Innovations and Creativity

These words are very nice to hear.
Only thro Innovation has the world changed.
Innovation has come about by creativity amongst the people inhabiting the world.
Take the stone age where man did not have any modern gadgets but still he lived happy.
He created fire, made a home where he could save himself from rain and sun.
Lets take examples of certain innovations which influenced our lives.
Electricity was invented which led to innovations in lighting, transmission systems like Trains, without which we could not have traveled long distances in our lives.
Automobiles were invented which has made our lives better as we can now travel anywhere with a bus, car.
Aeroplanes have brought continents closer as in a matter of few hours we can go to USA crossing the seas.
All these were possible because of creativity of few individuals who did not accept life as it is but felt the urge to do something different.
In the olden days we used to write ,we had pen friends and the communication was thro letters sent from one country to another which used to take days to reach the recipient.
Now it is a new era where we need to pick up a telephone and call up a friend in another country or send a e mail to him/her which is received instantly.
Communication has revolutionized the way we live.
Distances are no more a problem.
I happened to read a nice article in Outlook Business published in India where they have given a few innovations which mattered to us.


10 BORN OUT OF IDEAS ACCIDENTS
Many a product has come into being because of an accidental
bump or a piece of carelessness. Here’s a look at 10 of them

MICROWAVE OVEN
One day, Percy Spencer, an American scientist,was studying a magnetron—a vacuum tube that produces microwave radiation. Suddenly he felt the candy bar in his pocket melt.Spencer was intrigued.He placed some unpopped corn kernels near the vaccum tube.To his surprise, the kernels started sputtering popcorn all over.
Next, he placed an egg near the tube and it spewed out the yolk. The microwaves had broken the egg. Spencer realised he had stumbled upon a new way of cooking.

VELCRO
After a stroll through the mountains,Swiss engineer George de Mestral found
thistle on his trousers. He tried removing it, but it tenaciously clung to his pants.
Mestral put the thistle under a microscope and saw that it had thousands of
strong but tiny hooks. Out of this grew the idea for the fastening mechanism,
Velcro, which hit the market in 1959.Velcro has since become an eff ective
material used in clothing, shoes, sports equipment, luggage and wallets.

PACEMAKERS
In the 1950s, Wilson Greatbatch,an engineering professor, was hard at work trying to come up with a device to measure heart sounds.Instead of reaching out for a 10,000-ohm resistor, a cylinder to control electric current, Greatbatch grabbed a stronger resistor and plugged it into the circuit. It pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and repeated itself again.Of course, it didn’t succeed in doing what it had set out to do. But it beat like a heart. Voila, one of the most signifi cant medical devices of all time was born: the pacemaker.

ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS
In 1879, Constantine Fahlberg, a chemist, was engrossed in his lab experiment. He forgot to wash his hands and went to dine at a friend’s place. As he ate, he felt his sweet tooth being tickled. After tasting various residues on his hands and clothes and the chemicals in his workplace,he finally traced the cloying sweetness back to a particular compound he was handling in his lab. Later, Fahlberg oxidized a sample of the compound, orthotoluene sulfamide, that had rubbed off on to his hands, and came up with orthobenzoyl sulfi mide. The world now knows it as saccharin.By 1907, saccharin was used as a replacement for sugar in foods for diabetics.

THE SLINKY
The slinky as we know it today was originally just a spring with its secrets yet
to be unlocked. Sometime in 1940, Richard James, a marine engineer, rolled
it along the fl oor. The spring uncoiled itself elegantly and tumbled across the
fl oor before it came to rest. Slinky—a name that refl ects the sound it made—
was introduced in toy stores in 1948, and became one of the most popular
and iconic toys of all time.

ICE CREAM CONES
When ice cream vendors ran out of dishes to serve their wares at the World’s
Fair, St Louis, Missouri, in 1904, a substitute had to be found quickly.It was a
sweltering day and ice cream was melting before you could say ‘eat’.One of the
stall owners, who was selling Zalabia, a water thin waffl e from Persia,came up
with a brilliant idea.He rolled the wafers into cone-shaped receptacles and
popped ice cream on top.

POST-IT NOTES
In 1970, Spencer Silver, who was working for 3M, developed an adhesive but wasn’t successful in marketing it to his own company.The adhesive was weak and the glue came unstuck easily. Four years later, Arthur Fry, a fellow colleague and a member of his church choir, found to his annoyance that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark pages fell off . Fry applied Silver’s adhesive to his bookmarks and they worked wonderfully. Fry sold the modifi ed idea to 3M.And thus was born the Post-It note.

PENICILLIN
Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria in 1928.
Subsequently,he went on a holiday,forgetting his research. His failure to clean up his workspace resulted in one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time.When he came back, he found the glass culture dishes he had left out overrun with fungi. Fleming discovered that the bacteria were unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould. He had discovered penicillin,which would go on to revolutionise the way doctors treated bacterial infections.

SARAN WRAP
In 1933, Ralph Wiley, a college student,was cleaning some glassware
when he came across a vial he couldn’t clean Soon after, Dow Chemical, the company where Wiley worked,developed it into a green film and called it ‘Saran’. The new material would later give rise to a transparent and odorless film marketed as food wrap.Today, no food packaging industry can aff ord to do without Saran Wrap.

SAFETY GLASS
In 1903, Edouard Benedictus, a French scientist, was climbing a ladder in his lab, looking to fetch a chemical substance. As he was climbing up, Benedictus knocked a glass fl ask down.He heard the glass shatter,but when he looked down, he was surprised to find that the shards had stayed together, intact otherwise. In fact, the flask was coated with cellulose nitrate,a liquid plastic. Thus was born the idea for safety glass.

Let us keep our eyes and ears open for you never know what would be the next innovations that would be born out of your curiosity.
We ought to give back something to our world and make it a better place to live for our future generations.
So keep thinking and be creative.
Cheers.