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We are focusing on your ability to read and understand what you are reading in this next activity. Read through the story carefully and then answer the questions that follow.
Remember Annie Oakley? She invented a way of life to solve a problem in her life and it made her rich and famous. Read about some other people who used their common sense.
Why don’t you invent it?
Bright ideas come to all of us once in a while.
The trouble is, we often fail to give them a second thought.
As a result, many useful ideas go to waste.
Not very long ago a man named O’Sullivan was working at a bench in a factory. The vibration from the old machines jarred his nerves. He decided to bring a rubber mat to work. He stood on it, and found that the trouble stopped.
Two days later he could not find the mat. Some fellow worker liked O’Sullivan’s idea. In fact, he liked it so much he had taken the mat. O’Sullivan brought another mat. This one was also removed. He brought a third mat. But this time he cut out two pieces of rubber. These he nailed to the heels of his boots. And it worked. The vibrations did not bother him. O’Sullivan had the sense to understand the value of his invention. Soon he had put rubber heels on the market.
They made him rich. Ideas like that can be worked out by anyone. One does not have to be an expert in some technical field to do it. Often the expert is trapped by his own knowledge. He might think the idea is not worthwhile. His point of view might be too technical. He would not think along simple lines but someone fresh in the subject can make an idea work.
Elias Howe, son of a farmer, also came up with a sharp idea. No-one had thought of an eye in the point of a needle. It would be all wrong. But it worked! The result was the lockstitch sewing machine.
Ideas do not always spring up ready-made and cut to fit. They can be the result of curiosity. A man once watched his wife pinning up her long hair with hairpins. She would put a little kink into each prong. Then she would stick in the pin. His curiosity was aroused. “Why the kinks?” he asked.
“To keep the things from slipping out,” he was told.
The man was smart enough to make this idea pay. Some time later he put a hairpin on the market. It had three or four kinks in each prong. He made a fortune. Yet no one could say that he was an inventive genius.
An idea does not have to be inventive in order to sell. Before safety matches were used, a matchbox had a strip of sandpaper on both sides. One day a man was about to throw away an empty box. He saw that one striking side was as good as new. He asked about costs of sandpaper. He found out how much of it was used in the match trade. Then he decided to sell his idea.
It took a great deal of knocking on doors, but he managed to see a top executive. The man made it clear that he had an idea that would save the match company about $250 000 a year. He would tell the company his idea – if it would pay him $15 000 a year for the rest of his life.
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