History of inventions and how we learn to invent?

According to World Intellectual Property Organization(WIPO) a patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. Getting a patent requires technical information about the invention to be disclosed to the public.

Even though the history of patents dates back to 1416 AD, I first learned about patents only a couple of years back when I learned about Ruchit Kumar Regmi, an inventor who claimed that his inventions could read the brain signals with non-invasive methodologies to aide handicapped, treat mental health issues and associated mental and neurological disorders. He has also provided his inventions to Boeing company for the advancement of pilotless aircraft. He did not have funds to renew his patents, so I had helped collect donations for him. At that time, probably five years back, I used to imagine inventions as some foreign concept, intimidating and difficult process. Today, if you are thinking the same I have some questions for you.

Why does it inspire person A to invent on a given day and why is it not a matter of concern to person B?

Do you ever pause and think that the root of everything that goes into building things around you is a work of someone’s inventions and intellectual property on how they are built is stored somewhere in the form of patents?

How many things that surrounds you is taken for granted and in the manufacture of how many have you shown interest in?

What is the first thing that was ever invented and why did people feel the need for it?

Have you ever read a single patent thoroughly?

What are the sources of ideas ?

Do you ever pause and think what may the details of patent of the pen and keyboard that you are writing with comprise of?

Are you aware that electricity as we see or understand it today started with the invention of platinum filament in 1800 by Sir Humphrey Davy, a British chemist and an inventor?

Has the thought of production of electricity that may intimidate many of us replaced by thought of power of perseverance and care for humanity knowing it is a product of more than 200 years of continuous improvements?

How many Nobel prizes it took to get current precise MRI ?

How much studying and research it took me to even Google “what is the physics behind magnetic data storage ?”

Which nations care about inventions the most?

What kinds of problems are being solved the most with growing number of innovations and what does it have to do with the thought process, values and consciousness of the inventor?

Do we have more men filling the patents over women resulting in lack of innovation in areas of problems women face?

Do Americans hold more patents than Chinese?

Has any science fictions that you read ever ignited curiosity on how things work or were you even introduced to any science fictions growing up?

Do you know any games that allow us to reverse engineer the original founders of a product thereby teaching you learn about innovations as you play?

Can you recall any movie, book, song, museum, story, an idea, person, or any creation of nature that made lasting impact on your consciousness that recognizes the power and influence of innovations?

How often have your senses been exposed to things that popularize science and innovation?

How extended and rich is your consciousness for innovation?

Has your vocabulary been constructed to fluently speak the language of innovation?

Wait, did you just get irritated or overwhelmed by these many questions?
If so, it is by design.
Each question deserve a pause and reflection on what possible answers may look like.

Collective intelligence and the creations that it brings in the world is improving the lives of people each day. The motive for the founders of the internet was to collect the world intelligence by connecting the people all over the world and leverage their collective brains to bring world peace.
Based on the article by an online magazine Science Alert, it has been claimed that the fifty percent of the innovation has been born out of accident, a happy one!

But would such accidents and its usefulness have been recognized without an eye that was already searching for it and without our value system that teach us to value innovation and observation to make the lives of people better?

Inventions: Evolution of Ideas by vital Lacerda that allows you to visualize how ideas are interconnected and how one inventions lead to another. The game allows to visualize each society built with inventions portraying civilization advance with increased inventions. Each society’s progress is measured in Intellectual Property Points(IPP), and the player with highest IPP becomes the strongest and wins the game.Innovation by Carl Chudyk is board game that introduces various innovations from the stone age through modern times where each player builds a civilization based on diverse technologies, ideas and cultural advancements.

China had been victim of economic espionage where its trade secrets had been stolen like tea and silk worms talk about china’s strategy in last years and how it has help the nation improve.

Lastly, I want to conclude this chapter with my story through the lens of innovation.

I have a Nursing degree with the qualification of a Registered Nurse that would allow me to successfully work in any hospitals. During my practical shift in various hospitals of Nepal, not only I had exposure to various diagnostic tools like X-Rays, CT-Scan, MRI, ECG, Electro Convulsive Therapy, USG etc. but I also had performed some of the diagnostic tests on patients. But, I never observed or learned to see the interconnectedness of the above-mentioned diagnostic tools and science behind it. The need to be knowledgeable of such connections is to see the processes with the lens of an inventor to better serve the suffering of patients.

I was not interested or trained where to look and what kind of thought process to leverage until my recent research for this book.
As I reminiscence my three years of life dealing with various diagnostic and therapeutic devices as well as taking care of hundreds of patients in hospitals and communities, I wish I had been trained to see the physics behind therapeutic/diagnostic devices and the mindset behind the innovators either it be theories/procedures, tools or it be medicines.
I wish I had been fascinated by the hidden electrical world inside our body, the value of Electrophysiology, branch of physiology that studies the electrical properties of biological cells and tissues. I only knew about it after stumbling upon a random book “PHYSICS AND MUSIC” by Gleb Anfilov at the library in Russian Center of Science and Culture.

I was dumbfounded to discover that it would be possible to record what a singer sings in the mind making it possible for a thought-controlled computer to generate all sorts of music. It is possible to do so because the cords can be set vibrating without the mechanical force of air i.e. the vocal cords get vibrated by electric pulses transmitted to the throat emitted straight from the brain. The human voice can be seen as some sort of electrophysiological speaker. Even when a singer is not singing but just listening to a music or singing a song in his mind without producing a sound, his/her cords are vibrating in accordance with the frequency of actual singing. It all comes down to the matter of such vibrations of the cords to be picked and recorded with the help of electronic instruments making it possible to create music just by thinking. With the knowledge of physics and leveraging the functionalities and potential of human organs, the silent vocal cords can be given a voice. After learning the potential of electrical properties of human cells, I never saw the human organs the same way again and never took them for granted. Once I learned the anatomy and physiology behind vocal cords, it made even more sense and I have become more intentional on why we recommended patients with neurological conditions to not get distracted while eating as it may choke because of direct impact of brain signals on the throat.

But then I asked myself wasn’t the tools that I had exposure to like MRI, ECG, EEG and USG are doing the same i.e. transmit the signals from brain, heart and abdomen respectively into an output device such that the data emitted by body organs gives us clue into how they are working making it easy to diagnose abnormality in organs?

Today we can see the predictions made in sixties turn into a reality through an advancement in biotechnology. We have witnessed the electrophysiological property of the brain being leveraged to treat problems related to neurological conditions.
A neuro-scientist Naweed I. Syeed has created the world’s first neurochip that connects brain cells to a silicon chip. Building on the top of the idea of neurochip, we have witnessed a company, the Neuralink, successfully implant a chip in a quadriplegic patient who can now spend his time qualitatively by playing games on computers and enhance and expand his ability to interact with the world by engaging in online debates through tweeting his thoughts just by thinking as an ability to control the mouse with thoughts has been made possible.

I wish I had learned to see the Nursing, career of care, through the eyes of an inventor only to make care more caring and responsible.

I wish I was introduced of Florence Nightingale in a way where her identity is of that of a statistician and a writer as much as it was of a founder of modern Nursing.

I wish my teachers knew that as much as I needed to learn the fundamental principle of healthcare by Florence Nightingale i.e. “The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.”, I would have contributed to patients care even more by knowing Florence Nightingale also believed “But to understand God’s thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.” In other words, Florence Nightingale highly valued statistics which inspired her to introduce an analytical approach to medical care to help the patients better.

Only with the research for this book I found Florence Nightingale leveraged the collected data on patients during the Crimean war to convince the need for widespread reform in hospitals and nursing practices. She delivered the story with the help of graphics, polar area diagram, that she invented. She is one of few Mathematicians who used the power of graphics to explain statistical findings to non-specialist readers. It was collecting, organizing and finding insights from data that helped reform the medical and nursing profession for the good.
The example of Florence Nightingale is perfect to understand the Max Morris, a Statistician saying “Statistics real contribution to society is primarily moral, not technical.” So, If we can help statistics enthusiast see statistics not just as a technical tool but a tool of care that if applied unbiased might increase our understanding of morality and thereby help create a world with heightened consciousness of morality through data used with responsibility.

On the contrary, the most likely reason why my college had formulated the Nursing education’s curriculum with limits is because it requires knowledge of limited subject areas to successfully work as a Good Nurse, but it would not have hurt neither would it take a lot of portion of syllabus to introduce the invention element in it.

Who knew wright brothers would have drawn familiarity with bicycles in creating the Chain-and-Sprocket transmission system to transfer power from the engine to the propellers of the airplane?
who knew Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr would turn out to be an inventive genius and invent frequency hopping technology which today is the basis for Wi-Fi and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth. She is now attributed with the title “mother of Wi-Fi”.
Hedy Lamarr is not an exception, many examples can be found with a little search.

If I were to introduce you to every knowledge and insights about inventions and how it is crucial for quality of life, it would take years, but If I have become successful in convincing you to care for an inventive mindset, you could care to research yourself and find dozen of books on history of inventions and innovators, associated contents and possibly invent something useful someday.

After all, the most important factor that you would need is a deep care and obsession of certain issue that you wish to solve, isn’t it?

why not portray the inventive spirit today and setup an inventing room or inventing table in your house where you could allocate your time to invent?

Dr.Shunpei Yamazaki, a person with the highest inventions in the world, says that unless he pushes himself to 0.05 seconds before death, the invention won’t come. He also wants to live longer and he invents because he wants to make people happy.

So, shall we care and be obsessed about inventing new things and processes to make the lives of people better?

While we can get excited about innovations as much as we want, the innovations that makes our world beautiful, better and worth living.
While we get hopeful about innovations and cannot wait on the next revolutionary product that we are innovating on, it is also worth mentioning and be concerned about the negative impacts of innovations on humanity.

I personally believe that invention of language may have introduced considerable harm to humanity more than we realize either by errors in understanding or by error in communicating. Many people fail to accurately investigate malfunctions of language causing inefficiency in humanity. I am going to conclude this section with the description of the game “Building the Tower of Babel: Linguistics in Science Fiction” reminding us the curse of language. The game was played at 81st World Science Fiction Convention in Chengdu, China.
“The people of the world live and work together and share a common tongue. They build a giant tower “whose top may reach unto heaven”. God isn’t a fan of this development, so curses humanity with different languages so they can’t cooperate, and scatters them around the world.”

The only reason for invention should be to make things better and beautiful!