Whatever happened to inventors? In school we always learned about Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, and Thomas Edison inventing everything else. But who are today's inventors? Dean Kamen invented the useless but still entertaining Segway, but it seems like these days most things are invented by hordes of underpaid researchers at faceless corporations rather than eccentric unemployed guys with crazy hair.

There are a number of possible explanations for this:

1) The power of the faceless corporation
Let's say I go out and invent an automobile engine that can be powered by water. Building a prototype and testing the engine to make sure it doesn't spontaneously burst into flames is prohibitively expensive, so I would have to look to a major automaker for funding. Then there's the other side of the coin: if you invent anything that threatens America's reliance on oil, cigarettes, overpriced CDs, cola drinks, or pop-up internet advertisements, you'll get blindsided by lobbyist groups, legal shenanigans, and smear campaigns. Next thing you know, your clean-air, non-smoking, uncola, pop-up-blocking car that plays MP3 files has been outlawed in all 50 states and you're on the FBI's
list of terrorists.

2) Our lives are too easy
Most of the great inventions (the light bulb, the radio, the cellular phone) served to alleviate some problem in our lives. But what problems (that don't involve terrorists or the Red Sox consistently sucking) do you have that could be solved by a nifty gadget? I could see faster/safer/more efficient transportation, but again this isn't something that could be solved by one guy with crazy hair.

3) Invent America
Every year, a single event turns hundreds of thousands of 4th and 5th graders off from ever wanting to be an unemployed eccentric inventor: Invent America. Along with the Science Fair, this is the other compulsory event that tests how well elementary school children (and their parents) can put together a trifold poster board. But unlike the Science Fair, where you can just stick a plant in the closet and study the effects of no light, food, or water on geraniums
(Hypothesis: they die.), for Invent America you actually have to come up with a unique idea and build a prototype.

The suggestions that teachers give to kids always involve "think about something in your life that could be easier or better and invent something to fix it", but they're ignoring one thing: middle-class kids' lives are the easiest of all. What are they going to invent, an extra hour of cartoons on Saturday morning? A box to hold their Yu-Gi-Ohmygodthisisahorribleshow cards?

When I was in 5th grade, my big contribution to society through Invent America was a Nintendo Cord Keeper, i.e. a cardboard mailing tube that you could stuff your Nintendo controller cord inside when you weren't using them so people don't trip. Nowadays, Nintendo solves the problem by only including one controller with their game systems, forcing you to go to the store and buy a second controller. While there you'll see the wireless controllers that are only 10 to 20 bucks more and buy one of those. Then you'll have mismatched controllers, which any kid knows will lead to accusations of cheating if your friend loses a game to you, so you'll have to buy another cordless controller and throw the included corded controller away. It's a pretty lucrative invention actually.

But by tying a spontaneous thing like inventing to a structured, required thing like "You'll get an F if your invention isn't good enough and then you'll never get into that prestigious middle school" kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it? It's like requiring a high-schooler to read a book for English class. No matter how good the book is, they will end up hating it. This is why English teachers only require high schoolers to read boring books like Scarlet Letter or pointless books like The Great Gatsby. They don't want to turn kids off from reading the real quality literature, like Harry Potter or Cracking the DaVinci Code.