Fig. 2. WHERE THE BIG IDEA REALLY ORIGINATES
There are many kinds of raw, or original ideas and they show themselves in various ways. You may get a very vague idea of an invention, or of an improvement, or it may be a clean cut one on the jump; it may be a very valuable idea or it may be a wholly worthless one, but it is generally easy after you get one to enlarge upon it, as we shall presently see, and to build up in the mind’s eye a structure so that you can guess pretty nearly whether you will have a palace, an architectural monstrosity or a chicken-coop when it is done.
A first, or raw idea may come to a fellow, who is on inventing bent, in any one of several ways but chiefly when (1) he is conjuring up in his mind something which he has seen or heard; (2) when something happens by accident which shows him an effect or a result that is new, and (3) when he is looking at or working on some device or machine; and this last way is the one that is most productive of ideas for useful improvements.
As an example of getting an idea behold a young man rocking in a chair with closed eyes; he is thinking of nothing in particular but of a good many things quite vaguely. A thought of his sister packing her trunk—in the way a woman usually packs a trunk—comes into his mind and then an idea strikes him that it would be a good scheme for a trunk to have drawers in it like a bureau. The result of this raw idea is the wardrobe trunk as we know it to-day.
Accidental Discoveries.—Once in a long while some one hits upon an invention purely by accident.
A good illustration which covers the point was the discovery of vulcanized rubber. The story goes that Charles Goodyear happened to drop some crude rubber and sulphur on a hot stove at the same time with the result that it was made much stronger and more elastic than before.
Experiment showed that the vulcanized rubber could be made as soft or as hard as desired by using more or less sulphur and applying more or less heat. From this discovery of Goodyear’s has sprung the gigantic rubber industry of to-day.
Discoveries of this kind were often made in the early days of invention but the principles which underlie all of the sciences are now so well known that invention itself has been brought down to a scientific basis; and instead of inventors being long-haired, dreaming Micawbers they are generally men of education and genius too, trained along the lines they are working in and who look like clean-cut business men; and if they are successful inventors you may depend upon it they are business men.
When I say that they are men of learning I do not mean that it takes a college professor to be a big inventor; indeed very few college professors have the genius to be inventors and too many inventors have too little knowledge along the line in which they are working. Of the two genius is the greatest for it is bred in the bone while any one can educate himself.