A. Frederick Collins

“ Almost every one has had, at some time or other an idea for a new invention or of how some old device could be improved.
To get an original idea for an invention is in itself a mark of genius, but it is not enough to make it a success and if you do not know how to develop it you are almost certain to give up before you have completed it. ”

“ In making a machine from your own ideas and plans no one can do the work so well as yourself provided you can do the work at all and besides it is cheaper and far more satisfactory.
Should you have a fat pocket-book and at the same time a taste for inventing and the sciences—these elements seldom go hand in mind—but if they should get close together in your case I say, the right way to make a model is to hire skilled men to do the work while you do the thinking and the assembling in your private lab. ”

“ Now if you quit it is all off but if you go on and on trying everything you can think of, keeping up your belief that the thing you are striving for must come and in your own ability to do that which you want to do, after long hours, or days, or weeks of constant work the result will come to you like a flash and just as though the guardian angel of invention hovered over you and put the desired thing right into your mind and hand. ”

“ Certainly since you know that inventors like Edison, Brush, Weston, Thompson, Tesla, and a hundred other men almost as big, had applied themselves with diligence to dynamo problems during the last 40 years you would not care to go very far in spending your time or your money working on it until you learned whether or not some one before you had thought of and used the same principle.
Yet hundreds of beginners in the field of inventing work along in the dark because they do not know the state of the art, and always to their sorrow. ”

“ Now my purpose is not to tell you what to invent as much as it is to tell you how to invent and, if when you get an idea that you believe worth while you will follow it up step by step as I have outlined in this book you will at least save yourself time, worry and money and you stand a chance of winning fame, glory, and a bank account. ”

“ What to Do When You Find There Are No Other Improvements Like Yours.—After you have looked up, or have had looked up, the state of the art as carefully as possible, and you are satisfied that your invention, or improvement, is different from everything else you have been able to find, you should by all means go ahead and make such experiments, or build a working model, as the case may be, in order that you may know that all you have thought about it is really true. ”

“ Many advertising patent attorneys agree to make what they are pleased to call a free search for you—and do it while you wait, so to speak. A free search, or desk search, as it is dubbed by those who don’t make them, is of no value whatever for it is the snap-shot opinion, or rather a notion, of a patent attorney who is drumming up business by un-business like methods. ”

“ The power to do work is caused by energy; energy is developed when some force is applied and can be stored up in bodies as when a ball is thrown. When the energy stops acting, or is used up, there can no longer be any work done. Energy can be transferred from one body to another, as from a clock-spring to a wheel, or from one wheel to another wheel; and energy can be transformed, as the chemical energy of a battery into the rotary energy of a motor or from steam into mechanical motion. ”

“ When I say that they are men of learning I do not mean that it takes a college professor to be a big inventor; indeed very few college professors have the genius to be inventors and too many inventors have too little knowledge along the line in which they are working. ”

“ But even as you have had the genius to invent a new and useful time, labor and money saving device—there will, among the men you have surrounded yourself with, rise up one whose brains teems with schemes of ways and means to dispose of the factory’s output at the greatest profit and you may have a few stray ideas too as to how the thing can best be done. ”

“ The First Raw Idea.—There are several ways by which you may get an idea for an invention but in any case the first raw idea, or inductive discovery, as it is called in philosophy, must and does come from something outside the mind, something that you have seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt, and when your mind is in the right condition to receive an idea of this kind you will know it when it comes and grasp it very quickly, that is if you are a real inventor. ”

“ It doesn’t matter very much what invention you are working on you ought to read a first book on physics and one on chemistry and what’s more you should study them if you expect to ever invent anything of magnitude.
A book on physics tells all you need to know in the beginning about matter, force, motion, the principles of machines, the mechanics of liquids and gases, electricity and magnetism, sound, heat and light. ”

“ Where an electric current is used for some simple device a thorough knowledge of electricity may not be necessary but if your invention requires that a low voltage current be changed into high frequency oscillations which are in turn varied by the voice and these oscillations are sent out from an aerial wire, all of which is done in a wireless telephone, I should say that you ought to have a pretty fair understanding of the theory of electricity before you begin your experiments—that [13] is if you expect to develop your invention into an apparatus of utility and hence of worth. ”

“ One good thing about an idea, though, is that we don’t have to know what the mysterious thing is or how it springs into being in the mind. In this way an idea is very much like electricity—we don’t know exactly what it is but we do know a good deal about how it works and this is enough for our present purpose. ”

“ From this discovery of Goodyear’s has sprung the gigantic rubber industry of to-day.
Discoveries of this kind were often made in the early days of invention but the principles which underlie all of the sciences are now so well known that invention itself has been brought down to a scientific basis; and instead of inventors being long-haired, dreaming Micawbers they are generally men of education and genius too, trained along the lines they are working in and who look like clean-cut business men; and if they are successful inventors you may depend upon it they are business men. ”

“ And yet a patent examiner of to-day would not be likely to see any difference in a needle with an eye in its head and one with an eye near its point, that is, if he had never seen either one before.
If you have made a machine to do a certain thing and you find that another machine has been invented that does the same thing and in the same way you may be able to change the mechanical movements, or electrical devices, until you are able to get the same or a better result by other and better means. ”

“ Now what I have said about flying is just as true of whatever else you may happen to be working on, for books and papers are printed and published about nearly every subject you can think of, from aviation to wireless telegraphy; by reading up on the subject of and allied to your invention you will soon have the history of it by heart and this makes up a large part of the state of the art. ”

“ How to Experiment with Electricity.—Electricity is very much like mechanics in that any one can put up an electric bell or screw in a plug-fuse but to experiment and build an apparatus in which electricity and magnetism are the powers used you must know how electricity is generated, how magnetism is produced, the different forms of electricity that are available and finally the kinds of apparatus best suited for the work that is required of them. ”

“ Because the patent office will not accept your drawings unless they conform exactly to certain rules; your specification, which means the description of your invention, must be written in a certain way, and the claims, which are the very vitals of the whole patent, must be drawn with exceeding care for while nothing of value must be left out it is even worse to write in too much as this limits your claims. ”

“ A letters patent, or patent as it is called for short, is exactly what its name implies and that is a disclosure of your secret and for this disclosure of a new and useful invention on your part the government agrees to give you a monopoly, that is the sole right to make, use and sell it as you please for a term of 17 years. ”

“ Forms of Energy.—There are nine forms of energy that you can make use of in your experiments and in your inventions, and these are:
Machines and the Principles of Machinery.—A machine is a contrivance of mechanical parts by which energy is transferred from one part to another. Beside the amount of energy required for doing useful work there must be an extra amount for overcoming the friction. Remember that no machine can either create energy or increase it, and, as you have seen, every machine wastes some energy in friction ”

“ And if you know nothing of electricity, you are not likely to think out an improved electrical device.
But this much is certain if you are going to experiment the right way you must know something about the right way to experiment. No one should expect to work out to a successful conclusion a new machine or apply a new improvement to an old machine if he knows nothing of the first principles of mechanics or about mechanical movements, and by rights he ought to have some knowledge of machine design. ”

“ The matter of being near to certain raw materials you need for manufacturing, or to a market for your product is not one that you will probably have to decide alone. Nor need the question of labor take up your time for the wages of skilled machinists, electricians and chemists are about the same throughout the United States, and while rents are higher in large cities than in the towns and villages still nearly one-half of the articles and machines made in the United States are turned out in 100 of the largest cities. ”

“ If you are a little skilled in the use of tools there isn’t anything I know of that will give you greater pleasure than to make each part of your model with your own hands in your own shop and watch it grow day by day until it becomes in truth the very apple of your eye. ”

“ By constructive I mean that you take an idea that had its origin in your brain and this vague, intangible conception, which takes up no space, has no weight and is not bound by time, you build up step by step of wood and steel and like materials until at last you have created something out of nothing, or as nearly as it can be done. ”

“ If your invention is a small one and but little money is needed to develop it into a marketable product a 5 per cent. interest is enough to give those who back you for taking the risk. A 10 per cent. interest is ample to offer for sufficient funds to develop a more complicated invention.
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This will leave you a 30 or 35 per cent. interest to sell to others later on, when you have a working model and your patent is granted, to furnish the capital necessary for equipping a factory to make the device and to provide funds to market it—that is if you work out a plan along these lines. ”

“ Even as right is always on the side of the army with the heaviest artillery, if there are enough shells, so, too, justice is always on the side of the inventor who has the smoothest patent attorney and the cleverest experts if they have enough ammunition in the way of some claims. While it requires skill to draw up good claims they can in any case be made better where the state of the art is known by yourself and your patent attorney. ”

“ As soon as your experiments are completed or your model is finished so that you know exactly what you want to claim as being strictly new and novel and original with you, then you are in shape to hire a patent attorney to draw up your patent application and file it and don’t do the latter a moment before. ”

“ Certainly the electric lights we now have are good enough as far as the light goes but light costs us ten times as much as it ought to cost for the reason that 90 per cent. of the energy there is in a ton of coal is wasted and only 10 per cent. of it is transformed into actual light.
Oliver Lodge, England’s greatest electrician, once said that if we knew how the glow worm makes his light then a boy could turn a machine that would develop enough electricity to light a factory. The problem for you to tackle then is not to make a better light but to make a cheaper light. ”

“ If you are going to spend $1,000 or $100,000 on making your product known among men and women and popularizing it so that everybody will buy it, or wants to buy it, it is well to have an advertising agent or firm get up the ads, place them in the papers where they will do the most good—in a word engineer the whole thing for you while you are superintending your factory and your partner is taking care of the orders—then all you have got to do is to count the shekels that roll in or out as the case may be. ”

“ In this respect a manufacturing concern is very like a human being in that it has a brain and a body. You and those interested with you are the brains of the organization and those who work for you, to the end that profits may pile up for your benefit and behoof, form the body.
On your head, most likely, will fall the responsibility of turning out a high-grade product at the lowest possible cost and to do this the right way and to the [147] best advantage you must begin at the beginning and think and scheme out how you can obtain the best results with the least outlay of time, labor and money. ”

“ This time you will have to engage patent counsel—no mere patent attorney will do if you are to win—and you must have experts to testify for you and your patent cause—it is no longer called a patent case—and testify against your opponent. The only limit to the fee that able patent counsel will demand and collect is fixed by your bank account while $100 per day is the usual fee of a technical expert though like his legal ally he will ask and get much more if you can afford it. ”

“ And after you have learned the rules by heart you may feel that since you know more about your invention than any one else you can make the drawings and write the specification and claims as well or better than the average patent attorney. ”

“ And to give up a good idea and then find that some one else has thought of the same thing later, worked it up and made money out of it gives a fellow a most uncomfortable feeling about what might have been. ”