Inventions are often born out of dissatisfaction. And serendipity often plays a role here too: you are looking for the solution to a problem but find the answer to something completely different.

This was the case with the Geo: an important innovation on the original football. In the 1980s, Frank Schaper used to fly a lot for his work as R&D manager at KLM. Leafing through The Flying Dutchman, the inflight magazine, he noticed that the flight paths were always drawn with arcs. Why not straight lines with the distances added? This idea stayed with him, and he realised that the existing sphere shape of the globe could not be flattened onto a surface without causing distortions. Frank went in search of a solution and, using a football consisting of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, he projected the world onto 32 cards, pentagonal or hexagonal and loose-leaf. These could be placed and pushed together so that a connection could always be made between any two points A and B on Earth. And measured with a ruler.

But the proportions used for a football showed that the scale of both cards was different. That was because the pentagons and hexagons of the football pattern were not the same distance from the centre. After months of calculations, he came up with specific ratios, which finally provided a solution.

Frank showed the result to his brother Bert, a graphic artist and photographer. And together they came to the surprising conclusion that the football should not be perfectly round. So they did not come up with one, but two inventions. They approached ID-NL, a Rotterdam-based company that helps and supports inventors with commercialisation. And because of ID-NL's long collaboration with NLO, the Schaper brothers came to the table with a patent attorney, who then drafted 2 patent applications. First for the football, because that seemed more commercially attractive. In July 1992, the application was submitted to the Patent Office. A year later, in November 1993, the application for the world map system followed.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

There was a lot of interest, especially for the football. In 1994, the FIFA World Cup was hosted by the US. Nike, an important sponsor of all major sports like athletics and basketball, had concluded that football was missing from that list. So, Nike invested in developing the 'Geo', the name that the Schaper brothers had chosen for their round football, derived from geography and geometry. And in 1996, the Nike-Geo, 'El balon magico', was introduced in La Primera Division, the Spanish premier league. Football clubs PSV and Inter Milan, as well as the Dutch national team and the Brazilian national team also played with the Geo. Millions have since been sold all over the world.

The Geo also scored in the English Premier League. As Life After Football, an internet platform, posted on its website: “From David Beckham's memorable free kicks to Jaap Stam's hard tackles, this ball has been through it all. The greatest Premier League goal of all time came off the foot of Dennis Bergkamp. This was the goal against Newcastle United in the 2001-2002 season. He came one-on-one with the Newcastle United keeper with a fabulous pass and slid the Nike Geo low into the right-hand corner. And so it can be said that the Dutch and the Nike Geo are a golden combination.”

And the world map, or 'flat globe' that started it all? Unfortunately, the market has not yet shown any interest in this.