Chapter 11. If You Wish To Invent

The inventor does not differ markedly from any other idea producer. Merely in some cases his work is more complex, his risks often greater, and so some practical comments concerning his procedure may be appropriate.

It has been said that the greatest room in the world is the room for improvement. It is probably this fact that motivates inventors. Not that they are averse to making money from their ideas, but they do seem to go about it the hard way.

The world is full of all kinds of contrivances, big machines and little gadgets which are far from perfect. They simply remain in use because no one bothers to correct their faults. Just because they were once an "improvement" on something, people are prone to accept them as they are, with whatever defects come with them at no extra charge.

Yet the person who is looking for a bright idea can almost always find something to improve.

At this time I am not talking about the emergency business idea that has to be produced on schedule to fill a specific need. The invention type of idea discussed in this chapter is more of the abstract, indefinite, any-time-will-do affair in which one starts from scratch-and scratches.

Let us take a simple idea that anyone could have had, and see how it developed-into the collar industry. An industrious housewife had the unpleasant chore of washing a continuous number of her husband's shirts. There seemed no end to the job. She decided to see if she couldn't improve her lot. She turned an observant eye t the problem and noticed that the collar became soiled faster than the shirt, and that she often had to wash whole shirt when only the collar needed it. Out of that observation came the idea of separating them and washing each as required. And out of the idea, in turn, came the then new industry of separate collars.

You see here that the inventive process begins with critical attitude that will take a problem of any size am dissect it into its component parts. Instead of getting alone; in the same old way with the day-to-day discomforts, some one looks into the matter, studies it without prejudice, reasons soundly, and comes up with a newer and better method. Almost all the machines we use are crude and inefficient compared to what they could be. It is said that locomotives use only eight per cent of the energy in the coal required to move them. Many motor-moved appliance are over-noisy, to say the least, and numerous other ill beset the things we use. Often these ills are far more basic than superficial inconveniences like noise. They may affect actual efficiency and safety as well. People who will put their minds to improving such things can find many opportunities to engage in constructive work of widespread benefit and resulting personal satisfaction.

What about accidental ideas? They may be all right a far as they go, but it is certainly not reliable to go out and wait for an accident. If one bumps into you, fine. It's certainly a plus value, but it doesn't make you an inventor o an idea producer of any other kind. Many so-called accidental inventions are not properly so designated. They are made possible by the trained observation and intelligent deductions of the person who sizes up the given situation.

Typical of such ideas are the discovery of aniline dyes by Perkins. He was looking for something totally different - an improved quinine, if I remember. Then this turned up as he was throwing a disappointing but beautiful purple mixture into the drain. But he had the wisdom to stop throwing it down the drain, and to analyze it and investigate how it happened, how to do it again, what it was good for and all the other things that made it of value.

The same procedure occurred when Roentgen discovered the X-ray; and when a bit of sulphur dropped into the rubber mixture which Goodyear was working over after a disheartening attempt over a period of years to vulcanize rubber. This gave us the multitudinous valuable product of this substance which would have been impossible without the "accident".

Sometimes the accidental idea brings a fortune to the person who gets it, as was the case with a man who was waiting for a street car and idly picked up a hairpin at his foot. As he waited for the car, he played with the pin, bending it around his fingers. The idea entered his head that papers could be held together if it were properly bent. So we have paper clips, and he made a fortune, though he had never invented anything before.

But there are few inventions which a sudden inspiration reveals as a perfect thing. The inventor who takes his vocation seriously, will search for a problem that challenges his interest, and work at it until he finds a solution that satisfies him. Often the creative thinker stops when he says, "I have an idea." That is the time to study it, develop it, prove it, either actually if the cost is not too great, or theoretically in every last detail. An idea is only an abstraction until it is reduced to practice.

Many people in deciding to invent or improve something endeavor to imitate exactly the process as found in nature or in previous practice. The creative thinker leaves imitation behind him and tries a different way. Thus someone cites the fact that the person who made the first carpe sweeper did not try to incorporate the motion of human arms brushing a broom over the floor. He developed a new principle-that of rotating brushes which would automatically force the dust up into a small receptacle. Similarly the man who wished to improve the carpet sweeper perfected another new system-setting air to do the job of the brushes and giving us the vacuum cleaner.

Have you been afraid you don't know enough to make an invention? It was Morse, a painter of portraits, who invented the telegraph, and another artist, Robert Fulton, who invented the steamboat. Often the mind that is uninfluenced by precedent has a better chance of succeeding than one who knows all the difficulties and has been told by the experts that "it can't be done." It seems even people who have enough confidence in an inventor to put some money into his venture do so fearing his failure. The men who loaned Fulton money stipulated that he should not publish their names, for they were so sure of failure that they expected nothing could come to them but ridicule.

Discouragement is one of the difficulties, which inventors and many other creative thinkers have to overcome. It is so easy for the average person to stand in the bylines and make fun of a sincere original effort. Imagine what people said when Edison claimed a plate made of metal could talk like a human voice. When he invented the phonograph, the least objectionable thing he was called was a clever ventriloquist. People "knew" that iron ships would sink; that the earth was flat; that it had to take eighteen days to paint a new automobile and thus hold up the assembly line into a fine jam-until someone tried another finish.

It is odd that Edison himself was guilty of discouraging other inventors at every turn. Instead of seeing things from their side of the fence, since they had so much in common, he often ridiculed ideas that he did not originate. But he did at least have unbounded faith in his own, even though they were much more far-fetched than what an outsider might suggest.

That is what the inventor or other creative thinker needs to keep all the time despite obstacles and discouragement-his faith, for the difficulties are of considerable variety. A reasonable argument against some new inventions is that they may cause unemployment. In the 16th century a Council ordered the inventor of a weaving machine to be strangled to prevent his machine from causing beggary among hand weavers. And in England, long after, rioters broke up the early cotton machinery because it was considered an enemy of honest workers. Today we have automation, strikes, featherbedding and so on.

A distinction must be made in lands of inventions. Some simple inventions in the form of novelties may be immediately adopted and have a vogue of but one or two years-a matter which the inventor may fully understand in advance.

The other and far more important class of inventions may not come into use despite all efforts of the patentee, during the seventeen year life of the patent. Among these are those of a highly original and fundamental type which may form a new departure from previous and well established practice. Or again, inventions that are ahead of their time and require the art to grow up to a point where they can be successfully utilized; or those that from their very nature require the investment and risk of a large amount of money before a practical demonstration of the advantages claimed by the inventor can be had; or such inventions as can be used only by some existing monopoly, like a government railroad, telegraph or telephone corporation, whose interests or fancied interests may He in throttling or shelving the invention.

Fortunately for civilization, there are always some inventors who are willing to be martyrs for an idea or a cause. None of the difficulties mentioned seem to have any effect upon their morale and stamina to keep going on. The awe they may feel at the idea of patents, and the disgust they may later have at the workings, non-workings and inept workings of the Patent Office will not faze them.

But to make money at inventing may require a compromise between helping out civilization and helping out your immediate family with your brains. If you're in it for money, you will avoid these long-time projects with all their complexities. At its best and easiest, invention requires concentration, patience and some technical knowledge of the problems involved. There should certainly be in addition enough business sense to protect one's financial interest. It also requires action after the invention is made. Every time you go to a dime store, you can see little ingenious gadgets that you realize are so obvious that you could have done them yourself. The fact remains that you didn't. To make money on an idea means acting upon it.

It also means sticking to fairly simple things that people will accept. It means thinking of something that won't be too hard to manufacture or too expensive to sell or too hard to use. To be commercially successful an invention should accomplish one or more of the following: save time, lower costs, sell easier, do more, work better. Inventors do sometimes gain quick wealth but only provided they have a practical knowledge of the business aspects of manufacturing, promoting and selling the invention in addition to the special requisites of making the invention in the first place. This world is a very materialistic, practical and hard one, and it will not go for an inventor's brainwave unless it fills a want.

For all the technical cleverness of inventors, they do manage to devote their energies to some strange things. One man came out with a motor-driven corkscrew. Another sewed a ring of sponges around a hat brim or umbrella, so the rain would be absorbed there and not drip down on him. So take a warning from these, and when you get a new idea, think up every reason you can think of as to why you should forget it. If you then still think it's good, 50 ahead. There are enough things in our daily lives which lave faults to challenge ingenuity, and which fill the requirements of a potentially successful improvement. There are, for example, tea kettles whose handles become too hot; salt shakers that don't shake salt; egg beaters that are hard to wash; smelly ashtrays. You go on from there.

It is wise to keep to fields which are in the public eye. Direct your work to specific companies by improving their present wares or by providing them with competitive products which they can produce with a minimum of expense. Or at least before you make a heavy investment in time, money, experiments and hard work, take into consideration the difficulties we have enumerated, and outwit them by avoiding the roads they travel on.

Another thing, if you want to invent and don't know where to begin, there are a number of books which make you a present of plenty of practical needs to explore, and which prove very stimulating indeed. Once you have worked out a good idea, manufacturers will be interested. They don't care who you are, where you were born, or how much education you have.

Your inventive powers depend on your previously acquired impressions. All artistic, scientific and technical inventions are in essence the production in new forms of mental pictures previously engraved on the brain through the senses. The more the mind is stored with these pictures the more material it has at its disposal for the production of original work.

Mere possession of a multitude of impressions, however is not in itself sufficient for the creation of a new work Invention involves the painstaking use of analysis, dissection, comparison and assortment of ideas in order to produce an original synthesis which, while borrowing some thing from every impression examined, will not reproduce any of them in its original form. In other words, invention is the product of an immense amount of thought. That is why great artists, scholars and inventors sometimes appear absentminded. They are not so; in fact, it is just that their minds are so deeply concentrated on one subject that they are oblivious to every other.

Creative thinking can be enormously valuable even if it is not inspired but is dug out by deliberate conscientious effort. Indeed this factor is the dependable one, and the inspired thinker himself must use it if he would really convert his inspiration to use.

"How did you discover the law of gravitation?" someone asked Newton. "By thinking about it all the time," he replied. Or, as Alexander Hamilton put it, "All the genius have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought."

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