Eraser and pencil are two different technological achievements. A poor painter, William, put them together and invented a pencil with an eraser wrapped around the pencil tip. He received a patent. He sold the patent and patent rights to the Labadeb Pencil Company, which made the company's annual income from patent fees alone reach 500,000 US dollars. Hausfeld, a technician at a music industry company, combined the two technologies of ultrasonic examination and computer image recognition to invent a CT scanning instrument that can detect inside the human body, and won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
This invention technique is called combination method. It is a method of integrating multiple technological achievements in creating inventions to conceive of novel designs and unique functions.
The combination method is an effective way to formulate ideas in detail. Someone analyzed 480 major achievements since 1900 and found that since 1950, the number of combined achievements far exceeded the number of breakthrough inventions, becoming the dominant technology. Combined technological inventions make technology more complete and mature. The combination method also has certain rules to follow. When we have a creative idea or seek a special function, we can invent and design from different angles in three forms: principle combination, interpolation combination, and spoke combination.