Academic support professionals are often required to be observant, creative, and meticulous under demanding circumstances. Sometimes it helps to take inspiration from unexpected places:
The world was at war. It was 1943, and the United States was stretched across two oceans, trying to protect its merchant fleet while fighting at sea against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Shipyards were working around the clock to build new and better ships.
In one such facility on the Delaware River, in Philadelphia, Dick James was trying to solve a problem. He was a mechanical engineer, and his task was to develop a support system from which to suspend delicate shipboard instruments, to keep them stable when a ship was in rough seas. He was working with tension springs, and at one point he accidentally struck one that was sitting coiled on a shelf. The spring arched over, planted itself on top of some books stacked nearby, flipped end over end and arched again onto the table on which the books were sitting, and then flipped again to stream in another arch over the edge of the table and onto the floor.
Anyone else in that room might not have noticed the spring's behavior, or, if they had, might only have responded with an amused chuckle and promptly forgotten about it. But James saw something in the way the spring had practically stepped from level to level, like an animated pair of britches. He wasn't sure what it was good for, and he soon discovered that he could not reproduce it reliably. But he sensed it was something, and something that hadn't been seen before. When he got home that day, he told his wife Betty about it and declared that he was going to find the right kind of steel and the right degree of tension to create a spring that could walk.
Dick James was on his way to inventing the Slinky, the perennially wonderful toy that still sells well, 75 years after that first accidental demonstration. What I find inspiring about this story is not just the fact that James observed something new and thought it was worth considering simply because it was new, and not just the fact that he pondered the possibilities of the new phenomenon without knowing exactly where they would lead him. What's inspiring for me personally is that James recognized that he would have to put in some serious work to make a spring that could walk, and that he undertook all that effort without a clear end result in mind at the start. He experimented for over a year, using different types of steel-alloy wire wound in coils of various sizes and tensions, and as he worked, he and his wife worked out what they wanted their end product to be: a toy with a name that connotes graceful movement and with properties that would allow it to stride down inclined planes and stairs.
James continued working on warships, because that was his job and it mattered. But during his off hours, he kept testing and measuring and winding and cutting, and with his wife planned how to package and market and sell his new invention, until finally in November of 1945, a couple of months after the end of the war, experimentation and application came together in a demonstration at Gimbel's Philadelphia department store — a Slinky, walking down a ramp set up in the middle of the store, surrounded by children and parents. Within 90 minutes, James sold out his entire inventory.
Sometimes, in academic support, in the midst of putting out fires and ministering to students in distress and trying to build stable platforms that will keep our students steady even in rough seas, we might notice something out of the ordinary — an odd pattern to student responses, an exercise format that isolates a particular skill, a certain stimulus that alters behavior or affect — perhaps something that most other people would not recognize as unusual. We don't have to discard such observations if their usefulness is not immediately obvious. Sometimes, it makes sense to start refining a tool first, and then take advantage of that time spent in development to uncover what the tool might best be used for.
(Bill MacDonald)
