INSANE INVENTORS
—OLD ENGLISH PROVERB
Modern humans take inventions for granted. They sleep on a nice comfortable mattress, that isn’t full of bugs and rodents, because inventors in the 1800s discovered that tightly packed cotton keeps out unwanted critters. They wake up with the help of an alarm clock, which was first built in 1300s Germany, and use a toothbrush to clean their teeth, rather than their finger, because of a patent from 1857.
They grab a slice of bread for toast, thanks to the invention of the bread sheer in 1924. Then they head to school or work in an automobile first invented by Karl Benz in 1846.
The truth is that everything humans use had to be invented. Some inventions were logical, like putting a wooden handle on a shell to create a spoon. Others were accidents—like the invention of Ivory soap. (A worker left the mixer on too long and it filled the soap with air so it floated in water.) Other inventions took years of research and testing, like the search for a polio vaccine. But everything we use was created from the experimentation and imagination of another human being.
Sometimes inventors have to do dangerous experiments to figure out whether their idea will work or not. Often, rather than endanger someone else, the inventor exper-iments on him- or herself. It can mean jumping off a tall building holding a bunch of cloth and ropes to test the idea of a parachute. It can mean injecting yourself with poison to study the effectiveness of an antidote. It can even mean dying while testing the invention of a submarine or a diving suit. Regular people look at these inventors and think, “They’ve got to be insane.” Only a crazy person would volunteer to drink vomit to see how disease spreads or test the effects of strange gasses by breathing them. Only an insane woman would sleep with radioactive radium by her bed. Only a crazy man would use his own body as a crash test dummy. But these scientists and inventors risked their lives to make changes that would help all of humanity.
