The humble jerry can.

Have you ever wondered why it's called a jerry can? Early in WWII, Allied fuel cans were flimsy tins that leaked and needed tools and a funnel to pour. The Germans had quietly perfected theirs: a tough 20-litre steel can, welded in two halves, with three handles so one person could carry two, an air pocket so it floated, and a spout that poured cleanly without spilling a drop. The Allies got hold of a few, copied them exactly, and named it the jerry can (Jerry being the wartime nickname for a German).

The Compaq clean room.

IBM had the whole PC market locked up, because it owned the BIOS, the guarded scrap of code that boots a computer up. Copy that legally and the monopoly was broken. So Compaq used a "clean room": one team studied IBM's secret code and wrote up what it did; a second team, sealed off so they never saw a line of it, rebuilt it from that description alone. That method became the blueprint for the entire PC-clone industry, and started an arms race: firms now scramble their code like spaghetti to make copying near-impossible.

The missile that flew home.

In 1958 a Taiwanese jet fired a top-secret American Sidewinder missile at a Chinese MiG. It struck, but didn't explode, lodging in the tail as the MiG limped back to base. The missile was handed to Soviet engineers, who reverse-engineered it so precisely that when US experts later examined the copy, they found the parts were interchangeable with the original.

The one to remember

Don't start with a blank page. Start with something that already works.

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