INVENTORS
The older I get the less I believe in individuals who seem to have simply sat down and decided they were going to be “inventors”
I have decided it doesn't work that way at all. We have plenty of examples of both men and women who might be said to been born inventors and can't help making new and exciting new gadgets.
It now seems to me that one does not go about becoming a generator of wonderful, new contraptions which we can buy, sell or trade to each other. It doesn't work that way at all.
People who invent things - both products and procedures - don't just sit down and take pencil and paper and make up something. In truth, inventors don't invent anything at all ...what they do is look at life about them and see where something is yet to be desired and they, then, process what they have in mind in order to meet the need they,or others, might have.
Take this thing of players at a football game going into a “huddle.”. Who, in his right mind, would waste time hunching together to talk while a game was in progress? That “huddle”, as we now know it, was necessity when it was “invented” by a football player at, then Gallaudet College, now University, in Washington, .D.C. Since 1864 that has been a leading educational institution for the deaf. That, you can see, made the “huddle” idea a necessity because the opposition team always knew what the next play was to be as it was “signed” in plain sight.
Hand signals at your baseball diamond came about in pretty much the same way. There was a major league player by the name of William Hoy, unabashedly know as “Dummy Hoy” by his fellow players, and sports writers of that day, who had to have some way of knowing what the decisions were. Fans liked such signals telling them what had taken place and there are, I'd estimate, millions of us today, who would not have any idea of going on down on the actual playing field without such graphic guidance from signaling officials
I can remember when our railroads devised the idea of time zones for the nation to keep their trains from running into each other.
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Great inventions have come about for the simple reason that they were needed to meet some, specific need.
Inventors are those one-step-ahead individuals who realize such needs exist and rush off hellbent to find the answer to that need. Give a Thomas Edison just a hint that something might be needed which could talk back to us, or light our way in times of darkness, and he was off to the lab afire with ways to try to do it.
So, to solve our problem today in this modern era, need to become aware of our needs and of world about us. Only then can we venture out to take care of whatever it is we find is required to make for a better life for everyone.
Don't just sit there. Think of something that is needed. If you see a way it can be done, you're on your way.
A.L.M. Sept. 30, 2003 [c575wds]
