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BOOKS AND ARTICLES
WHERE THEORY BEGINS "IT'S IMPOSSIBLE..."
Books and articles / And then came the inventor
I first saw the inventor a long time ago, even before the war. We lived in Baku, I was in fourth grade then. One day, returning from school, I noticed fitters in the yard, sadly smoking near a tattered transformer booth. The wooden walls of the booth were broken, the fitters sat on the boards and looked at a huge black transformer standing on a stone pedestal. The height of the pedestal was considerable, more than a meter, and now that the booth was removed, the transformer looked like a solid, impressive monument. The installers were waiting for a crane to remove the old transformer and install a new one. That evening I prepared my homework by a kerosene lamp. There was no light both on the second evening and on the third. Residents bustled around workers playing dominoes. In those days, the crane was considered a rare, serious machine, and it was not easy to wait for it. The fitters scolded weakly; they themselves did not know when it would all end. At first, however, I didn’t realize that he was an inventor. A rumor just spread that the neighbor from the eleventh apartment, the accountant, would be removing the transformer from the pedestal tomorrow. Almost all the residents had nicknames, some were respectfully called by name - “Uncle Kostya”, “Uncle Volodya”, and the accountant was just an Accountant. Many years later, when I saw the artist Vitsin on the screen, I shuddered: he was the spitting image of the Accountant... The next day I ran away from the last lesson: I really wanted to see how the Accountant would lower the huge transformer. I made it just in time. There was an ice supply at the gate, and the fitters were dragging pieces of ice into the yard, to the transformer. Something needs to be clarified here. There were no electric refrigerators in those years. Every day - from spring to autumn - a cart with ice, bluish slabs weighing twenty kilograms, passed from house to house. Housewives bought ice - a slab, half a slab, a quarter slab, crushed it and filled wooden refrigerator cabinets. Or they simply put ice in buckets and basins. And now, for some reason, the fitters were carrying ice slabs, and the Accountant was laying them down, and an ice cube quickly grew next to the pedestal. When both cubes - ice and stone - became the same height, the Accountant placed boards on the ice, and the fitters used crowbars to move the transformer - slowly, centimeter by centimeter - from the stone pedestal to the ice one. The ice creaked, but the slabs were laid neatly, the cube did not crumble, it held up. The accountant himself covered the ice with a tarpaulin. And we stood and watched water flowing from under the tarpaulin. At first it was a thin trickle, then a real stream: the September sun in Baku works like summer... Everyone in the yard, even the scandalous old man nicknamed Treasure (he insisted that he knew where the richest treasures were buried, but the trouble was - there was no money for the trip), everyone said that ice was a great idea. And Uncle Misha (now the Accountant was called by name) sat on a folding chair, read the newspaper and from time to time, throwing back the tarpaulin, carefully examined the ice... In the morning I ran out into the yard. The transformer dropped half a meter, no less. It was Sunday, but the fitters were working - installing a new shield. A clear stream of water ran from under the tarpaulin. I was shocked. After all, everyone knew that the ice was melting, and I knew it too, but no one, not a single person, guessed that the transformer could be moved onto the ice, and then everything would happen by itself, and the ice would smoothly lower the load to the ground. Why did Uncle Misha guess that this could be done, but we didn’t?! And one more thing: ice, ordinary ice, which was only suitable for cooling, it turns out, could carefully lower weights. Ice can probably do a lot more. And not just ice. I suddenly had the idea that every substance can do anything. That’s when this word came to my mind: invention. I realized that Uncle Misha made an invention and, therefore, he is an inventor. Maybe they'll write about him in the newspapers. Especially if he figures out how to lift the new transformer. I didn’t have a single suitable thought on this matter. Unfortunately, the truck crane arrived on Monday. A new transformer was lifted onto the pedestal, and the old one was taken away. The fitters connected the lights, the carpenters put together a new booth, the painter painted it - and that was the end of it. But I always remembered that in any situation, even the most hopeless one, you can come up with something, invent something, and this “something” will be very simple, unexpected and beautiful. I made the first invention for which I was given an author's certificate in the tenth grade. Then there were other inventions, work in the invention department, meetings with a variety of inventors. I became more and more interested in the mechanics of creativity: how inventions are made, what happens in the inventor’s head, why does an idea for a solution suddenly appear?.. Do you want to try to become an inventor yourself? Please, here's your challenge. Task 1. TO BEAT OR NOT TO BEAT?
One day, the director of an electric lamp plant gathered engineers and showed them a stack of letters. “Consumers are complaining, dissatisfied with our lamps,” the director said sadly. - We need to improve the quality of products. I think the whole point is that the gas pressure inside the finished lamp is sometimes higher than normal, sometimes less... Who can tell me how to measure this pressure? “Very simple,” one of the engineers stood up. - We take the lamp, break it and... - Are we breaking it? the director exclaimed. - You can break one lamp out of a hundred for control, - the engineer did not give up. “I would like to check every lamp,” the director sighed. - Think, comrade engineers! And then an inventor appeared. “A task for schoolchildren,” he said. - Open your textbook... And he explained in which textbook you can read an almost ready-made answer to this problem. What do you suggest? Do you have any ideas - how to measure the gas pressure inside an electric lamp? After sitting for an hour or two on this task, you can come up with a list of five to ten ideas. Ideas are usually very weak. It is often suggested to weigh the lamp. Theoretically, everything is correct: knowing the weight of an empty lamp and the volume of its bulb, it is not difficult to weigh a lamp filled with gas and calculate the weight of the gas. But practically the decision is bad. There is little gas in the lamp - tenths or even hundredths of a gram. To catch a deviation from the norm, you need to know the weight with an accuracy of thousandths of a gram. You will have to very carefully weigh and measure the lamp and its parts - and this is during mass, continuous production! The production of lamps will slow down sharply, and their cost will increase... Strong inventors also have bad ideas. But the strength of the strong is that, having become convinced of the unsuitability of one solution, they do not stop, but stubbornly continue to go through option after option. A person thinks about a task day and night. Everything that his gaze falls on, he transfers to the task: can it be used? It's snowing, it's cold... what if you cool the lamp?.. The gas will become liquid, it will be easier to measure its volume... An overloaded bus passed noisily... noise, sound... and what if you "sound" the lamps ? After all, the speed of sound depends on the density of the gas... They show football on TV... but what if you put a tiny ball in a lamp? The speed of its fall will depend on the density of the gas... And so on day after day, month after month, year after year. Sometimes all my life. It also happens that life is not enough; other inventors pick up the baton, and the endless question begins again: “What if we do it this way?” It happens that halfway to solving a problem they abandon it: an unsolvable problem, what can you do... Imagine a researcher who says: "To reach supersonic speeds, we need to study runners. What is the difference between a good runner and a bad one? What is the secret to running fast? That's what I need to know..." Runners are indeed different from each other, but no matter how much study runners, you can’t build a car that can outrun sound. We need other principles. The trial and error method dates back to ancient times. In essence, he is the same age as man. Everything has changed during this time, and the man himself has changed, but the trial and error method has remained almost unchanged. Several years ago, Academician V.L. Ginzburg, responding to a questionnaire from the magazine “Inventor and Innovator,” admitted that his inventions appeared “as a result of a search of options.” The end of the XNUMXth century, a world-famous scientist - and a plethora of options! Like two thousand, twenty thousand, two hundred thousand years ago... In short, we need to look for a completely different approach to solving inventive problems. Technology is developing naturally. It is no coincidence that in different countries different inventors, solving the same problem, independently of each other come to the same answer. This means that there are patterns, they can be found and applied to consciously solve problems - according to rules, according to formulas, without an “empty” search of options. There were, of course, skeptics: “How can everyone be taught to invent?! This is impossible!..” But I have been studying the theory of solving inventive problems not for a year, not two, but my whole life. At first I worked alone, then like-minded people appeared, at first there were few of them - just a few, then - dozens, hundreds... Through joint efforts we managed to advance the theory quite far. Books were written, textbooks and problem books were compiled. Courses, seminars, and schools began to operate. Currently, teaching the theory of solving inventive problems is carried out in more than a hundred cities. It turned out that invention can indeed be taught the same way as, say, physics, chemistry or mathematics are taught. In 1978, students of Dnepropetrovsk State University took a test on the theory of solving inventive problems. And two years later, a new academic subject was introduced in all technical universities in Ukraine - “Fundamentals of Technical Creativity”. You can master the theory of invention at any age, but the earlier you start learning, the better the results will be. Just like in sports. In fact, problem solving should be taught starting in kindergarten. Or maybe from a manger. But we don’t know how to do this yet. It turned out that it was easiest to teach experienced engineers. Where theory was lame, experience helped... and the problem was solved. When the theory became stronger, we began to teach young engineers. Then we moved on to the students. They began to include high school students in student groups. Since 1974, Pionerskaya Pravda began publishing inventive problems. The most real “adult” problems are like the problem of measuring the gas pressure inside an electric lamp. Thousands of letters came to the editor. We analyzed them, sorted out typical mistakes in the newspaper, explained a piece of theory - and again gave problems... No, we haven't reached the nursery yet. At the fifth-sixth grade level there is a barrier that has not yet been overcome. The fact is that to master the theory of invention you need to know physics, at least a little of physics - what they teach in the sixth grade. Well, in kindergartens and nurseries they don’t take physics at all... However, it is already clear how to overcome this barrier: you need to work not with inventive, but with game problems. Imagine an empty room - only a doll lies on the windowsill. Two thin strings are lowered from the ceiling. It is necessary to connect, tie their lower ends - and this must be done by one person. If you take the end of one of the strings, you cannot reach the other. Someone has to submit, reject the second string. But the task is for one person, and there is no one to give the second string... The solution is also accessible to kids who have no idea about physics. We need to swing the second string. It won't swing on its own - it's too thin. Therefore, you need to hang a weight, a doll, from it. That's it, problem solved! You can complicate the conditions: let there be balloons and a doll in the room. The balls are not suitable as a load; they are too light. But for some reason, it is the balls that attract the attention of those solving the problem; they do not immediately remember the doll. You can make the task even more difficult: remove all objects from the room. Will the baby think of taking off his shoe and hanging it instead of a weight?.. As you can see, the problem is not inventive... and yet it is somewhat similar to inventive. How exactly it is similar - we will talk about this later. Now it can be noted that there is no blank wall between tasks related to different types of activity - in science, technology, art, etc. In this book we will mainly talk about invention. But the book is addressed to those who want to learn how to solve a variety of creative problems. Of course, this book is not a textbook. I just want to show that solving creative problems is accessible to everyone, necessary and extremely exciting.
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Comments on the article: Nicholas I read this book at an early school age and I am very glad about it. Because of her, he taught physics and chemistry with particular interest, which promised more opportunities to solve inventive problems. Sergei As a child, I subscribed to a magazine, I don’t remember what it was called, there was a heading "And then an inventor appeared." I loved her so! Decided to brainstorm! It's so cool!
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