Description
From man's inventiveness has arisen the vast difference between his way of life and that of animals. Who are the geniuses who made our civilisation possible? From all the tens of thousands of millions of men and women who have peopled the earth, only a few thousand - say .00001 per cent - have had the creative genius to conceive something new and useful. Their inspiration did much more than raise our standard of living. It changed the size and distribution of population, brought about great shifts in the location of political power, created new class systems, transformed education and much else, in ways which few of us fully appreciate.Who, then, are the inventors? What motivates them? How can they be encouraged? What have they got that others have not? These are questions of more than philosophical interest. It might be expected that governments would devote tremendous efforts to finding such talents and to making life easy for them. But the reverse has been the case. Traditionally, inventors have had to struggle for recognition; they have been neglected and even ridiculed.
A survey of the lives of inventors reveals that almost all of them have aspects of character which are relatively rare in combination. Intense persistence, optimism, originality of approach, combined with an almost mystical conviction that there are more effective, more elegant ways of doing things. And, above all, an extreme independence.
