Who are inventors? Different segments of the population usually have different opinions on this matter.
Their wives often consider them to be malicious fools who waste their time and family money, but at the same time they remember their golden hands, capable of fixing anything in the house.
Colleagues at work usually consider them blessed, dangerous for their neighbors, because they constantly disrupt the calm flow of work and because of them, attacks on the standard-setters' workshop are possible, fraught with a revision of the standards, naturally, in the direction of increasing them.
Officials and their superiors hate them. Sometimes quietly, but more often loudly, because their initiatives, while not providing any benefits to officials, increase the overall volume of bureaucratic work, sometimes significantly.
Perhaps an inventor can be defined as an intelligent person who is deeply passionate about the idea of “doing something differently, doing it better.”
The 18th century marked the beginning of a still-lasting era of inventors. Whatever you call our era—whether modern or contemporary, the age of steel and steam, or the age of electricity—the key point is that the evolutionary development of, say, oil lamps, which had served people for centuries and millennia to provide illumination in the dark, suddenly shifted to revolutionary development, with the invention of new forms of lighting—kerosene lamps, and then electric lamps. And how far lamps powered by electricity have advanced! From carbon-arc incandescent lamps to LED lamps, which last many times longer and produce many times more light with the same wattage.
But if you think about it, in other areas of life, technological development has taken the same, if not longer, path, leading to even greater results.
In everyday life, these are televisions, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and new materials and new branches of industry created for their existence and maintenance.
In manufacturing, these include industries of new artificial materials, new methods of processing materials, precision methods of processing superhard materials… Steel production, the production of many previously little-known metals, whose use in the modern world has long exceeded iron or steel, the production of plastics, which in many areas of life have already displaced steel, glass, porcelain, rubber…
The latest information technologies, combined with humankind's space achievements, allow for instant connection with any subscriber anywhere on the planet, as long as they have the necessary equipment. Yet, back in the 1970s, newspapers printed in provincial cities in the USSR carried the headline: “Sent from Moscow by photo telegraph.”
Within the memory of the last generation, intercity telephone service has changed. In the 1960s, to call from Leningrad to Moscow, you had to go to a long-distance exchange, place your order, the operator would call the desired city, the operator there would call the local number, and if the other end answered and agreed to speak, you could go to one of the available booths and talk to the subscriber in another city (sometimes, as in the joke of the time: “Moscow! Moscow! Answer!!!” – “Can't we talk on the phone?”).
Then it became possible to place an order at a long-distance call center and talk from a home phone, having paid for a certain number of minutes of conversation in advance.
Then it became possible to simply dial “07” and contact a subscriber in another city through a long-distance telephone operator, and then the postman would bring a receipt for using the long-distance telephone.
Then it became possible to dial 8 from home, then the area code and the desired home phone number – and talk as much as you wanted, remembering that the call costs money and that soon a bill for a long-distance call will arrive, and the fee will be quite large.
Today, you can simply take your cell phone out of your pocket and dial the desired number—and not worry about money, because during the conversation, your money will simply drain from your cell phone account. Until it's all gone or until you end the call.
Better yet, grab a phone with Skype and call someone registered on that same Skype, even from the other side of the world. The call will be free, and you'll only have to pay for internet traffic.
So, come on. Ours is the age of inventors, not the age of electricity or atomic energy!
