Key elements of creativity and invention
Just below is a short slide show on Creativity and Invention.
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Here are articles highlighting various
aspects of the invention process.
aspects of the invention process.
INVENTING BY ANALOGY
By Larry Kilham
Perhaps I can make the invention process less abstract by telling about my own invention experience for what eventually became a multimillion dollar product.
I was more or less happily plodding along as the partial owner and general manager of a plastics machinery company in New Jersey. I felt that I should develop a new product for quality control during plastics production. It was a gnawing feeling. I believed that there had to be a way to see the impurities in plastics, called gels. They are in all plastic products, and they can cause a great deal of frustration by the damage they can cause, ranging from pinhole leaks in milk jugs to runs in stockings. I knew that the market for such an invention was potentially huge.
I knew that most plastics processing is done by machinery as part of the extruding or molding process. The logical place in the process to detect plastic gels would therefore be within this machinery. But knowing that I still didn’t know how you would you see the gels, even in fairly clear molten plastic, because of their small size and transparency. A gel is usually smaller than a pinhead and is floating around in a very hostile environment of high pressures and temperatures, strong chemicals and fumes, and other obstacles. It needed more thought on my part.
I had only a vague idea about how to “see” the gels in molten plastic. An optical approach seemed most promising. What I needed was some sort of very robust probe that would allow for a remote vision on a micro scale into molten plastic. What I was considering was like finding a way to use field glasses to look into a live volcano. It was a challenge, and I set out to solve it.
Then one of those little miracles of inspiration happened. While walking at dawn in the mountainous countryside in upstate New York, I chanced to see dew drops glittering on a spider’s web. That’s when it hit me. The light was sparkling from the dew drops like the sparkles of light from a chandelier. Sunlight shining from the other side of the tiny dew drops in them to shine brilliantly as points of light even in the considerable early morning mist. Furthermore, the vibration of the dew drops in the gentle morning breezes, made them shimmer and glitter, so that they stood out even more from their background. This “shimmering” insight would be the key to succeeding in the product development. As an engineer I saw that an electro-optical concept had presented itself. I could now develop an instrument that would allow tiny impurities to be seen in murky molten plastic. It could not only detect gels but probably count them as well. I was elated by my discovery and anxious to get to work on it. I along with co-workers eventually received three patents on this and related process monitoring technologies.
Based on my experience, my list of things to do when you invent should be:
By Larry Kilham
Perhaps I can make the invention process less abstract by telling about my own invention experience for what eventually became a multimillion dollar product.
I was more or less happily plodding along as the partial owner and general manager of a plastics machinery company in New Jersey. I felt that I should develop a new product for quality control during plastics production. It was a gnawing feeling. I believed that there had to be a way to see the impurities in plastics, called gels. They are in all plastic products, and they can cause a great deal of frustration by the damage they can cause, ranging from pinhole leaks in milk jugs to runs in stockings. I knew that the market for such an invention was potentially huge.
I knew that most plastics processing is done by machinery as part of the extruding or molding process. The logical place in the process to detect plastic gels would therefore be within this machinery. But knowing that I still didn’t know how you would you see the gels, even in fairly clear molten plastic, because of their small size and transparency. A gel is usually smaller than a pinhead and is floating around in a very hostile environment of high pressures and temperatures, strong chemicals and fumes, and other obstacles. It needed more thought on my part.
I had only a vague idea about how to “see” the gels in molten plastic. An optical approach seemed most promising. What I needed was some sort of very robust probe that would allow for a remote vision on a micro scale into molten plastic. What I was considering was like finding a way to use field glasses to look into a live volcano. It was a challenge, and I set out to solve it.
Then one of those little miracles of inspiration happened. While walking at dawn in the mountainous countryside in upstate New York, I chanced to see dew drops glittering on a spider’s web. That’s when it hit me. The light was sparkling from the dew drops like the sparkles of light from a chandelier. Sunlight shining from the other side of the tiny dew drops in them to shine brilliantly as points of light even in the considerable early morning mist. Furthermore, the vibration of the dew drops in the gentle morning breezes, made them shimmer and glitter, so that they stood out even more from their background. This “shimmering” insight would be the key to succeeding in the product development. As an engineer I saw that an electro-optical concept had presented itself. I could now develop an instrument that would allow tiny impurities to be seen in murky molten plastic. It could not only detect gels but probably count them as well. I was elated by my discovery and anxious to get to work on it. I along with co-workers eventually received three patents on this and related process monitoring technologies.
Based on my experience, my list of things to do when you invent should be:
- Put your mind in invention space.
- Look at all system variables whether understood or not.
- Be on constant alert for the unexpected insight or analogy.
- Look for the connectedness of everything.
- Look for a simple interrelated design solution.
- Do more experiments to improve your insights and understanding.
- Don’t worry about what others think. Pursue the vision.
NOTICING
How Creative Ideas And Inventions Start
By James L. Breese, Jr.
My uncle, James L. Breese, Jr., who was a gifted thermodynamic systems engineer, and whose father received 136 basic patents in oil burners, wrote to me:
I have always felt that creativity and discovery arise largely from a talent for noticing odd things. You also allude to this in your mention of noticing how tiny dew drops sparkled on a spider's web leading to the “aha” moment of your polymer gel detector invention. Any number of people had seen swinging lamps and chandeliers before Galileo noticed that the period of swing was constant regardless of amplitude (within limits). How many researchers hunched over microscopes in that dusty London lab had impatiently cleaned pollen and fungus from their Petri dishes before Alexander Fleming noticed that fungus was devouring bacteria in the dish?
After the discoveries of Faraday and Maxwell, everyone knew that moving a magnet near a wire produced the same effect as moving the wire near the magnet, but it took Einstein to see that this odd occurrence ruled out the notion of absolute motion. Willis Carrier, while waiting for a train to arrive on a foggy night noticed that water drops were forming where wisps of fog swept over rain puddles. He instantly had the counter-intuitive idea that moisture could be extracted from air by passing the air stream through a water spray that was below the dew point temperature of the air. He applied that to solving the problem of high humidity in printing plants and subsequently founding the modern air conditioning industry. Perhaps the greatest noticer of all time was Charles Darwin who saw important differences among plants and animals that countless observers before him had apparently never noticed.
FOSTERING INVENTION
Talk at The MIT Club of New Mexico
Santa Fe, NM, December 7, 2002
By Larry Kilham
Imagination is more important than knowledge
- Albert Einstein
Whenever civilization was bogged down and the good life seemed over, it seems that major innovations provided a rebirth giving people more efficiency, variety, and, importantly, hope. Ever since I worked in MIT's famous building 20 in the 60's as a graduate student researching artificial intelligence and other neat stuff, I have wondered about the process of innovation as it happens and how it relates to history. Building 20, incidentally, was a WW II temporary building that was a hotbed of innovation among other reasons because due to its cheap and forgettable construction, you could drill holes anywhere, pull piping and wires, set up machinery with no fear of recrimination and with the hope of a potential breakthrough. The building of course was torn down and replaced, one suspects, by virtual labs.
Point 1 - There must be a variety of resources to draw upon and synthesize from
Many centuries ago, before recorded history, mankind sought solutions to major problems by migration. They crisscrossed the Mideast deserts; they moved from cave to cave in Europe; they crossed the Aleutian land bridge from Asia to the New World. In this area, the Anasazi built villages, lived in them for a few hundred years, and then moved on. Every few thousand years, a peoples would invent something of basic importance like pottery or bronze casting.
We know from the early peoples' mythology and paintings that they were not dumb nor unable to think creatively. They didn't invent much because they didn't yet have the disparate elements of prior invention involving, ceramics, metallurgy, chemistry, mechanics and so forth to produce useful new products. Also, they may not have had the free time for contemplation and experimentation.
In pre-Christian times, the Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were inventive in such areas as pottery, metallurgy, war machines, and mechanical devices. Continuing evolution from this simple industrial base lead to the relatively comfortable and prosperous life for the merchant princes and their consorts of the Renaissance. (Our analysis will now follow the Western world, although important inventive developments were taking place in China, the Moslem empire and elsewhere).
Point 2 - There must be an agony and an ecstasy. Creation is an emotional experience. This may be why so many super creative people are manic depressives.
As the name Renaissance implies there was an explosion of creativity in art, music and invention among other endeavors. As Orson Welles said in The Third Man "The Borgias presided over bloodshed and the Renaissance, but in Switzerland they had 500 years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." The many inventions of Leonardo da Vinci bubbled up out of the Borgia caldron.
In the cradle of the Renaissance, Michelangelo released the statues from stone "breaking the marble spell" revealing images from his mind. The sculptors spoke of the hand of God working in the mind of the artist. I saw a Pueblo Indian woman sculptor on Public Television saying essentially the same thing: that she breaks the mold revealing a sculpture already created by a higher being. A brilliant computer programmer said that in his most ecstatic moments his software emerged the same way (Why Invent, MSN).
In the 80's I myself was groping for a way to see microscopic imperfections called "gels" in molten plastic. I was the president of a small plastic machinery company and realized that these gels started all kinds of problems from runs in stockings to leaks in plastic milk jugs. Everyone despaired in finding a solution to catching these when the plastic was first produced as a raw material. One day I chanced to see dewdrops glittering at dawn on a spider's web. It sparkled like a chandelier. Furthermore, the vibration of the dewdrops made them shimmer and glitter so that they stood out even more from their background. This shimmering insight would be key to a successful product.
The effect of the simple spider web was replicated by racks of video equipment, bundles of special fiber optics, and all kinds of special optics. About $2 million of investment and several years later I had an instrument that my new company sold to DuPont, Exxon and Dow and many other major polymer producers worldwide. Our biggest application was making better Lycra Spandex. My vision was propelled by the revelation of a novel idea. Of course, that was the fun part. Months of sweat equity were invested after that designing and perfecting the product. It eventually produced three patents and an IR 100 award.
Point 3 - There must be a free-will environment where the would-be inventor can successfully resist conformity and take risks instead.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was an explosion of inventions aimed at better living through an industrial society. This prolonged the British Empire and launched what might be called the American Empire. In terms of resources there was "mad money" investment capital to support inventors and fledgling industries, and there was a very large assortment of technical resources to draw upon. Steam power. Gas chemistry. Industrialized fiber spinning. Electricity. Structural steel. Precision machining. Mass production.
But perhaps most important was that in England, United States, France, Italy and other countries was an exciting creative environment epitomized by the eccentric English inventor: someone not hemmed in by a deterministic society, a non-conformist with a free-will and inquiring mind, yet an intellectually trained and self-disciplined achiever who kept persisting in achieving an inventive goal until it was reached. Victorian society, while apparently straight-laced, I think was charmed by these eccentric creative types, and through a variety of mechanisms ranging from family trusts to intellectual societies supported and encouraged them. In Japan, on the other hand, you must fit in to a very deterministic society or you are no one, and consequently that country was not a major creative contributor to the industrial revolution.
Point 4 - For Project Inventions there must be a commitment of similar minds working together with an intellectual ferment guided by a charismatic technical leader.
From the beginning of the 2nd World War through to the present there yet another element has been added to the invention formula: this is "The Lab" in the form of an ad hoc affiliation of engineers and scientists loosely collaborating to solve a specific problem. MIT pioneered this with the Radiation Lab which pioneered much of the radar development during WW II. As an electrical engineer I find their lab notes published in the "Radiation Lab Series" still useful, for example in the derivation of optimum filters. Another MIT on-demand creation was the Instrumentation Lab which developed servo systems and inertial guidance systems so critical for the important national efforts of the cold war ranging from guided missiles to lunar probes. And of course there was Los Alamos National Labs, while not a brain child of MIT, still doing the leader's work in nuclear weapons and related areas.
A key part of the MIT Lab formula, as I will call it, was having a collection of people working on the problem, starting with a charismatic scientific leader such as Vannevar Bush or Robert Oppenheimer, stirring in a university president and industrialist type board, and staffing with essentially ad-hoc scientists and engineers. Shirtsleeve experimentation always was important.
In the 60's I was part of an Arthur D. Little and Bell Labs team working under Navy direction to develop and deploy a worldwide system to detect, identify and track enemy submarines. We succeeded, and the project code named SOSUS was first publicly mentioned in the book and movie Red October. Like one of the MIT labs, we had a scientist leader, an eclectic collection of support engineers and scientists, and a high ferment creative environment. Anyone, however lowly, could volunteer an idea. People would dash off tennis courts to scribble down concepts. The really important classified stuff wasn't determined by the ominous degree-of-secrecy labels on your filing cabinets; it was determined by an informal almost secret society of intellectual buddies. As the project became institutionalized, with a management bureaucracy taking over, the old gang including myself drifted off to seek new challenges.
IBM, Xerox, Bell Labs and Arthur D. Little were among the industrial companies at that time that were caldrons of intellectual yet productive brew.
Point 5 - A new way of thinking about the why and wherefore of invention is in order.
Now it is said that we live in a knowledge-based economy. The gurus are selling "data mining" to squeeze something more out of our data collections. The complexity theorists say that invention is merely a Darwinian chance event. After n inventions and trial and error, an improved society will crawl forward like an improved insect. (I will be burned at Fiesta as a heretic in cyber complexitySanta Fe). Some children live in the endless fascination of the Internet and others are doped off on video games.
Maybe we are ending civilization as we have known it from earliest recorded times. Man has always been the measure of all things even if there was an overall cosmic guidance. Anything could be sacrificed or expended to improve the lot of at least important men and women. Also, at least on earth, man has been considered the supreme intellect.
Now we have an emerging recognition that a natural and stable ecosystem may be the ultimate measure of all things. At the same time there is a growing feeling that some sort of man-computer megabrain is the intellectual engine of the near future. Something more productive than Hal the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I think what we remnants of a previous age can do is to encourage the new generation to get mesmerized by something better than buddy cops and bad guys. There is still a chance that someone we know could become a Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry. He hit upon that goal at 5 years old when his parents read him a Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon." He never stopped imagining and experimenting even when he wound up in our own Roswell!
I think by universal acclaim we can safely say that Albert Einstein was one of the great minds of all time. Not very well known is that the young Einstein read that popular refrigerators of the day occasionally exploded. So he and Leo Szilard invented a refrigerator that solved the problem by a better compressor, and they collected $10,000 in royalties from Electrolux. Szilard, a visionary physicist, received several patents for nuclear reactors including one involving the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator pump.
Of course, not everybody has the stuff to be Einstein or Thomas Edison. But inventions and improvements to inventions can be made at various technical and intellectual levels. There should be more encouragement of the students in technical, engineering, business schools and the like to look at careers in innovative product development instead of preparing for supposedly "safe" jobs in the technocracy. My company, which is based on continual innovation, lost no jobs as a result of 9/11, the dotcom crash, Enron debacle, etc.( Indeed, we are doing more product development than ever before while our competition is moping around in a no-risk paralysis mode.) The stimulation of careers in the satisfactions and adventures of innovation could go back to preschool reading such as Robert Goddard hearing Jules Verne's story.
So we need to foster, and encourage more inventors up to the scale of Einstein and Szilard to tackle the challenges of vanishing resources, alternate energy, efficient food production and so on. It's time for a new initiative like those for winning WW II and bringing in the atomic era to employ the best in brains, vision, creativity and project management.
I'll wind up by trying to sell Hope, that glimmer that was slipped into Pandora's box. I close with a provocative and stimulating quote from naturalist Jane Goodall:
Without hope, all we can do is eat and drink the last of our resources as we watch our planet slowly die. Let us have faith in ourselves, in our intellect, in our staunch spirit.
© Lawrence B. Kilham 2002
RESEARCH, INVENTION, AND INNOVATION IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET
By Dr. Joseph R. Stetter, Holder of over 20 patents in chemical engineering and gas sensors
There was a time when I spent time each month in the reading room in the chemistry library browsing my favorite journals. There was a time when I visited the library on the spur of the moment whenever I had an idea to elaborate, or a problem to solve, or any issue for which I needed added information. There was a time when I took and later taught courses in the organization and searching of the literature of science and engineering.
In brief, invention is “building a better mousetrap” and innovation is “doing something different with the invention for social impact.” Of course my career modus operandi in science and engineering would have evolved in any case and in many areas of the scientific endeavor since progress in scientific instrumentation as well as knowledge has evolved rapidly and significantly.
But, in the aspect of scientific invention and innovation, no greater impact has been observed than that of the internet and allied technology [search engines, content providers, etc…]. No longer do I need to go to the library to find information And while this sounds simple, it is an immense transformation.
A good research group or research university was judged in part by how good the library was. Now stature in research capability is judged by how good your search engine might be. I still love libraries but it is a nostalgic love and not a love from need. I love the atmosphere of a library and the feel of a book. However, I now have at my fingertips, still for a subscription fee of course, multiple libraries that grow in quantity of information with unbelievable rapidity.
My challenge now is to understand the search engines, so I am not mislead to what the provider wants me to see and to the best information to understand my issue. Operationally, I now first go to my computer when I need information rather than the library. The course I last taught in chemistry literature was not so much an emphasis on library literature and libraries but about distinguishing the quality of information from anecdotal web page postings to the highest qualityrefereed journal articles and the ongoing scientific discussion that improves our theories and knowledge base.
Finally, I absolutely enjoy having information from technical to social immediately available to solve a problem and find it enabling of invention and innovation on many fronts. The ideas that I have come to me at odd times, and often can only gel if they can be incubated quickly. This is now realized and I look forward to the day when every piece of literature in every language is available immediately to every person on earth on their cell phone! What a transformation of thought, operating style, and creative stimulus we have seen in less than a single lifetime.
FORMAL EDUCATION FOR THE INVENTOR
By Peter H. Kilham
My father, a very prolific inventor and engineer, has something important to say. He was willing to give education a chance, but became discouraged. In 1933 he wrote:
Now let us look at schools and see what the future of the country may be. Are people made like machines, in quantity and to a set standard? Or is education a means of developing the individual? In the main I think we shall find schools to be factories of the more expensive variety. Of course there is at present a very strong trend in teaching towards broader and more individual education, but in general what have we? Classes of numbers of pupils, I believe, all of whom are graded in a series of numbers that do not relate to any of them. Classes in which the book is the thing, not the pupil. Classes where memory ranks high, imagination low. Classes where every subject is divided into parts instead of classes where the parts are combined to show the whole. Self-sufficiency demands a broad general education put to use according to the need. Schools give a pigeonholed education almost totally removed from use. They tell us it is “mind training” but the memory is only part of the mind.
I couldn’t agree more. It was the same in my education 20 years later.
Formal education often is very important in determining success factors behind creativity, invention and entrepreneurship. Creative minds, however, tend to be impatient and often drop out of school before they complete their formal education. They become frustrated with the formality and rigid structure they perceive to be endemic to classroom education. There doesn’t seem to be any room left for the mind to wander, catch a glimpse of a new vision, or pursue it wherever it may lead.
Correspondence schools traditionally have been a source of second start education for those who grew to realize that they didn’t learn enough to achieve some aspiration. Today’s correspondence courses are offered with the convenience and appealing media of online transmission. Some universities including MIT are offering their courses free online to anyone who logs in to them. This is a definite second chance for some self-directed individuals. Where possible in such cases however it would be very helpful to have a couch or tutor critique and guide the otherwise self-guided student as they try to sort out this stream of knowledge.
With highly interactive computer clouds offering multimedia education in a reality-based dialogue method, the students could find themselves in a virtual classroom with personal attention.
When students become employees in industry or government, they often will find more interest in new ideas than seemed to be the case in schools, especially if they are employed in technical areas such as engineering. However, deficiency of essential formal education often shows up as lack of essential technical knowledge or communication skills.
I have encountered many entrepreneurial technicians and engineers who hit a brick wall because they didn’t know the physics or chemistry involved in their inventions. It is very difficult to catch up in deep technical areas later in life. They should have studied more science and math in schools and universities. The areas of significant technical invention today usually are much more complex than in Edison’s day, so prospects are much dimmer for the essentially self-taught entrepreneurs.
Equally a stumbling block is the lack of communication abilities on the part of these entrepreneurial hopefuls. They can’t seem to explain in understandable language what they are thinking or proposing. They can’t read published information that is required to support their project. They can’t write down their findings and notes for their associates and followers.
Our schools apparently have the reference resources students need in terms of both technical education and communication skills, but this knowledge often doesn’t seem to be getting through to the students. Three things need to be done:
1 – Get children interested in creative accomplishment at an early age and keep them focused on this throughout their lifetimes. This requires teachers who love what they are doing. Teachers who are on fire. Teachers who love science and really want their students to absorb it.
2 – Make sure that the fundamental knowledge needed has been presented and learned. If teachers do not know their course material, replace them with ones who do.
3 – See that the students who are interested in innovation, invention and entrepreneurship don’t drop out of school prematurely, foregoing the additional technical education and communications skills that they will need.
We will need many graduates who are hooked by the challenge of the unknown. They will be captivated by the wonder of unknown and the goal of making a unique contribution to its understanding.
This motivational process starts at the top—with the president of the United States—and carries through political and business leaders, parents, clergy, educators and many others. When Russia launched the first orbiting satellite, there was frenzy in the United States not to fall behind again in the technological race. We put our man on the moon first, and this goal has faded out. Now the world is faced with larger and irreversible problems of environment, climate, food, water and energy, and a new sense of mission to be accomplished must be developed.
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