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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

2.  The Birth of an Idea

     There have been only a few thou­sand of these thought cultivators in the history of the world. It has been said that except for about 1,500 of these thinkers living in the last 3,000 years, we might still be living in caves.

     Now, somebody might say that if these people are as rare as all that there isn't much that can be done about it. We'll just have to wait until one happens to come along. But that isn't true. We can develop thinkers just as we can educate people in other lines. If no one practiced playing the violin, there wouldn't be any great violinists. Through practice, we can develop this ability to think.

     Along with these original think­ers, we have millions who are afflict­ed with mental laziness - those who are satisfied. They are the easy think­ers. When a new thought is given them, they find it much easier to agree than to question it. And that is dangerous, especially if the idea is a bad one.

     We are fighting the world's great­est war because millions of people were sold one of these bad ideas. But I am still in hope that we can some day put as much energy into the de­velopment of good, constructive ideas as we are now putting into the fight­ing of a bad one.


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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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