Working Out Ideas by Experiment.—Though you may think long and hard and read everything you can find that has a bearing on your great idea, you will soon reach a point where you feel you would like to try it out, that is to build it up in reality so that you can see if it will do the work you want it to do or if it won’t do the work where the trouble comes in.
Generally speaking if it is a mechanical or an electro-mechanical scheme you begin by drawing this brain-child of yours on paper and then you make a model, or try to, and you add to it, take away from it, tear it down sometimes and at others you scrap it and build an entirely new one.
But usually it is some one part that needs patience and effort and skill put upon it and as you try out idea after idea, plan after plan and scheme after scheme you are not only almost sure to find just what you are looking for but very often experimental work will lead you to fresh ideas for other and even more important improvements.
Another curious thing I have found about experimenting is this: you may start out on a certain line and find that the result you want is so hard to get it seems hopeless to go ahead. Now if you quit it is all off but if you go on and on trying everything you can think of, keeping up your belief that the thing you are striving for must come and in your own ability to do that which you want to do, after long hours, or days, or weeks of constant work the result will come to you like a flash and just as though the guardian angel of invention hovered over you and put the desired thing right into your mind and hand. The moral is that everything comes to the inventor who keeps on experimenting and does not give up.
Ideas for Inventions in General.—Inventions may be divided into three general classes and these are (1) mechanical, (2) electrical and (3) chemical; and there are combinations of these classes as (a) electro-mechanical and (b) electro-chemical inventions and your idea may come under the head of any one of them.
Fig. 3. A MODEL SELF-INKING PRINTING PRESS
Ideas for Mechanical Inventions.—Inventions of a mechanical kind include nearly everything in the broad domain of physics but the term mechanical inventions is applied especially to devices that are worked by means of pendulums, springs, weights, levers, wheels and axles, pulleys and inclined planes, screws and pistons and which have to do with force and motion.
To work out an idea for a mechanical device if the latter is a fairly simple one, as a printing press, see Fig. 3, or a scroll saw, see Fig. 4, should not be a very hard thing to do because all of the parts can be easily seen and if you add a few parts to it and it does not work the fault can be readily picked and the part that is causing the trouble can be redesigned and changed until the whole device is made operative.