Discoveries and Inventions That Anyone Can Make 2.1.1.1 Watch it carefully, then something will be given (1).

It is too famous that Mr. Konosuke Matsushita invented, manufactured and sold a bifurcated socket to form the basis of today's Matsushita Electric Industrial. This means that he looked at people's inconveniences, solved it by himself and succeeded it as a business.

There are many inconveniences, unreasonableness and difficulties around us. Just complaining about these doesn't help. It only builds up frustration. We must first create a solution to the problem we find, present it concretely as a thing that can be convinced by a third party, and perform an operation experiment. Otherwise you cannot speak out to the public that the solution is your idea. The first thing we have to do is to observe everything very carefully.

This is the same as when I made a desk lamp with a timer in my high school days and when I completed the first prototype of Setsuden-mushi (a profit making device). I observed a convenient fax machine, felt the unusual temperature and warmth of the equipment, noticed unnecessary standby electricity consumption, feeling the unreasonableness of wasting electricity.

At the same time as making a habit of observing by ourselves, it is necessary to observe the achievements of the ancestors, interpret it at the level of our own and store it in our own power.

I read the personal note (2000.11.02 on Asahi Shimbun) by former Professor Shirakawa of Tsukuba University, who was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Then I looked back on my past and recorded my hopes at that time as follows.

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Looking at the memo written by Mr. Shirakawa, who majored in chemistry and received a 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a conductive plastics, I also want to look back on my past with the common point that I studied a little bit of chemistry.

I'm not sure when I became interested in science, especially chemistry, and came to like it. I can't think of the reason why liked it. Chemistry was not taught independently in elementary and junior high schools. I became conscious of chemistry because we had 5 chemistry classes a week as a high school subject and because the grade of chemistry in the first semester was so terrible.

Until I graduated from high school, I was raised in the northern part of Onomichi where we had rice fields, fields, mountains and the sea. The surrounding flora and fauna and the environment were nature itself. Unlike the recent elementary and junior high school students, who have to put themselves only in artificial environments, I may have been very fortunate when I think of my long life.

In relation to the natural environment, I remember fishing in the pond in front of my house and catching birds in the mountains. (My brother was enthusiastic to catch the Japanese white-eye and the Japanese warbler and I often was looking at them.) And we children helped our parents and grandparents with the farm work.

As mentioned above, I became aware of chemistry only when I was in high school. The result for the first semester was just two or three out of ten (10-point evaluation) on my report card. That made me angry with myself. As a result, I got full mark of 100 points at the mid-term exam and 90 plus at the final exam score in the second semester, and the rating on the report card jumped up to the best of 10. I was simply happy with that.

It is necessary to memorize a certain amount of basic knowledge in chemistry like any other subject. I am sure that we can understand the reaction and theory only when the basic memorization part is firmly put in my mind. The slump in the first semester and the reaction to the lack of study taught me the basic attitude toward studying chemistry. And this may form the basic attitude toward my current desire to develop.

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I think there are many elementary and junior high school students who are interested in science and chemistry, and more broadly in science and technology. This is because chemistry has interesting things different from mathematics and national languages. We can even inject and add our own ideas in experiments.