Example: Olympic Diving Camera

Creative people are curious and seek out new information and new experiences. The more ideas you have floating around in your brain, the more raw material you have for creative expression. Here is an example:

"On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He waits. He leaps. And then--somehow--the camera stays with him as he plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water's surface, the picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot--and we watch in disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.

"The [DiveCam] is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan named Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago. . . . It's sophisticated, yes, but only because it's simple. They put the camera into a pipe and drop the camera.

"The idea for this wizardry came to David Neal, now NBC's Olympic production supervisor, in what he recalls as a Isaac Newton moment. It was in the lobby bar of the Ritz Carleton 13 years ago in Atlanta ahead of that city's Olympics. He and an associate has been to the diving venue where they had climbed the 10-meter platform.

"'When you stand up there,' he says, 'it makes you marvel at what these athletes will do. We were thinking: What must it be like to plummet from that height? How can we capture that sensation?'

"At which point the apple landed on Mr. Neal's head: 'Why not let gravity do the work?' On the requisite cocktail napkin, and in keeping with Sir Isaac's univeral laws, he sketched a cartoonish doohickey. . . .

The DiveCam has 53 feet of custom-extruded aluminum piping. "The falling camera rides a rail on the inside of the pipe. A glass strip runs along the pipe's full length; the camera takes its picture through the glass."

--Barry Newman, The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008

When Linus Pauling taught at Cal Tech, [almost*] all of his exams were closed book. He maintained that only what you have in your memory bank is available for creative thinking. If Mr. Neal didn't know Newton's laws of motion, he wouldn't have had his flash of insight.

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