National Inventors Month

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Henry Ford

The printing press. The automobile. The internet. Electricity. Penicillin. Glasses. Sliced bread! All of these things and thousands more are inventions made my ingenious inventors that may have lived thousands or hundreds of years ago, or may even still be alive today, that we benefit from every single day.

But do we ever take the time to think about just how much out-of-the-box thinking went into inventing these things, or how brave those inventors must have been to dare to dream up and create something nobody had ever heard of before? Probably not! And that’s why Inventor’s month was…invented!

The History of Inventor’s Month

National Inventors Month began was started in 1998 by the United Inventors Association of the USA (UIA-USA), the Academy of Applied Science, and Inventors’ Digest magazine. As Joanne Hayes-Rines, editor of Inventors’ Digest and a sponsor of National Inventors Month, put it: “We want to recognize those talented, brave individuals who dare to be blatantly creative, and therefore different, and whose accomplishments affect every facet of our lives.”

When we think of inventors, we usually think of people like Alexander Graham Bell or Henry Ford, and there’s nothing wrong with that—those people had an enormous impact on what life looks lie today, having invented the telephone and the automobile, respectively.

However, in an age of gadgets, gizmos and electronics, it’s easy to forget that there is still incredible progress being made in technological innovation. Need proof? Shunpei Yamazaki, without whom our LCD screens would not be able to work. Mark Zuckerberg, who created the most effective way to share pictures our cats ever. Stephen Hawking, whose insightful thories in cosmology have shaped the way humanity sees the universe.

Inventor’s Month is dedicated to recognizing the creativity of inventors everywhere, dead and alive, and of course encouraging everybody to get inventive.

How to Celebrate Inventor’s Month

There are a couple of great ways to celebrate Inventor’s Month. One is to think about what your own favorite inventions are, and how much you appreciate the person who came up with them. Maybe you have bad eyesight and could not live your life the way you do without your trusty contact lenses? Maybe you work long hours and your microwave is your superhero? Or maybe you’re a housewife/husband who would go crazy without that dishwasher? Whatever your personal favorite invention is, take some time to find out a little about who was behind it. If his or her invention makes your life so much better the least you could do is show the inventor some respect by finding out a bit about its history.

Another way to go about celebrating this month would be to look into patenting an invention of your own. It is estimated that the average person has one or two ideas every month that could make them rich if they just had the courage to make their dreams reality! So what are you waiting for? Inventor’s Month is time to get those creative juices flowing and see what you are capable of! Nobody is saying you have to be the next Alexander Fleming, so don’t worry too much about what will happen if your invention doesn’t turn out to be a game-changer.

What’s important is that you had the courage to go where no man has gone before, and that would definitely make all of the inventors before you proud!