While the child maintenance administration system was envisaged as a way of saving money, its own price tag has risen since it was conceived.
One of the volunteer guides, who asked not to be named, added quietly: "I think we can agree Wolf Hall might be a mixed blessing!" Like most old houses, Hampton Court, celebrating its 500th birthday, has been much altered since it was conceived and built by Henry and cardinal Wolsey, which is why Wolf Hall had to use so many different locations in place of, or as well as, the originals.
This is especially true of its pinnacle motor car, redesigned only eight times since it was conceived by Sir Henry Royce in 1925.
If the Internet has become ubiquitous, it's only because in the over 50 years since it was conceived as a technology by military scientists, its use has been woven into the fabric of our daily lives.
LF That Hard Day's Night should still be a movie milestone 50 years after it was first released is astounding, since it was conceived as a $150,000 loss-leader that would recoup its budget from US album sales.
This view has gained many adherents since it was conceived, a century and a half ago, by Charles Darwin.
The pool had grown steadily since it was conceived in the early 1970s at the suggestion of Justice Powell, who prized efficiency.
Long a favorite project of civic organizations, developers and politicians, a $1 billion proposal to create a grand annex to Pennsylvania Station, North America's busiest transit hub, has often moved like a creaky locomotive since it was conceived nearly 25 years ago.
Marooned on the edge of New Street, like a great tanker cast adrift, the building has been a catalogue of catastrophes since it was conceived in the 1990s as an experimental home for interactive digital art.
James Morison, the ocean and climate expert from the University of Washington, Seattle, who has run the North Pole Environmental Observatory project since it was conceived in 2000, told me a week or so ago that the ice conditions were still iffy.
