GROPING IN THE DARK

As we listen to fine music, you probably wonder, just the same as many others, what kind of person the composer was and how he arrived at the combination of notes and intervals that resulted in this particular composition. We are sure that back of it there are long hours of cut and try, discouragement and hard work. We hear only the successes.

I wish we could see the great amount of patient work that is required and the great amount of discarded material which is necessary to produce one of these successes.

Composition, development and invention are not new things. The procedure used is as old as mankind itself. However, there is a certain amount of dramatic appeal to discovery inasmuch as it always includes the element of surprise. It is often the result of starting out to do one thing and ending up with something different. Columbus, of course, is the classical example of this. He started out to find a new route to India, and discovered America.

Many years ago, I read a story which had a great effect on me and whenever I think of men groping blindly to find things, it always comes to my mind.

The story is about a man by the name of Bernard Palissey who lived in the southwest of France about 400 years ago. He was jack-of-all-trades _ surveyor, painter, a worker in glass and, in addition, he was a nature lover. 

One day, a wealthy nobleman of the neighbourhood showed Palissey a white enamel cup which came from the east. It fascinated him immediately. In fact, he admired the cup so much that, then and there, he resolved to make enamelware just like that cup, in spite of the fact that he knew nothing about pottery, and the best of his knowledge, there was no man in France who could make enamels.

He told his wife that evening, “I have to grope in the dark, for I have no knowledge of clays and don’t know anything about the composition of enamels”. As we say today: he had to start from the scratch, because there was no other way. There was nothing in literature, as all important information at that time was kept a secret.          

Palissey said: “I will build a furnace in the old open shed back of the house and will work on this in the evenings. I can coat some of the broken pieces of flower pots with the chemical compounds which I will want to try. Some of these may turn out to be the white enamel I am looking for”. For months, in all kinds of weather, he worked in the open shed without apparent results. However, he was getting first-hand experience.

But instead of continuing to work only in the evenings, he began to neglect his regular work, so, as months become years, his family became destitute. After five years of this constant research, he was so poor that he could not buy fuel for his furnace.

One day when his family was away, he tore down the fence around the garden for fuel. But this was not enough to raise he temperature, so he tore up a part of the floor in the house and then started to use the furniture! The neighbours were sure he had gone mad and notified the magistrate. When the officers arrived to take him into protective custody, they did not find a crazy man but one in ecstasy, “Look, look!” he said. “The enamel has melted!”

Some of the pieces out of this hectic experiment caught the eyes of the Duke de Montmorency, who gave him the job of decorating a chateau. Now he could feed his starving family and he was able to replace the fence, the floor and furniture. He was able also to get a better furnace.

Three years after his first experiment, he made another important step in the process. But still he was not satisfied. All of this work had been adding to his experience, but it took another seven years, that is, fifteen in all, until he had worked out a process for making this particular new type of enamelware for which he became famous.              

If he had discovered the white enamel, which he so painfully sought, he would never have been known.  

It was the new thing which he discovered, more or less accidentally, that makes him famous as a creative artist. I did not realize when I read of Palissey that, instead of this being a story of a specific incident; it was really the universal history of all development.

The Palissey principle can often lead to new and valuable results. Not always the results sought for, but frequently things of far greater value. On many research problems, after all scientific methods have been tried, I prefer the cut-and-try method of groping in the dark, with the possibility of bumping into something, to just sitting still and philosophizing.