Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
A lot of the Google inventions came from engineers just screwing around with ideas. And then management would see them, and we'd say, 'Boy, that's interesting. Let's add some more engineers.'
In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.
Inventions are rarely just a sudden bright idea. Even if they are, they usually have antecedents in the form of pieces of the idea... Piecing these things together gives one a sense of where inventions come from, and that's interesting.
Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.
Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?
Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do.
The two inventions of the century, the car and the computer, are gradually coming closer together.
Ben Franklin may have discovered electricity- but it is the man who invented the meter who made the money.
All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.