A light bulb suddenly switching on over their head, or an elusive thought plucked right out of the sky… how do inventors and other creative people come up with ideas?
Click start to play today’s Word Search, where we work out how to nail down the elusive word - ‘creativity’.
Creativity is the spark that lights a fire of innovation in every field – from the arts to scientific discoveries. But does every spark start with a “eureka” moment, like it supposedly did for the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes? He discovered a law of buoyancy while bathing, and the story goes that he excitedly hopped out of the bathtub and ran down the street, shouting, “Eureka!” (“I have found it!”), in delight.
According to a June 2014 report in the National Geographic, one age-old theory that carries some weight is that the crux of creativity lies in analogies, similar to the basic ones you would have studied in school – a crumb is to bread, as splinter is to wood, for example. Those who have a creative streak constantly connect old ideas and experiences to new situations.
For instance, the inventor of the lightbulb, American businessman Thomas Edison, and his team had a reputation for constantly dreaming up new inventions. He is credited with inventing the acoustic telegraph and the phonograph, and with his team, developed a cotton picker, a snow compactor and a way of generating electricity with magnetised iron. But documentation of how he developed the kinetoscope – a machine for viewing motion pictures – shows how using analogies can spark creativity and lead to new inventions or discoveries.
Edison went to a lecture in 1888, where a British photographer named Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated how he could capture animals in motion through his praxinoscope – a spinning cylinder that creates the illusion of motion. Through Muybridge, Edison learned that motion could be recorded in a sequence of photographs. He had already successfully recorded sound through his phonograph, and he realised that recording motion was not so different. So, what if you could combine both?
Within eight months, Edison wrote a preliminary patent for his kinetoscope, where he stated: “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording of a reproduction of things in motion…”
For the inventor, it wasn’t one enlightening moment, but a series of connections through a simple analogy that got the ball rolling. Less of “eureka” and more of “what if…” seems to be the key to creative brainstorming.
Play today’s Word Search and let us know if you enjoyed it at games@gulfnews.com.
