This is a horrible, robot voiced video, with some language captioned over it. But it's all I could find about the little known inventor, Dr. Elmer R. Gates.
Who the hell is Elmer R. Gates? Born in 1859, Elmer Gates is a man I read about in the classic Napoleon Hill book about success, Think and Grow Rich. Published in 1937, from an idea sparked by the great industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, Think and Grow Rich is one of the all time best selling success books, in print for over 80 years, now. It's one of the first books anyone interested in business or personal success should read. You can look it up and learn about this book. Heck, you can even read the whole book online at the link below.
Back to Dr. Elmer Gates. Elmer Gates was an inventor, that's how most people of his day would have thought of him. He came up with ideas that earned him over 200 patents, in the same time period when Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and many others of the mechanical and electrical era were inventing new technologies. We still use Edison-style light bulbs lit up by Nikola Tesla's AC current today, so the effects of these men's inventions carry on, even today. Elmer Gates invented the foam retardant used in fire extinguishers, among many, many other things.
Like I said, I read about Elmer Gates in Think and Grow Rich, which, ironically (since I'm a homeless guy these days) I've read 8 or 10 times. It wasn't the inventions of Dr. Gates that Napoleon Hill wrote about in the book, it was how Elmer Gates came up with many of those ideas.
On page 179, of this online version of Think and Grow Rich, we read that Dr. Gates would go into a special room in his lab. He called it his "personal communication room." The room was sound proof, and it was sealed, so he could turn the lights off to make it completely dark. He had a chair, a small table to write on, and a pad of paper. Elmer Gates would go into this room alone, sit down, hit a button to turn the lights off, and then mentally concentrate on all the known parts of the invention he was working on. Then he would sit there, until new ideas for the invention came to him. When that happened, he would hit the button, turn the lights back on, and start writing down his ideas, until all the new information that came to him was in his notes. Then he would go out, and apply the new information that came to him to the project.
Where did all that new information about the invention come from? His imagination? His subconscious mind? Some collective superconscious mind? No one else seemed to know. But new information came to him, and it came to him time after time after time. At times he would get paid to "sit for ideas" for major corporations or other entities. Time after time, reading Think and Grow Rich, I thought, "sitting for ideas?" That sounds like a real cool way to make a living. In a sense, that's part of what a writer does. So maybe I have a chance, in that sense. In any case, I always found the little story of Dr. Elmer R. Gates fascinating, and maybe you will, too. It's less than a page, you can read Napoleon's Hill's story of Dr. Gates on that link.
Today, on my Substack site, I wrote a post about insights, and how I think that intuitive insights, artistic and creative sparks (new ideas for techniques or projects), scientific breakthroughs, and spiritual revelations and epiphanies, all seem to come to people through the same process, or very similar processes.
That doesn't mean this process is easy, or that anyone can just go into a dark room, think for a while, and come up with million dollar, or these days, billion dollar ideas. But the basic process is something anyone can try to improve upon. I think just about everybody has had some kind of intuitive hunch, or idea, at some point in their life. Artists, musicians, inventors, and top caliber athletes have all talked about intuition, unplanned responses to events, time slowing down, and being "in the zone," or the "flow state," at times. This is how many of my poem ideas, years ago, and many writing and other creative ideas, have come to me, for over 30 years now. So if this sounds interesting, you can read my insights about insights, in this Substack post.
If this whole concept interests you, I highly recommend reading Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. You can find the whole book at that link, to read it online, or pick up a copy at a book store, the library, or a website.
I've been doing writing on deeper subjects on Substack, a platform designed for writers. Check it out:
No comments:
Post a Comment