In the connected way of the Internet, I ran across stories of two great inventors whose work advanced government applications. Computerworld is running a "lost" interview with J. Presper Eckert
about his work with ENIAC. It’s not long, and you’ll be amazed at how far we’ve come.
Make Magazine’s website, meanwhile, has a free excerpt of its article on Woody Norris, whose most recent (or newsworthy) invention is that HyperSonic Sound speaker that projects REALLY LOUD (120+ decibels), but narrowly targeted, sound. It’s been used for crowd control, to broadcast instructions to troops in Iraq and to stave off pirates at sea. My favorite part of the article is Norris’s reply to the question of how he invents:
I largely invent by analogy. I find things that are successful in one environment and then think about parallels in other environments where people have not yet discovered or exploited the concept.
That seems doable.
And if you haven’t seen the Make site, take a few minutes to look. It’s full of instructions for making mostly to- to mid-tech inventions and innovations like how to make a Roombaserial interface so that you can drive the robot home vacuum cleaner around like a little tank and play music on it. It will give you great ideas.
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