• Question: is there you wanted to invent but someone already invented it or you just didn`t do it ? if so what was it?

    Asked by Mookie to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      I’m not really an inventor, but there are certainly some problems I wanted to solve, but someone got there first – like the effect of hydrogen in the Earth’s core!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      When I was in school I wanted to have all my textbooks in digital form so I wouldn’t have to carry them all around all the time. Now that I think on it, what I wanted was an iPad with a bunch of e-books. Good work, digital revolution! Now I want a 3-D printer that can also un-print, so it can take apart physical objects and drop out cubes of material. (It would make it so easy to move house!)

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      If I had a penny for every time I discovered that someone had beaten me to a good idea or invention, I’d be incredibly rich!

      I had a great idea once for a way to wirelessly charge electronic devices, only to discover later that it was identical to how electric toothbrushes (and some new smartphones) work. To this day I still have a great idea for how to launch very small satellites into space without needing the huge, polluting rockets we have now, and another idea about clean electricity generation but I’ve never yet done anything about either of those ideas. I have four or five notebooks full of crazy ideas for inventions like these!

      When I was younger I once thought I had a great idea for how to actually build a working lightsaber. Sadly, it turned out to be much harder than I expected…never did make it work!

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