When I was six
or seven I had a cardboard carton in which I
stored a variety of unrelated parts—coils,
resistors, tube sockets, and various other
hardware my dad had not needed in
constructing his many home-built radios; a
door bell that my grandmother had retired
because she no longer liked the sound (in
later years I became sympathetic to her
conclusion that it had become “too quiet”);
cabinet hardware that my grandfather had
replaced; and bell wire on which I had spent
part of my weekly allowance at Woolworth’s
Five and Ten; to name but a few. I would
select parts from the box that I could use
in building my own projects. Some were
usable in my Lionel tin-plate railroad
set-up (and later in my HO-scale layout),
others in a less than perfect homemade
telegraph key. Still others would end up as
an incongruous part of something I had built
with my Erector set.
This ancient
parts box came to mind as I sat down to
write this column. It occurred to me that I
have a parts box from which these
Backscatter columns emanate, if that is the
appropriate verb. It consists of numerous
folders into which I file notes, clippings,
articles, and partially written columns
which, in some cases, may never reach the
printed stage. Some of the folder topics are
broad: “Engineering Education” or “Ethics”
are examples. Others are quite specific:
“The Obsolete CD” is one. As my deadline
approaches, I riffle through a few of the
files, hoping the process will yield from
among the disparate topics something that
will finally crystallize into a useful
theme. The process has not thus far failed
me, I think, though you are the better judge
of that than I.
I have since
discovered that several noted authors
admitted to having their own versions of a
parts box. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example,
would write sentences or paragraphs that
appealed to him, having no notion of which
novel or short story he might place them in,
if any. He would catalog them for possible
opportunistic use at some later date.
Inventing
from the Parts Box
Prolific
inventor Jacob Rabinow postulated a
figurative parts box to describe the
successful process of inventing. It is, he
said, as if you were to record many related
ideas on index cards and then toss them into
the air. You would then examine the
resulting patterns and juxtapositions as
they lay on the floor. By rejecting
unpromising groupings and selecting the good
ones, he said, a successful invention might
then reveal itself. I never had the
opportunity to check it out, but I’m
guessing that, in his case, the index cards
to which Rabinow referred were in his head,
where he skillfully tossed them until the
concept for one of his more than two hundred
inventions emerged.
That thought
leads me to my final proposition, namely,
that our brain is the most sophisticated
parts box of all. As with my cardboard box
of yore, we put lots of stuff into it,
hoping something useful will emerge. It
usually does.
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