It’s really about the execution (not the idea).
Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s not so much about having a great idea. Ideas are everywhere. And everybody has them. What actually does matter, is doing something with the idea. And, of course, doing it in a unique manner. Mrs. Fields didn’t invent the chocolate chip cookie. Starbucks former CEO Howard Schultz wasn’t the first person to sell coffee.
There is no downside to pursuit.
Go after this idea. Learn more about the market. What currently exists that’s similar? What does the market say about the need? Everything you learn and experience will put you well on the way to better understanding how market research, product development, prototyping, boot-strapping/fundraising, and business actually work.
Get on the internet and query what customers are saying about this need. Go to a local hobby store and buy some material and start experimenting at home.
Collect data. Make some charts and graphs of your experiments. Learn the basic math or engineering related to the invention.
Make a quick prototype. Show it to friends … or better yet potential customers, and get their feedback.
Ask your professors for help and advice.
Any one of those things is better than watching television or hanging out. And being a bit atypical, because you’re working on something and skipping some typical social activities, will be good experience.
Prepare yourself to answer questions.
Anticipate the questions you’ll be asked about your idea. Determine if you should seek a partner or investor. Be able to articulate the problem. Be prepared to discuss what already exists on the market. Explain in 30 seconds how your idea is an improvement. Show some basic market research. Show some test results. Put together some rough pricing estimates.
Use this idea as an opportunity to develop yourself.
Everything you experience and learn by exploring and trying to bring this product idea to fruition will not only make you a better student and give you better insights into business, but it will make you better at life. That’s a far-reaching statement, but I believe it’s absolutely true.
Everything you do and learn, contributes to what you know and who you are. And there is no better way to learn than by doing. No textbook, no story, no friend, no teacher can take the place of learning by doing. “Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
—Isaac Asimov
And, Eric, one thing I can promise you. Regardless of where this idea leads. You will absolutely be a better person for pursuing this idea.
I imagine it’ll be a fun experience, like walking on little waterbeds.
Frozen Fish Inspired an Innovation Revolution
“It is easy to be wise after the event.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
There’s no way anyone could have predicted that a frozen fish would inspire someone to pursue an invention of such significance—that it would not only create an entirely new industry and change the world, but would also have you eating your vegetables. But that’s what happened as a direct result of a curious American inventor.
His name was Clarence, and he was born in Brooklyn in 1886. Clarence attended Amherst College for two years prior to leaving school due to financial difficulties. He then went to work for the US Agriculture Department, where he became an assistant naturalist and was assigned to work in the western United States. In 1912, he was assigned to the far northeast region of Canada. It was there that the Inuit taught Clarence how to ice fish and how to freeze the day’s catch. And that’s when Clarence had his epiphany.
The Challenge of Seeing the Curve Ahead
Technology entrepreneur, writer, and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki has talked for decades about the challenges inherent in anticipating change and the even greater challenge of then getting ahead of the change, of seeing what everyone else is missing. Basically, it rarely happens. Though, in hindsight—the upcoming disruption should’ve been obvious. There are countless stories about smart people focusing on the work at hand and missing the change ahead.
Here’s one that involves ice.
In the early 1800s, there was a huge business in the northeastern United States related to harvesting ice. Men would venture out onto a frozen lake, cutting huge blocks of ice chunks, and loading them onto horse-drawn carts, where they were then taken and put into storage. Later they would be delivered to “iceboxes.” There were dozens of companies in this business, employing many people harvesting and transporting the ice.
All that was upended once commercial refrigeration was possible beginning about 1850. Once that technology existed, water could be frozen into ice wherever the refrigeration equipment was located. And, of course, eventually these facilities were located everywhere and were no longer dependent on a cold winter to produce ice. And then, in the 1920s, the home refrigerator was introduced, and that upended the commercial refrigeration businesses.
Here’s what’s interesting. None of the companies harvesting ice from the lakes made the transition to the commercial refrigeration industry. And decades later, none of the commercial refrigeration companies transitioned to the home refrigeration market. Oftentimes, it’s the people outside the industry, those unencumbered from the accepted thinking, who drive the next disruption cycle.
Back to Clarence
Clarence was not in the refrigeration business. But during his time in northeast Canada, Clarence learned how the Inuit rapidly would freeze their catch, and he couldn’t help but notice how incredibly fresh the fish tasted once thawed. It was something he recognized as superior to the frozen, mushy, and dry fish he’d eaten everywhere else.
The concept stuck with him, and, in 1922, Clarence Birdseye began experimenting. He had little money, so with meager funds and in an attempt to replicate the conditions he experienced in northeastern Canada, he bought ice, an electric fan (to create wind chill), and salt (to lower the freezing point).
He learned that conventional freezing methods of the day were far slower in comparison to how the Inuit froze their fish. He observed through a microscope that the conventional freezing methods resulted in much larger ice crystals, and that the large crystals damaged the fish tissue when thawing—hence the mushy taste typical of slowly frozen fish.
He started a company called Birdseye Seafoods Inc. to commercialize his discovery—but the company went bankrupt a couple of years later, as there was little demand from a slow-to-adopt market.
Clarence Birdseye kept working, and developed an entirely new way to quickly freeze packaged fish by squeezing the packages between two frozen belts under pressure. He patented his idea, secured backing from three wealthy partners, formed a new company called General Seafood Corporation, and returned to the fast-freeze fish business. This time, the market was ready—and within a few years, he expanded beyond freezing fish to fast-freezing chicken, fruits, and vegetables.
Clarence went on to develop refrigerated display cases for grocery stores. He leased refrigerated boxcars to transport the frozen foods by rail. In the end, Clarence Birdseye created what became the frozen foods industry. He held nearly 300 US and foreign patents in his lifetime and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.
The brand Birds Eye remains a household name. And it all started when a curious man met a frozen fish.
Twenty of the Greatest Inventions of All Time
I was flat on my back. Everybody standing around me had their faces covered. They covered my mouth and nose with a rubber mask; told me to close my eyes and start counting backward from 10—which is exactly what I did. I tried to be brave, but it was scary. 10 … 9 … 8 … Maybe I got to 5 or 4. And then I passed out. I was seven years old and in the hospital to get my tonsils removed.
That’s a roundabout way of explaining why anesthesia is on my list of “20 of the Greatest Inventions of All Time.” That was a sufficiently memorable experience. Though if there was any doubt, there have been a few su
bsequent visits to the dentist that further solidified my thinking.
Although not as subjective as listing the top 20 movies of all time, listing 20 of the greatest inventions is nonetheless open to discussion and argument. Our personal experiences and the era in which we live influence what we rank as important. Also, an invention’s impact might not be apparent for decades, so we need the perspective of time to understand an invention’s utility and reach. Time is clearly necessary for the impact of an invention to shake out.
My logic of what makes this list is primarily based on what has most benefitted humankind. Again, it’s difficult to compare some of these inventions, or to determine exactly where they rank. Both the airplane and the computer are in my top twenty, but there wasn’t a fancy algorithm used to order them, or even that put them on the list in the first place. It was just a matter of my estimation.
As a side note, I thought about listing “The Lever” or even “The Sewing Needle,” as those were also important and fundamental “tools,” but in the end decided not to include them as “inventions,” because levers and needles exist in nature (sticks and thorns) and somebody just had to start using them.
As a second side note, there were some profound ideas that I thought might be considered great inventions—such as the “The Scientific Method” or “Evolutionary Biology” or theories of the universe, but I also decided those would better be classified as “ideas,” because they exist without a specific invented product.
Here then is my list of “20 of the Greatest Inventions of All Time,” along with a brief explanation as to why.
The Wheel
The wheel is everywhere, but interestingly historians say the first wheels were not used for transportation. Evidence shows that the first wheels were potter’s wheels that were created about 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia. They were used for chariots about 300 years later.
The Printing Press
Before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and movable type in the early 1400s, books or other documents were generated by hand. Once the printing press mechanized book making, the number of books grew exponentially to 20 million volumes by 1500, and then upward of 200 million just 10 years later. This explosion of books drove literacy and the spread of knowledge around the globe.
The Plow
The plow allowed soil to be more easily turned, so the nutrients buried several inches underground would be brought closer to the surface, while at the same time burying the grass and vegetation, which would decompose and provide more nutrients to whatever crops were planted. When pulled by an animal, a plow greatly improved food production.
Cement
The invention of cement allowed for everything from pottery, housing, and canals. It’s been described as the bond that held civilization together.
The Steam Engine
The steam engine was the dawn of the industrial age. Invented by James Watt in 1781, the steam engine was initially a relatively small, 10-horsepower engine, that within a dozen years grew a thousandfold to 10,000 horsepower. That is basically the doubling of horsepower every year (I just did it on a napkin), and that’s Moore’s law.
Penicillin
One of the first drugs to be used against disease, penicillin has improved and saved countless lives. Although penicillin was discovered by Scottish scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Fleming in 1928, it proved difficult to produce in quantities until the mid-1940s. In fact, the first patient was treated with US-made penicillin from Merck in 1942, and that single patient used half the total supply produced. Eventually, the production process was sorted out, and the US produced 646 billion units per year in 1945.
The Light Bulb
On the back of my business card is a quote from Thomas Edison. “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” I’m actually reading it now, and it’s after midnight (and dark outside).
The Lens
The invention of an optical lens allowed the unseen to be seen, and therefore the unknown to be known. What was previously invisible to the naked eye—whether microscopic organisms or distant stars—all were made visible by the invention of the lens.
Paper
Paper and the printing press worked hand-in-hand to drive literacy, spread knowledge, and improve the world.
Vaccines
Receiving a vaccine is basically a way of getting the body to fight and then remember a disease. Then when it is encountered in the future, the body is prepared to recognize and destroy the disease before it can multiply in large numbers. The World Health Organization reports (in 2018) that licensed vaccines are currently available for 26 diseases with another 24 in the pipeline.
The Computer
The small amount of programming I did was in high school and then in engineering school at college. Like most everyone at the time, we held our punch cards together with rubber bands and spent hours waiting for the ream of green and white printout. A missing comma or extra period somewhere in our punch cards would result in an error message, and we’d have to make the correction and then start all over. It was painful. There was only one building on campus where our programs were run—and it was in the basement of the math and science building. For some reason, we were always there late at night, and it always smelled like peanut butter and sweat. We’d hand our rubber-banded stack of punch cards though a window to an operator, and he went into a back room and handed them over to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It was incredible to see the emergence of the personal computer. One of my engineering friends built a computer in his dorm room in the late 1970s. I remember several years later being fascinated watching a plotter generate a graph, or the first time I used a graphical user interface with a mouse.
Like many of you, since then I’ve used a computer nearly continuously throughout my career. My amazement continues to grow, along with the increased performance and capabilities. It’s “a bicycle for our minds,” as described by Steve Jobs.24
The Telephone
As with many inventions, the telephone was developed by several different people who each made contributions. The telephone made voice communications possible, and that resulted in lessening the distance between people. It also lets you talk to your mom when you’re far away, and say “love ya, Mom.”
The Internet and the World Wide Web
The internet provides untold utility to billions of people around the world. Anyone (anywhere) with a basic computer and internet access has access to a treasure trove of essentially unlimited information. Even more mind-boggling, it provides anyone (anywhere) with a communications platform with greater capability and greater reach than what the most powerful commercial broadcasting companies had even 10 years ago. It’s like giving you the keys to a worldwide media empire. Its impact is still nearly unimagined.
The Automobile
One of the first complex machines to be mass-produced, the automobile quickly became ubiquitous and necessary. It drove the construction of highways and byways, affected where people worked and lived, and profoundly affected the social fabric of America.
The Flush Toilet
Nick Veléry wrote an article for The Economist where he described the flush toilet as more miraculous than the invention of antibiotics. “Without plumbed sanitation within the home to dispose of human waste, we would still be living in a brutal age of cholera, dysentery, typhus and typhoid fever—to say nothing of bubonic plague.”25
Not surprisingly, the earliest history of a toilet that used water as a means of flushing, used the flow of river water diverted through a drainage system to carry waste downstream. Probably the phrase “location, location, location.” was heard shortly thereafter.
Anesthesia
Hard to believe, but anesthesia was invented only in the mid-1800s. I’m not sure what was used before the invention of anesthesia, but I would hate to have had a major injury that required a trip to the surgeon or dentist before that time.<
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The Airplane
If you have the chance, you should visit Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina. That’s where, in 1903, the Wright brothers first flew a controlled, heavier-than-air, powered flight. Out among the grassy sand fields, the distances of their first few flights are shown with markers. There’s a model of the Wright Flyer and of their modest cabins where they lived and worked during their visits from Ohio to North Carolina, where they made repeated attempts to fly. It’s hallowed ground.
It’s hard to believe that just a little more than 50 years later, Boeing introduced the 707. And just 66 years after the Wright brothers first flew, in 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Hallowed ground indeed.
Semiconductors
Made mostly from silicon, the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust, semiconductors are the foundation of our computers (now in our cars, homes, phones, and on our wrists) and currently a $330-billion global business.
The Radio
Guglielmo Marconi patented the radio a few years before 1900, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that it worked well enough to be used as a medium for news and entertainment. Although the telegraph allowed for immediate communications over long distances, the radio provided the ability to effectively communicate with huge numbers of people directly by voice.
Genetics
People have been studying, experimenting, and manipulating plants and animals since ancient times through selective pairing, but Gregor Mendel is considered a leader of modern genetics. In the mid-19th century, he studied the nature of inheritance in plants. Bonus 21. Steelmaking
Learning how to create quality steel in large production quantities provided the material for the industrial age. It is a fundamental component within virtually every industry—automobile, aircraft, construction, machinery, ship building, and manufacturing.
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