Keep group and individual notebooks.
Inventors use notebooks to imagine how new systems might be created, to sketch parts they are thinking about building, to plan new ventures and to reflect on the methods they are using. (See Exhibit 3 for a sample page from Bell's notebook.) An inventor's notebook can also be used in court to establish that her/his invention has priority over a rival's. In one famous case, DeForest used a confusing notebook entry to prove that he, and not his rival Armstrong, deserved a patent for the regeneration circuit that was crucial to the development of radio. The court battle between these two inventors lasted for twenty years and took every imaginable twist and turn, with courts initially declaring Armstrong the winner. This case illustrates the importance of keeping detailed records of one's invention process!
Every notebook entry should have a date and time and contain enough detail to establish how each device or variation or idea might be used. Sketches are essential--they don't have to be beautiful. In fact, Edison's notebook was almost all sketches, many of them quite rough.
In your group notebook, you should focus on the work you are doing as a team, recording all the steps, including rough sketches of devices or parts of devices you intend to build or actually build. Bell was careful to distinguish between thought experiments and devices he actually built and tested; you should do the same. You should also describe the results of every experiment you conduct. Bell made a key discovery related to his second telephone patent by going carefully through his notebook; he found a positive result he had obtained on July 11, 1876, and wondered why he had not followed-up on it. In this case, good record-keeping led to a patent.
The opposite can also be true. Collip, the first person to develop an effective therapeutic form of insulin, lost the ability to make it at a critical time, partly because his notebooks did not contain enough details to allow him to reconstruct exactly what he had done. Sometimes conditions one does not think important at the time turn out, in hindsight, to have been critical. Write as much as you can about the exact conditions under which you conducted an experiment, so that you will be able to replicate any successes.
Each entry should be signed by all those present.
In your individual notebooks, record any ideas you have between group meetings or independently of group efforts. You may be given a separate set of questions to guide your thinking about invention in your individual notebooks, but remember to use them also to record your individual thoughts about the invention path your group should follow and also your reflections on your group's processes and your role in the group.
Either or both of these notebooks are good places to begin considering how your system might have altered history: how could it have changed the way in which telecommunications was done? This kind of speculation will force you to think boldly, to design for the future.
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This page was last edited: Sunday, July 18, 1999