The story
Coined as “Well, back to the old drawing board,” as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Arno of The New Yorker on March 1, 1941, depicting a delighted engineer walking away from a crashed plane.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
back to the drawing board
Today it means: Indicates that one must try a different strategy in order to achieve some goal following the failure of a recent attempt. Full definition →