The Scientist and the Engineer 69 



Marconi, and, one of the greatest of them all, Thomas 

 Edison. 



In both groups the achievement is obviously so great, so 

 unrelated to what has gone before, that ordinary men have 

 difficulty imagining how the deed was done. The individuals 

 themselves are not very helpful in explaining how they did 

 it either. The more self-conscious and introspective may be 

 able to describe the events leading up to the generation of 

 a new idea, but the critical moment seems to elude them. 

 Sometimes it is shrouded in a dream as in the anecdote 

 recounted by Otto Loewi. 



Others are impressed by the element of luck that seems 

 to enter into many, if not most, discoveries and modestly 

 pretend that their achievement was nothing more than a 

 stroke of good fortune. Certainly many technical advances 

 have been made because some technician broke a ther- 

 mometer and added some unplanned mercury to a reacting 

 mixture, kept the gas on for too long a time, or simply 

 neglected to throw away a bacterial culture and thus re- 

 vealed a "new" species with an unusually long growing 

 time. Alexander Fleming is said to have discovered the 

 action of penicillin by observing a clear area in one of his 

 cultures at a spot accidentally contaminated with a bit of 

 common bread mold. In all these cases, however, the phe- 

 nomenon had probably occurred many times before without 

 anyone's noticing. The act of noticing the importance is 

 the really significant thing. This interaction between chance 

 and the creative human intellect has perhaps been best 

 described by Pasteur in his famous aphorism, "Chance 

 favors the prepared mind." 



Still other creative people, especially those with an en- 

 gineering or artistic bent, entertain the theory that most 

 people are potentially equally creative but are spoiled by 

 the unstimulating and actually inhibiting effects of much 



