The Spirit of Invention

From the Stone Age on, invention has been

one of the great occupations of mankind.

It has brought us immense benefits, but it

has also brought problems in its wake. Thequestion is how to make invention work in

our best interests, knowing that it will

never cease...

[] One of the toys that Canadian stores will bedisplaying this Christmas shopping season is alittle auto that runs on ~top" or "gyro" power. Yousimply roll the wheels of the toy car by rubbingthem swiftly along the floor; this in turn impartsa spin to a fly-wheel made of lead hidden insidethe miniature vehicle. Because of the relativelyheavy weight of the fly-wheel, it will maintain itsrotation for a long enough time to drive the littlecar around a room- a feat accomplished withoutbenefit of a spring motor or electric battery.

The device is an inventive application of thespinning and stabilizing force of a top, and theability of a fly-wheel store energy. These phe-nomena have been known for centuries, and havebeen put to use in many different ways. The topgoes back to ancient times, to the playgrounds ofGreece and China. Its more complex cousin, thegyroscope I a device that seems to defy the forceof gravity in some of its tricks of balance- hasled to such no-nonsense inventions as the gyro-compass, gyro-pilot and the gyro-stabilizer, trans-portation aids which an airline or shipping com-pany would have difficulty getting along without.

It is not surprising that many inventions havehad their roots in toys. That whimsical zeal andfreedom from practicality that impels a creativeperson into designing a delightful playthingwould also appear to open new avenues to a mindstriving to cast aside the restraints of convention,and seeking to create useful new things.

Toys not only anticipate future machines anddevices, but reflect the current state of technology.

Small boys in Canada play with toy space rocketstoday, just as small boys in Paris played withballoons after the Montgolfier brothers made theirfirst balloon flight in 1783.

The world has always revelled in the wonder ofinvention. The ability to invent- a universalcharacteristic of mankind through the ages- isan attribute that has enabled people to adapt tovarious environments to improve their livingstandards. Through invention, man has tamedfire, electricity and the atom, discovered the fun-damentals of mechanics and chemistry, learnedto record his thoughts in writing and pictures,and has made some of civilization’s most admi-rable creative thrusts.

Invention is usually defined as a creative effortthat is embodied in physical equipment. It is, ofcourse, closely linked with scientific discovery-finding out what nature already holds. Inventionsthemselves are not confined to new devices. Theymay be improvements or ingenious combinationsof existing things.

In a sense, the application of a principle usedin a toy to the workaday world may only be a kindof improvement on the original idea. The steamengine, a favourite subject for those who studyinvention, had its roots in an ancient toy inventedby Hero of Alexandria. The device consisted of asmall hemispherical container of water suspendedover a flame. The steam that blasted throughsmall jets in the sphere made it spin.

Oddly enough, Hero’s gadget failed to stimulateany significant development of the steam drive

principle until the late 17th or early 18th cen-turies. These long-delayed practical experimentsculminated in the invention of the modern con-densing steam engine by a Scottish engineer,James Watt, who patented it in 1769.

Not all of the great inventions had whimsicalroots, yet Canadian patent records seem to bearwitness to many fanciful turns of mind pursuedby this country’s inventors in an earlier era. In1889, for example, a lady in Calgary invented amechanical skirt-lifter designed to raise her hemdiscreetly as she crossed a dusty street.

If inventive skill is any measure of nationalaccomplishment, Canada has justification for agreat deal of pride. The Canadian patent officehas a list of impressive inventive contributionsdating as far back as 1791 when the GovernorGeneral in Council granted a series of patents fora process to make potash. Since then, Canadians,or Canadian residents, have broken new inventiveground in such fields as transportation (snow-mobiles, hydrofoils, short take-off and landingaircraft), food and agriculture (harvesting ma-chines, the pre-cooked cereal known as Pablum,early ripening and disease resistant wheat), andcommunications (the telephone, the AC radiotube, and the wirephoto).

Some other less publicized but still importantinventions made in Canada were kerosene in 1846by Dr. Abraham Gesner, of Halifax, N.S.; the firstcontrollable pitch propeller in 1927 by WallaceRobert Turnbull, of Rothesay, N.B., and the firstpanoramic camera in 1887 by John Connor, ofElora, Ont.

There is no such thing as agenuine single inventor

J. J. Brown, a Canadian author who has writtenseveral books on invention, observes that Cana-dians have made contributions to world scienceand technology out of all proportion to their num-bers. He complains, however, that many goodideas have been taken abroad for development,a shortcoming that can be remedied in the futureby more public and official recognition of theCanadian inventor and his ideas.

In a broader sense, it is evident that good ideasare not confined to geographic boundaries. Brown

notes that "there is really no such thing as a gen-uine single inventor who is uniquely responsiblefor a particular invention. Every man stands onthe shoulders of his predecessor". Lord ErnestRutherford, whose experiments at McGill andManchester universities in the early 1900s yieldedevidence as to the hidden structure of the atom,used to say that "science is international, and longmay it remain so". The same could be said forinvention.

The record of invention around the world provesthe universality of innovative thought. It iscommon for similar developments to be born indifferent countries at the same time--simul-taneous invention, as it is called. It is not as coin-cidental as it might appear; inventors are bom-barded with the same stimuli of daily life as therest of us. Up-to-date reports of developing tech-nology tend to spread quickly, so it is only reason-able to expect creative minds to pounce on what ismost interesting and pursue similar lines ofexploration. No wonder the history of invention isshot through with litigation and prior claims.

Little would have resultedwithout the entrepreneur

If a museum of simultaneous invention wereever founded, it would, as Brown has suggestedin his book Ideas in Exile, ~show how the electriclight, the telephone, sound recording, calculus,anaesthesia, jet propulsion, the airplane, topology,non-Euclidian geometry, the theory of evolution,were all discovered in different parts of the worldat about the same time."

One might put it down to the old saying: Greatminds think alike. There is, however, disagree-ment among observers of innovation as to the needfor a ~’great mind". One school of thought puts theemphasis on the correct preconditions, the eventsand developments that will inspire invention.Technical advancement in one field is frequentlydependent upon technical progress in another. Ithas been said that if Watt had invented his steamengine earlier, machines to produce the metal partswould have been available earlier too.

Whether or not, or when, the condensing steamengine would have been invented if Watt had notbeen on this earth is a hypothetical questionwhich can never really be settled satisfactorily.Yet it does seem clear that without the businessbacker or entrepreneur, very little would haveresulted from his deed. The role of men namedJohn Roebuck and Matthew Boulton in the storyof the steam engine should not be forgotten. Itwas they who provided the capital and businessknow-how to make Watt’s machine a success.

Inventors are often characterized by theirpersistent, and often vain, efforts to win supportfor their brain-children. Not only do they seekdirect financial backing, but public recognition oftheir ingenuity. What inventor has not had tocombat social resistance to change, to new ideasand new ways of doing things? The history ofinvention and technology is full of examples.While one part of society has been innovative,adept and daring, another part has been conser-vative, protective and fearful. The Wright broth-ers were ridiculed after their first attempts to fly.In the 18th century Scottish engineer AndrewMeikle, a miller who invented an improved wind-mill and threshing machine, drew sharp criticismfor his fanning mill. Country people regardedgrain cleared by it with suspicion, and some cler-gymen argued that ’~winds were raised by Godalone, and it was irreligious for man to attemptto raise wind for himself’.

When industrial innovation first developed inEurope, opposition came from those whose livesand work were still stratified under the rules ofmedieval trade guilds. Workers feared, often quitecorrectly, that the new machines might dispossessthem of their jobs.

One of history’s most famous anti-technologicalreactions took place in the early 19th centurywhen the Luddite movement arose in Nottinghamand neighbouring districts in England. Namedfor a real or legendary man known as Ned Lud,the Luddites launched machine-breaking riots,an ostensible protest at the poor quality of goodsproduced by the new machines.

The movement spread through parts of Europeduring a depression that followed the Peace of1815 and a serious crop failure. It came to an endafter severe repressive legislation was enacted,and after prosperity gradually returned.

There is no doubt that, today as then, the intro-duction of modern inventions and new technologyexposes society to some disruption and displace-ment of the work force. Indeed the effects of newtechnology are transmitted much faster in thisage than they were in the past.

While the practical application of the steamdrive principle had to wait some 1800 years,modern society translates invention or discoveryinto application in a matter of a few years. Some-times this happens too fast for society to adapt.

Can the soft sciences keep pacewith the hard sciences?

The narrowing time gap between invention andapplication can have socially and environmentallydamaging effects. For example, DDT was hailedas the world’s most effective pesticide, and wasused liberally for many years before there wasany true understanding of the complex damageit caused to the ecology.

The problem of unemployment due to techno-logical change is said by some to be a failure Ofthe social or "soft" sciences to come up with inno-vations of their own to match the advances of thephysical or ~hard" sciences--to invent suchsocial devices as unemployment insurance, forexample, to maintain economic stability in acommunity until new jobs are eventually created.The ideal is to let innovation solve the problemsof innovation. An admirable goal, of course, butdifficult to achieve.

Even forecasting the use that will be put to aninvention or discovery is an effort fraught withpitfalls. The ebullient Lord Rutherford, oftencalled the father of the nuclear age, assessed thepossibilities of nuclear power in an interview withthe New York Herald Tribune in 1933: ~Theenergy produced by breaking down of the atom isa poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a sourceof power from transformation of these atoms istalking moonshine."

Thomas Edison was more on target when heforecast some of the possible uses for the phono-graph, which he invented in 1878: music, dicta-tion, and talking toys. But it is doubtful thatEdison foresaw the growth of the recording in-dustry into what it is today. That would be toomuch to expect.

Edison got the idea for the phonograph whileplacing a disc of paper in a telegraph repeater, amachine used for transmitting telegraph mess-ages. He noted a faint musical note coming fromthe revolving apparatus and built a machine toexplore the quirk. This bit of luck known as seren-dipity- the happy accident--is not all thatuncommon in the field of invention. CharlesGoodyear discovered vulcanized rubber afteraccidentally dropping a mixture of raw rubberand sulphur on a hot stove.

Despite team invention, we stillneed those great minds

Modern inventors cannot simply rely on luck.It is common for them to work in large researchlaboratories as mission-oriented teams whichuse the most methodical methods possible. Loneinventors find it more difficult to tackle the im-mense jobs which enlargement and complicationof science and technology necessitate.

Nevertheless, there remains a demand for greatminds, geniuses with a flare for new ideas whichcan be embodied into machines and new processes.They still provide the seeds from which modern"team" invention may grow.

Despite the problems of social acceptance ofnew developments and the disruptions sometimescaused by them, the pattern of invention andtechnology has been that of man’s victory overadversity. At the same time, the diversity ofinvention has matched the challenge of a varietyof environments. To some extent all of us have toshow inventive skill to cope with our environ-ments, whether it be finding a more convenientway of working, devising a computer program,modifying some household appliance to suit aspecial purpose, or concocting a new recipe. In-vention, therefore, is a fact of life which is allaround us. It cannot be avoided or ignored.

Mankind cannot shun the computer, the jetengine and the communications satellite andretreat back to cottage industry. As John Dewey,

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the U.S. philosopher, psychologist and educator,once said: "There is no greater sign of paralysisof the imagination than the belief, sedulouslypropagated by some who pride themselves onsuperior taste, that the machine is the sourceof our troubles.., it is hard to think of anythingmore childish than animism that puts the blameon machinery."

The onward push of technology is much morepowerful now than in the social environment ofthe first half of this century, during which Deweylectured. There are, for example, worrisome trendsof invention and research in the fields of weaponryand genetic engineering. There is new concernabout the environmental damage and waste ofresources which invention may bring in its wake.

The Frisbee may presage theflying saucers of tomorrow

It all comes down to how mankind’s intelligenceand imagination are put to use, how society willemploy its collective wits to avoid the dangersinherent in new things, and how nations canenjoy the fruits of invention in a way that willmeet social as well as immediate practical goals.

If history is any guide, mankind will go on toinvent ever more new gadgets and machines. Toyswill continue to reflect current technologicaladvances, and lead the way to future inventivepursuits. The Frisbee may presage the man-carrying flying saucers of tomorrow. The toyrobots becoming popular with children today maybe a first step towards designing and marketingof cheap household robots. That toy car with thegyro-fly-wheel drive could well be a predecessorof a widely used fly-wheel power system for busesand subway cars.

From the cave-men on, each age has had its ownfascination with invention. It has proved to be anintegral element of the spirit of human kind. Letus in this age take joy in its discoveries, while atthe same time ensuring that they will be used ina responsible manner to build a better life in thefuture. Let us learn to live comfortably with Manthe Inventor, for he will be with us until the endof time.

~)THE ROYAL BANK OF CANADA 1978/PRINTED IN CANADA