Headline Nov 01, 2015/ ''' T O I N V E N T '''

''' T O I N V E N T '''

TO INVENT, said Thomas Edison, you need just,...... just two things : '' good imagination and a pile of junk.'' In the case of Mike Kelly, add a storm:

It was a cold winter day in 1986 when Kelly, his windshield wipers and his career path were all shaken up. Snow was falling and ice was building up on his wiper blades as he drove along the highway.

He reached forward out the car window, trying to grab the wiper to shake off the ice. Instead,  with his attention diverted, he nearly ran into a guardrail.

Back home later that day, Kelly, a sales manager for a high-tech company, was curious about how you could safely knock ice off the wiper by flipping a switch inside the car. In his garage, he duct-taped an electric back massager to his wiper and plugged it in so it would shake the wiper:

''I was trying to simulate what I had done manually,'' says Kelly. But the massage unit was too powerful.

''It nearly broke the windshield,'' he recalls.

Still, the test planted a seed. Sixteen years and more than 100 prototypes later, Kelly's Shaker Wiper De-icer hit the market. 

The Shaker, a small cylinder of about  2.5 centimetres in diameter, clamps to an existing wiper arm and consists of a motor, an ubalanced weight and a switch for inside the vehicle. Activating the motor spins the weight, which causes the wiper to vibrate and, in turn, the ice to dislodge.

Those are the devices inner workings. Now for it's Inventor's inner workings: Kelly was inspired by his near-crash, a desire to do good and the challenge of solving a problem.

''Life would be boring, otherwise,'' he says.

He started with a  ''pile of junk''  -a massager and a duct tape  -and added the crucial raw material, his imagination.

Just what sparks that imagination and turns the gear in the mind of the inventor? Here are five ways that inventor thinks:

1. They constantly ask, ''What if?''

The pulse to invent has roots in a restless nature, in a need to tinker just for the sake of seeing the result. That was the case for Willard Boyle, a member of the *Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame*, who, while at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1969, co-designed the  ''charge-coupled device''  {CCD} with G Smith.

The light sensitive chip, which can store and reproduce images, went on to have applications in everything from digital cameras to the Hubble telescope.    

At the time, however, the CCD had no set function. Boyle simply was intrigued by the opportunity to examine new processes  -to apply changes to a system and observe what happens. ''There was a lot of 'What if?' says Boyle.

Boyle had asked  ''What if?'' since he was boy in northern Quebec. One day when he was about 12, he was listening to a battery-powered radio and wanted to improve the reception. What if, he thought, he rigged a wire from the radio to the phone line?

The result was even more amazing than he had anticipated: In addition to improved reception, sometimes the radio would pick up phone conversations from all over town.

To Boyle, the path from that crude experiment to his career as a physicist is clear: ''It's about living a life of curiosity.''

As a student in Winnipeg, Brad Caruk had a similar compulsion to probe, a need to know. What if he combined a GI Joe, toy jeep, clock motor, infrared sensor, can opener, hook and fishing line?

The result was full motion war scenario.

Student Caruk's rooms overflowed with electronic parts. "My mum called it an inventor's junk room," he recalls.

Student Caruk grew up to be a computer animator, starting up the company  Digital  Pictureworks  at 23. He later became a partner in  SideTrack Technologies, where he designed a method of showing videolike ads on the walls of dark subway tunnels :

Motion-sensitive lights were used to illuminate a series of static images as the train passed. The ads are now created using multiple bars of blinking LED lights; SideTrack has deals with subway systems from Boston to Brazil.

In some ways, Caruk still feels like the boy in the bedroom, forever tinkering.

"My hobbies have become my business."

The Honour and Serving of the  "Educational Operational Research" continues. Thank You for reading and sharing forward with all the students in the world.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"' The Impulse To Invent "'

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless