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Flash of Genius
Throughout history, inventors have rarely had an easygoing life. They’ve seldom had any capitol needed to develop their ideas, few saw their ideas be part of common use in their lifetime and regrettably those who did often had them stolen.
Like many inventors, Robert Kearns was a dreamer.
The other night we watched this fantastic inspiring true story (Flash of Genius) film starring Greg Kinnear about a college professor in Detroit (Robert Kearns) who invented and fought for years against major automaker Ford for infringing upon his intermittent windshield wiper system that you now see in every car in the world.
Back then, car wipers were either on or off; they couldn’t be metered to swipe periodically.
There’s a scene in court where Kearns represents himself and he’s being criticized for not inventing anything because technically all the parts he used to create this system already existed and could be found in any catalog. There is some validity in what was being said against Kearns but his rebuttal is what stood out for me.
His son hands him a book by Charles Dickens (Tale of Two Cities), he reads the first couple of lines and asked the witness if he thinks that Dickens invented any of the words he recited. The witness reluctantly responds “No”.
Kearns says -
“I haven’t checked but I’m pretty sure there’s not a single word in this book that is new and they can all be found in a dictionary. All Dickens did was arrange them into a pattern. He created something new by using words, perhaps the only tools that were available to him just as almost all inventors have had to do in history.”
Kearn’s analogy was nothing different from what he had accomplished. He took basic electrical components, arranged them into a specific pattern and achieved an ambition that every car company in the world was struggling to invent but Kearns was not being given credit for it.
The outcome I’ll leave for you to explore on your own but this scene got me thinking that what we become as individuals or company depends fundamentally not just on our ideas but on our ability to achieve them and execute them amazingly well and they’re rarely found by thinking but by doing.
You don’t have to be part of a major corporation for your ideas to be heard. Any group of passionate, ambitious people could technically put a company out of business with a brilliant idea or strike it rich by selling it to them.
