I’m trying to think of some classic invention stories to teach to my elementary school students. I am looking for some stories that have a moral to them. For example, Thomas Eddison invented the light bulb after trying thousands of filaments. The moral of the story is usually, keep trying. Any body know of any classic invention stories that have some sort of moral to them?
Invention stories with a moral to them?
Posted by admin on May 19th, 2011
Posted in Africa story 
Tags: elementary school students, filaments, invention, light bulb, moral of the story, thomas eddison
Isaac Asimov always said that the great inventions were not marked by the inventor shouting "Eureka! (I found it)" but instead, "That’s funny…."
The moral being that the greatest inventions were often discovered by accident.
I can think of a few:
Charles Goodyear was experimenting with rubber in his garage when dropped a square of rubber on a hot-plate, which immediately began to sizzle and smoke. He scooped it off and dumped it into some water. When he brought it out of the water he found that it was much harder than before. With experimentation, he perfected the process and called it "Vulcanization", after Vulcan, the Roman god of smiths.
Another one is that of Jonas Salk who left a petri dish of bacteria out in the lab and went away for a long weekend. When he came back, mold was growing in the dish. But what he noted was that the bacteria was repelled by the mold. More experimentation followed, with the result being the first doses of penicillin, which revolutionized medicine and immunizations!
Here are a few stories of those who never quit:
Charles Darwin was, in his father’s eyes, a layabout who never did anything but watch birds. His father once told him, "If I were to crack open your skull I would find nothing but a lump of white fat!" After that little altercation, Darwin signed on board the S.S. Beagle, bound for the Galapagos, whereupon he wrote out his treatise, The Origin of Species.
A young man had lost his family and his job and was thinking about throwing himself into Lake Michigan to drown. After a moment he realized that he now had nothing to lose, so why not set about making some of those "crazy ideas" of his into reality. Thus was born the noted scientist and Futurist, Buckminster Fuller!
That’s all I can think of right now.
If you’re teaching a class, you might check and see if your school has access to a series of videos produced by PBS called "Connections". The narrator is the author of the book of the same name, James Burke. The series is filled with funny little stories about inventing things and discovering them, and how one invention led to another one, usually on the other side of the planet!
For example, how Henry Ford borrowed the French perfumist’s atomizer, and turned it into the automobile carburetor.
There were, I believe, ten one-hour videos in the first season.
I believe Burke also did a second series of Connections, solely for children. You might check into that, too.