The Birth of an Idea; C. Kettering

How long has it taken man to do this? The -records show we have be~n developing the elemen ts of radio for about a hundred years. But, if we made a more careful study, we would find the thing really started in the year 600 B.C.-more than 2,500 years ago. It really started as a thought-a very weak, vague idea. In the year 600 B.C., a Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, found that by rubbing amber he produced a force that would pick up straws. Two Reprinted by permission of The Kettering Archives, General Motors Research Laboratories, General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan. thousand two hundred years later, Sir William Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's physician, did a little more thinking and experimenting wi th the idea and called the phenomenon electricity. Sixty years later, von Guericke, a German, built a machine to generate static electricity. One hundred years later, Benjamin Franklin identified posi tive and negative electricity and proved lightning and electricity were the same thing. In 1820, Oersted, a Dane, proved that electricity would produce magnet ism. And about the same time, Faraday did some experimenting and discovered the principles of the electric motor.

Now, here is what happened. After. Faraday, came Morse and Bell, who used the idea. as a means of communication-the telegraph 669 670 THE FREEMAN November and the telephone. Edison made the idea glow and lit up the world. Marconi and deForest went Morse and Bell one better and laid the foundation for radio. But here is the point-for over 2,500 years, that electrical thought had been growing. It had been carefully cultivated and expanded by a few straight-thinking men-a Greek, an Englishman, a German, a Dane, an American and an Italian. Often these men were working at the same time, unknown to each other. And this small, capparently unim port ant idea in the year 600 B.C. has grown until it has literally changed the face of the earth and the habits of its people. Here is an interesting thing about intangible ideas like this one. Once they occur, they are indestruc tible. Wars, plagues and persecu tions may drive them out of sight for a while but they always spring back again-perhaps in another man's brain, perhaps in some other part of the world, to be cultivated and enlarged. And I c~nnot feel but sometime there will be another mentality similar to Schubert's that will catch the same theme that he had, and write the finishing part of that great symphony.

There have been only a few thou sand of these thought cultivators in the history of the world. It has been said that except for about 1,500 of these cthinkers living in the last 3,000 years, we might still be living in caves. Now, somebody might say that if these people are as rare as all that there isn't much that can be done about it. We'll just have to wait until one happens to come along. But that isn't true. We can develop thinkers just as we can educate people in other lines. If no one practiced playing the violin, there wouldn't be any great violinists. Through practice, we can develop this ability to think. Along wi th these original thinkers, we have millions who are afflicted with mental laziness those who are satisfied. They are the easy thinkers. When a new thought is given them, they find it much easier to agree than to question it. And that is dangerous, especially if the idea is a bad one.

We are fighting the world's greatest war because millions of people were sold one of· these bad ideas. But I am still in hope that we can some day put as much energy into the development of good, con structive ideas as we are now putting into the fighting of a bad one. And speaking of good, constructive ideas, we might still go back to 600 B.C. and find out why the amber picked up the straws. We don't know that yet. If we did, I believe we could open up new fields that might be quite as important as the electric light, the telephone or the radio. ~ WARREN T. BROOKES IS OUR ECONOMIC FUTURE LIMITED? An economic has been regularly as imminent for centuries. an almost continuous seen'ung decline in our resources, it has not come no limit to the greatest we!ann"'l)rOaUIClniQ and asset of _ ....._1.... _ ........... Krl0'''''''110'N. ONE of the more persistent argu ments of our time is the doomsday prophecy that America's economic future is limited and that, in Gover nor Jerry Brown's words, "We must lower our expectations:' The basic premise of this scenario 'is that America became rich in the first place because of our rich mate rial resources, particularly oil; and, now that our oil seems to be run ning out, it is time for Americans· to' begin scaling down their economic growth.