Inventors and Inventions
Inventive mind is a special quality and all people possess it in some degree. I think everyone is ready to create something when he really needs it to make the work simpler and faster. But few do it in reality, because the world today is full of inventions and appliances of different kinds.
The history of inventions began long ago, maybe even earlier than Ancient Egypt and Greece. The first most important inventions were the wheel, the waterwheel and levers of different types. They were all meant to ease human work. A lot of things that we have today were created thousands of years ago and still help us greatly.
The new era of inventions started with the discovery of electricity. Later on in the twentieth century it transformed into electronics and the pace of progress today is really overwhelming. The question is: do we really need everything that has been invented so far? In my opinion any invention must comply with the two following rules:
•it helps, but it doesn’t eliminate human work, as it will make people lazy;
•it can’t do people or nature harm.
Unfortunately some inventors don’t think about it in the process of creation, which leads to grave consequences. Their logic is as follows: if I don’t invent this, someone else will definitely do it. The same situation was with the nuclear weapons. But these are the descendants who will face the aftermath of the criminal scientific activity.
The history of inventions is full of curious facts. We all remember the argument about the inventors of the radio. Nobody knows for sure whether it was Popov or Marconi, because in those days even a three months’ difference in the discovery of the same phenomenon was considered to be simultaneity.
Do you know that the first drawings of a bicycle date back to the times of daVinci? But officially Karl von Drais is known as the inventor of it. Thomas Edison patented more than 1000 inventions, but it does not mean that they were all his intellectual property. He took some of the inventions of that time and improved them to make them more suitable
for practical use. Once he said: ‘The value of an idea lies in the using of it’.
In 1871 an Italian engineer Antonio Meucci did not only demonstrate but also patented a working model of the telephone, but he did not have enough money to extend the period of the patent so two years later Alexander Bell did it and officially became the father of the telephone.
Finally, a Japanese inventor Yoshira Nakamatsu has more than 3300 patents, but most of his inventions even sound a bit strange: a musical golf club, a wig for self-defense, a self-raising toilet seat. I don’t think there is any necessity to continue.
Summing up I can say that the process of invention is really interesting and it is not just a waste of time, but when you want to invent something you should think not only about your ambition and popularity but first and foremost about the world around and people who live in it.
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