By Jeffrey Stefan

wireIt doesn’t take much to trigger a truly inventive mind. A genuine inventor doesn’t need a massive research lab with unlimited funds.

With a simple piece of material and an inventive imagination, real innovation happens. Take a piece of straight, fairly rigid thin gauge wire and hold it.

You can bend it, revealing interesting mechanical properties. If not bent with too much force, the wire comes back to its original position. This is called shape memory, an advantageous, utilitarian property.

If you bend the wire in a particular fashion, such as in successive half circles you have flexible yet rigid elements in essentially a flat plane. Paper can be inserted between the elements. Due to shape memory the wire will attempt to retain its original configuration in the same plane and push against the paper. Hence the paper clip.

Around the midpoint of the 19th century an inventor named Walter Hunt fiddled with a piece of wire. He wrapped it around his finger and discovered that if he made another loop at the end, he could temporarily hold the two ends of the wire together. Hence the safety pin.

These two configurations of a single wire, with the simple understanding of shape memory, produced inventions with widespread utility. With both of these ubiquitous inventions, the wire is essentially constrained within a single X Y plane.

What about adding a third dimension, Z? What will the combination of a third dimension and the shape memory property yield? Twisting the wire around a pencil produces a spring. A spring absorbs and stores mechanical energy and is used from everything to operating a simple ballpoint pen to earthquake-proofing a skyscraper.

What else can be done with a simple piece of wire? Hold the wire, light a match and hold it against the other end.

You will quickly discover it has heat propagation properties. You also notice the wire, if you bend it into a curl, moves a little one way as heat is applied and moves back to its original position when it cools.

You are now armed with the knowledge of the wire’s mechanical shape memory properties and its newly discovered thermally induced shape memory. If you curl the wire at one end, and make the end straight and position it in front of a graph, the wire can be used as a temperature probe and measuring device.

Two properties of the simple piece of wire are revealed, including thermal shape memory and heat conductance. Utility has increased with the discovery of these properties. Inventions, like thermostats, utilize these properties.

An additional, hidden property lies under the surface and emerges with a little thought, especially with the heat example. With the wire’s ability to transfer heat and the ability to indicate and measure the heat transfer via the rudimentary pointer, the wire carries information.

Connect a small battery to each end of the wire in a darkened room. If the wire is small enough in diameter it will soon begin to get hot and glow.

Another interesting set of properties emerges. The wire conducts electricity and produces heat along with light. Coil the wire (similar to wrapping the wire around a pencil and making a spring), put it in an evacuated glass housing so it doesn’t burn apart easily and apply electricity. Hence the light bulb.

If the wire can also conduct electricity, and armed with the insightful notion that the wire transmits information, then short bursts of electrical energy through the wire in repeatable patterns can be used to transfer information over a distance. Hence the telegraph.

Discovering that electricity may be conducted by metal (including a metal wire) is a phenomenon of nature and cannot be patented, but the code Samuel Morse developed can and was patented[1].

Let’s say you’re working on your prototype telegraph system and have cut several wires at different lengths and stretch them out over a distance. You measure the electrical activity as you transmit your code. In your measurements there is some background energy, however minute, and it’s a bit different with different lengths of wire. You experiment a little more and realize that the wire may be picking up a form electricity traveling through the air. Possibly from lightning or other natural, cosmic source.

Here’s where inventive imagination and previous knowledge intersect – if you can receive a form of electricity (electromagnetic radiation) at a wire, can a wire radiate energy? If it can radiate energy, can you send repeated patterns that carry information over the air? And so on…

All this from a little piece of wire.

Editor’s note: This essay appears in the January 2010 print edition


[1] Issued June 20th, 1840.