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.
5 thoughts on “Are The Days of Inventing Something With “Q-Tips” Method Over?”
Hi Srini,
You have touched a very important aspect of entrepreneurship.
This will give a renewed thought and looking at things differently.
Thanks,
-Gaj
I can see this in everyday life.
Usually the best solution is the simplest one, and it is just hiding behind our habitual way of thinking, maybe just five minutes of relaxiation away.
I remember one day I was trying to solve a problem I had on a web page. I tried many different ways without fixing it. The I walked in another room and spent 10 minutes meditating in silence. When I came back, I had a stupid ans simple idea with which I solved the problem in a matter of minutes.
You can call it “thinking outside the box”.
You are right on Giovanni,
Years ago while working as a programmer…
I was suppose to make a demo to a client( it was a $1.5M deal) important to my company. For some reason I could not compile the code. It would just not compile. I changed the variable declarations, included external libraries in the code, showed my code to other experts etc etc. I even changed the complete logic of the program and
re-wrote 60% of it.
Thats when I decided to shutdown the whole thing and take a break. The following day about 15 minutes before the demo, and while waiting in the lobby for the client to get access into the building..that’s when it clicked, I found that my original code was missing a semi-colon.. just a semi-colon.
You are so right, despite of our best efforts sometimes we have to play along with the time, detach ourselves from the stressed thinking and re-visit the problem withe a some renewed energy.
Simplicity is the key to a successful life..
Srini
We sometimes had a fear in trying things because we are afraid to fail but can you think how investors made their invention?A trial and error basis,they made research and finally have the perfect combination.So why not do it and keep discovering ways for a successful business.
A man has a so called creative mind that continuoulsly think for ideas.With all those ideas,a certain thing will comes up.I believe every person is born with a quality of being an inventor,we just have to discover how to make it.