And so it is with many other contrivances; when you come to any part that doesn’t seem to fit or is not clear, make a cardboard model and your troubles will vanish as dew-drops in the morning’s sun.
CHAPTER III
THE STATE OF THE ART
Taking it for granted, now, that you have drawn out your invention on paper and have made cardboard models of the more difficult parts so that you can see about what your device or machine will look like and how it will work your next move is to look up the state of the art.
What is Meant by State of the Art.—The state of the art means everything that has been published either in books, papers, or in patents about anything that has been discovered or invented, which has a bearing on your invention.
As an instance the state of the art of the dynamo electric machine, or dynamo as it is called for short, goes clear back to 1833 when Faraday made the experiment of passing a wire across the pole of a magnet and found that a current of electricity was set up in it—that is in the wire. Since that time hundreds of patents have been taken out and thousands of articles have been written about dynamos.
All of this information, or data as it is called, goes to make up the state of the art in the class of dynamos and all of the patents can be had and many of the articles too if you know how to go about it to find them and one of the purposes of this chapter is to tell you how to do it.
Use of the State of the Art.—You can easily understand that with all the thought that has been given to, and the experimental work that has been put on, dynamos to the end of bettering them it is a pretty hard thing to make an improvement that has not been made before, though it is still quite possible to do so.
Suppose, then, you had thought of and worked out on paper some improvement on the dynamo which you believed to be new and original and of great value. Certainly since you know that inventors like Edison, Brush, Weston, Thompson, Tesla, and a hundred other men almost as big, had applied themselves with diligence to dynamo problems during the last 40 years you would not care to go very far in spending your time or your money working on it until you learned whether or not some one before you had thought of and used the same principle.