Inventiveness

Here's an article about a guy who took 11 hours to make 300 apples power a LED lamp, and then took a 4 hour exposure of his experiment on film.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/visualscience/2012/07/24/how-many-apples-does-it-take-to-power-a-lamp-about-300/

I love stories about inventiveness. Inventive people do crazy fun stuff, like build Rube Goldberg machines, which I love.

http://coolmaterial.com/roundup/rube-goldberg-machines/

I am always dismayed by people who are dismissive of inventive people. Inventive people are dedicated to their work, and their experiments move the world forward.

If you think about it, all of the things we use on a day to day basis came into being when someone had an idea that revolved around creating something, and decided to experiment with something else, or fiddle around with some contraptions with a view to improving life on this planet.

All the products we use today were invented, they arose out of a series of continuously improving inventions over time. Our electricity, planes, trains, cars, ships, buses, microwaves, ACs, cameras and computer systems were all developed by groups of people improving each other's work over time.

None of these inventors were mere consumers of products that existed in their lifetimes. If that's all they were, we wouldn't have all the stuff we do today. If Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers were merely content with what they had to begin with, with what other people had made for them, our world wouldn't have developed in quite the same way it did.

It was because these special people acted on their impulses, working with and developing the technologies they had, that they came up with new inventions that were in turn improved upon.

And those improvements continue today. Inventive people are continuously toiling away at something they believe in, creating products that other people use, even if that's not always apparent, like with fruit powered lamps.

Here's a video describing the work of Theo Jansen, who creates kinetic sculptures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N0IonPOy-I&feature=related

I've never been particularly inventive myself, but I appreciate the importance of inventiveness, and I think other people should too. Of course, I don't think everyone should be inventive. Civilizations thrive on diverse skill sets. If everyone was a geek, the government wouldn't have anyone to defend the country. In fact, in a case like that, there might not even be a government. Now what would THAT do to a civilization?

Inventiveness