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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

    • The Excitement of Creativity


    We all know about Archimedes who ran naked out of the bath tub, shouting "Eureka!", when he made his famous discovery. But Archimedes was not the only one who has experienced this kind of overpowering excitement during the act of creation. According to one observer Boyd, the scientist who measured the gravitational constant "would come out his laboratory whooping and yelling and leaping over tables and chairs." Let us look at some other examples:

    • When Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, with Charles Darwin, once caught a new species of butterfly - a particularly brilliant species of the genus Ornithoptera - he was more than just thrilled. Describing this experience he wrote: "None but a naturalist, can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause."

    • When Charles Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol, he "wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree... and walked, thinking of it, fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London when most people were in bed."

    • Describing his experience of writing the book October Fair, Thomas Wolfe wrote: "the truth is that never in my whole life have I lived so fully... as I did during those three months when I was struggling with the giant problem of my work.... For one thing, my whole sensory and creative equipment, my powers of feeling and reflection - even the sense of hearing, and above all, my power of memory, had reached the greatest degree of sharpness that they had never known. At the end of the days savage labor, my mind was still blazing with its effort, could by no opiate of reading, poetry, music, alcohol, or any other pleasure, be put at rest. I was unable to sleep, unable to subdue the tumult of these creative energies..."


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