Where would we be without inventions? Well, the answer is fairly easy to surmise; sitting around in our mud huts hoping the cow will produce some milk, and that our vegetables will grow.
Inventions have given humans the edge over the other species on the planet, as our collaborative minds create a new world bigger and better than the one before.
The problem is, humans are fallible – and what’s more, arrogant. Humans have, throughout the centuries, had an uncanny ability to invent things that will improve our lives forever – but we’re just as likely to boast about our discoveries, too.
This desire to show the world what we have uncovered and just how very clever we are has lead to many good inventions being tried before they were ready; they subsequently failed, and the idea was pushed to the back of a drawer, banished from history forever.
The inventions that have survived have done so for one of two reasons: firstly, the inventor was wise enough to perfect his invention before unveiling it to the general public in a blaze of glory.
Or, as is more likely, a good idea may have experienced a bad start, but has been good enough for people to persist and perfect the technology as it works along.
Solar panels very nearly suffered the fate of numerous other inventions that were revealed to the public too soon and proven to be disastrous, thus shoved to the back of the drawer and forgotten about.
Excited scientists proudly told the world how the dependence on fossil fuels would be able to end, and all thanks to something called solar panels and their ability to generate electricity.
Yet they went public too soon, with an imperfect technology, and solar panels quickly got a reputation as unreliable.
However, the idea stuck, and now we exist in a world where solar panels are almost becoming the norm. Solar panels have thus proven that even after a bad start, the good ideas tend to stick.