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The Creative Muse: Stories of Creativity & Innovation

Madhukar Shukla


  • Preface
  • Introduction

    STORIES:

  • Discoveries about Creativity
  • Laws Of Planetary Motion
  • Electricity From Clouds
  • Band-Aid
  • Pneumatic Tyres
  • Gummed Paper
  • The Trap Of Paradigm
  • Invention Of Sewing Machine
  • Just-In-Time System
  • Transmission of Nerve Impulses
  • Printing Press
  • Dangers Of Locomotives
  • Flashlight
  • Lawn Mower
  • Phonograph
  • Rubber Heels
  • The Periodic Table
  • Discovery Of Electromagnetic Fields
  • The Tao Of Physics
  • Congenital Impact of Rubella
  • Typewriter
  • The Theory Of Evolution
  • The Benzene Ring
  • The Wreck Of Titanic
  • Wagner's Rheingold
  • Underwater Construction
  • Search For The "Hidden Likeness"
  • Fermi & Nuclear Fission
  • Cash Register
  • Discovery Of Current Electricity
  • Cure Of Diabetes
  • Boolean Algebra
  • Principle Of Photosynthesis
  • Ball Point Pen
  • The X-Ray
  • The Fuschian Functions
  • Safety Glass
  • The Creative Triggers
  • Why Aeroplanes Cannot Fly
  • The "Brownies" Of Stevenson
  • The Blunder That Founded 3M
  • Invention Of AC Motor
  • Discovery Of Teflon
  • Toynbee's The Study Of History
  • Inventors' Blindness
  • The Excitement Of Creativity
  • Electric Fan
  • How Typhus Gets Transmitted
  • Proof Of The Big Bang
  • Mathematical Theory Of Chance
  • Coleridge's Kubla Khan
  • Vulcanisation Process
  • Structure Of The Crystals
  • The Compulsion To Create
  • 3M's Post-It Note Pads
  • Ice Cream Cones
  • The Structural Theory Of Atom
  • IBM And Computers
  • Helicopter
  • How Experts Resist Ideas
  • Creative Reveries Of Enid Blyton
  • Predictions In Gulliver's Travels
  • Float Glass Technology
  • Principle Of Immunisation
  • Journey Into Unknown
  • The Genius Of Karl Fredrich Gauss
  • Jean Coceteau's The Knights Of The Round Table
  • Neon Light
  • Transistor Radios
  • Precocious Minds?
  • The Masterpiece Of Sir Walter Scott
  • The "Fraud" That Changed The World
  • The "99% Perspiration"
  • Xeroxing
  • The Poem Of Stephen Spender
  • The Anatomy Of Inspiration
  • Travellers' Cheques
  • Edison's Fraud
  • Awe, Wonder And Alienation
  • The Logic Of Irrational

  • Epilogue: Themes & Patterns

    • Theory of Evolution


    In December 1831, Charles Darwin, a young man in his twenties, set sail in a survey ship called the Beagle, on an unpaid post of a naturalist. Darwin's interest was in collecting beetles. Six years later, when he returned he was a changed person. He had amassed a plethora of data, which showed that species were not immutable. He was a subtle observer, who, as his son described him:

        "... had a special instinct for arresting an exception. A point apparently slight and unconnected... It was just these things that he seized on to make a start from."

    Darwin's data showed that when separated from each other, members of the same species develop in different ways. But for a long time he could not think of any mechanism which drove species apart. In 1838, he read Malthus' essay on population, and was struck by the assertion that population multiplies faster than the food. The momentous insight that this would mean struggle among the members and species came to him unanticipated while travelling in coach. He wrote:

        "I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me."

    The answer lay in the idea of the survival of the fittest. By 1838, Darwin had roughly formulated his hypothesis, but the implications of the insight were so unsettling that it took him another four years to commit them in a 35 pages notes in pencil. By 1944, he had finally written down a 230 pages long outline of his theory.

    But it was another 15 years before he published it. Darwin found the theory too unnerving, and wanted it to be published only after his death.

    The reasons why Darwin finally published his theory before his death, was because, in 1858, he received an astonishing letter from a young naturalist from Moluccas. The letter was from Alfred Russel Wallace, and it contained an identical theory as Darwin's.

    The circumstances which led Wallace to reach identical conclusions were also strikingly similar. Wallace was also a naturalist (he earned a living by collecting specimen and selling them to museums), and had travelled around the world collecting data and observing diversity of species. His generalisation came in a delirium when he was confined to bed due to malarial attack. As one his biographers described:

        "It was during an actual attack of fever that the idea came to him. His mind was reflecting on Malthus's "Principle of Population", and brought remembrance of this book, which he had read twelve years before, into connexion with the vast stores of knowledge that he had gained of the lives of wild animals in their native haunts in the East Indies... The principle of the survival of the fittest "suddenly flashed" upon him. "Then at once," he wrote, "I seemed to see the whole effect of this," and waited impatiently for his fit of fever to leave him, so that he could write down a sketch of his theory. That same evening he did so, and during the next two evenings he wrote a fuller account to send to Darwin."

    And so, in 1859, Darwin was forced to present his theory along with Wallace to the scientific world, and to publish Origin of the Species.


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