steadily and found a wider audience about a decade later, the reviewer writes. Byrne was one of the readers it caught. He widened the idea far past science. His examples include continental drift, solar panels, handwashing, submarines, the painters Caravaggio and Vermeer, and the novelists Kafka and Faulkner.
He sorts the wake-ups into six kinds. A powerful advocate. A new technology. Accident. A shift in the economics. War or disaster. A change in the culture. Then come the stories, told with real enthusiasm, the reviewer says. The Romans had excellent concrete and lost it. The 19th-century version was weaker, and the old secret was heat rather than the volcanic ash long credited, the book says. Bach changed music in the early 1700s, the book says. Yet until Felix Mendelssohn championed him, people treated his pieces as practice drills rather than art. Mendel, Byrne guesses, was ignored because he was a working-class monk outside the scientific club.
The patterns are faint
Byrne hopes that studying these cases will teach readers to spot the next one. A section heading says the book's aim is pattern recognition. Here the reviewer pushes back. The patterns are faint, he writes, and the categories are arbitrary, which Byrne concedes. Caravaggio sits in the culture chapter, yet his comeback was pushed by real people, among them the Gilded Age art adviser Bernard Berenson. Byrne himself writes that “Even the staunchest champion won't succeed if the world isn't ready.” So what's left are general lessons. Think across fields, redraw the information, and don't assume the past knew less. Farrington also wishes Byrne had studied his own record. In 1988 he founded Luaka Bop, a record label that introduced Americans to overlooked pop from abroad, Brazil's Os Mutantes among them.
Our read
This is Time Value of Money (M3) with a Behavioral warning and a slice of Investments/Risk (IN04). Being early looks exactly like being wrong, and it looks that way for a long time. Mendel waited four decades. Nobody paid him interest while he waited. An idea that depends on the world catching up has to be sized so you can survive the wait. Too big a position gets you forced out at the worst moment, sometimes right before the wake-up. Patience is a budget. You have to be able to afford it.
The reviewer's caution matters too. Stories of vindication are irresistible after the fact. Hindsight makes every sleeping beauty look obvious. The signs that would have picked it out at the time were faint, and Byrne admits it. So we don't bet the plan on being early. Our own rule for new money has three tests, and only one passes right now, so we wait. Waiting is sizing, done on purpose. If you're holding something early, ask at your review how long the position could wait. If that's shorter than the idea needs, make it smaller.