Buried Talent Hardly Exists

People sometimes tell me that great things are being buried.

That there are people with talent who haven’t made it into the world. That there is superior work that nobody knows about. It becomes a conversation about what a waste it is. However, when I actually trace the examples of things said to be “buried,” I feel that they always lead to one of two outcomes.

Held onto for twenty years, then emerged

By the late 1830s, Charles Darwin had arrived at the idea of natural selection. He wrote a short draft in 1842, and by 1844, he had developed it into a fairly lengthy paper.

And then, he didn’t publish it. He even wrote instructions to his wife, essentially asking her to publish it if he were to die. For fourteen years, he kept it in his drawer.

On June 18, 1858, a letter arrived. The sender was Alfred Russel Wallace—a thirty-five-year-old man who had been traveling through the Malay Archipelago collecting and selling specimens, someone Darwin had never met. The manuscript sent from an island called Ternate described natural selection.

On July 1 of that same year, the writings of both men were read aloud on the same evening at the Linnean Society in London. First, Darwin’s 1844 paper and a letter he had written to an American botanist the following year. Then, Wallace’s manuscript. It was structured to show that Darwin had arrived there first, while acknowledging that Wallace had reached the same conclusion independently. The following year, On the Origin of Species was published.

This is not an isolated case. In 1922, William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas of Columbia University published a paper titled “Is Invention a Necessity?” They listed 148 instances between 1420 and 1901 where at least two people had independently arrived at the same discovery. Calculus was Newton in 1671 and Leibniz in 1676. The telephone saw Bell and Gray file documents at the same office on the same day: February 14, 1876.

Their conclusion was that discovery is inevitable if three conditions are met: the problem is clearly defined, there are people who want to solve it, and the necessary tools for solving it exist in the world.

Even if one person stays silent for twenty years, the same discovery emerges from the other side of the planet.

Stopped for twenty-four years

In 1973, a mathematician named Clifford Cocks discovered a certain mechanism while working for an organization called the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK.

His boss, James Ellis, had held an idea for “non-secret encryption” for several years—the notion of whether encrypted communication could be handled without exchanging keys. Cocks heard this, went home, found a way to implement it, and returned. He said it took about thirty minutes to write up. The following year, Malcolm Williamson found a method for key exchange.

This is what we now call public-key cryptography. The thirty-minute discovery was almost identical to the mechanism that would later be known as RSA.

This was not made public. It was internal information within an intelligence agency.

Three to four years later, people in the United States arrived at the same place. Diffie and Hellman in 1976; Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman in 1977. They published papers, and their versions became the ones used worldwide. The systems currently powering banking and communications belong to that lineage.

The British story only became public on December 18, 1997. Twenty-four years later. There had been a plan to disclose it in 1987, but the timeline was pushed back ten years due to a commotion surrounding another exposé book. Ellis had died one month prior, in November 1997. He died without the world knowing that he had arrived there first.

It took a national intelligence agency to keep it stopped for twenty-four years.

The state of being “buried” does not last long

When you place these two examples side-by-side, it becomes clear what determines the length of time something remains buried.

Darwin was an individual. He remained silent for twenty years, but he could not be stopped. Someone who had arrived at the same conclusion appeared from a place where they had never met.

GCHQ was a state. They stopped it for twenty-four years. It actually stayed stopped.

The only difference is the magnitude of power held by the party doing the hiding. For something of value to remain buried, there must be a force suppressing it. And only the state possesses that kind of power.

Therefore, something that is stalled simply because one person is holding onto it is not being suppressed. It is only stopped because no one else has arrived at the same place. To return to Ogburn and Thomas’s phrasing: either the problem isn’t clear, there is no one who wants to solve it, or the tools don’t exist yet.

Things that are interesting and valuable either spread on their own, or they are things that must not be made public in the first place. The state in between those two does not last very long.

When people say, “They’re doing something interesting, but it’s not getting out there,” usually, they aren’t doing anything interesting.