I have stated elsewhere that as a youths growing up at Nkhoma Mission, my brother and I made several attempts to construct a bulb from thin wire extracted from the gauze placed on windows to prevent mosquitoes getting in.
A coil was made from this thin wire and placed in a bottle with the two ends of the coil connected to two strands of thicker wire, which were made to protrude out of the bottle. Power was applied to the “bulb” from the mains socket. The filament would momentarily give a white glow then burn out. We concluded that our “bulb” was burning out because we had not extracted air from the bottle.
We had two major difficulties with our experiment. The first was that we could not easily get thin wire because there was not a foundry at Nkhoma Mission or in Lilongwe city that extruded wire. We therefore had to resort to mischief, extracting strands from the wire gauze, to get what we wanted.
The second problem was that we failed to continue with the experiment because we could not figure out how air could be expelled from the bottle. There was not a single laboratory within easy reach that could do that for us.
In short we lived in a culture that did not support experimentation. Inventions are works of genius by the inventors, but they cannot happen unless the culture surrounding such inventors is such that it will aid the invention.
Johannes Gutenburg invented the printing press in or around 1450. This became an extremely important invention in history because it ushered in what has been termed the renaissance, the rebirth of knowledge. Previously, production of books was a painstakingly long process as they had to be copied out by hand, taking several months to complete one volume. With Gutenburg’s press, books could be mass produced, newspapers came into being, and a much wider circle of people than before could access knowledge.
In modern times (1989), Tim Berners Lee invented the worldwide web (www), an invention comparable in impact to printing technology. The www has ushered in what many believe to be the second renaissance. Thanks to the www, massive quantities of information can fly around the world, reaching various destinations in next to no time. Tim always rubbed shoulders with techno-savy people as he grew up.
Gutenburg lived in Mainz, Germany. This was a wine producing area and was therefore littered with many wine presses. Gutenburg himself was familiar with these presses and adapted one of them to become a printing press. The culture around him ably aided his invention.
The inventor of the motor car, Karl Benz, lived around a culture that made it possible for him to come up with a self propelled wagon. Wagons in Germany and the rest of Europe at that time were a common mode of transport. These were horse drawn. In the United Kingdom I saw canals that had been dug to facilitate a water version of the horse wagon. These too were drawn by horses that walked on the banks of the canal.
Besides the wagons, a number of people had been experimenting around the possibility of a more efficient engine than the existing steam engine during Karl Benz’s time. One of such experimenters was Nicholas Otto, who came up with what is regarded as the first four-stroke, internal combustion engine in history. Benz constructed an engine similar to Nicholas Otto’s and placed it on a wagon to create his three wheeled motor vehicle.
The culture of writing also aided these inventions. People documented whatever experiments they conducted, making it easier than would have been the case for someone else to follow what had already been done so that they could start from where the previous experimenter stopped and progress with new additions and discoveries.
We need to search within our own culture and identify what needs to be changed to create a culture conducive to inventions. Some of such changes can be effected at policy level. We can, for example, introduce science and technology fairs, where individuals and organisations can exhibit their innovations and the best ones get some prizes. This could be at regional level as well as national level. That way, our innovators will have something to look forward to and work hard at developing innovative products. Apostle Kantanka of Ghana has been through many of such fairs in his country and is now developing a range of highly innovative technological products, including motor cars, farm machinery and jets. When you see a vehicle branded Kantanka in the near future, you will know where it is coming from.