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.

THOMAS EDISON

ON February 11th, 1847, a great personality Thomas A. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio. His inventions have changed the entire pattern of civilization. Edison’s ideas have invaded almost every phase of our daily life. We pick up a telephone and his handiwork is there. We push a switch and Edison’s idea illuminates the room. We put a record on a phonograph and Edison makes it come to life. He helped create the electrical age and made the world of motion pictures. Edison has made our world a more convenient, a more interesting and a much better place   in which to live. And what is just as important, he created millions of new jobs. 

Thomas A. Edison

Nearly all of us are familiar with the story of the first incandescent lamp, his experiments with the phonograph and motion pictures, but perhaps some of the other high-lights in his life are not so well known. Edison never seemed to have enough to do. Even while working fifteen hours a day as a train newsboy, on the side he learned telegraphy and set up an amateur printing press in the mail car.  His education consisted of observing, doing and reading. Later when he became an expert telegraph operator, he still found time to continue his studies.

Edison’s mind from early youth was always filled with ideas. He was always looking for better ways to do the job. But he had more than ideas. He had the desire and ability to put them into physical form and try them out. But this experimenting cost money, and the minute young Tom would get hold of a few dollars, it went into apparatus and equipment. 

But it wasn’t long before his experiments bore fruit. He redesigned the clumsy stock ticker of that day and sold the improved machine for $40,000, a fortune then. To Edison, it meant only that he could spend more money and time in research. By the time he was 30 he had become a professional inventor. He had more ideas than he could complete by himself, so he set up a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey and employed some assistants to help him work on the many unknown details. This procedure of Edison’s is probably the first time in history that an organized group was used to investigate a problem. The lone inventor was being replaced by organized research. The Menlo Park Laboratories were moved to Dearborn, Michigan under Mr. Edison’s supervision where it became a part of the great Ford Museum. Out of this laboratory came the telephone transmitter, the phonograph, the incandescent lamp and the motion picture. 

First working drawing of Phonograph

Because of the variety and number of Edison’s inventions, we are apt to get the impression that these things came to him easily – that they were just flashes of genius. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is one story about Edison that illustrates not only this point but brings out his ability to use a fact whether it was good or bad. 

Edison was hard at work experimenting on an important invention. In spite of numerous attempts, he could not get the result he wanted. All his efforts failed. A sympathetic friend said to him, “It’s too bad to do all that work for nothing”. “But it’s not for nothing”, said Edison. “We have got a lot of good results. Look now, we know 700 things that won’t work”.

     

A further illustration of this tenacity of purpose is demonstrated by his search for the best filament material for his incandescent lamp. For eighteen to twenty hours a day he experimented with all sorts of materials – from human hair to plant fiber from the South Seas – until one day he found that carbonized bamboo fiber gave the best results. Most people would have stopped there but not Edison – he had to find the best type of fiber. As one writer said, “he ransacked the earth from the Malay Peninsula to the jungles of the Amazon. He tried 6,000 varieties and it cost him over $100,000 until he found the ideal type in the South American jungle”.

Incandescent Lamp

Just as a journey of a thousand miles start with a single step, this man has taught us that many times the great inventions start with small ideas. And Edison lived in a world of ideas – he knew he was surrounded by thousands of things, every one of which he felt he could improve. His only difficulties were that the days and nights were too short and there were not enough hands and minds to work on all the problems. If he were living today, I am sure Edison would look around and say, “Let us not become egotists just because we have made some progress. There are many problems yet unsolved and it seems to me there are just about as many things to be done now as there where when I was a boy, but the opportunities are so much greater. So let us get to work”.