How to be a successful inventor

What do you need for an invention to be a success?

Well, good timing for a start. You can have a great idea which the pubuc simply doesn’t want... yet. Take the Italian priest, Giovanni Caselli, who invented the first fax machine using an enormous pendulum in the 1860s. Despite the excellent quality of the reproductions, his invention quickly died a commercial death. It was not until the 1980s that the fax became an essential piece of equipment in every office... too late for Signor Caselli.

Money also helps. The Frenchman Denis Papin (1647 — 1712) had the idea for a steam engine almost a hundred years before the better- remembered Scotsman James Watt was even born... but he never had enough money to build one.

You also need to be patient (it took scientists nearly eighty years to develop a light bulb which actually worked)... but not too patient. In the 1870s, Elisha Gray, a professional inventor from Chicago, developed plans for a telephone. Gray saw it as no more than ‘a beautiful toy’, however. When he finally sent details of his invention to the Patent Office on February 14th 1876, it was too late; almost identical designs had arrived just two hours earlier... and the young man who sent them, Alexander Graham Bell, will always be 30 remembered as the inventor of the telephone.

Sarah Curringham, Peter Moor, Cutting Edge, Longman.