A Measure of Hitting Capacity Is Obtained with Mallet and a Scale
although the common opinion is that they are. Most geniuses have lived longer and better than the average run.
Mastery of the subject is also necessary. There are very few "lucky" inventions that have been made accidentally.
Another requisite is hopefulness. A pessimist is rarely an inventor. The inventor has to have enough imagination and confidence to take a chance. Lindbergh was willing to take a chance.
Inventors should restrict their imagination to very definite problems. Francis Galton, the first scientist to study imagination, found that inventive mechanicians had considerable imaginative ability. "The best workmen are those who visualize the whole of what they propose to do, before they take a tool in their hands." he said. This power to see things in the "mind's eye" can be helped if one systematically exercises the imagination. Day dreams are merely the play of imagination, not exercises. Reading maps and picturing in imagination the contour of the roads, the appearance of the mountains and the positions of the cities is a good exercise. Practice studying blueprints so that you can see the completed machine working in your imagination. Exercise your imagination to see how the furniture in your room would look if it were rearranged. Odd moments can be used to profit on exercises such as these.
How people are different in their imagining abilities is astonishing. Some people can easily imagine how things would look if they could be seen, but are totally unable to imagine sounds. The musician, it has been found, should have a good imagination for sounds.
The value of imagination-developing exercises is shown by eminent composers insisting that pupils compose music without the help of an instrument, using only paper and pencil. They must be able to compose by "hearing" the notes only in imagination in order to become really great composers.
Beethoven lost his hearing, but had such a well-developed imagination for musical sounds that he was able to write some of his most triumphal symphonies by hearing them only inwardly in his imagination.
Not all of us have the auditory imagination and other mental abilities to make us great musicians, but each person has some strong points in his imagination of which he should make the most use.
There was the case, for instance, of a
