Sometimes if you look at the things around us in our daily lives you can see how simply they are, yet how they serve a functional purpose. Life without them would have been very difficult. For example, imagine a small thin section of metal, perhaps an inch long, with a flat head and threaded sides. You have a metal screw. And who invented it? If you look around us now, at all the things we have in our daily lives that require a screw, can you imagine how life must have been like before its invention?
The ubiquitous things around us often reveal to us how simple designs can serve great functions and go on to great popularity. For example, the simple brick that is the basic building block of construction is now so widely used, that without it we might be living in an era of tin huts or mud huts!
One of the inventions we have in our lives that displays similar simplicity is barbed wire. Made in the 1800s, it was used to enclose land and still is in the present day. It merely consists of wire intertwined with each other. At its outset, the fragile wire was not perceived to be strong, but its inventor, one John Gates, put it to great use by showing how it could enclose wild animals! It made him a great fortune!
But inventions may not need to be physical things. They can be things such as music. Dizzy Gillespie pioneered a style of music called bebop – you can learn more about it from this post here – and revolutionised the music world!
The human spirit is intertwined with creativity. Keep inventing and keep trying to find new ways to do old things, or find solutions to improve efficiency. And remember you may not necessarily come up with a new physical thing, even a new process can actually become a new invention as well!