Month / October 2010

by Roger Dennis

Fortune favours the prepared mind : Great (Accidental) Inventions

A great post from Gizmodo about inventions that were not necessarily the result of years and years of thinking, but of accidental discovery.  The first paragraph is a literally a teaser to get you into the story:

Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon after his WWI stint in the Navy, was known as an electronics genius. In 1945, Spencer was fiddling with a microwave-emitting magnetron—used in the guts of radar arrays—when he felt a strange sensation in his pants.

via Whoops! The 10 Greatest (Accidental) Inventions of All Time.

by Roger Dennis

Seek answers away from the core

A quote that resonated from the book “The Power of Pull” :

A study of Innocentive’s record in connecting searchers with solvers suggested that the solutions were much more likely to come from people in unrelated disciplines than from people in the same discipline as the searcher.

There’s plenty more gems in this book, recently published by the wonderfully named “Centre for the Edge.”

(Apologies for brevity – heavy client schedule for next two weeks).