>Henry Ford had ordered a dynamo for one of his plants. The dynamo didn’t work, and not even the manufacturers could figure out why. A Ford employee told his boss that von Neumann was “the smartest man in America,” so Ford called von Neumann and asked him to come out and take a look at the dynamo.
>Von Neumann came, looked at the schematics, walked around the dynamo, then took out a pencil. He marked a line on the outside casing and said, “If you’ll go in and cut the coil here, the dynamo will work fine.”
>They cut the coil, and the dynamo did work fine. Ford then told von Neumann to send him a bill for the work. Von Neumann sent Ford a bill for $5,000. Ford was astounded — $5,000 was a lot in the 1940s — and asked von Neumann for an itemised account. Here’s what he submitted:
>Drawing a line with the pencil: $1
>Knowing where to draw the line with the pencil: $4,999
>Ford paid the bill.
From: https://superintelligence.fandom.com/wiki/John_von_Neumann_(...