How to invent? Invention is a problem and a solution. It necessarily follows that the first thing to do is to thoroughly comprehend the problem and then contrive mechanical means to solve it. Work from the centre outwardly; that is, build up your machine around your object of accomplishment. Do not try to design a machine and insert it afterwards.

There are many men so extraordinarily gifted that it is possible for them to succeed in diverse directions, even in those for which they have not been especially equipped by training. That is conspicuously true in invention.

Useful inventions have been invented, and fortunes made by the inventors who were not engineers so far as training was concerned, nor were they even machinists, yet their extraordinary gifts have out-balanced the disadvantage of the lack of training for mechanical creation; but they all had to enlist, more or less, the services of others to make up for their own deficiencies. No doubt there will be many more inventors from outside the ranks of mechanical engineers, and they will find the following suggestions useful.

Understand thoroughly what you have to accomplish, first of all. After conceiving your ideas of a mechanical contrivance to do it with, try and make some kind of a sketch of the whole and the part respectively.