Most buses I see have their exhaust outlet at the roof level. This has been true since the early 1970’s. This was a brilliant but simple invention that everyone loves and benefits from.
It is meaningful to me. I have invented, discovered and created many original products, devices and ideas. It is rare that I get the appropriate credit for my originality and contribution. (List of 15 original ideas). There are two arguments I confront.
One is that the idea I came up with would have come to someone, anyone, with more time. Maybe within a few more years.
The other is that I got my idea from a milieu and someone else might have gotten it too. The time was ripe.
A few years ago I tried to demonstrate for one of my granddaughters the power of original ideas. We were at a street fair in Seattle and we came across a design school with a few students displaying their designs. I asked my granddaughter to watch what I did.
I challenged the students to design a modem. I said that nearly every household in America had a modem but they were usually hidden because they were so poorly designed and generally ugly.
The design students promptly drew a half dozen pictures of new modems. Most cute, like ceramic cats or bedroom clocks.
I told my granddaughter that this challenge would quickly get into the thinking of the whole design world and within three years we would we see some attractive modems.
Three years is up. I sent her the image of a new, well designed modem that just came on the market.
But that doesn’t show cause and effect. My cause.
The bus exhaust does show cause and effect. The idea is so simple and powerful that it could have appeared anytime in the prior 35 years from the time when buses became common and spewed exhaust on every street level human being.
But it didn’t. It required one person in the right place to come up with that idea. I don’t know who it was, but it was one person. Thank you sir or madam for showing the world that good ideas, often obvious, do not occur spontaneously.
Genius is important and original ideas are vital for modernity.