Robert Foulis’ Lifesaving Invention
So many scientific breakthroughs occur by accident, or at least by serendipity. A bright person, being in the right place at the right time, notices some oddity and asks, “Hmm, I wonder if that would apply to ….?”
Robert Foulis was a Scottish immigrant in Saint John, New Brunswick. I exaggerate but little to say that Saint John is the fog capital of the world. Foulis was an engineer and a tinkerer, and was aware that various attempts had been made to develop devices to warn ships of dangers hidden in the fog. No such device had really proved successful.
Robert was walking home one night in 1835 through the thick Fundy fog. At some distance from home, he began to hear his daughter playing the piano. But what really caught his attention was that it was the low notes, penetrating and deep, that he heard long before the higher notes. “Hmm,” he thought to himself, “I wonder if that’s the secret to making an effective fog horn?” And of course you know the answer. His automated, steam-driven fog horn became the model we now know.
So what does this have to do with communication? Well, actually, plenty. You see, the human mind spends most of its time looking for connections. When you connect A with B, you have learned something.
Now here’s the interesting thing: when we make our own connections, we own them. This means we retain them better, and we make better use of them, than if we are handed solutions off the shelf.
The powerful communicator uses this principle to share important messages. Data dumps are soon forgotten, but if you paint pictures and give the listener bits of a puzzle to solve, the listener’s mind will take these and create his or her own beauty. It will remain a prize never to be surrendered.
Data-dumper or thought-provoker– which kind of communicator do you want to be?
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