NOTICING
How Creative Ideas And Inventions Start
By James L. Breese, Jr.
James
L. Breese, Jr., who was a gifted thermodynamic systems engineer, and
whose father, James L. Breese received 136 basic patents in oil burners,
wrote to me:
I
have always felt that creativity and discovery arise largely from a
talent for noticing odd things. You also allude to this in your mention
of noticing how tiny dew drops sparkled on a spider's web leading to the
“aha” moment of your polymer gel detector invention. Any number of
people had seen swinging lamps and chandeliers before Galileo noticed
that the period of swing was constant regardless of amplitude (within
limits). How many researchers hunched over microscopes in that dusty
London lab had impatiently cleaned pollen and fungus from their Petri
dishes before Alexander Fleming noticed that fungus was
devouring bacteria in the dish?
After
the discoveries of Faraday and Maxwell, everyone knew that moving a
magnet near a wire produced the same effect as moving the wire near the
magnet, but it took Einstein to see that this odd occurrence ruled out
the notion of absolute motion. Willis Carrier, while waiting for a train
to arrive on a foggy night noticed that water drops were forming where
wisps of fog swept over rain puddles. He instantly had the
counter-intuitive idea that moisture could be extracted from air by
passing the air stream through a water spray that was below the dew
point temperature of the air. He applied that to solving the problem of
high humidity in printing plants and subsequently founding the modern
air conditioning industry. Perhaps the greatest noticer of all time was
Charles Darwin who saw important differences among plants and animals
that countless observers before him had apparently never noticed.
(c) 2009 Lawrence B. Kilham