Back in the Industrial Revolution, the original age of disruption—when the spinning jenny inspired the same kind of wonderment as Google does today, and the self-winding clock held the promise of SpaceX—a little-known English translator named C. R. Prinsep encountered a problem germane to his time. He had been commissioned to work on a hot book about modern markets by Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist who had achieved Thomas Piketty-like fame amid the Napoleonic age. But as Prinsep dutifully plowed through the manuscript, he found himself unable to pinpoint a suitable English word to describe the new type of worker at the heart of his subject’s thesis—the do-it-all visionary of the day, the one with the temerity to guide an idea from conception to success; the plucky upstart attempting to overthrow the old order. Or, as he would later write, “the master-manufacturer in manufacture, the farmer in agriculture, and the merchant in commerce; and generally in all three branches, the person who takes upon himself the immediate responsibility, risk, and conduct of a concern.” Short of the proper synonym, Prinsep settled for an apt replacement. He called these people “adventurers.”
