The Power Of Our Dreams

One European scientist made a study of his fellow workers and found that 75 per cent had made their most important discoveries when away from the job. The history of scientific progress is studded with cases, which back him up.

For example, in 1920 a Canadian surgeon, Frederick Grant Banting, worked all day long on a lecture on diabetes. The more he read about the disease the more confused he became. At last he gave up and staggered to bed.

Then in early hours of the morning he suddenly sat up, turned on a light and wrote: “Tie off pancreatic duct of dogs. Wait six to eight weeks for degeneration. Remove residue and extract.” That idea, shot forth by his subconscious in the middle of the night, led directly to the discovery of insulin.

Every profession and every industry has many such cases. One day in 1895 a man in Brookline, Massachusetts, found his razor dull. Let King C. Gillette tell what happened: “It was not only dull, but it was beyond the point of successful stropping and it needed honing, for which it must be taken to a barber or to a cutler. As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it lightly as a bird settling down on its nest-the Gillette razor was born. I saw it all in a moment, and in that same moment many unvoiced questions were asked and answered more with the rapidity of a dream than by the slow process of reasoning.

“A razor is only a sharp edge and all back of that edge is but a support for that edge,” he thought. “Why do they spend so much material and time in fashioning a backing which has nothing to do with shaving? Why do they forge a great piece of steel and spend so much labor in hollow-grinding it when they could get the same result by putting an edge on a piece of steel that was only thick enough to hold an edge?”

His mind charged ahead. “At that time and in that moment it seemed as though I could see the way the blade could be held in a holder; then came the idea of sharpening the two opposite edges on the tiny piece of steel that was in uniform thickness throughout, thus doubling its service; and following in sequence came the clamping plates for the blade with a handle equally disposed between the two edges of the blade. All this came more in pictures than in thought,” he remembered, “as though the razor were already a finished thing and held before my eyes. I stood there before that mirror in a trance of joy at what I saw. Fool that I was, I knew little about razors and practically nothing about steel, and could not foresee the trials and tribulations that I was to pass through before the razor was a success. But I believed in it, and took joy in it. I wrote to my wife, who was visiting in Ohio, ‘I have got it; our fortune is made.’”

The fact he knew nothing about steel or about razors carries an important lesson to all. Gillette had to learn about them before his razor was a success. In fact for six years, yes, six full years, his razor was a joke to his friends, but eventually it made industrial history. If he had known anything about the business, however, his judicial mind might have convinced him he was crazy before he saw the whole picture, and it might have even erased it all from his memory. Most important was the fact that his mind was open to see the vision.