The Modern Profession of Inventing in America

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 19, 12 May 1909, Page 34

The Modern Profession of Inventing in America

THE TWO KINDS OF INVENTOR AND THEIR METHODS—HOW MR. EDISON THE TYPE OF THE INDEPENDENT EXPERIMENTER, GETS HIS WONDER FEE RESULTS—THE RISE OF “INVENTIONS DEPARTMENTS” IN GREAI INDUSTRIES—HOW THEY CREATE NEW DEVICES.

By

FRENCH STROTHER

THE complicated machinery of modern business has produce-: :a. types of inventor. One :- trie free-lance: energetic and : is en ■ t . tc treat marketable inver.ti ns s'-itF. ient to rsaintair. h:s f a n il ind endenee. The ther is th • nvent ns ; irtment": the idea factory. or inventive brain of a great busi-n-.-s-: ma.:-. tr, f a number of uzkn a: units— □ en have - n ugh ngen liry ti n as part at the creative organisati n The best-known example o: ta independent -nventrr is Mr. Timas A. Edison. This strange man. s simple in ■ rs nal

appearance and manner, so extraordinary in his habits of life and methods of work, m res an ng his nplicated scries f shops and experiments with such mental precision and constructive energy, yet ap pearing to do so without any sense of orler or system—a sort . : volcanic intellectual ha s- . hat e is th< lesj i : all t .- men rh trv t analyse him. But lie has no sentimental notions about an invention. When an idea it's to him his first question is: “If it can be done, is it worth anything:" If it will not pay he :;r :t. levthe thing .- invents must - worth The instant he decides that the idea is

worth while, he sets in motion his extraordinary metho! of developing it. Some time ago. for example, he needed a Chemical mixture that -hould have two properties that are rarely found together in the same compound. He might have set a chemist to work to figure out from the known science of chemistry, what would be most likely to fill the requirements, and so narrow the problem down to one of trying a few chemicals. What he did was to take Watts’s t hemical Dictionary, in seven! ponderous volumes. and get hi, assistants to make every chemical mixture in it that could even eon eivably serve his purposes, and try ever, one of the thousands. “Out of the lot. I found abo.it seven ompounds that worked.’’ said Mr. Edi-

- n. " I it when . finish* . thi ex er ments I knew bey nd i de ut t that th s< seven . . ’ ' ' ■ - that '. . ' ■ . for that purpose.” 1: becanx interested in radiun - • ntists had described certain substance, as being those in which the presence of '. . :et • . .. . ph t p'.st---. Mr. JM:s?:i ■. - :t ' i. H. t -.-k plates, put : titty ' : . ea.h :• ate. and . • ked them up for seven weeks in a dark room. At the end of that time he had the plate developed. and found that practically every one of the 350.000 spe -imens sh 1 traces of the presets e of radium. Hus. then s . s meth I—t1 —t take n thing for grs nt< 1, t ev< that anyt ing may be possible, and then to try everything conceivable in the hope of hitting on what he needs. To see him moving through ... great or tri -. head b wed, han Is in :o k- t-. hi- faee set in an expression of intense mental preoccupation. s hair relessly combed ...■■. way ;t may please to fall. his eyes fo- — 1 miles away except when he flashes - - '- k f instant understanding, his whole appearance, except for the eyes and the humorous yet ' ■. nof til ss ker. Y« t his is the eating pra t '■ : t ing and exer ising not at all, works often for six - t sleep, falls unns i is fr m exhaustion on bench or ■ . ■ - ■ t- r a k without undres-ing: electrical with mental energy: marvellou- in the power of his mental imagination. This is the popular ilea of what an inventor is —a man of dreams and action in one, possessed by ar. ilea that harasses him until it be delivered in finished form.

But inventors of this type form but a small part of the real profession of in venting. The great majority of practical inventions are made by a group of men • of whom the public never hears. These i men are members of one of the most • complicated and highly organised of the I modern professions. Every great manufacturing concern maintains, under one ■ name or another, an "inventions depart I ment,” employing men who are paid vari- , ous salaries simply to develop inventions. They are supplied with every mechanical appliance to facilitate their work: the bills are paid by the company, and every invention they make is assigned to the company “in consideration of salary and i one dollar." The General Electric Company, at >.henecta.lv. N.Y'., for example.

employs about 800 men who devote much of their time to developing new ideas. It spends £-500.000 a year in this development w rk. Th Wist ngh use an ■ = do the same thing: so does every progressive manuf turing concern of any consequence in the United States. And it is these unknown men. grappling with the everyday, practical problems of great manufactories, who make most of the inventions of immediate commercial valu . THOMAS A. EDISON—INDEPENDENT INVENTOR. Mr. E-ii- n has very definite idea- about inventing as a profession. When asked to les tribe th personal qualifications and the type of mind necessary for an inventor. Mr. Edison said: "The point in which 1 am different ivent - is that I have, be- - - the usual make-up, the romp of

,n the model shops of the Genera! Electn Cotnpanv, New Y'ork.

practicality as a sort of appendix, the sense of the business, money value of an invention. Oh, no. I didn’t have it naturally. It was pounded into me by some pretv hard knocks. Most inventors who have an idea never stop to think whether their invention will be salable when they get it made. Unless a man has plenty of money to throw away, he will tind that

This relatively small machine produces 400 h.p. more than the other engines shown on this page. making inventions is about the costliest amusement he can find. Commercial availability is the first thing to consider. -In working out an invention, the most important quality is persistence. - ea r -y everv man who develops a new ide i works it up to a point where it looks impossible then he gets discouraged. That s not the place io discouraged, ihat s the place tc.‘ oet interested. Hard work and torsticking to a thing till it’s done, are the main tilings an inventor needs I can’t recall a single problem in my lne, of anv sort. thatl ever started on that 1 didn't solve, or prove that I couldn t solve it. 1 never let up until I had done everything that I could think of, no matter how absurd it might seem as a means to the end I was after. Take the problem of the best material for phonograph records. We started out using wax. That was too soft. Then we tried everv kind of wax that is made, and every possible mixture of wax with hardening substances. We invented new waxes. There was something objectionable about all of them. Then somebody said something about soap. So we tried every kind of soap. Thai worked better, but it wasn't what we wanted. I had seven men scouring India, China. Africa, everywhere, for new vegetable bases for new soaps. After five vears we oot what we wanted, and worked out the records that are in use to-day. Thev are made of soap—too hard to wash with and unlike any other in use, but soap just the same. -The second quality of an inventor is imagination, because invention is a leap of the imagination from what is known to what has never been before. "The third essential is a logical mind that sees analogies. No! No! not mathematical. No man of a mathematical habit of mind ever invented anything that amounted to much. He hasn’t the imagination to do it. He sticks too close to the rules, and to the things he is mathematically sure he knows, to create

anything new. I don't know anything about mathematics; can’t even do proportion. But I can hire all the good mathematicians I need for £3 a week." This last point is illustrated by an incident that occurred in his laboratory. He needed to know the exact capacity of a vessel of very irregular shape. He called in two of his mathematicians to work it out. They made innumerable careful measurements with various finely graduated instruments, and after an hour’s work went away with a mass of figures to work out the capacity. As soon as they had left. Mr. Edison filled the vessel with water, poured the water out into a measure and noted how many cubic inches it held. Two days later the mathematicians brought in the result of their complicated figuring, and it tallied exactly with Mr. Edison's five-minute measurement. In the practice of his profession Mr. Edison has to save time. There is a pretty- well developed suspicion among his assistants that his deafness is largely a ruse to avoid hearing things that he

does not care to pay attention to. When Mr. Edison sat for the photograph in this article, in one of the poses his eyes were dropped, looking at his hands. It was a time exposure, and the instant the shutter of the camera closed with a click, he looked up and exclaimed "Overexposed." His attorney shouted to him: "Did vou hear that click?" "Eh. ' "How did you know that he had finished that exposure ?’’ "Oh. I had an intuition.” To Mr. Edison, time is so valuable that he does not waste it even by taking account of it. Time to him is only the chance to get things done: and no matter how long it takes, they must be got done. In his office safe there is carefully locked away a £540 Swiss watch, given him by a European scientific society. It is never used. He buys a stem-winder costing a dollar and a-half. breaks the chain ring off. squirts oil under the cap of the stem, thrusts it into his trousers pocket—and never looks at it. When it gets too clogged with dirt to run, he lays it on a laboratory table, hits it with a hammer and buys another. MR. EDISON AT WORK. Where a man in the profession of law or of medicine has a suite of offices. Mr. Edison's profession requires a great build ing containing many laboratories. In thi. building are many rooms set .Hurt for different kinds of experiments. In one. an assistant who came to him in 1889 from the laboratory of the German scientist, Helmholtz, works alone, or with his

sub-assistants, on phonograph improvements. Mr. Edison may not see him for two weeks at a stretch, but when he does come, he is full of enough ideas to keep that room busy for a mouth. In another room is his chief chemist, himself an inventor of proved merit, working out Mr. Edison's ideas on some new chemical compound. Across the hall, in a room tilled with batteries, each of a different Com position, two men and a boy are taking records of how the batteries work. In another room, improvements are being worked out for Mr. Edison's new storage battery. There are often a dozen inventions under way at once, each requiring the work of an expert; and through the great laboratory Mr. Edison moves from room to room, keeping cheek on the progress of each, suggesting radical changes in the work, always full of ideas, and impressing so profoundly on his men his own mental curiosity, and eagerness, end ener gy that they, as they say themselves, work much harder for him than they would be on their own ideas.—From the "World's Work."

The huge reciprocating engines that are necessary to drive a generator producing 1000 h.p.