Abstract
There is a sharp and intriguing conflict of opinion between those who hold that the day of the individual inventor is done1 and those who consider that not merely is he very much with us but that, from present appearances, he will continue to play an active part in technical progress. The views of the first group have been set forth in Chapter II.2 Against them can be set the notions of some eminent scientists, technologists, individual inventors and students of invention. A few of many possible quotations follows.
Great floods have flown
From simple sources; and great seas have dried
When miracles have by the greatest been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits,
Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.
All’s Well that Ends Well.
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Notes
L. P. Lessing, ‘The Late Edwin H. Armstrong’, Scientific American, Apr. 1954.
Lt.–Col. Chinn, author of the authoritative history of the machine—gun, in an interview given to The American Rifleman, Feb. 1956.
For an extremely vivid account of one such group see G. Pawle, The Secret War, 1939–1945.
There is, indeed, a very suggestive analogy between the multiplication of different types of plants, the variety arising partly through inter—specific hybridisation and partly through mutation, and the multiplication of inventions, deriving partly from usual combinations of existing ideas and partly through a sudden outcropping of master inventions. Thus although there are tens of thousands of different varieties of roses now grown, 95 per cent of existing rose species have not yet received attention by the hybridist. (Ann P. Wylie, ‘The History of Garden Roses’, Royal Horticultural Society Journal, Feb. 1955.)
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© 1969 John Jewkes, David Sawers and Richard Stillerman
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Jewkes, J., Sawers, D., Stillerman, R. (1969). The Individual Inventor. In: The Sources of Invention. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00015-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00015-9_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-00017-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-00015-9
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