HOW TO INVENT
How to invent? Invention is a problem and a solution. It necessarily
follows that the first thing to do is to thoroughly comprehend the
problem and then contrive mechanical means to solve it. Work from the
centre outwardly; that is, build up your machine around your object
of accomplishment. Do not try to design a machine and insert it
afterwards.
There are many men so extraordinarily gifted that it is possible for
them to succeed in diverse directions, even in those for which they
have not been especially equipped by training. That is conspicuously
true in invention.
Useful inventions have been invented, and fortunes made by the
inventors who were not engineers so far as training was concerned,
nor were they even machinists, yet their extraordinary gifts have
out-balanced the disadvantage of the lack of training for mechanical
creation; but they all had to enlist, more or less, the services of
others to make up for their own deficiencies. No doubt there will be
many more inventors from outside the ranks of mechanical engineers,
and they will find the following suggestions useful.
Understand thoroughly what you have to accomplish, first of all.
After conceiving your ideas of a mechanical contrivance to do it
with, try and make some kind of a sketch of the whole and the part
respectively.