Could you imagine the amount of discoveries made and inventions created for the past hundreds of years? Telephone, electricity, penicillin, light bulbs, DNA, X-Ray… But would you believe, that these things so usual to us at present, met criticism and misunderstanding at the time when they were first invented?
There is no surprise that science faced different obstacles that cramped its progress. The church, politicians or just a couple of powerful people could decide not only the fate of a new invention, but even scientists’ destinies. Lack of communication and direct ways of experiences exchange, absence of reasonable investments in science also made new ideas so complicated to introduce in real life.
That’s why the main idea of DEIP is to anticipate the past mistakes and make the process of new ideas implementation more effective and easier than it was before.
Let’s imagine for a minute, the DEIP platform already existed at those times.
As you may know, the first attempts to invent a steam locomotive were undertaken in early 1770s. But they were met quite sceptical and even hostile by society and scientific world in particular. A bit of more success had the attempts of Richard Trevithick with his several shots to construct a steam locomotive. He even shared his ideas with James Watt, who rejected them as being extremely risky ones.
Nevertheless, Trevithick managed to get some financial support from several companies that believed in his projects. But as various technical problems were encountered (mostly because of lack of practical experience and like-minded fellows), soon finance parties got disappointed and stopped the collaboration with Trevithick. Trevithick didn’t have his own savings to develop the researches himself, so he had to abandon his numerous projects.
How DEIP would assist Trevithick in this case?
By submitting his ideas on the platform, Trevithick’s projects would already get impartial assessment of other scientists, regardless the influence of religion, politics, society and etc. As a result, even on the initial steps, the scientist would get some stable independent financial support for further development.
Secondly, he would have the opportunity to find like-minded scientists, who were thinking or already working on the same issue (William Murdoch, Oliver Evans or George Stephenson, for example). Moreover, they could start collaborating with each other to advance more in their research.
Finally, Trevithick would share his previous unsuccessful experiences to prevent his fellows from making the same mistakes and encourage to find a better solution.
As a result, something more complete and decent could have been created much earlier with the help of the DEIP platform. We might have already used trains in 1800s.
New ideas are the engine of progress in our world. As Albert Einstein once said: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”.
To make these ideas work, share them with DEIP and DEIP will help to bring them to life.
Marie Mulyarchik, Editor, DEIP
