The philosopher John Stuart Mill saw a modicum of nuttiness as good for creativity. Writing in 1859, he declared:
"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained." And, of course, one can find persuasive examples by the thousand: in his later years, for instance, the poet W.H. Auden would paddle around Oxford in his carpet slippers; and two centuries before Dr Samuel Johnson entertained the coffee houses of London with his zany views on 18th-century life. Jonas Hanway, too, did his bit for the virtues Mill outlined. He lived in London in the 18th century, and introduced something which no man had ever done before: he habitually used an umbrella to protect himself from rain.
Umbrellas are believed to have made their first appearance in these parts just before 1600, and during the 17th and early 18th centuries the umbrella - or parasol - became an essential accessory for the well-dressed lady; it was desirable to protect oneself from the effects of summer sunshine, and to maintain intact a fashionably pale complexion.
By the 1660s, when the action of Robinson Crusoe takes place, the hero begins to see another use for parasols: "I spent a great deal of time and pains to make me an umbrella.
"I was indeed in great want of one, and had a great mind to make one. I had seen them made in the Brazils, where they are very useful in the great heats; and I felt the heats every jot as great here, and greater too, being nearer the equinox.
"Besides, as I was obliged to be much abroad, it was a most useful thing to me, as well for the rains as the heats."
And in due course, womenfolk, too, would use one, now and then, to keep away the rain: by 1710, Jonathan Swift could describe how The tuck'd up seamstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oiled umbrella's sides.
But no self-respecting man would carry an umbrella in the civilised world until Hanway introduced the custom.
Around 1750, to the great amusement of his fellow citizens, he began to carry an umbrella to ward off the rain.
His idiosyncrasy apparently caused great hilarity in the streets of his native city at the time.
It was another 30 years before the practice became accepted as anything like normal, but at least Hanway lived to see his practical innovation generally adopted; umbrellas were a common sight in the streets of London by the time he died in 1786.