Are The Days of Inventing Something With “Q-Tips” Method Over?
There are many ways to invent something. No one knows this better than Thomas Alva Edison. Edison was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life worldwide into the 21st century.
One of his famous quotes was about the response to the idea that he had failed after 10,000 experiments to develop a storage battery. There are many variants on this quote, with the numbers mentioned ranging from 97 to 10,000. The one that surely stands out is. “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”
One of Edison’s quote I like the most is: “There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.”
If you ever tried to invent something or do something creative you would relate to this quote firmly.
The advancement of communications & technology has simplified data aggregation which in turn has helped the modern day inventors immensely. Inventors from the early days had their own way of approaching and solving problems. Some took numerous experiments and years to invent something while other just applied their genius to reach their end goal fairly quickly.
One such inventors was Alan Brite(aka Alan Bloom) who back in 1949 invented a metal cleaning liquid called “Copper Brite”. Allan never finished his college in fact he enlisted in army and went to war while he was still in his 11th grade. Soon he found his passion in inventing and went on to invent many things. One of his successful inventions was Copper Brite.
Here is the Genius of Alan Brite.
Alan went to the library one day and collected all the names of the chemicals that can be used to clean copper. He bought about 60 of them and lined all of them in bottles on a table and started dipping Q-tips in each one of them methodically to swab a copper coin till he found the perfect combination that cleaned copper the best.
He then went on to build a multimillion dollar business from this one solution.
In later years Alan modified the formula to meet several standards but used Q-tips approach to do that each time.
After nearly 50 years “Copper Brite” still stands as one of the best products in the market place. Alan is the president of the company and you can read about him on www.CopperBrite.com
Think about this.. Can you apply this method in your own business? Is there any way you can line up all possibilities and somehow juggle & mix them to find the right combination that can not only solve your problem but can make a huge impact in the society in a good way.
May be you can. Who knows one has to try and try hard I guess.
As I conclude one more quote of Edison comes to my mind: To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.