Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Alexander Graham Bell owned the telephone only because his patent application landed on the examiner's desk a few hours before Gray's. The first kind of creation was sui generis; the second could be re-created in a warehouse outside Seattle.
- from The New Yorker, Annals of Innovation
In the Air - Who says big ideas are rare? by Malcolm Gladwell. May 12, 2008
