Another Breakthrough Nap

One of my favorite tactics to tap into the subconscious mind is to nap into the subconscious mind. Edison's "thinking chair" continues to provide both amusement and inspiration. Remember, this is an empirically proven strategy for problem solving...

I was struck by this excellent from "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" which recounts a major breakthrough in the development of semiconductors:

"Metallurgist Bill Pfann was mulling over how to raise the purity of germanium to improve it further for transistor production. Pfann had returned to his office after lunch--'I put my feet on my desk and tilted my chair back to the window sill for a short nap, a habit then well established,' he recalled. He had scarcely dozed off when he suddenly awoke with a solution. 'I brought the chair down with a clack I still remember,' he said. Pfann envisioned passing a molten zone--a coil of metal, in effect, creating a superheated ring--along the length of a rod of germanium; as the ring moved, it would strafe the impurities out of the germanium.

"Kelly (one of the all-time great minds in technology history) would eventually tell people that Pfann's idea--it was called 'zone refining,' and was an ingenious adaptation of a technique metallurgists had used on other materials--ranked as one of the most important inventions of the past twenty-five years. Kelly didn't tell people it resulted from a man sleeping on the job."

To which I say, too bad.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.