The nature of invention
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Invention brings together the facets of existing technology to address a problem. That problem may be entirely new, or it may have been solved before, yet only suboptimally. The point is, there is always something before, ad infinitum.
People, fishermen, construction workers, go about their business every day and look out for anything easing their loads, and come up with plenty of inventions they never talk about. They refer to them as shortcuts and share them with close friends, if any.
We people non-blue-collar always make a fuzz about inventing something new, and trying to get the most out of it. It’s a habit of bragging that comes with our ed-u-ca-tion, which often works and brings in cash and options and whatnot.
With this background you will understand where I’m coming from.
So I was confronted with the problem of keeping a bag of Pfeffernüsse from getting stale after I opened it. It didn’t have a ziplock, nor did I have a clamp or even a rubber band to keep it shut. Imagine my surprise when a simple kitchen fork offered itself as a solution. A fork has parallel prongs, each pair (I’m talking about three pairs of successive prongs of a total of four) equipped to keep a folded top of paper bag contained in its folded configuration.
Part of an invention, I learned, is to forego all of the previous connotations and functional uses of the material at hand; by confining the use of the item “fork” to eating, I would never have hit upon the possibility of its wider use, transcending kitchen, gastronomy, even its use in tuning.
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