inventors essays

inventors essays Mr. Hughes starts off the article by explaining the prosperity of American invention from the end of the civil war to the beginning of WWI. The numbers of patents in America at this time were more than Britain, France, and Germany had all together. He will be discussing four major inventors of the time, all of which made major contributions to the electrical industry. The in inventors are Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, inventor of modern electric-power transmission; Elmer Sperry, pioneer in the field of automatic controls; and Lee De Forest, inventor of the modern vacuum tube. The field of invention back then differed from its modern form. Todays inventors are in industrial or governmental labs, none of the early inventors had this problem. These modern labs tend to slow down the inventive momentum of the inventor. These labs tend to make 5% refinements rather than 95% breakthroughs. There were such think tanks in the earlier times. Nikoli Tesla briefly worked in Edisons. After inventors of the time achieved economic independence they tended to do there own work. Edison created his own lab with, which was very impressive for the day, creating more than 1000 patents in his name. Because of the freedom of the time inventors had to narrow down what they would focus on. This was done w/ varying methods. They would look at previous patents on which improvements could be made, or they would search many different journals to get ideas from. So the inventors of the day did utilize collaboration from others just in a different way, such as entries published in journals. The next subject discussed was the capabilities of metaphor in invention, most of the great inventors were said to have used this method to help them along. Aristotle once wrote, Metaphor is a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar. Edison ...