Back to the Drawing Board
"To start over after a plan or attempt has failed."
Unusually for an idiom, this one can be traced to a single, precisely dated cartoon. On 1 March 1941, cartoonist Peter Arno published a drawing in The New Yorker showing a crashed military plane surrounded by ground crew, while an engineer calmly walks away with a roll of blueprints under his arm, captioned "Well, back to the old drawing board." The image resonated powerfully during the Second World War, when so many wartime projects failed and had to be redesigned from scratch, and the phrase was appearing regularly in American newspapers by 1947.
Sources: Peter Arno, cartoon caption, The New Yorker (1 March 1941); wartime popularisation documented in wordhistories.net.
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