1% inspiration, 29% perspiration, 70% plagiarism

Posted by Smokey Stover on April 12, 2006

In Reply to: 1% inspiration, 29% perspiration, 70% plagiarism posted by Lewis on April 11, 2006

: : : : "Genius is one percent inspiration and nintynine perspiration"what does this phrase means.

: : :
: : : Just what it says. That to be a genius you need not only to have inspiration, but to work and sweat to make your inspiration bear fruit.

: : That was originally said by Thomas Alva Edison, "the Wizard of Menlo Park", who worked, lived, and died in my hometown of West Orange, New Jersey.

: In the days when Patents were often difficult to register and breaches of confidence commonplace, it was not difficult for a well-organised commercial laboratory to use others' ideas and then claim the Patent. I have read suggestions that the Edison Lab was one such place and that they were not in themselves the creative genii that history generally names them. They may have merely been good at spotting good unprotected ideas and developing them/patenting them.

: it is like the Alexander Fleming story - he discovered penicillin, but didn't develop it or initially appreciate the importance of his discovery. when he got the Nobel Prize - the two guys who did the crucial follow up work turning his minor discovery into a life-saver shared the prize - yet it is his name, not theirs that is associated with the discovery.

: there are many other ideas for which a populariser gained the credit.

: Edison was something of a Gates-like entrepreneur from what I hear and were it not for their ilk, many great ideas would never get the publication they deserve.

: Still - I think "plagiarism" ought to be added to the quote...

: L

Lewis, aside from the difficulty of adding to a quotation, I take it that you regard plagiarism as something very negative. Most people do, and there was a minor fuss when it was learned that Senator Biden and Martin Luther King had both plagiarized during their academic careers. Indeed, my collegiate alma mater gave the boot to a perfectly good president because he plagiarized some of his lines in fund-raising speeches. Tut tut, not nice! But borrowing ideas while acknowledging their source can make us strong, or so goes, I imagine, the conventional wisdom.
I personally think one of the major themes of the development of human culture is the borrowing of ideas WITHOUT acknowledgment. How many times was fire independently discovered? How many tribes invented language from scratch, without knowing that there was such a thing as language? How many times was an alphabet invented from scratch? How many words were invented without any reference at all to previously invented words?

I don't know the answers to any of those questions, and it remains remarkable that any of those discoveries was made even once. We take cultural borrowing, or imitation, for granted, if it dates back far enough. Plagiarism follows the discovery that intellectual activity can produce "property" with money value. So basically plagiarism as a concept was fostered by the discovery of money and the proliferation of greed. (How many cultures independently discovered money?) SS

• 1% inspiration, 29% perspiration, 70% plagiarism Bob 12/April/06
  • 1% inspiration, 29% perspiration, 70% plagiarism pamela 12/April/06
    • Genius? I'll tell you about genius. Bob 12/April/06
      • Genius? I'll tell you about genius. pamela 13/April/06
        • Re-inventing the wheel Lewis 13/April/06