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Chapter 9 Ideas
Can you imagine yourself as an inventor? You might think that you need to know a lot of science, but this isn’t always true. The most important thing is a new idea, and ideas can come to all kinds of people in many different situations. Some of these ideas have changed the world. Catseyes™ * A simple idea can sometimes make millions of dollars for the inventor if enough copies of the invention are sold. In 1933, an English road builder called Percy Shaw was driving home. At one point on the road there was a bend with a steep drop on the right. The night was foggy, and Shaw followed the road with difficulty. Suddenly, the lights of his car caught a cat sitting on a fence. The light shone back to him clearly from the animal’s eyes and possibly saved his life. Shaw realized that “glass eyes” down the center of roads could help to guide drivers. He started work and put together glass balls and mirrors inside a rubber case. Each time a car drove over them, the “eyes” sank into the road and were cleaned by a piece of rubber. The government didn’t show much interest in Shaw’s idea until his “Catseyes” became useful during the war years because street lamps were switched off at night and cars had to use very weak lights. Enemy airplanes couldn’t see the light from Catseyes. After the war, the government started a program to put Catseyes on all Britain’s roads. Shaw became rich, but continued to live in the same house. In most ways his life didn’t change. * ™: a sign showing that the name is owned by a person or company that makes them, and cannot be used by others 52
Post-it™ notes A new idea can sometimes have an unexpected use. In the 1970s Art Fry, who worked for a company called 3M, was looking for a new way to mark his place in his Bible. He noticed that somebody at the company had produced a new type of sticky material. It was strong enough to hold onto paper, but could be lifted off easily and left nothing behind. He realized that his problem was solved. 3M liked the idea and started to make little books of yellow squares of paper with this sticky material along one side. They were called Post-it notes, although most people today call them “yellow sdckies.”
Sometimes inventors only have to copy what already exists in nature. In 1948 George de Mestral, a Swiss mountain climber and inventor, returned from a walk with his dog. Both he and the animal were covered in sticky balls from plants. Looking at these closely, he saw how they caught hold of the cloth, and an idea was born. He decided to call his new material Velcro and in time his company was selling 55 million meters of it every year. Today, Velcro is used on clothes and bags to keep pockets shut and to hold pieces of cloth together. Lock-nuts There are times when ideas come from looking at things in a new way. Catherine Ryan noticed that it was difficult to take her wedding ring off because her finger grew bigger when she pulled. She thought of a new kind of nut. It would get tighter as it was turned and so stay in place. Today these are called lock-nuts. Millions of them are used in the building of many types of 53
machines. Before Catherine Ryan had her idea, another nut had to be tightened against the first one. This took longer and cost more. The sewing machine Dreams can sometimes give an answer when deep thought has failed. In 1845, Elias Howe was sitting at his desk, trying to turn his idea for a sewing machine into something that might work. He fell asleep and dreamed he was in Africa and had been caught by local people who weren’t very friendly. In fact, they were going to eat him. They put him in a pot of water and started to heat it. He kept trying to climb out of the pot, but they pushed him back with their sharp spears. W hen he woke up, he thought about his dream. He remembered that the point of each spear had a hole in it and realized that this was the answer to his problem. Howe’s machine was never very successful, but the first popular machine, invented by Isaac Singer in 1851, used Howe’s needle with a hole in the pointed end. Howe took Singer to court and won. He collected $5 for every sewing machine made in America, and became the fourth richest man in the country.
From time to time the answer comes from somebody who is new to a situation. In 1903, on a trip to New York City, Mary Anderson of Alabama watched as a driver got out of his streetcar many times to brush snow from the glass at the front. Millions of people had seen the same thing on many occasions, but Anderson made a simple drawing of a long piece of rubber that could clean the glass. This was moved backward and forward by hand from inside. By 1916, these were being fitted to all American cars, and they were later powered by electricity. 54
A new vacuum cleaner Sometimes no improvements are made to a machine until somebody asks a simple question— why? In 1978, vacuum cleaners hadn’t really changed very much since the beginning of the century. There had been a number of improvements, but air was still pulled through a paper bag and in time this didn’t work so well because of the dust. One day, James Dyson found that he had no more vacuum cleaner bags. He took the old one out of the trash can, and discovered that it wasn’t really full. He shook the dust out of it, but it still didn’t work well. Dyson started to think about a better method. O n the roof of a local factory, there was a machine to remove dust from the air; it turned very fast and caught the dust against its sides. Dyson visited the factory that night and made several drawings of the machine. He rushed home and made a model out of card, which he fitted to his vacuum cleaner. It had no bag. Instead, a part of the machine inside turned round very fast. The dust hit the sides of this and fell to the bottom of the machine. To Dyson’s surprise, it worked well. It took fourteen years, though, and more than 5,000 models, before the Dual Cyclone (DC01) appeared in stores in 1993. It became the most popular vacuum cleaner in the UK, and Dyson cleaners are best-sellers in Western Europe. A radio for Africa Human need often leads to change. In 1991, Trevor Bayliss saw a television program about Africa. A medical worker said that if more people were able to listen to the radio, advice on disease control could be broadcast. But many areas were without Hectricity and batteries were expensive, often costing more than a Week’s food for a family. Bayliss had a new idea for a radio. You turned a handle a number of times and this produced enough Bayliss’s radio electricity to make it work. It took some time, though, to produce a working model and to make companies believe in the idea. Then, in 1994, Bayliss’s latest model, which ran for fourteen minutes, appeared on Tomorrow’s World, a BBC program about inventions. After this, he got the money to finish the job. His radio is now supplied to many people in the poorer parts of the world. It is also sold at full cost in Europe and the US, where people like it because used batteries damage the Earth. One of the first inventions was the wheel, and it has continued to be useful. Since then, life has become easier for many people as a result of new ideas. Most important inventions came at first front China, and later from the Middle East, Europe, and the US. There are recent signs that this is changing, and new ideas are coming froth many more parts of the world. One thing, though, will never change— the ability of human beings to look at something old and think of something new.
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