Hello, this is session six of week four. I'd like to tell you some stories about humble masterpieces. Simple products that we use everyday developed by creative people. And maybe we can learn about creativity by learning the stories behind simple things like the lipstick tube and the safety pin. I like to base myself on a wonderful book [COUGH] called Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design by Paola Antonelli, who's actually the curator of architecture and design At MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art. And the stories I'd like to tell you, based on stories in the book, there are about a hundred such stories about simple products and how they were invented. [COUGH] I'd like to tell you the story of the safety pin invented by Walter Hunt, and the story of the lipstick tube invented by Maurice Levy. So let's begin by talking about the invention of the safety pin. It's something we all use everyday. And the question is, who had the first idea for this wonderful Invention, [COUGH] the safety pin? We use these all the time. And, maybe don't always think about the creative people who invented them. How did they happen? Well, here's the story, [COUGH] as told in the book Humble Masterpieces. The safety pin was built by Walter Hunt, who was a New York mechanic. He built America's first sewing machine. But in a fit of altruism, he decided he wouldn't patent it. He wanted to give his invention to the world. And unfortunately, it lead to a great deal of hardship and debt in his life. So [COUGH] he found himself in debt and trying to think of an idea, tried to get himself out of the debt. He had a piece of wire, just a simple piece of wire and he was twisting the piece of wire. Fiddling around, kind of thinking with his fingers, trying to think of a way he can pay off a debt. He owed somebody $15. [COUGH] And then, as he twisted the wire, he discovered that if you twisted the wire like this circle on the safety pin and created a kind of a spring, the spring could hold the pin in its little housing, and that would protect people from sticking themselves. Hence the name safety pin. So this was invented by Walter Hunt. He invented it a long, long time ago, and he patented his design. He learned his lesson from the sewing machine. He patented it in 1849 and he sold the patent for $400. That got him out of the debt. So sometimes, a bit of desperation can create ideas. A bit of fooling around, thinking with our fingers, playing with a piece of wire, discovering something. It might have happened by accident, but he was able to observe this creative value, this solved a problem. Straight pins stick people, safety pins never stick people. But yet, they're still a pin, we still have the pin, and it can be out of its little house or it can in its little house. And the wire itself, the pin itself creates the spring effect [COUGH] that creates the value for people. Try things. Play around with things. And when you hit upon things, sometimes by accident, and they solve the problem. Be sure that you notice and observe that the problem is solved. This is the lipstick tube. And the lipstick tube is a part of American, in fact, world history. [COUGH] So, we go back to more than a hundred years ago. In fact, 1915, exactly a hundred years ago. A man named Maurice Levy was working with a manufacturing company and he developed this kind of bullet-shaped metal case for lipstick. Now lipstick is important because in 1912, the suffragettes, the women who were marching to get the vote for women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Stanton. They wore lipstick as a sign of emancipation. From men, surprisingly. They wore makeup as a way of declaring their freedom from men and their independence, the first feminists. But it was inconvenient at the time to carry along paint that painted the lips and Maurice Levy came up with this tube that was very easy to carry. [COUGH] But the tube itself didn't yet have the telescope feature. It didn't yet have this feature of turning it and pushing it up. And that actually came about because of a scientist at a German chemical products company called Henkel. Let me just review the idea here. Actually somebody invented this lipstick tube. And then the scientist at Henkel used the principle of the lipstick tube, the idea of connection, Connecione of da Vinci, he has this idea to create a glue stick. So if this is useful for lipstick, maybe we can use this mechanism for glue as well, and that led to the Pritt glue stick developed in 1969. One idea leads to another, so can you create an idea that meets a need? Simply by using one product and adapting it to another. And that takes creativity because this is lipstick. There's no connection between lipstick and glue, but if this gets the lipstick to where you need it, maybe you can do the same [COUGH] for glue. And that was the process that the German scientist came up with. So, what do we learn from these humble masterpieces? We learn, [COUGH] identify a need, solve the need in a simple fashion, convenient fashion, motivation. Walter Hunt really needed that $15. Try things, play things, build prototypes and see if they work. Many [COUGH] great products, the safety pin 1849, and we still use them today. There are two ways to change the world. You can create a breakthrough innovation that creates huge value for a small number of people. Or you can create small, Humble Masterpieces that billions of people use, and that create value for them for well over a hundred years. We'll end here and we'll go on to tell you a few more stories about Humble Masterpieces in our next session, session number seven. And we'll talk about the Frisbee and about the bar code, and then go on to talk about our seven global challenges.