Laziness as the Mother of all invention

A report from a seminar honoring the National Inventors Hall of Fame proved the occasion to ‘hail creativity” and boost patent protection. And the point is well taken. There must be more than a few would-be inventors out there who are laying down their smocks with the fear that weak patenting will make their work for naught, just as a handful of kids on my block have given up their quest for rock stardom, mindful of the abyss that awaits them as the music business and its copyrighted intellectual property stream away from one disk to the next.

But how can you figure how impeding patents are to the quest of the true discoverer?

Patents are excuses for litigation, and patent litigation certainly hectored such as Farnsworth and drove Armstrong over the edge. They need to make a living, and to make a payroll, as much as Metallica does today, but the fact that there were patents gave them little relieve. The little experience I had talking with inventors (of logic synthesis tools, writable optical disks, and early imaging software) gave me to believe that the drive to find ‘an easier way’ was the main thing they had in common.

I had occasion once to talk to one of the first producers of a silicon compiler, and he was pretty adamant that avoiding farm work got him into electrical engineering, and avoiding hand coding caused him to try to train a machine to layout semiconductor chips.

So the question that pops up: Which of the two following traits is more prominent in human nature?
1) the drive to make money, or
2) the desire to avoid work.

Serendipity in the offing
Anyway, the Times report on the invention fame seminar touches on more than just issues of patents and invention, mother. “The prepared mind notices when something doesn’t go as expected, and curiosity is piqued by observation,” said 3M Scotchgard Discoverer Patsy O Sherman. Certainly there must be something unique about the 3M environment that makes a way for prepared minds to notice the unexpected. Patsy’s Scotchgard ephipany came when some compound errantly but harmlessly landed on someone’s tennis shoes. 3M’s inventions of masking tape and Post-Its derived from not dissimilar mundane events that held surprises for the ‘lab guys’ on hand.

Other links related to this story

www.invent.org