Wilbur Wright squeezed the corners of an empty inner-tube box at the counter of his bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, in the summer of 1899. He pinched two diagonal corners at one end and the opposite pair at the other, and the top and bottom of the box bent in opposite directions.

Birds make the same twist. The next spring Wilbur wrote to the engineer Octave Chanute that buzzards regained their balance "by a torsion of the tips of the wings." Cables could pinch a pair of wings the way his fingers pinched the box.

In Washington, Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institution, held $50,000 of War Department money to build a flying machine that could carry a man. His unpiloted steam models had flown more than half a mile over the Potomac in 1896, so he scaled them up and gave the big one a 52-horsepower engine. On October 7, 1903, the Great Aerodrome left its catapult on a houseboat and dropped into the river, in one reporter's words, "like a handful of mortar." On December 8 it folded in the air and fell again. Both times, rescuers pulled the pilot, Charles Manly, out of the Potomac.

Nine days later, on the sand at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, the brothers took turns lying face down on the lower wing of the Wright Flyer. On the fourth flight, Wilbur stayed aloft for 59 seconds over 852 feet. The Flyer's engine made about twelve horsepower. The brothers' whole program since 1900, travel and all, had cost a little less than $1,000.

Langley had bought power. Wilbur had started from a different question, the one about what a flying machine had to do that no machine yet could, and the answer had sat in his hands, in cardboard, four years before.

The Why

First Principles Thinking breaks a problem down to the facts any solution must respect, then builds from those facts alone. Aristotle called such a starting point an archē, which W. D. Ross's translation of the Metaphysics renders as "the first point from which a thing either is or comes to be or is known."

Its opposite is reasoning by analogy: something worked before, so a bigger or newer copy should work again. Analogy is cheap and usually good enough, and Langley ran on it. Smithsonian magazine puts it in one line: "To build a full-size aircraft, Langley simply scaled up the smaller models." The models had flown with nobody aboard, and the full-size machine inherited their controls, a tail that moved only up and down and a rudder set in the middle of the frame. Its pilot had almost nothing to steer with. Analogy breaks when the new problem carries a requirement the old one never faced, and it breaks late, because the copy looks like progress until the day it meets the river.

The same split runs through music. The composer Harry Partch treated the piano's twelve equal steps to the octave as a habit of one instrument, went back to the whole-number ratios of a vibrating string, and came out with a scale of 43 tones to the octave. Standard instruments could not play it, so he built his own. His Cloud-Chamber Bowls began as Pyrex carboys that the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley had thrown away.

Every medium hands its newcomers a kit of forms, from the chapter to the rectangular frame. Each form began as somebody's answer to somebody else's problem. First Principles Thinking asks what your problem requires and treats the rest of the kit as optional. The hard part is seeing the kit at all, because it arrives looking like the medium itself.

The How

The method runs in five moves.

  1. State the fundamental goal. Write it as an effect on a person and leave the method out. Walter Murch, the editor of Apocalypse Now, ranked what a cut must do in his book In the Blink of an Eye: emotion comes first at 51 percent of the decision, then story at 23 and rhythm at 10, and three visual concerns share the rest. Write your version in one sentence, such as "The reader should dread the brother's next lie." Then cross out every word that names a tool or a format.
  2. List your assumptions. Write down every rule the project obeys without being told: novels have chapters, and photographs are rectangles. In 1995 Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg did this for cinema and published the Dogme 95 "Vow of Chastity," ten rules that banned studio lighting and any music laid over the picture. Vinterberg's Festen, shot under those rules, won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998. Once a habit sits on paper, you can test it.
  3. Verify each assumption. For each line, find where the rule came from, then sort it: fact, convention, or fix for a problem that has gone away. The first Kodak, sold in 1888, made round pictures, because a lens throws a circle of light; the rectangle is a crop set by the film or the sensor. The test cuts deepest at the numbers everyone trusts. The Wrights' 1901 glider, built from the standard lift equation and the best published figures, gave about a third of the promised lift, and on the way home Wilbur told Orville that men would not fly in a thousand years. That autumn the brothers built a wind tunnel, a wooden box six feet long with a belt-driven fan and balances made of hacksaw blades and bicycle spokes. After testing about 200 wing shapes, they caught the error in a coefficient the field had used since the 1700s. The accepted value was 0.005, and the Wright measurements gave about 0.0033.
  4. Identify what remains. The surviving list is short. In a September 1901 speech in Chicago, Wilbur sorted the difficulties of flight into three classes: the wings, the power, and "the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight." The first two were "to a certain extent solved." Balance was the requirement left standing, and "when this one feature has been worked out," he said, "the age of flying machines will have arrived." Your list might read: the story must build pressure and release it, and the audience's attention runs out. Everything else goes on a second sheet labeled choices.
  5. Build your solution from the foundations. Take the requirement the standard form serves worst, build one rough version around it, and expect the result to look strange. B. S. Johnson set out to write about the death of his friend Tony Tillinghast in the order memory brings it back, and a bound book fixes the order. So The Unfortunates arrived in 1969 as a box of 27 unbound sections. The first and last are fixed, and the reader shuffles the 25 between them. In 1982 David Hockney complained that photography shows the world "from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops," and only "for a split second." By that May he had built about 150 pictures from Polaroids, and each print caught a separate glance at a separate moment.

Tips and Tricks

  • Ask “why” five times in a row for any process you're using. Each answer strips off a layer of habit. By the fifth you usually reach a physical fact, or a reason that expired years ago.
  • Borrow principles from other fields and leave their methods at home. Wilbur took the buzzard's twisting wingtip and built it in wood and muslin, and he left the feathers to the bird.
  • Write your assumptions in permanent marker on paper. Pin the sheet above your desk before you start step 3, so every rule stays in view while you trace where it came from. Strike each one that fails with a single thick line and leave the words readable. A novelist who sees "novels have chapters" crossed out on the wall each morning has a harder time drifting back to it.
  • Build a "necessary elements" list for your medium. Remove one element at a time until the work stops working. The last element you removed belongs on the list.
  • Test your principles against extreme constraints. Price the project at one tenth of the budget, then at ten times the audience. A principle survives both versions, and a method usually survives one.

Mistakes to Avoid

  • Stopping at first-order questions. "Why does this scene exist?" produces a better scene. "Why does a reader need information in this order?" produces a better book. Stop at the first and you spend months reshuffling scenes while the scene itself goes untested.
  • Confusing principles with preferences. A clean, minimal page is a taste. Hierarchy is a requirement, because a reader must find the headline before the fine print. When your taste fights the stated goal, the taste goes on the second sheet.
  • Rebuilding the same structure from components. You take a conventional novel apart and reassemble a conventional novel with the chapters renamed. The 1903 Flyer put its pilot face down between twisting wings and set its elevator out in front.
  • Ignoring the limits your domain enforces. In tracking experiments since Zenon Pylyshyn and R. W. Storm's 1988 study, viewers usually follow about four moving targets at once, and a fight scene with seven moving threads asks more than the eye can give. The Wrights kept the lift equation and replaced only the number that failed.
  • Using first principles to justify what you already planned. If every principle you derive approves the plan you walked in with, you have written a defense brief. The method earns its cost when it takes something from you, the way the wind tunnel took the published figures the Wrights had built two gliders on.

Why Copies Fade

By July 1600, the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome held Caravaggio's first major public commission, two large canvases on the life of Saint Matthew. In The Calling of Saint Matthew, a tax collector sits at a table in a dim room as a single beam of light crosses the wall toward him. Caravaggio's apostles and pilgrims had laborers' faces and bare feet, and the churches pushed back. In 1602 the clergy of San Luigi rejected his first altarpiece of Saint Matthew for showing the saint as an unlearned peasant. The Carmelites of Santa Maria della Scala refused his Death of the Virgin, and the writer Giulio Mancini claimed the model for Mary had been a prostitute. Collectors bought what the priests turned away, and the Duke of Mantua took the Death of the Virgin in 1607 on the advice of Peter Paul Rubens.

Questioned in a libel suit in 1603, Caravaggio told the court that a good painter is one "who knows how to paint well and imitate natural things well." The dark rooms and the single light serve that definition.

Then the copies came. For about two decades after his death in 1610, painters from Rome to Utrecht reproduced the black backgrounds and the hard, single-source light, and the Utrecht painters revived the cardsharps and fortune-tellers Caravaggio himself had abandoned. They copied the answer and skipped the question. The Roman vogue faded after 1623, and the Utrecht school was finished by about 1630. The principle traveled further, and Martin Scorsese has named Caravaggio as an influence on Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

That history gives a test for new work. Work built by analogy can be described as an old thing with something added, and anyone can copy it from outside. Work built from a first principle has to be explained from inside, and a copyist who skips the explanation gets the surface and loses the reason.

The Wright bicycle shop held two boxes that counted. The first was a cardboard inner-tube box. The second was wood, with a fan at one end and a balance of hacksaw blades and bicycle spokes inside, and it showed that a number the whole field trusted was wrong. Langley had a 52-horsepower engine, a houseboat, a catapult, and $50,000 of War Department money, and twice his machine went into the Potomac with a man aboard. By then the cardboard box had long since done its work. It had sat bent at the corners on a counter in Dayton in the summer of 1899, and the whole Flyer was folded inside it.