Reviving Old Ideas

I had a lot of electronic designs published, and won various prizes for innovation. An interesting thing about my innovations, however, is that quite a few of them were forgotten ideas I revived. One example was my Thunderstorm Monitor (still out there) which revived a 1965 idea of measuring atmospheric charge -- while modern monitors tell you that lightning will occur when it has already occurred -- which doesn't seem like the brightest idea! In fact I revived an 1821 idea which I found in a book of the 1800s -- a simple coil which detected temperature changes.