Never be threatened with unemployment
Take some comfort from the man who developed the 40 Inventive Principles:
“The world is endless, the universe inexhaustible, and the human brain will never be threatened with unemployment.”
Genrich Altshuller
That’s why its called luggage
It is a common worry among those who seek to invent something new. And yet, sometimes you realize that inventions, even recent ones, are so bloody obvious it’s remarkable they had to be invented at all.
Take wheeled luggage. It’s astonishing to think that the US patent wasn’t issued for adding wheels to luggage until 1970. The wheel was invented five thousand years ago! The jet age had been under way for twenty years. For twenty years we’d just been lugging our bags through airports thinking, “Well, that’s why it’s called luggage.”
“Luggage, n.1590s, from lug (v.) to drag + -age; so, literally what has to be lugged about”
Principles involved
Wheeled luggage may look obvious in retrospect but inspiration for it could have come from Inventive Principles. Principle 5 – Merging: wheeled luggage merges the suitcase and the cart. Principle 12 – Equipotentiality: by rolling a suitcase we avoid the need to heft it.
The magic of Inventive Principles is that they give us a process to develop ideas that aren’t obvious when the problem is at hand – even when the ideas seem obvious later on.
