inventive genius

   1) A High Rate of Original Thinking Characterizes the Life of the Inventive Genius

   The biography of the inventive genius commonly records a lifetime of original thinking, though only a few ideas survive and are remembered to fame. Voluminous productivity is the rule and not the exception among the individuals who have made some noteworthy contribution. (Barron, 1963, p. 139)

   2) The Idea of the Genius and Its Origins

   The genius was, I suggest, in origin the Roman analogue to the psyche as here explained, the life-spirit active in procreation, dissociated from and external to the conscious self that is central in the chest. This will explain many facts not hitherto accounted for. The genius was believed to assume the form of a snake, as was the psyche. The psyche was believed to be in the head....

   Not only was his genius thus apparently liable to intervene or take possession of a man but we shall also see reason to believe that it was, in the time of Platus, thought to enjoy knowledge beyond what was enjoyed by the conscious self and to give the latter warning of impending events.... The idea of the genius seems to have served in great part as does the twentieth-century concept of an "unconscious mind," influencing a man's life and actions apart from or even despite his conscious mind. It is now possible to trace the origin of our idiom that a man "has" or "has not" genius, meaning that he possesses or does not possess a native source of inspiration beyond ordinary intelligence. (Onians, 1954, p. 129)

1) schöpferisch [Person, Kraft, Geist, Begabung]; fantasievoll [Künstler, Kind]

2) (produced with originality) originell; einfallsreich

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adjective (good at inventing: an inventive mind.) erfinderisch

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adj ( approv) novel, design erfinderisch, einfallsreich; powers, skills schöpferisch

\inventive design originelles Design

\inventive illustration fantasievolle Illustration

\inventive mind erfinderischer [o schöpferischer] Geist, findiger Kopf fam

\inventive person einfallsreicher Mensch

\inventive radio play geistreiches Hörspiel

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inventive [ınˈventıv] adj (adv inventively)

1. erfinderisch:

inventive merit (Patentrecht) erfinderische Leistung, Erfindungshöhe f

2. originell, einfallsreich

3. Erfindungs…:

inventive faculty ( oder powers pl) → academic.ru/39114/invention">invention 2

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1) schöpferisch [Person, Kraft, Geist, Begabung]; fantasievoll [Künstler, Kind]

2) (produced with originality) originell; einfallsreich

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einfallsreich adj.

erfinderisch adj.

schöpferisch adj.

сущ.; лат.

1) мн. genii гений, дух

2) одарённость; гениальность

3) мн. geniuses гений, гениальный человек, гениальная личность

4) талант, склонность

5) мн. genii

а) дух (времени, нации)

б) чувства, настроения, связанные с каким-л. местом

- artistic genius

изобретательный; быстрый на выдумку; находчивый

(genius) inventivo (-a), creativo (-a), (mind) ricco (-a) d'inventiva

m; nur Sg. inventiveness, inventive genius, resourcefulness

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m kein pl inventive genius

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Erfindergeist m; nur sg inventiveness, inventive genius, resourcefulness

1) General subject: a fertile mind, ingenious mind, pregnant mind, fertile mind

2) Makarov: inventive genius, inventive head, inventive mind

Er·fin·der·geist m

inventive genius

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives, Weapons and armour

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The Brennan family, including Louis, emigrated to Australia in 1861. He was an inventive genius from childhood, and while at Melbourne invented his torpedo. Within it were two drums, each with several miles of steel wire coiled upon it and mounted on one of two concentric propeller shafts. The propellers revolved in opposite directions. Wires were led out of the torpedo to winding drums on land, driven by high-speed steam engines: the faster the drums on shore were driven, the quicker the wires were withdrawn from the drums within the torpedo and the quicker the propellers turned. A steering device was operated by altering the speeds of the wires relative to one another. As finally developed, Brennan torpedoes were accurate over a range of 1 1/2 miles (2.4 km), in contrast to contemporary self-propelled torpedoes, which were unreliable at ranges over 400 yards (366 in).

Brennan moved to England in 1880 and sold the rights to his torpedo to the British Government for a total of £110,000, probably the highest payment ever made by it to an individual inventor. Brennan torpedoes became part of the defences of many vital naval ports, but never saw active service: improvement of other means of defence meant they were withdrawn in 1906. By then Brennan was deeply involved in the development of his monorail. The need for a simple and cheap form of railway had been apparent to him when in Australia and he considered it could be met by a ground-level monorail upon which vehicles would be balanced by gyroscopes. After overcoming many manufacturing difficulties, he demonstrated first a one-eighth scale version and then a full-size, electrically driven vehicle, which ran on its single rail throughout the summer of 1910 in London, carrying up to fifty passengers at a time. Development had been supported financially by, successively, the War Office, the India Office and the Government of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had no rail access; despite all this, however, no further financial support, government or commercial, was forthcoming.

Brennan made many other inventions, worked on the early development of helicopters and in 1929 built a gyroscopically balanced, two-wheeled motor car which, however, never went into production.

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See also: Behr, Fritz Bernhard; Lartigue, Charles François Marie-Thérèse; Palmer, Henry Robinson( monorails); Whitehead, Robert( torpedoes).

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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He was the fifth child of Charles and Ann Stalcrop Evans, and by the age of 15 he had four sisters and seven brothers. Nothing is known of his schooling, but at the age of 17 he was apprenticed to a Newport wheelwright and wagon-maker. At 19 he was enrolled in a Delaware Militia Company in the Revolutionary War but did not see active service. About this time he invented a machine for bending and cutting off the wires in textile carding combs. In July 1782, with his younger brother, Joseph, he moved to Tuckahoe on the eastern shore of the Delaware River, where he had the basic idea of the automatic flour mill. In July 1782, with his elder brothers John and Theophilus, he bought part of his father's Newport farm, on Red Clay Creek, and planned to build a mill there. In 1793 he married Sarah Tomlinson, daughter of a Delaware farmer, and joined his brothers at Red Clay Creek. He worked there for some seven years on his automatic mill, from about 1783 to 1790.

His system for the automatic flour mill consisted of bucket elevators to raise the grain, a horizontal screw conveyor, other conveying devices and a "hopper boy" to cool and dry the meal before gathering it into a hopper feeding the bolting cylinder. Together these components formed the automatic process, from incoming wheat to outgoing flour packed in barrels. At that time the idea of such automation had not been applied to any manufacturing process in America. The mill opened, on a non-automatic cycle, in 1785. In January 1786 Evans applied to the Delaware legislature for a twenty-five-year patent, which was granted on 30 January 1787 although there was much opposition from the Quaker millers of Wilmington and elsewhere. He also applied for patents in Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Hampshire. In May 1789 he went to see the mill of the four Ellicot brothers, near Baltimore, where he was impressed by the design of a horizontal screw conveyor by Jonathan Ellicot and exchanged the rights to his own elevator for those of this machine. After six years' work on his automatic mill, it was completed in 1790. In the autumn of that year a miller in Brandywine ordered a set of Evans's machinery, which set the trend toward its general adoption. A model of it was shown in the Market Street shop window of Robert Leslie, a watch-and clockmaker in Philadelphia, who also took it to England but was unsuccessful in selling the idea there.

In 1790 the Federal Plant Laws were passed; Evans's patent was the third to come within the new legislation. A detailed description with a plate was published in a Philadelphia newspaper in January 1791, the first of a proposed series, but the paper closed and the series came to nothing. His brother Joseph went on a series of sales trips, with the result that some machinery of Evans's design was adopted. By 1792 over one hundred mills had been equipped with Evans's machinery, the millers paying a royalty of $40 for each pair of millstones in use. The series of articles that had been cut short formed the basis of Evans's The Young Millwright and Miller's Guide, published first in 1795 after Evans had moved to Philadelphia to set up a store selling milling supplies; it was 440 pages long and ran to fifteen editions between 1795 and 1860.

Evans was fairly successful as a merchant. He patented a method of making millstones as well as a means of packing flour in barrels, the latter having a disc pressed down by a toggle-joint arrangement. In 1801 he started to build a steam carriage. He rejected the idea of a steam wheel and of a low-pressure or atmospheric engine. By 1803 his first engine was running at his store, driving a screw-mill working on plaster of Paris for making millstones. The engine had a 6 in. (15 cm) diameter cylinder with a stroke of 18 in. (45 cm) and also drove twelve saws mounted in a frame and cutting marble slabs at a rate of 100 ft (30 m) in twelve hours. He was granted a patent in the spring of 1804. He became involved in a number of lawsuits following the extension of his patent, particularly as he increased the licence fee, sometimes as much as sixfold. The case of Evans v. Samuel Robinson, which Evans won, became famous and was one of these. Patent Right Oppression Exposed, or Knavery Detected, a 200-page book with poems and prose included, was published soon after this case and was probably written by Oliver Evans. The steam engine patent was also extended for a further seven years, but in this case the licence fee was to remain at a fixed level. Evans anticipated Edison in his proposal for an "Experimental Company" or "Mechanical Bureau" with a capital of thirty shares of $100 each. It came to nothing, however, as there were no takers. His first wife, Sarah, died in 1816 and he remarried, to Hetty Ward, the daughter of a New York innkeeper. He was buried in the Bowery, on Lower Manhattan; the church was sold in 1854 and again in 1890, and when no relative claimed his body he was reburied in an unmarked grave in Trinity Cemetery, 57th Street, Broadway.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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For the first twenty-five years of his life, Gestetner was a rolling stone and accordingly gathered no moss. Leaving school in 1867, he began working for an uncle in Sopron, making sausages. Four years later he apprenticed himself to another uncle, a stockbroker, in Vienna. The financial crisis of 1873 prompted a move to a restaurant, also in the family, but tiring of a menial existence, he emigrated to the USA, travelling steerage. He began to earn a living by selling Japanese kites: these were made of strong Japanese paper coated with lacquer, and he noted their long fibres and great strength, an observation that was later to prove useful when he was searching for a suitable medium for stencil duplicating. However, he did not prosper in the USA and he returned to Europe, first to Vienna and finally to London in 1879. He took a job with Fairholme \& Co., stationers in Shoe Lane, off Holborn; at last Gestetner found an outlet for his inventive genius and he began his life's work in developing stencil duplicating. His first patent was in 1879 for an application of the hectograph, an early method of duplicating documents. In 1881, he patented the toothed-wheel pen, or Cyclostyle, which made good ink-passing perforations in the stencil paper, with which he was able to pioneer the first practicable form of stencil duplicating. He then adopted a better stencil tissue of Japanese paper coated with wax, and later an improved form of pen. This assured the success of Gestetner's form of stencil duplicating and it became established practice in offices in the late 1880s. Gestetner began to manufacture the apparatus in premises in Sun Street, at first under the name of Fairholme, since they had defrayed the patent expenses and otherwise supported him financially, in return for which Gestetner assigned them his patent rights. In 1882 he patented the wheel pen in the USA and appointed an agent to sell the equipment there. In 1884 he moved to larger premises, and three years later to still larger premises. The introduction of the typewriter prompted modifications that enabled stencil duplicating to become both the standard means of printing short runs of copy and an essential piece of equipment in offices. Before the First World War, Gestetner's products were being sold around the world; in fact he created one of the first truly international distribution networks. He finally moved to a large factory to the north-east of London: when his company went public in 1929, it had a share capital of nearly £750,000. It was only with the development of electrostatic photocopying and small office offset litho machines that stencil duplicating began to decline in the 1960s. The firm David Gestetner had founded adapted to the new conditions and prospers still, under the direction of his grandson and namesake.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Lister was descended from one of the old Yorkshire families, the Cunliffe Listers of Manningham, and was the fourth son of his father Ellis. After attending a school on Clapham Common, Lister would not go to university; his family hoped he would enter the Church, but instead he started work with the Liverpool merchants Sands, Turner \& Co., who frequently sent him to America. In 1837 his father built for him and his brother a worsted mill at Manningham, where Samuel invented a swivel shuttle and a machine for making fringes on shawls. It was here that he first became aware of the unhealthy occupation of combing wool by hand. Four years later, after seeing the machine that G.E. Donisthorpe was trying to work out, he turned his attention to mechanizing wool-combing. Lister took Donisthorpe into partnership after paying him £12,000 for his patent, and developed the Lister-Cartwright "square nip" comber. Until this time, combing machines were little different from Cartwright's original, but Lister was able to improve on this with continuous operation and by 1843 was combing the first fine botany wool that had ever been combed by machinery. In the following year he received an order for fifty machines to comb all qualities of wool. Further combing patents were taken out with Donisthorpe in 1849, 1850, 1851 and 1852, the last two being in Lister's name only. One of the important features of these patents was the provision of a gripping device or "nip" which held the wool fibres at one end while the rest of the tuft was being combed. Lister was soon running nine combing mills. In the 1850s Lister had become involved in disputes with others who held combing patents, such as his associate Isaac Holden and the Frenchman Josué Heilmann. Lister bought up the Heilmann machine patents and afterwards other types until he obtained a complete monopoly of combing machines before the patents expired. His invention stimulated demand for wool by cheapening the product and gave a vital boost to the Australian wool trade. By 1856 he was at the head of a wool-combing business such as had never been seen before, with mills at Manningham, Bradford, Halifax, Keighley and other places in the West Riding, as well as abroad.

His inventive genius also extended to other fields. In 1848 he patented automatic compressed air brakes for railways, and in 1853 alone he took out twelve patents for various textile machines. He then tried to spin waste silk and made a second commercial career, turning what was called "chassum" and hitherto regarded as refuse into beautiful velvets, silks, plush and other fine materials. Waste silk consisted of cocoon remnants from the reeling process, damaged cocoons and fibres rejected from other processes. There was also wild silk obtained from uncultivated worms. This is what Lister saw in a London warehouse as a mass of knotty, dirty, impure stuff, full of bits of stick and dead mulberry leaves, which he bought for a halfpenny a pound. He spent ten years trying to solve the problems, but after a loss of £250,000 and desertion by his partner his machine caught on in 1865 and brought Lister another fortune. Having failed to comb this waste silk, Lister turned his attention to the idea of "dressing" it and separating the qualities automatically. He patented a machine in 1877 that gave a graduated combing. To weave his new silk, he imported from Spain to Bradford, together with its inventor Jose Reixach, a velvet loom that was still giving trouble. It wove two fabrics face to face, but the problem lay in separating the layers so that the pile remained regular in length. Eventually Lister was inspired by watching a scissors grinder in the street to use small emery wheels to sharpen the cutters that divided the layers of fabric. Lister took out several patents for this loom in his own name in 1868 and 1869, while in 1871 he took out one jointly with Reixach. It is said that he spent £29,000 over an eleven-year period on this loom, but this was more than recouped from the sale of reasonably priced high-quality velvets and plushes once success was achieved. Manningham mills were greatly enlarged to accommodate this new manufacture.

In later years Lister had an annual profit from his mills of £250,000, much of which was presented to Bradford city in gifts such as Lister Park, the original home of the Listers. He was connected with the Bradford Chamber of Commerce for many years and held the position of President of the Fair Trade League for some time. In 1887 he became High Sheriff of Yorkshire, and in 1891 he was made 1st Baron Masham. He was also Deputy Lieutenant in North and West Riding.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology, Domestic appliances and interiors

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To assist the finances of a coal miner's family, Owens entered a glassworks at Wheeling, Virginia, at the tender age of 10, stoking coal into the "glory hole" or furnace where glass was resoftened at various stages of the hand-forming process. By the age of 15 he had become a glassblower.

In 1888 Owens moved to the glassworks of Edward Drummond Libbey at Toledo, Ohio, where within three months he was appointed Superintendent and, not long after, a branch manager. In 1893 Owens supervised the company's famous exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago. He had by then begun experiments that were to lead to the first automatic bottle-blowing machine. He first used a piston pump to suck molten glass into a mould, and then transferred the gathered glass over another mould into which the bottle was blown by reversing the pump. The first patents were taken out in 1895, followed by others incorporating improvements and culminating in the patent of 8 November 1904 for an essentially perfected machine. Eventually it was capable of producing four bottles a second, thus effecting a revolution in bottle making. Owens, with Libbey and others, set up the Owens Bottle Machine Company in 1903, which Owens himself managed from 1915 to 1919, becoming Vice-President from 1915 until his death. A plant was also established in Manchester in 1905.

Besides this, Owens and Libbey first assisted Irving W.Colburn with his experiments on the continuous drawing of flat sheet glass and then in 1912 bought the patents, forming the Owens-Libbey Sheet Glass Company. In all, Owens was granted forty-five US patents, mainly relating to the manufacture and processing of glass. Owens's undoubted inventive genius was hampered by a lack of scientific knowledge, which he made good by judicious consultation.

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