Can only exceptional individuals really be creative? Psychologists say no. Creativity is in all of us, and everyone can awaken it with practice. The sudden awakening of a world-changing idea, or the big C as they call it, with the C standing for creativity, is more myth than reality, they continue. There is no difference between the big C and the small c, which stands for achievement achieved by small steps. But the fact is that people who have new ideas and are able to turn them into reality are different. If for no other reason, it is because they dare to walk down untrodden paths that they do not know where they will lead, and risk rejection, criticism or defeat.
The journalist Max Bunker, real name Luciano Secchi, and the painting professor Robert Raviolo, who took the artistic name Magnus, have experienced all the pitfalls of a creative breakthrough. They started working on the script for the Alan Ford comic strip, which reached cult proportions in the former Yugoslavia, 50 years ago, or around the time when the 007 movie Casino Royal hit the cinemas.
“We wanted to make a satire of James Bond on the principle: as much as he is organised, those around him are disorganised,” Max Bunker explained to the public how Alan Ford, an unemployed advertising expert who accidentally becomes a secret agent, and the members of the secret TNT Group, led by His Highness or the paraplegic Brood 1 (Number 1), came to be.
They worked and reworked the script for three years before deciding in July 1968 that it was exactly what it should be. They presented it to the readers. They were just working on the third issue when the sales figures of the first issue were brought to them. They were not spectacular, but they were not defeatist either. They consoled themselves that, like any new thing, Alan Ford needs time to grow on people.
During the production of the fourth issue, a report of the sale of the second issue was received. From an initial 22,000 copies, sales had slipped to a negligible 8,000. “Magnus and I were like parents expecting a healthy, beautiful and strong newborn baby, and this one turned out to be delicate and tiny.” Their colleagues turned their backs on them. No one said anything to them, they just looked at them with derision.
“To forget our misery for a while, we went to the cinema, a pizzeria and a disco. There we spent the morning without saying a word about what was tormenting us. The next day we looked at the sales figures again. They confirmed unequivocally that we had missed it. I went up to my study, an upstairs room where only Magnus and I worked, and started writing.” The momentary impulse to throw up my hands was gone. What followed was “an enthusiasm of furious audacity and determined persistence”.
Surrender would have been suicide, he and Magnus agreed, and so it was with little hope, but with all the more fury, that they fought through the crisis that threatened to end Alan Ford’s career as a spy after the fourth issue. He continued to build it slowly and painstakingly. It took him two years to become famous. “We had a long way to go before we tasted the glamour of success. With a strong heartbeat,” recalls Max Bunker.
Motivation and perseverance
Max Bunker and Magnus persisted on their path, even though for two long years hardly anyone recognised their originality. Psychologists say that three things are important for creativity. You have to choose to do what you do because it makes you much more motivated to do it than if you are forced to do it. What you do has to have value for you, because then you will put much more energy into your work. You need to develop your skills and acquire the necessary knowledge because this will give you the feeling that you are capable of making your idea a reality.
People who believe they are gifted are much quicker to fall in the face of challenges than those who realise they have to work to succeed. They believe that they are unable to leap over hurdles because they are not talented enough, so believing that you are capable of learning something is also important for creative success.
However, the belief that anyone who wants to excel in their field must spend at least 10 years acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge, because without them they cannot be creative, is not entirely true. The more talented take less time to excel than the less talented. Moreover, experience shows that the biggest creative breakthroughs occur when someone is just learning about something.
“I found it. The fortune is ours!” wrote King Camp Gillette in a letter to his wife, Atlanta Ella Gaines, in 1895. For twenty years, he had been searching for what he believed would bring him riches and make him proud to stand alongside his inventor father and his equally remarkable mother, Fanny Lemire Gillette. She spent decades collecting and testing recipes until, in 1887, she published The White House Cook Book, which turned out to be so good that it was still in print a hundred years later.
King Camp Gillette started taking care of himself at the age of 17, when his family lost all their possessions in the Great Chicago Fire. Even though he became a travelling salesman, he tried not only to sell things, but also to improve them. By 1890, at the age of 35, he had applied for four patents, but had not succeeded in any of them.
He was about to give in to despair when he met William Painter, inventor of the stopper that today closes, for example, a beer bottle. He advised him to find an idea for something that people would use, throw away and buy again. In those days, people didn’t just throw anything away, but Gillette, thinking it was the only promising invention, fell asleep every night and woke up with it in the morning.
One morning in 1895, he tried to shave in the bathroom. His razor, which was then called a “neck cutter” because it could also cut your neck, was absolutely blunt. He would have had to either sharpen it or buy a new one, but razors were so expensive that one had to last a man’s lifetime, even though the blade eventually could no longer be sharpened at all.
That’s when he had an idea: he would make a safe and cheap razor that could be thrown away and replaced with a new one when it wore out. It was a bold idea, but it soon turned out to be a supposedly unworkable one. The Massachusetts Institute of Metallurgy told him that it was impossible to make a hard, thin, one-sided, sharp steel plate that was also cheap enough for people to throw it away without a guilty conscience. He was not convinced.
He waited for the inventor, William Emery Nickerson. He realised that the sharp steel plate needed to be slightly wider and the handle into which it would be inserted slightly angled so that the sharp edge could be sharpened accurately. Unfortunately, he could not think of a machine to make such a razor. It took the two men two years to come up with the idea.
Todi did not want the razor to come to life. They had to give it away for free to men to prove its usefulness, safety and time-saving shaving. Sales slowly picked up, but when the US government ordered more razors from Gillett for all its military forces during the First World War, the sustainability of its success was assured.
Bigger head, more ideas
What is creativity anyway? Psychologists define creativity as the deliberate creation and execution of a new idea, while other experts have found that it is better suited to a bigger head. For example, the skull of an australopithecine was 450 cubic centimetres, about the size of a chimpanzee’s skull, and that of a homo sapiens was 1330 cubic centimetres.
In this skull, around 100 trillion nerve cells processed information. They sent information around through about 165,000 kilometres of nerve fibres and through about 0.15 quadrillion synapses, which represent the contact between two nerve cells.
In 1902, German researcher Otto Loewi joined the laboratory of University College London. Like many of his colleagues, he and his colleagues Henry Dale and Thomas R. Elliot were searching for an answer to the question of how nerve cells communicate with each other. Is there a chemical transmission involved?
Years passed, the question remained unanswered. One evening in 1921, Loewi fell asleep while reading. In a dream, he saw an experiment that could bring to a close a long-standing debate on the communication between neurons. He woke up in the middle of the night, scribbled on a piece of paper how he had to carry out the experiment, and fell back asleep. In the morning, he got up and looked at his notes. He could read nothing and remembered nothing.
The next night he woke up at 3am. Once again, he dreamt about the experiment, only now he could no longer risk forgetting the dream again. He rushed to the laboratory and immediately removed the hearts of two frogs. Because of certain specifics of their functioning, the two hearts continued to beat.
He injected saline into one of them and stimulated the vagus nerve to lower the heart rate. Then he pumped the hydrochloric acid out of the heart and injected it into the other heart. The heart rate of the other heart also dropped.
He explained the result of the experiment by saying that the vagus nerve of the first heart secreted a substance that slowed the heart rate. However, since this substance was also transferred to the second heart by the hydrochloric acid, he was convinced that the substance was chemical. He called it vagusstoff, which is German for vagus substance. His colleague Henry Dale isolated it years later and called it acetylcholine. Today, it is considered the first nerve transporter to be discovered.
In 1936, the men won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. This was possible because the brain changed during human evolution, and more complex brain connections also allowed more complex communication between nerve cells. It was then that man could become creative.
To be creative, one must not limit one’s thoughts, but allow them to flow. There are many theories about what happens in the brain during creativity. One was tested on musicians by monitoring their brain activity while they improvised.
They found that during improvisation, the part of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, self-restraint and assessing what is right and wrong is switched off. At the same time, the part of the brain responsible for self-expression and autobiographical narrative is switched on, and is also linked to self-awareness.
When the mind is open, the rules are forgotten and the directed thoughts are gone. Then those thoughts and memories that have hitherto been floating as insignificant somewhere beneath the surface of consciousness begin to penetrate into consciousness. One thought spontaneously conjures up another, another a third, and so on. Free associations give rise to new ideas that go beyond what is known.
Mechanical engineer Willis Haviland Carrier was walking through a railway station waiting for a train when he had an idea to artificially cool the room and control the humidity level. It was a foggy evening in 1902. The air was saturated with moisture, but there was hardly any perceptible humidity. It was too cold. And it dawned on him: if he could saturate the air and control its temperature, there would be exactly as much humidity in the room as he wanted. The air conditioner was born.
One step forward, two steps back
To turn his idea into reality, Carrier had to switch his brain into an analytical programme. It would be difficult for a human being to survive if he relied only on free associations. Too much information would be flowing through his brain, so he had to learn to switch softly between free association and analytical thinking. It took him thousands of years to make this routine, but about 100,000 years ago he did it.
Creative people are different from ordinary people precisely because they can switch between the two more easily and quickly. When an idea comes to them by free association, they have to evaluate whether it is good or not, and they can only do this if they are analytical and distanced. Unfortunately, that is often when the idea turns out to be a bad one. They discard it. That and many others. Out of the many that come to them, one idea, maybe two, is useful.
Before they realise it is a bad idea, they often spend some time going in the wrong direction. In the end, they have to go back to square one and to the idea they basically rejected. Or as Albert Einstein would say, “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research”.
Thus, it is characteristic of creators to be hard-working in spite of everything, and above all persistent in evaluating their ideas, sifting through them to see which ones are useful, reworking, revising and changing them. Finally, they test them, either by trial and error or by create, test, discard.
Hungarian painter, sculptor, writer, medical student and hypnotist László Biró was losing his nerve with his fountain pen. It was constantly pouring and leaving marks. He started to look at printing machines and think what he could do to make pens as reliable as machines. The ink they used for them seemed ideal, but it was too thick for an ordinary fountain pen. He had to invent a new pen.
He and his brother, the chemist György, spent years trying to get the result they wanted. In 1938, they finally patented their ballpoint pen, but unfortunately they had neither the money nor the conditions to start making it. When the Second World War forced them to Argentina, they continued to improve it, and in 1943 László Biró applied for another patent.
Now he had an idea for a pen in his drawer, not with a pen, but with a point with a metal ball. The nib of the nib was constantly rotating as it glided across the paper, dipping into the ink that came from inside through a very thin opening. The bead prevented it from drying inside, but also from pooling on the paper.
The British Air Force became aware of the new pen. Their pilots complained that the fountain pens were leaking at high altitude and their notes were illegible, and they disliked the pencils because they had to file them. The British bought the rights to make ball-point pens from the Biró brothers, their pilots used them with success and the word got out.
The brothers sold their patent to a British entrepreneur, Henry George Martin, for one million dollars, and the intricate business story of a simple plastic ballpoint pen called the Bic Crystal, or Biro, began, and continues to thrive today.
The birth of an idea is a beginning, but it is not a given. An idea is more likely to be born by someone who has a lot of contact with others, because this will increase the likelihood of learning something new and will stimulate the birth of a new idea.
“I have always looked to everyday life for the main inspiration for my stories. Ideas came to me in the most ordinary situations. Listen to people in everyday places, on the tram, on the bus, on the subway, in the shop, in the pub, in the football stadium, and observe them. You’ll recognise the puzzles and action from Alan Ford,” Max Bunker reveals the pool from which he draws his ideas.
The chances of a new idea being born are also higher if a person is interested in different fields than his own. For example, geniuses often have many hobbies and often become experts in these fields as well. According to one study, more Nobel laureates in the sciences are involved in the arts than less renowned scientists, although Nobel laureates generally sleep no less than ordinary people. Albert Einstein even slept more than the usual eight hours, but still played Bach, Mozart and Schubert.
Images from a dream
Sleep can also contribute to the birth of an idea, as in the case of Otto Loewi described above. The writer Mary Shelley dreamt two scenes from her Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, dreamt his stories.
In 1865, Friedrich August Kekulé had a dream in which dancing atoms appeared in his dreams, connecting to each other. He woke up and immediately began to draw what he saw. After a while, he dreamt again. This time the atoms were dancing too, but now they were linked together in a snake-like chain. As the dream story continued to unfold, the snake, made up of atoms, coiled up and began to eat its own tail. This image gave him the idea for the circular structure of benzene.
How much we dream at night is not entirely clear. Until now, it was thought that we dream in REM, or rapid eye movement, but recently it has been reported that we should also dream in non-REM. 71% of the time we dream in REM, and 95% of the time we dream in non-REM.
When Kekulé was asleep, the parts of his brain that normally restrict people were less active. There are many theories about what dreams are, but one is that dreams are the same thoughts we think during the day, but because our brains function differently during sleep, they are in a different biochemical state. This often makes them seem bizarre or nonsensical, but they are still connected to what we were thinking about when we were awake.
It is not known what the famous English romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge was thinking about before he fell asleep, but he certainly wrote the poem Kubla Khan in a dream. One evening he felt unwell. To ease the pain, he took laudanum, or opium tincture, and fell asleep. In his dream he saw a Mongol ruler called Kubla Khan. Also in his dream, Coleridge began to write a poem and, when he woke up a few hours later, he put it down on paper.
He had intended to write several hundred lines, but got distracted in the middle and had to urgently turn his attention to business. When he came back to the poem, he had forgotten what he had intended to write. The verses he managed to put down on paper have become one of the most famous and timeless poems in English poetry.
Ideas can also come to ordinary mortals in dreams, but you just need to think intensely about what you are interested in before going to sleep, and then you might dream about it, if you manage to fall asleep, of course. In any case, researchers agree with the old wisdom that it is good to sleep through a problem. In fact, research shows that it is much easier to solve a problem for those who allow themselves to doze off while intensively working on it, because then new information is linked together.
If we take a little nap right after we have learned something new, it will come back to us much more easily than if we hadn’t napped. The more REM sleep a person gets during this time, the better he or she will remember the information, especially those that were emotionally charged.
Salvador Dali used naps to gather ideas. He would clench his keys or spoon in his hand and lie down on the sofa. He placed a tin plate on the floor under his arm, which was hanging off the sofa. Just as he was about to fall asleep for real, his arm relaxed, the key slipped from his hand and fell onto the plate. The sound woke him immediately, and he grabbed the pad and began to sketch the images he saw in the half-dream. Thomas Edison used a similar technique, and he too was supposedly overwhelmed by the images in the half-sun.
Philosopher John Dewey argued that man is most creative when he is relaxed to the point of daydreaming. Even today’s psychologists agree that daydreaming can give birth to a groundbreaking new idea because we can play out different scenarios without risk. Most people are thought to spend between 30 and 47% of their waking hours in their imaginary world, and we all alternately experience two types of daydreams: positive-constructive ones and dysphoric ones, in which we imagine defeat or punishment.
In principle, daydreaming is anything that is unrelated to the work we are doing at the moment, even if we are thinking about what we need to buy in the shop. When a person is stressed, bored, sleepy or restless, his thoughts drift away more quickly and more often than when he is comfortable.
Wandering thoughts make sure that when we are busy doing something, we don’t forget what is just as important to us. Allowing our thoughts to run free also makes it easier to come up with ideas that are floating beneath the surface of our consciousness and are harder to access because of self-control. They can lead us to new insights because we can connect ideas in new and original ways, but only if we are able to capture them.
We also need to dream consciously. Creative people are more likely than ordinary people to find themselves daydreaming, so they can consciously catch the idea that came to them while daydreaming. The inattentive forget about it because it doesn’t seem important.
In principle, the more complex the fantasy story, the more of the brain is involved in daydreaming. Leaving aside those who are addicted to daydreaming and cannot escape its grip, daydreaming is positive if the thoughts that arise are useful, valuable, pleasant and helpful to the person.
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Let’s play
Researcher Spencer Silver was looking for a new glue. In the 3M lab, he played with chemical ingredients, deliberately mixing them in the wrong proportions. He succeeded, inventing a new glue. The only embarrassing thing was that it was diametrically opposed to what he was aiming for. The glue should have been strong as never before, but it was so mild that he could attach one thing to another and easily detach it.
In theory, he was defeated, but he was delighted. He knew he had invented something useful, he just couldn’t remember what the new glue could be used for. He started looking for a problem that he could solve with it. He came up with a multitude of ideas, none of them useful. Finally, he came up with the idea of coating a blackboard with glue and having people attach messages or photographs to it. Nobody wanted to buy it. Silver found himself at an impasse. What would you use the glue for, he asked his colleagues, desperate. None of them could think of anything useful.
Six years later, in 1974, his research colleague Art Fry sang in the church choir. Finding pages in the songbook was a nightmare for him. The indexes kept falling to the floor and he could never find the song he was supposed to sing. He remembered Spencer Silver’s Glue. He coated half of the index with it, stuck it to the sides of the songbook and easily removed it without damaging the pages of the songbook.
So, almost without problems. The glue didn’t want to remember which paper it should stay on, the index or the page of the songbook. Now Fry asked his colleagues for help. They realised that the first thing to do was to put a coating on the index pages so that the glue would remember which sheet it originally came from.
The new adhesive sheets have become a real hit for the company. Co-workers wrote messages on them and developed a whole new form of communication. Would you start selling them? No, said the technical department. Until then, the adhesive had always covered the entire surface of the paper strip, and they argued that building a machine that could apply the adhesive to only part of the sheet would be too expensive, if not impossible.
Fry argued with rational engineers and eventually started building the machine himself on the ground floor of his home. He had to knock down part of the wall of his house to get it into the lab, but it was worth it. When colleagues saw that it was possible, they began to refine the machine until, 40 years ago, it automatically cut the sheets into small squares, coated them and applied glue to the coating.
But there was a problem again: the yellow slips, known as Post-its, did not impress the test users. They were just about to be consigned to the dustbin of history when, in 1978, ten years after the invention of the miracle glue, marketing director Jack Wilkins realised that the problem was not the slips, but the marketing approach. Nobody had explained to people how to use the slips in the first place.
Acquirers started going from company to company, from bank to bank and from shopping mall to shopping mall. They showed people how useful the new sticky notes were and explained that they brought a new form of communication. Ninety per cent of those they visited said they would buy the sticky notes immediately. They were given the green light to be produced and became a bestseller almost overnight.
When Spencer Silver invented his miracle Post-it note glue, he was playing with chemical ingredients. Psychologists say that play that has no goal and no expectations is especially good for creativity. It is not what you play, but that you play. Curiosity, imagination and creativity are like muscles, they say, if you don’t use them, you lose them.
Free play makes people better socially adjusted and better able to cope with stress. It is particularly important for children because it has no rules and allows for more creative responses, for example when inventing roles. In contrast, with guided play, the rules are known in advance, so the child learns to follow, not create.
Imaginative play is also important for children to build their imagination, which helps them in difficult situations. For both children and adults, play enhances creative thinking and both are better able to cope with unexpected situations.
Creativity also requires distance in its various forms. Research shows that the most effective people are those who take a break while they are creating, either to do something unrelated to their main work or simply to take a nap.
Time distance is also useful. Those who imagine themselves in the distant future are said to have more unusual ideas than those who are only looking at the next day. Physical distance is also useful, because it is easier to solve a problem if you are physically removed from it. Emotional distance is of course also necessary when evaluating an idea.
Slightly less helpful for creativity is brainstorming, where creativity and idea generation is encouraged in a group setting. Psychologists say that it is only useful when you have solved a problem or come up with an idea on your own and you are just working it out with others. Another disadvantage of group creativity is that more introverted and quiet individuals may not come forward, even though they may have good ideas.
Risk aversion
Finding inspiration also depends on the character of the individual. For some it is a matter of retreating into silence, for others it is a matter of being among people, and all creators are said to be more inclined to melancholy. Aristotle explained that those who have made a name for themselves in the fields of philosophy, politics, poetry and art often show a tendency to melancholy.
Plato also spoke of the unusual behaviour of poets and playwrights, yet today many psychologists agree that such cases are the exception rather than the rule. Others say that the link between creativity and depression is strong.
Eminent scientists are said to be more detached, solitary, preoccupied with their own internal processes, meticulous and critical. Some are eccentric. Albert Einstein picked cigarette butts off the road to get tobacco. Robert Schumann believed that Beethoven dictated his compositions and that the dead glow from their graves. Charles Dickens is said to have used an umbrella to ward off the imaginary phantoms he wrote about in his works during his walks in London.
Creative people are also thought to be more likely to drink alcohol and to come from families at high risk of psychopathology. Even if an outstanding innovator is ordinary, he or she should have someone in the family who was not.
Some say that at least 20% of creativity is written in the genes. Whether a person is open to new experiences is a largely hereditary trait, and tolerance for uncertainty and change is also said to be hereditary. It has to be greater in creators if they want to come up with a new idea and to cope with the stress of not knowing how the public will receive their work.
However, no one will be creative if they don’t master their field first, and it is true that the more talented people progress faster, start earlier in their careers and are more productive. Genetics could thus explain why two individuals with the same learning path progress at different rates.
For example, researchers have also found that adopted children whose mother had schizophrenia were more likely to follow a creative path than those whose mother did not. They are thought to inherit genes for unconventional ways of thinking, but not for the disease.
Maureen and Tony Wheeler were different, but still ordinary. After marrying in 1972, aged 22 and 26, they decided it was too early to start a serious couple life. They hit the road in a beat-up van, worth just £65. They crossed Europe and reached Afghanistan, where they sold the car for ten dollars and moved on, until they sat in a bar in Thailand, wondering how they would get to Australia with almost no money. By chance, they heard that a ship was looking for crew to go to New Zealand. They joined it, spent long days vomiting and arrived in Sydney with 27 cents in their pockets.
They settled in Australia and told people they knew what they had been through. Watching them listening intently and interested in every detail, they came up with the idea of writing down their experiences. They sat down at the kitchen table and wrote their Cheap Asia guide in a month. They printed it themselves, stapled it themselves and sent out 1500 copies themselves.
They expected nothing from him. At that time, tour guides were not fashionable, but Maureen trained as a social worker and her husband, an engineer, took any job he could get. The rational Maureen would not have bet much on the future of tour guides, the confident Tony would have bet everything.
In the end, they invested everything they earned in their new publishing company. During the hard days, they reassured themselves that they could still go to work if it all fell through. In 1981, they published a guidebook to India. They immediately shot to fame and went from a couple settled in Australia with 27 cents in their pockets to the world’s largest independent guidebook publisher.
The biggest barrier to creativity is risk aversion, psychologists explain. The established way of thinking is too safe and comfortable to pursue new ideas and approaches, and this also leaves people with no chance of radically new solutions. The fear of rejection, criticism and defeat is too great for most people to allow themselves to be creative. Creatives have had to learn to live with stress and for many, rejection awakens an even greater will to continue, as for example in the case of Max Bunker and Magnus, authors of Alan Ford.
Alexander Graham Bell never experienced rejection. He was not eccentric either, but he was extremely versatile, as are many artists, and of course the word does not just refer to the artists we like to associate with it. He studied sheep breeding, the workings of aeroplanes, the field of communications, water distillation and much more, although he was basically an expert in the psychology of speech and the study of the deaf.
He didn’t know much about electricity, and it’s a good thing he didn’t, or he would have been convinced, like everyone else, that a voice cannot travel through a wire. But he believed it could, even though he had invented the telephone while he was trying to improve the telegraph. It was the main means of communication in the second half of the 19th century and served its purpose well, with Bell’s only problem being that he could only send one message at a time.
Unlike electricity, he knew sound inside out. He had been working with it all his life, but now he decided to play a little with something he didn’t know at all. “Leave the beaten track now and then and go into the woods. Every time you do, you’re bound to find something you’ve never seen before. Follow it, explore all around it, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about. All great discoveries are the result of thought,” he said, long after he had realised that the idea of a “harmonic telegraph” might not be utopian at all.
In October 1874, his future brother-in-law, the prominent Boston lawyer Gardiner Greene Hubbard, was so enthusiastic about it that he immediately provided him with funding for his research. In June 1875, he and his assistant Thomas Watson had figured out how to persuade sound to travel over a wire, and now all they had to do was invent a transmitter and receiver to make it possible. “Mr Watson, come here. I would like to see you,” are the first words spoken over the phone.
On 10 March 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell presented his great discovery to the public. It made him famous and amassed him a fortune, but it didn’t stop him. He explored all kinds of things, sometimes in response to current events. In July 1881, when James A. Garfield, President of the United States, was shot dead by a lawyer, he hastily invented an electromagnetic device to try to find the bullet lodged in his body.
About ten weeks later, James A. Garfield died, and Bell’s newborn son Edward did not survive due to respiratory problems. Bell used his personal pain to help others. Not long after losing his baby, he invented a kind of airless vest to help people breathe easier.
