Everything Has Already Been Invented
So many people, so creative during so many years – nothing left to invent?
Necessity is the mother of invention
You probably know that idiom, and it sounds quite logical – inventions are made when needed. So, do we keep finding new need that need new inventions?
When looking at such as cars or other complex constructions, they consist of many different parts, and for each new model, some of the parts will be different from before.
Perhaps because of problems discovered with s certain design – maybe it was breaking too often – or because a cheaper way of producing it was developed. It could be, as well, that a different vendor was found for that part, and they simply make it with a different shape, or from different materials, for no particular reason.
For cars, exactly, there is a current trend in the development going toward more automatic safety features.
It has been a long process, and it is quite possible that the ideas behind most of the features now available in the cars were thought out long ago, just not implemented until now. Looking through old issues of the magazine Popular Mechanics is a revelation of ideas, and a lot of it has been implemented along the way in some form. Science fiction writers also contributed, but, I guess, so did anyone who ever thought about how to make a car.
It is fairly obvious to put a mechanism in the car that will brake it automatically if it is about to hit the car in front of it, or a pedestrian.
But much of this is invented on top of each other. You need a car, and you need it to move at a certain speed, before it even becomes relevant to consider automatic brakes for it.
So, we could add another idiom, on top of the one about necessity, saying
All inventions are made on top of other inventions
This could possibly be phrased better, but I’m sure you get the point.
And that leads us back to the original claim, that nothing new is ever invented. Some people have explained that idea with the fact that everything new seems to be just a variety of what is already there. Which makes sense, given our new idiom. It looks like, but with a twist.
All new inventions seem to be in the shape of twists.
It’s kind of the human nature, isn’t it?
We try to make life work as we know it, stay in the same house for as long as we can, wear the same trousers for as long as they’ll last, etc., but eventually something needs to change. Outer reasons are often the cause, but we can also feel a certain restlessness that doesn’t come (directly) from any outer source. It is something in us that makes us want to paint the walls in a different color, rearrange the furniture in a room, or even sell the house and move to a different one.
The same restlessness exists in commercial contexts, with manufacturers feeling that they have to change the models all the time. Perhaps because of competition, but also because they hope that they can induce a restlessness in their existing customers, to make these want to buy the new model, even though their old model still works.
A new model “needs” new features of some kind, so that it is possible to speak about it as better. And so, the manufacturer will try to think out, invent, something new all the time. For a shoe manufacturer, this mostly consists of color, shape, and other details that are not exactly necessary, but at times they try to fix a problem seen by some of their customers by making a completely new construction, such as a “barefoot shoe” that makes your foot feel like if you didn’t wear a shoe at all.
Such “completely new inventions” are, however, most often inspired by other, existing, inventions. Or other people have thought about it before, the new inventor just doesn’t know about it. A “barefoot shoe”, for instance, could be seen as a new version of what some Native Americans did when letting the juice from the rubber tree cover their feed, thereby getting foot-shaped shoes.
A lot of inventions get lost in time. People stop using a certain design, perhaps because life conditions change, and it isn’t needed anymore. Let’s say, as an example, that a people move from a cold climate to a warmer, thereby forgetting about some of the clever kinds of warm-keeping clothes and boots they used to make.
Later, some of these forgotten ideas will then be reinvented, because conditions change once more. Perhaps with inspiration from memories of the original, or perhaps completely anew, leading to a similar solution to the same problem, but still, a new invention.
In general, it isn’t fair to claim that no new invention is really new. We keep moving, but we do not necessarily keep evolving in a progressive manner – it isn’t so that all new things are at a higher level than before. It goes in waves, things are developed, others forgotten, new things are needed, old things no longer.
Over the course of centuries or millennia, some of the same or similar things will no doubt be invented several times, by different people under different circumstances. But with a twist.
Every new invention is just a twist on existing ones
Factoids
It's not about right or wrong, it's about thinking – capturing typical thoughts and turning them around, inside out, to see what they're made of