You may have read about the best new invention in my life, in the blog: Staging Your Day. It’s a little white stage on my desk, that helps me remember and reinforce what I’m working on. Otherwise, I might despair and walk away before I realized it, or feel conflicted about how I’m using my time. This stage centers all my thoughts on this one task, and I feel validated, and FINISH MY WORK.
Teeny tiny thing. Huge change in everything I do.
This week, I’m bringing you the other best thing I got from that same seminar on inventing, presented at CPSi by Craig Kosinski – a man who has been a model builder, and an artifact curator and display artist for museums. See below for his official bio. I’m sharing a timeline of how we got from Gorillas to Us in 52 milestones. It is breathtaking. I scribbled notes furiously during his presentation bec WOW! Here it is.
The key takeaway? Things Take Time. This is the important and amazing message for impatient people like me.
- In the Stone Age, (3.5 million years ago) Man began making stone flake tools, but the idea to tie a stone to a stick and hunt animals from a safer distance didn’t come about for another 3 million years. (Yes, you read that right!)
- We discovered fire 2 million years ago, but didn’t think to cook food for another 100,000 years.
- Once we started cooking food, we ate more proteins and tougher vegetables and our metabolism changed. Within a million years of cooking, we had a brain gene mutation called FOX P2 – that permitted us to develop speech.
- They invented the wheel in 3500 BC – at first used horizontally for pottery making – domesticated the horse a couple hundred years later, but didn’t think to combine horse and a vertical wheel to create a chariot for another 2000 years.
- Gunpowder was invented in China in 1000 AD but didn’t get introduced to Europe for another 250 years.
- Writers will care about inventions like Paper (105 AD), the Gutenberg Press (1440) lead pencil (1564), the typewriter (1878) and the first PC (1975).
Here’s the link again – the History of Invention
The history nerd in me loved really getting all these human milestones in one place – download the timeline and see it! I love the steady, if slow, progress we’ve made. Painful at times, triumphant at others.
The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread – was sliced bread. It was invented in 1912 – but the guy lost his machine in a bakery fire. He went off to World War I and didn’t get back to reinventing the machine until 1928. (“Oh yeah,” he thought, “that bread slicer thingy! Gotta get back to that.”)
We all have “bread slicers” still on the drawing board, or shoved in a drawer. (Gotta get back to that.) And we all have unbelievably, painfully long development times on things we are inventing in our heads – sometimes for our whole lives.
I enjoyed collecting these milestones to gain insight into invention, progress, blind spots and human need not necessarily mothering invention. I mean they needed spears for 3 million years… hunters were dying. But also I see invention mothering human need. Once we had the Gutenberg Press more people needed books.
Enjoy inventing your worlds. We never know what needs we will meet in our audiences.
Craig Kosinski holds Masters Degrees in Creative Studies and in Arts Management. He has been a writer and editor, a model builder, and an itinerant museum worker consulting on artifacts. His hands-on work with artifacts allowed him to view them through the lens of creativity and see how they were inventions solving specific problems. In his recent book, ReCraft Your Creativity, Mr. Kosinski brings together his passions for creativity, craft, art, and artifacts with his curiosity for how these relate to each other. He continues to serve museums and businesses through Group Facilitation, Creative Problem Solving, and Project Management.