The toughest part of inventing isn’t solving problems. It’s figuring out which problems are worth the effort.
“A few years ago, an inventor patented a device that caused an electric motor to rock a chair,” wrote Raymond F. Yates in 1942. “Now imagine, if you will, the sad spectacle of anybody too lazy to rock his own chair! No wonder he could not make money. If he had expended the same effort on something that was actually needed, he might be wealthy today instead of being sadder but wiser.”
Mr. Yates, a self-taught engineer, inventor and technical writer, tried to nudge other inventors in the right direction with his book, “2100 Needed Inventions.”
Published by Wilfred Funk Inc., Mr. Yates’s book was a list of ways people could alleviate certain nuisances and defects of life and get rich for their trouble.
While Mr. Yates recorded most of his 2,100 inventions in no particular order, he did make a top-10 list that proves he wasn’t a trivial thinker.
His top-three needed inventions all concerned energy — a way to transform energy into power with less waste, a more efficient way to store energy and better light bulbs. Fourth was perfection of rapid transportation, including, possibly, “magnetic levitation as a means of overcoming the problem of friction.”
Others were better televisions — “a personal television receiver that would fit into a vest pocket” — artificial or transplantable eyes for the blind and a cure for cancer.
Photo by allaboutsymbian.com.
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