AKRON, OHIO : (The following report was filed by the editor of this magazine, Frederick Alien.) The National Inventors Hall of Fame, founded in 1973, finally got a permanent home last summer in Akron. I went to see its official unveiling. The Hall of Fame was the idea of a group of patent lawyers and Patent Office officials, and for its first two decades it consisted mainly of a display in the Patent Office foyer and an annual ceremony somewhere in Washington to induct new members. Now it has five levels of exhibit space at a sharp new science museum called Inventure Place.

Inventure Place, designed by the architect James Stewart Polshek (an Akron native), is shaped something like a fivestory Quonset hut that has been sliced down the middle, with a gleaming sail-like front wall that curves downward to an open plaza. Inside, you begin your tour with an escalator ride to the topmost of five balconies behind the curved front and above a sunken ground floor. At this top level you see displays on the patent system, including some sample patent models and reproductions of especially eye-catching drawings for things like an improved screw, a fire ladder, and, from 1866, the Checkered Game of Life, with squares labeled DISGRACE, FAME, SUICIDE, POVERTY, IDEENESS, GOVERNMENT CONTRACT, WEALTH, and CRIME leading, for the victorious, to happy old age at fifty.

Below the top floor are three levels of displays about each of the Hall’s more than a hundred inductees, presented in chronological order from the likes of Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear, and John Ericsson through dozens who are still alive. Their accomplishments are honored with well-chosen poster-size photographs with informative text blocks below them and expanded displays on the lives of some especially interesting inventors like Charles and Julia Hall, Charles Steinmetz, and Harold Edgerton. A fifth level offers exhibits about the challenges and perils of getting inventions to market (“Now You Have a Patent,” “The Regulation Game,” “Finding the Funding,” and so on).

The new institution makes an entertaining and educational tribute to some of the most underappreciated makers of the modern world

The larger ground-floor area under these balconies, which reaches beneath the plaza in front of the building, contains the science-museum part of Inventure Place, with interactive displays about electronics, water, light, magnetism, and more, designed largely to appeal to children. The scene is different from that at other new science museums because in hopes of promoting creativity, the designers have left the displays unexplained; you have to play with them to figure out what they are. I was interested to notice a co-inventor of a vaccine that has protected millions against hepatitis B (he was in town for the Hall of Fame’s grand opening) lose himself in fascination with an interactive laser display and fiddle with it for minutes on end.

The combination of science museum with Inventors Hall of Fame appears to be a wise one. The former promises to have an enduring appeal for area families and school groups; the latter can attract travelers from afar with something unique in the world. The Hall of Fame makes a fitting tribute, both entertaining and educational, to some of the most underappreciated makers of the modern world, its inventors. It is definitely worth a visit if you’re anywhere nearby.

While in Akron, I moderated two panel discussions that were part of the grand-opening ceremonies. In them Hall of Fame inductees were asked to discuss their creativity. I sat surrounded by the inventors of tetracycline, the magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner, fiber optics, Tagamet, lasers, pacemakers, CAT scans, and more, two of them Nobel Prize winners. A lineup of people who study and advise about creativity for a living asked them about their inventiveness: Where did they think it came from? What inspired them? How can we teach people to be creative?

The replies included some colorful stories. Wilson Greatbatch, father of the cardiac pacemaker, showed how he likes to do his inventing on a file folder, wiring electronics onto one flap and drawing diagrams on the other. Robin Ganellin described developing Tagamet by candlelight during a British coal miners’ strike. James Hillier, who invented the electron microscope while still in college, said he had idolized Norman Rockwell and really wanted to be a commercial artist but was required to take mathematics and science courses and got sidetracked. There were disagreements. Many of the inventors said they believed sheer luck had helped them a lot, but Raymond Damadian, who studied at Juilliard for eight years to be a concert violinist before changing fields and inventing the MRI scanner, said he wished people would never use the word luck ; it too easily suggests that hard work isn’t paramount.

Nobody had a firm answer for how you can make people more creative. But then, that’s the $64,000 question. It’s probably about as difficult and important a question as exists.

WASHINGTON, D.C. : Meanwhile, at the Smithsonian Institution, a different group is taking its own approach to promoting creativity. The Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, established this spring with a $10.4 million gift from the prolific inventor and his wife, will collect, store, and disseminate knowledge about technology, society, and the inventive process from a base in the National Museum of American History.

Like Inventure Place, the Lemelson Center proceeds from the assumption that people, especially children, are naturally inventive but may lack the outlets for their curiosity that were more common in the past. Young Henry Ford, for example, loved to spend hours taking clocks apart and putting them together. Try that with a digital watch and you’ll understand why technology can sometimes be as inscrutable as Mayan hieroglyphics to modern youngsters.

Lemelson’s career itself illustrates this process of increasing abstraction. As a teenager in the 1930s he designed and built model airplanes, duplicating the most glamorous and visible high technology of the day. After serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II, he studied engineering at New York University, worked in the Navy’s research arm for four years, then began his career as an independent inventor. His most important patents cover such areas as machine vision, computer-controlled machine tools, talking systems for aviation safety, and improvements in facsimile transmission.

As a typical hardworking American boy made good, Lemelson should be an inspiration to youth. Yet what child of today fools around with avionics for the heck of it, or builds a fax machine in the garage out of spare parts? With chips and lasers replacing nuts and bolts, today’s technology can seem so arcane and magical that it’s hard for young people (or adults, for that matter) to get a handle on it, let alone imagine themselves as creators instead of simply users.

For example, a survey of teenagers in shopping malls revealed that many more could identify the singer Mariah Carey (93 percent) and the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal (89 percent) than figures like Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography (less than 10 percent). No surprise there, perhaps; and a fairer poll might have compared Land with contemporaries like the Andrews Sisters and George Blanda. Still, the mall rats overwhelmingly thought themselves more likely to make a million dollars a year as professional athletes than as inventors. That’s understandable: Anyone can sing in the shower or shoot a few hoops in the driveway and pretend to be Shaq, but it’s much harder to picture yourself as an inventor if you don’t know what it means. In real life, of course, the youngsters in the survey are a lot more likely to end up selling overpriced cookies in the malls they were surveyed in. The Lemelson Center hopes to make them aware that they have other options.

In doing so, the center will engage in a broad range of activities, extending from minute, painstaking scholarship to hands-on building and selling. It will conduct symposia and conferences, assemble first-person histories from inventors, make archives available electronically on subjects ranging from telephones and computers to doughnut makers, Tupperware, and the Dustbuster, create and promote interactive museum exhibits, and bring together the inventors of today and tomorrow with lectures, demonstrations, intern programs, and fellowships. The center, in turn, is just one component of the Lemelson National Program, a collection of schemes with similar aims that includes the LemelsonMIT Prize, awarded to inventors of key technologies; the Lemelson Professorship and Fellowships at MIT; and student/faculty Lemelson E-teams (E standing for excellence and entrepreneurship) at Hampshire College (the alma mater of Lemelson’s son Rob) and the University of Nevada, to nurture the development of inventions.

Behind these myriad programs stands the ever-elusive goal of bringing together inventors, educators, and historians to share what they know with the general public. Many past efforts along these lines have fallen victim to conflicting interests. Historians don’t get tenure by being accessible to schoolchildren; inventors don’t make money from working with them; and teachers are often at a loss to incorporate the latest advances in computer data structures, or a revised theoretical framework for assessing technological determinism, into their lesson plans. Yet each of these disciplines has much to offer, and the Lemelson Center hopes to start, and keep, them talking to one another. The center’s director, Arthur P. Molella, and his colleagues have learned from the Smithsonian’s previous efforts along similar lines, as well as from such places as EPCOT. Still, Molella says, “With its blend of scholarship and public outreach, and its multimedia emphasis, there is nothing in this country quite like the Lemelson Center.”

Inventure Place and the Lemelson Center show that preserving our technological heritage, making sense of it, and spreading the word can take as much work as creating the technology did in the first place. If American innovation is to continue flourishing, though, such work is vitally important.