A Trump adviser recently sketched on a serviette an ill-conceived plan to partition Libya. His idea was ‘the worst solution’, but other impromptu scribbles have proved far more influential

Writing anything on the back of a napkin sounds impractical – they’re tricky to write on without tearing, and which side is the back? – but some of the biggest ideas in business, science, politics and showbiz began as doodles on the damp rag from underneath a cocktail glass.

This week, the Guardian reported that President Trump’s adviser Sebastian Gorka had recently suggested dividing Libya into three, and that he sketched his plan on a napkin to show to a European diplomat. (The diplomat reportedly informed Gorka – an aspiring presidential envoy to Libya who has faced scrutiny for his past ties to the Hungarian far-right – that his idea was “the worst”.)

It’s not the first time the White House has taken its cue from a scribble on a serviette. In 1974, during a dinner with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – then aides to the Ford administration – economist Arthur Laffer drew a simple graph on a napkin to illustrate his argument that, at a certain point, increased taxation leads to decreasing government revenues. Named “the Laffer Curve”, the graph was later used to justify President Reagan’s “trickle-down” economic policies.

The idea for the world’s most successful budget airline came about in 1966, when Rollin King, owner of a small Texas commuter carrier, was pitching his plan for a new, low-cost service to his lawyer, Herb Kelleher. He drew the prospective route between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio on a napkin. The following year, the pair launched Southwest Airlines. (In 2007, however, King cast doubt on this origin story.)

Farrington B, the boxy font still used on every credit card, was first drawn on a napkin at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York by inventor David Shepard, while physicist Paul Lauterbur claimed to have drafted his design for the MRI scanner on napkins at a Pittsburgh hamburger joint in 1971. Three decades later, his work won him a Nobel prize.

The Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week was supposedly conceived during a brainstorming session at a bar in the mid-1980s. Shark Week’s executive producer Brooke Runnette told the Atlantic in 2012 that the notion behind the world’s longest-running cable TV event “was definitely scribbled down on the back of a cocktail napkin”.

Then there’s Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who says he wrote A Few Good Men, the play that would become his first movie, on cocktail napkins when he worked as a bartender at a Broadway theatre during a production of La Cage aux Folles. Elsewhere in showbiz, when four Pixar bigwigs met for a celebratory lunch in 1994 as they wrapped production on Toy Story, they casually sketched – on napkins, of course – the ideas for four more films: A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc, Finding Nemo and WALL-E.

Makes you wonder why these people don’t carry notebooks.