Almost every one has had, at some time or other an idea for a new invention or of how some old device could be improved.

To get an original idea for an invention is in itself a mark of genius, but it is not enough to make it a success and if you do not know how to develop it you are almost certain to give up before you have completed it.

And to give up a good idea and then find that some one else has thought of the same thing later, worked it up and made money out of it gives a fellow a most uncomfortable feeling about what might have been.

Now my purpose is not to tell you what to invent as much as it is to tell you how to invent and, if when you get an idea that you believe worth while you will follow it up step by step as I have outlined in this book you will at least save yourself time, worry and money and you stand a chance of winning fame, glory, and a bank account.

How to Get an Idea.—There is only one way to invent a new thing or to make an improvement on something that has already been invented and that is to get an idea.

And what, you may wonder, is an idea? It is easy to say that it is a notion that comes into your head, or a thought that springs into your mind. But I doubt if even a psychologist could explain just what an idea is or how one originates in the mind any more than a biologist could tell how the germ of life is retained in a seed and how it grows when it is planted.

One good thing about an idea, though, is that we don’t have to know what the mysterious thing is or how it springs into being in the mind. In this way an idea is very much like electricity—we don’t know exactly what it is but we do know a good deal about how it works and this is enough for our present purpose.

The First Raw Idea.—There are several ways by which you may get an idea for an invention but in any case the first raw idea, or inductive discovery, as it is called in philosophy, must and does come from something outside the mind, something that you have seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt, and when your mind is in the right condition to receive an idea of this kind you will know it when it comes and grasp it very quickly, that is if you are a real inventor.

There are many kinds of raw, or original ideas and they show themselves in various ways. You may get a very vague idea of an invention, or of an improvement, or it may be a clean cut one on the jump; it may be a very valuable idea or it may be a wholly worthless one, but it is generally easy after you get one to enlarge upon it, as we shall presently see, and to build up in the mind’s eye a structure so that you can guess pretty nearly whether you will have a palace, an architectural monstrosity or a chicken-coop when it is done.

A first, or raw idea may come to a fellow, who is on inventing bent, in any one of several ways but chiefly when (1) he is conjuring up in his mind something which he has seen or heard; (2) when something happens by accident which shows him an effect or a result that is new, and (3) when he is looking at or working on some device or machine; and this last way is the one that is most productive of ideas for useful improvements.

As an example of getting an idea behold a young man rocking in a chair with closed eyes; he is thinking of nothing in particular but of a good many things quite vaguely. A thought of his sister packing her trunk—in the way a woman usually packs a trunk—comes into his mind and then an idea strikes him that it would be a good scheme for a trunk to have drawers in it like a bureau. The result of this raw idea is the wardrobe trunk as we know it to-day.

Accidental Discoveries.—Once in a long while some one hits upon an invention purely by accident.

A good illustration which covers the point was the discovery of vulcanized rubber. The story goes that Charles Goodyear happened to drop some crude rubber and sulphur on a hot stove at the same time with the result that it was made much stronger and more elastic than before.

Experiment showed that the vulcanized rubber could be made as soft or as hard as desired by using more or less sulphur and applying more or less heat. From this discovery of Goodyear’s has sprung the gigantic rubber industry of to-day.

Discoveries of this kind were often made in the early days of invention but the principles which underlie all of the sciences are now so well known that invention itself has been brought down to a scientific basis; and instead of inventors being long-haired, dreaming Micawbers they are generally men of education and genius too, trained along the lines they are working in and who look like clean-cut business men; and if they are successful inventors you may depend upon it they are business men.

When I say that they are men of learning I do not mean that it takes a college professor to be a big inventor; indeed very few college professors have the genius to be inventors and too many inventors have too little knowledge along the line in which they are working. Of the two genius is the greatest for it is bred in the bone while any one can educate himself.

To make the point clear here are three famous men of genius and who were largely self-taught.

Faraday who made the dynamo and motor possible was a poor, uneducated boy with a burning thirst for knowledge when he was apprenticed to Davy at the Royal Institution in London. Edison had about as little schooling as the law allows, but he taught himself science and he now stands head and shoulders above all the rest of the great inventors. And Marconi, a young fellow of 23, invented the wireless telegraph while the greatest scientists of the world could not do it until he showed them how.

Thought Out Ideas.—There are very few inventions which are complete when the first idea of it comes into the mind, but instead nearly all of them require thinking out, or deductive proof as it is called in philosophy.

This second process of thinking consists of turning the raw idea over and over in your mind so that you can judge whether it is good or not, how it will work out and other things about it, and to do this you must know as many of the facts relating to it as you can and when you have these all clear and catalogued in your mind your idea then takes on the aspect of an invention.

The two usual ways to get the needed facts are (1) to read up on the subject, and (2) to experiment along the line of your idea. Of course if it is your regular work that has called forth your first idea it is quite likely you will have all of the facts you need to go ahead and work the thing out; but if your idea is about a device, or a machine, or a compound you know nothing of your best plan is to read up on the subject and follow up your reading by making a number of experiments.

Reading up Your Subject.—In this day of public libraries it is easy to get books on any subject unless it is one on sunsets and sunsets don’t count in inventing—in fact nothing counts except the big idea, a shop or a laboratory to develop it in and burning the midnight incandescent light.

It doesn’t matter very much what invention you are working on you ought to read a first book on physics and one on chemistry and what’s more you should study them if you expect to ever invent anything of magnitude.

A book on physics tells all you need to know in the beginning about matter, force, motion, the principles of machines, the mechanics of liquids and gases, electricity and magnetism, sound, heat and light.

Suppose you have an idea for an electrical device, if you will read the chapters on electricity and magnetism in your book of physics you will learn what you ought to know first about these subjects and then if you need to go deeper you can get a more advanced book.

A book of the elements of chemistry tells about gases, acids, alkalies and metals and of their chemical changes, and you will find a little knowledge of chemistry of considerable use in working out many ideas. There are many books of physics and chemistry but Avery’s Elements of Physics published by the American Book Company of New York, and Remsen’s Elements of Chemistry published by Henry Holt and Company of New York are good books for a beginner to read.

Working Out Ideas by Experiment.—Though you may think long and hard and read everything you can find that has a bearing on your great idea, you will soon reach a point where you feel you would like to try it out, that is to build it up in reality so that you can see if it will do the work you want it to do or if it won’t do the work where the trouble comes in.

Generally speaking if it is a mechanical or an electro-mechanical scheme you begin by drawing this brain-child of yours on paper and then you make a model, or try to, and you add to it, take away from it, tear it down sometimes and at others you scrap it and build an entirely new one.

But usually it is some one part that needs patience and effort and skill put upon it and as you try out idea after idea, plan after plan and scheme after scheme you are not only almost sure to find just what you are looking for but very often experimental work will lead you to fresh ideas for other and even more important improvements.

Another curious thing I have found about experimenting is this: you may start out on a certain line and find that the result you want is so hard to get it seems hopeless to go ahead. Now if you quit it is all off but if you go on and on trying everything you can think of, keeping up your belief that the thing you are striving for must come and in your own ability to do that which you want to do, after long hours, or days, or weeks of constant work the result will come to you like a flash and just as though the guardian angel of invention hovered over you and put the desired thing right into your mind and hand. The moral is that everything comes to the inventor who keeps on experimenting and does not give up.

Ideas for Inventions in General.—Inventions may be divided into three general classes and these are (1) mechanical, (2) electrical and (3) chemical; and there are combinations of these classes as (a) electro-mechanical and (b) electro-chemical inventions and your idea may come under the head of any one of them.

Ideas for Mechanical Inventions.—Inventions of a mechanical kind include nearly everything in the broad domain of physics but the term mechanical inventions is applied especially to devices that are worked by means of pendulums, springs, weights, levers, wheels and axles, pulleys and inclined planes, screws and pistons and which have to do with force and motion.

To work out an idea for a mechanical device if the latter is a fairly simple one, as a printing press, see Fig. 3, or a scroll saw, see Fig. 4, should not be a very hard thing to do because all of the parts can be easily seen and if you add a few parts to it and it does not work the fault can be readily picked and the part that is causing the trouble can be redesigned and changed until the whole device is made operative.

Of course if the machine is a more complicated affair in which there are pistons, valves and the like as in an air-pump, see Fig. 5, or an ordinary engine, see Fig. 6, it is liable to develop internal—or perhaps infernal would be more fitting—troubles that are sometimes very pertinacious and hard to overcome.

The easiest and best paying way to begin a career of inventing is to hit on an idea to improve some simple device that either makes for safety or for saving, for convenience or for lessening mental or manual labor. But if you should happen to get an idea for something big and hard don’t give it the go-by, but follow it up along the lines which I have indicated in this book and you will stand a pretty good chance of finally working it out to a successful conclusion.

Ideas for Electrical Inventions.—Ideas for inventions in which electricity and magnetism are used are generally harder to work out than those of a purely mechanical kind for the reason that the cause in the first case which produces the result you want cannot be seen, whereas the cause in the second case which sets up the effect you want is always visible.

But electrical inventions are like mechanical inventions in that they may be very simple, such as passing a current through the heating element of an electric cooker as shown in Fig. 7, or it may be quite a complex piece of apparatus as for instance a loud speaking telephone for use on ship-board as shown in Fig. 8.

Where an electric current is used for some simple device a thorough knowledge of electricity may not be necessary but if your invention requires that a low voltage current be changed into high frequency oscillations which are in turn varied by the voice and these oscillations are sent out from an aerial wire, all of which is done in a wireless telephone, I should say that you ought to have a pretty fair understanding of the theory of electricity before you begin your experiments—that is if you expect to develop your invention into an apparatus of utility and hence of worth.

Ideas for Electro-Mechanical Inventions.—There are many devices that are partly electrical and partly mechanical, the operation of the one actuating the other and the other way about.

The electric bell, see Fig. 9, and the telegraph sounder, see Fig. 10, are types of simple electro-mechanical devices, while the telautograph, see Fig. 11, and the electrical gyroscopic compass for use on ship-board, see Fig. 12, are examples of the more complex electro-mechanical devices.

To work out an idea by bringing both mechanics and electricity to bear in the same device often makes the work much easier for sometimes the armature of an electromagnet or the plunger of a solenoid will operate to a better advantage than a combination of levers. But to use mechanics and electricity in the same device you must of course have a knowledge of them both.

Ideas for Chemical Inventions.—There is another class of ideas which require neither mechanics nor electricity for their working out. They are chemical compounds.

Suppose an idea comes to you to make a chemical solution for erasing ink, or to make a new high explosive. While the idea might be a good one you would have a long road to travel if you began experimenting and had no knowledge of chemistry and your road in the latter case would probably be straight up.

Trying out chemical compounds without knowing something of the reactions they produce is far more wasteful of time and money than puttering around with mechanical and electrical devices, especially when one’s line of business is selling ribbons, and besides it’s more or less dangerous too.

Should you get an idea for making an explosive more powerful than any yet invented, either dish the idea or pave the way by taking a course in advanced chemistry and even then your idea is liable to perish with you. Better let the Maxims or the du Ponts do it.

Ideas for Electrochemical Inventions.—Just as there are ideas that call for the use of mechanics and electricity in a single device so there are ideas for processes that combine both chemistry and electricity.

The action of a common dry cell is electrochemical and so is electroplating. But there are a large number of chemicals and chemical substances that are produced by electricity such as nitric acid from the air, calcium carbide from which acetylene gas is made, carborundum which is used as an abrasive in the place of emery, and then there is the electrolytic refining of copper, the manufacture of aluminum, besides a whole string of other electrochemical inventions.

While it is quite safe to work along electrochemical lines still it takes a considerable amount of technical knowledge in these days to invent anything that the kultured German scientists haven’t thought of and worked out.

Protecting your Raw Ideas.—Just as soon as you have an idea for an invention write as clear a description of it as you can, read it to the members of your family, have them sign it and file it away as this is a record you may have to produce sometime in the future to prove your priority, that is that you were the first in time to conceive the idea.

As soon as you have your idea all thought out and have made a drawing, an experiment, a cardboard or other model, in fact anything that will show what it will do, at least to some extent, and so prove that you have really made a new invention, invite two or three of your trusted friends to see it.

Having shown, explained and enthused over it have them go with you to a notary public and sign a statement to the effect that they have seen it; then have him put his signature and his seal on it. You have two years from the date you first showed it to develop and file an application for a patent on it but should you fail to do this within the above time limit any one else can take up your idea, if they know of it, work it up and get a patent on it.

Finally keep a note book and write down every thought you have about your invention, and every experiment you make in good black ink; draw pictures and diagrams and make photographs if possible of your work as you go along and put them in your book with the dates on them. This kind of a record will furnish you with what patent attorneys call the evidence of conception, and which will prove very useful in establishing your prior rights if you should ever get into an infringement suit.