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Young World
Seeing ideas around us
ASHA NEHEMIAH
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Inventions that improved lives had their germ in ideas that came from creative people.
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Almost everyone who has taken a walk through the woods has been bothered by burrs, those tiny thorny seeds that attach themselves so tenaciously to one's socks or clothes. But only one person, a Swiss engineer named Georges de Mestral, was fired with the curiosity to discover what made burrs cling on so efficiently after he and his dog had taken a walk in the woods one day and returned with several burrs attached to their clothing and fur!
He put the burrs under a microscope and discovered how nature had shaped hundreds of tiny hooks on them. These hooks tightly gripped the microscopically small loops on the furry surface of his socks, his sweater and even his dog's coat!
Mestral's curiosity in investigating a common occurrence in Nature led to one of the greatest inventions of this century — Velcro fasteners.
Using the same principle , Mestral designed two strips of nylon — one with tiny prickly hooks and the other, more fuzzy, with loops. Velcro fasteners make our life so much easier by being used on a wide variety of items. What is it that makes millions of people view the same object while only one sees a creative possibility in it? What is it that makes thousands of people experience the same problem while only one finds a solution?
Creativity. There is an interesting definition of creativity. Where ordinary people notice nothing more spectacular than a pile of stone, a creative person can visualise a cathedral. Many inventions that have improved the lives of millions of people have sprung from creative people seeing the potential in some humble, everyday item.
Watching his wife perform an everyday activity like cooking breakfast led Bill Bowerman to an amazing discovery. Bowerman was a track athlete who became a coach after his running career was over. Along with one of his former students, Bowerman started a shoe manufacturing company. Their speciality was making lighter, better running shoes at a time when most shoes were heavy and clumsy.
Seeing his wife make waffles for breakfast gave Bowerman an exciting idea — the idea for making an improved kind of rubber sole, which would provide runners with a better grip while they were running.
Bowerman waited till his family left for church and then stealthily heated the waffle iron and placed a bit of rubber in it. Just as he had hoped, the rubber too emerged with the same waffle-like pattern pressed into it. There is no mention of Mrs. Bowerman's response to finding rubber in her waffle iron but history tells us that Bowerman took the piece of rubber with the waffle pattern to work next morning and fixed it onto a pair of shoes. When he tried on the shoes, he was delighted with the grip this new sole provided. Thus was born the first pair of running shoes with "waffle-soles". The humble breakfast waffle provided Bill Bowerman's company, Nike with the design of one of their most popular models of running shoes.
The idea for a stethoscope struck a physician called Rene Laennec when he was watching little children at play one day. The children showed Laennec how they could hear the sound of a pin scratching one end of a wooden board when they put their ear to the other end of the board. Laennec was amazed that he could hear a sound almost inaudible to the human ear at most times — the sound of a pin scratching — with such remarkable clarity when it was transmitted along the wooden board.
At that time (1876), doctors had to put their ear to the chest of the patient! One day, when he was examining a patient, Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and listened to his patient's heart through it. He was surprised at how much more clearly he could hear the heartbeat. Soon he fashioned the first stethoscope from wood.
Can it happen that the same idea can strike two people at approximately the same time?
History tells us that this is known to happen. On February 14, 1876, an inventor called Elisa Gray went to the U.S. Patent Office to apply for a patent for something he had invented. A patent is something that protects an inventor from having his original idea copied by someone else. Gray was excited about his new invention, which was something he had been working on for several years. He described it "as an apparatus for transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically."
What a shock Gray got when the U.S. patent office informed him that it had, just two hours earlier, issued a patent for the very same invention to another inventor. The other inventor's name was Alexander Graham Bell and his invention was the telephone!
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