There is nothing new under the sun
It was the first meeting of the discussion section of my freshman philosophy course. The graduate assistant rather pompously informed us, “As you read the works assigned in this course, all sorts of thoughts will be triggered. Undoubtedly, you’ll believe that you’ve come up with some unique philosophical insights. But no matter what you think you’ve discovered, remember that David Hume thought of it first.” I have to say that I don’t recall while reading Aristotle and Saint Augustine and Kant whether any brilliant new ideas spun out from my brain’s philosophical cortex. And if they did, it was unlikely that I cracked open A Treatise of Human Nature to confirm that Hume, in fact, beat me to it.
I think of this–which, sadly, is about the only thing I recall from Hum 105–since I recently invented two great devices that, as it turned out, were already for sale on Amazon. The first had to do with electricity. Trying to be a good steward of the environment, I’ve been switching from gas- to electric-powered tools. So now I have two battery chargers, one for my Dewalt and one for my Ryobi devices. Annoyingly, neither has an on/off switch. When I want to replenish a battery I have to mount it on the charger, fish around for the end of the power cord, and plug it into the wall socket. Then when the battery is charged I have to unplug it. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s a nuisance. And even more of a nuisance is our switchless popcorn popper. After the kernels have been loaded into the chamber you have to jam the plug into an outlet to start the process, then pull it out when all the corn has popped. So in both the charger and popper cases I thought it would be lovely to be able to plug the devices into some sort of on/off switch that, in turn, plugs into the wall. How cool would that be—I could leave the two battery chargers connected to that hard-to-reach outlet in the garage all the time, and just flip a switch when I wanted to charge a battery. And what an elegant upgrade to our popcorn popper–to simply turn it on and off with a proper switch rather than cramming the plug into the wall, then yanking it out while it was still hot from the popping.
After ruminating on the brilliance of my invention, it occurred to me it was distantly possible that someone else had thought of it too. So I searched the web with a series of awkward descriptions like “switch for device without on/off switch” and “peripheral electrical on/off switch.” Finally I hit pay dirt— “Grounded outlet wall tap adapter with on/off power switch” appeared. I could have written the copy myself: “Quickly turn off the power to this grounded single port power adapter instead of constantly plugging and unplugging the cord from the wall with this on off switch for outlet. Perfect for devices or peripherals without built-in power On/Off switch.” And in further confirmation that this was the product for me, it turns out that they were sold in packages of three—that meant one for each of the two battery chargers, and one for the popcorn popper. How sublime!
Last fall we planted several hundred native plants along our shoreline. Now, in the heat of summer they all need watering, along with the other plants and bushes and fruit trees scattered throughout our property. So I’ve set up several types of sprinklers. Quickly I realized how tedious it was to keep returning to the hose faucet on the side of the house to adjust the water flow. Especially when the sprinkler was sprinkling out of sight of the faucet, I had to make multiple little excursions back and forth to get the flow just right. I also set up a series of four soaker hoses. To move the water flow from one hose to another I had to switch off the water at the faucet, run back down the hill and remove the end of the hose from one soaker hose and attach it to another one, and go back up the hill to turn on the water again. How tedious–Jack and Jill had nothing on me!
In the midst of all the to-ing and fro-ing, the proverbial light bulb suddenly lit up: I invented a little device that sits on the end of the hose to adjust the force of the water supply. While contemplating getting a patent attorney, I idly searched the web, and to my surprise found “Brass garden hose shut off valve.” It was my precise invention, already marketed on Amazon, two for $7.99! Again, I could have written the description: “Adjustable Flow Control: The valve allows you to customize water flow according to your needs, making it ideal for various gardening tasks and applications.” And indeed, ideal they are!
In these two cases I was actually very happy to have my inventions scooped, if not by David Hume then by some clever engineers who appreciated that there was a need, and elegantly met it. In other realms I’ve been less excited to learn that my original ideas were anything but. For example, several years ago while listening to some jazz, the name “Felonious Monk” popped into my mind; what a clever play on the musician Thelonious Monk, eh? I did a Google search and was abashed to find there were over 57,000 hits for Felonious Monk, including a book with that title and as an Egyptian-American comedian who goes by that stage name.
But still I persist. Yesterday, while eating a bagel from Briny Bagels here on Bainbridge Island, I started thinking of better names for a bagel shop. I came up with “The Tower of Bagels.” Great idea, huh? My first search produced only Tower of Babel references, so I thought that maybe I’d actually come up with an original idea, whoo hoo! But then I searched some more and, alas, found the Tower of Bagel in Sheffield, UK. To rub it in, their bagels are vegan, organic, and handmade. Oh well! Same fate for my clever name for a coffee shop (Holy Grounds) and a Thai restaurant that serves booze (Thai One On). I’m increasingly coming to believe that the graduate assistant was right—no one thinks of anything original any more.
But did they ever? It’s a cliché to reference the brilliant cave dweller who first thought of cooking food over the campfire, or the one who invented the wheel. But it seems to me quite unlikely that a specific Neanderthal came up with each great invention. Surely, at about the same stage in the species development numerous smart pre-humans independently thought of barbequing mammoth steak. Or collecting papayas in a basket and putting them on a wheeled platform to drag them through the jungle. And I believe that this remains true in modern times as well. People like Gates and Jobs and Zuckerberg are certainly smart cookies, but not necessarily the visionaries that many people (or at least their publicists) claim them to be. Almost certainly, at about the same time other people had been thinking about operating systems and personal computers and social networks. But all three of these geniuses dropped out of college to get their ideas to market first. If they’d hung around to earn their degrees someone else may well have beaten them to the punch. So though their “original” ideas were commercialized first, they were likely preceded by others who weren’t quite so entrepreneurial.
As Ecclesiastes 1:9 so nicely puts it, “That which was done is that which will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” But rather than disappointment at being scooped, I think this can be seen as a cause for celebration—it means that we humans were and are on similar wavelengths. When I invented the on-off switch and the hose shut off valve I was communing with all the other people who faced similar problems and came up with similar solutions. What a sweet little network!
So despite a minor blow to my pride, I don’t feel bad that I didn’t invent those devices. Or even made up the name of a bagel bakery. It was lovely to have my inventions ready made for purchase on the internet. And I feel really in tune with those guys in Sheffield who constructed the Tower of Bagel. In fact, next time I’m in Sheffield I’ll definitely go there and have a poppyseed bagel with a shmear. And schmooze with them about our mutually invented name.
Finally, when I think about it, it occurs to me that maybe even David Hume wasn’t quite as original as my graduate assistant believed—he could well have been scooped by even earlier philosophers. But without being able to do Google searches, he would never know.