How can you write about inventors without trying to invent something? I’m not talking about slapping something together on a lark. I’m talking about dedicating part of your life to making something that’s never existed before. That last sentence sounds a lot like novel writing.
To often the story has the inventor grab things off the shelf and make a gadget that saves the day. Deus ex machina. And the thrown together invention always works, never fails and does the job completely.
Inventing is a struggle. Day after day and long into the night the determined inventor battles to overcome what others just excepted. overlooked, or ignored.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but they never mention that bastard cost, the dead beat father of creation. The Wright brothers sought out every book they could get on heavier than air flight. Then they did experiments and found that the “Book” on flight by a famous German scientist was wrong, based on experiments with equipment they constructed.
Tesla used higher mathematics to build his inventions. It takes work to invent, not tinkering.
Go read the Popular Mechanics article on Van Halen and his inventions concerning guitars and music. Don’t touch that big blue thing.
Sometimes progress is measured in explosions and the learning is if you survive the blast and don’t do it again.
Stay strong, write on, and invent.
Professor Hyram Voltage