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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 Anatomy of Inspiration


    As one would have noted, inspirations have a tendency of dawning when the awareness level is low. It is almost as if the deliberately conscious states of mind act as a barrier for creative insights to occur. Probably that is why sleep, reverie, relaxing activities, etc., have been most conducive to those dazzling revelations which we have noted in the preceding stories. Here are some more examples:

      • In 1821, Beethoven was on a journey to Vienna. He fell asleep in the carriage, and had a dream that he had gone to the Middle East, and while travelling there, a canon came to his mind. He recounted: "But scarcely did I awake when away flew the canon, and I could not recall any part of it. On returning here however, the next day, in the same carriage... I resumed my dream journey, being on this occasion wide awake, when lo and behold! in accordance with the laws of association of ideas the same canon flashed across me; so being now awake I held it as fast as Menelaus did Proteus, only permitting it to change into three parts..."

      • Einstein reported that his profound generalisations connecting space and time occurred to him while he was sick in bed.

      • According to poet AE Housman: "As I went along, thinking, nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotions, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once."

      • Mathematician Poincare once noted: "I have especially noticed this fact in regard to ideas coming to me in the morning or evening in bed while in a semi-hypnagogic state."

      • According to Mozart: "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -say, travelling in a carriage,or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them... Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively but I hear them, as it were, all at once... The committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination."

      • Sir Walter Scott wrote: "The half-hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me."


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