What is an inventor and what does it mean to invent?
Inventions fascinate people. I daresay, almost universally. The more we judge that an invention is within our own production capabilities, the more fascinated we are with it. I doubt I would have ever thought about the aerodynamic profile. Even the simplest inventions earn us a kind of applause for the winner that could easily have been me, if it had been a little faster. If the current inventor of sticky notes hadn’t been born, I’m sure many other people would have thought of it.
Most of us have heard the phrase “necessity is the mother of invention.” This supposedly American proverb (actually much older) is accepted as an adequate explanation for inventions, although it says nothing about what an invention “is”. The French, in a curiously similar way, say “Fear is a great inventor.” Even Mark Twain felt compelled to declare an abstract link to the invention when he said: “Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.” While necessity, fear, and accidents may all be observable and materially present prior to the emergence of an invention, none of them define an invention; none of these tell us how a human being invents. At best, these sentences describe a catalyst or motivator, they are not complete descriptions. These are not definitions.
The word “invention” means find or discovery, if my introduction to Latin is of any value. This could give us an initial idea, but let’s explore if what is discovered is original or the result of some previous entry. The words of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), objective and sincere, seem worthy of investigation: “Invention in the strict sense, is little more than a new combination of those images that have previously been collected and deposited in memory; nothing it can come out of nowhere. “The key argument put forward by Sir Joshua Reynolds is that nothing can come out of nowhere.
The human reaction often elicited by an invention when initially perceived reveals some noteworthy universal consent. Because we often hear exclamations like, “That guy was thinking!” or “what a clever idea!” If these two exclamations have value, then we can say that thoughts and ideas are essential to inventions. What is a thought? What is an idea? If we admit that thoughts are the work of the mind, and if we also admit that ideas are what the mind works on, we can easily explore and formulate a rational doctrine of invention, even if it is done on a hypothetical premise. What is hypothetical in the formula is by no means far-fetched or irrational. Let us first look at the material substance of the act of thinking, the idea. From there, we can easily understand how this thing called an idea can be manipulated.
The idea is the mental representation of a reality. This is the common understanding in Western civilization. The mind acquires and accumulates ideas, first from sensory experience after that experience goes through the process of abstraction. Often with the theater of life experiences, sensory experience is stored in adequate power, but abstract essences reached by the mind by working on sensory experience are stored in another faculty, intellectual memory. These abstract essences are ideas.
Ideas fall into several categories, but let’s briefly consider the category of complexity. An idea is simple or compound. A simple idea only needs a note to describe it. “Dark” or “fast” or “wet” or “yellow” are examples of simple ideas. A compound idea uses multiple simple ideas to describe it. Most of our ideas are compound, so we have dictionaries that list the set of simple ideas that define a compound idea. Within this scope of activity is the process of inventing. Thus we see, by the fact that there are dictionaries, that we are able to separate compound ideas into the group of specific simple ideas that describe said compound idea. We call this “teardown” analysis. We can also perceive that simple ideas can be combined to build new and original compound ideas. This “combination” is called synthesis. I think the observant reader already knows by now what an inventor is or what it means to invent.
Analysis and synthesis are two simple acts of the mind and these two actions include the heart of the invention. Inventing is essentially an act of synthesis. What is synthesized? In the act of inventing what is synthesized is an arrangement of simple ideas and this arrangement included a new compound idea. While the provision may be original, the constituent parts are not original. Similarly, a very common thing like a pile of bricks can be rearranged thus producing a structure unlike any previous arrangement of bricks. The bricks are not an original idea. The new structure could be very original. So who is most likely to invent?
Every human being with functional mental faculties can invent. It is only necessary to perform the simple act of the mind called abstraction to store, initially from sensory experience, a library of simple ideas. These ideas stored in this way are remembered and organized in a new and original scheme that generally responds to a need. The first thing an inventor does is define a need. Then he goes to work fixing ideas until he finds a fix that works. The willingness to invent, that is, the willingness to define a need, as well as the willingness to search within and without to discover a willingness that solves the need, is of course essential to the inventor’s personality. In addition to this necessary layout, there is the large library of simple, summarized and stored ideas from many previous projects.
Due to the wide variety of life experiences from which he can draw, the seasoned inventor sometimes seems overconfident in the challenge presented to him. Just ask him to tell you about all the things he did that didn’t work. Not only will you enjoy a good laugh, but you will also come to know that good inventors have often failed. They did not fail permanently because each failure added to their library of ideas. Failing intelligently is critical to becoming a good inventor.
