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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 14, Issue 5 (August 1, 1939)

[section]

Man himself is an invention. Sometimes we are tempted to believe him an invention of the devil; at others merely a masticatory mechanism; and then we get glimpses of a finer function which seems to suggest some useful purpose in the engine-house of creation.

Being an invention himself it is not unnatural that he should be bitten by the bug.

Necessity may be the mother of Invention, but Inquisitiveness is the father. If altruists are the salt of the earth, inventors are the pepper. It is they who have pepped up progress until it has jibbed and kicked them.

From the time man was patented, inventors have pushed their noses into the unexplored potentialities of Gadgetry, and have wrested therefrom the secrets of Unlikelihood.

Inventors do not invent because they ache to improve man's lot, but because they are the victims of insensate ingenuity which manifests itself in gad-getry or bankruptcy, or both. For the path of progress is strewn with the financial bones of inventors whose ingenuity has not been capable of extending from horse-power to horse sense. Which explains why the inventors of the most successful inventions are not always the most successful inventors.