UNIVERSAL INVENTION

We can remember few people who made the same high contribution to both science and arts. This short list includes the name of our compatriot Genrikh Altov.

As the author of great science fiction novels and short stories, Altov (Altshuller) is known to almost all intellectuals of the former Soviet bloc. And as a distinguished scientist, he has been known around the world for decades, but, alas, few people remember Altov at home here in Baku. Like many men of science who lived in the hard times of Stalin's repressions, Genrikh Altov faced with all the charms of the period.

A dozen inventions

Altov made his first official invention certified by the state at 17 - during the war in 1943. Among his first improvements is a boat with a rocket engine, a flamethrower gun and a pressure suit. The following year, he studied at the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute. Altov did not "sit the war out" at the institute and volunteered for the army from the first course of the oil mechanical faculty in February 1944. By the 1950's, the number of his inventions (engineering solutions patented by the state) exceeded a dozen. The most significant of them is the gas thermal suit. By that time, Altov had been engaged in the most important work of his life for two years - Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), which makes it possible to create an algorithm of a universal approach to invention.

In 1948, being a straightforward man, as noted by contemporaries, Altov wrote a letter to Stalin and sharply criticized the state of invention in the USSR. On 28 July 1950, Altov was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison without trial. In the camp, he also made several inventions. On 22 October 1954, Altov was rehabilitated and returned to Baku.

Altov wrote about imprisonment through the prism of TRIZ: "There was a situation when between interrogations I was banned from sleeping in the cell and the duty officer regularly checked whether I was sleeping or not. There was an inventive situation. You should sleep and not sleep. I need to sleep because I need it and I don't need to sleep because this is what the guard needs. I have to be in two states at the same time. But what's sleep? To sleep means to sit. The maximum I'm allowed to do is to sit with my eyes open. To sleep - which is what I need - is to sit with my eyes closed. The eyes should be closed and opened at the same time. The problem is actually not difficult. The eyes should be open for the duty officers who regularly look into the peephole and move around all day. They need to see that I'm sitting with my eyes open, with eyes wide open, so that there's no doubt. And I have to keep my eyes wide shut... We tear away two pieces of paper from Nord cigarettes. We drew a pupil with a burnt match. I sat comfortably. My friend stuck my eyes to the eyelids."

After returning to Baku, Altov worked in the Ministry of Construction of Azerbaijan (Office of Technical Assistance). Here, in 1958, he held the first seminar on TRIZ, which formulated the concept of the PER (perfect end result) for the first time. He conducted seminars on TRIZ throughout the Soviet Union. In 1970, Altov created in Baku a school of the young inventor, which turned into the Azerbaijan State Institution of Invention - the world's first TRIZ training centre - in 1971.

It is widely believed that inventions come unexpectedly with insight, but Altshuller, being a scientist and engineer, set out to determine how inventions are made and whether creativity has its own laws. To this end, in the period from 1946 to 1971, he examined more than 40,000 patents and copyright certificates, classified solutions in 5 levels of ingenuity and highlighted 40 standard techniques used by inventors. In conjunction with the algorithm of inventive solutions, it became the nucleus of TRIZ.

Altov taught TRIZ to students from 1970. In the 1970's and 1980's, he led the inventions section in Pionerskaya Pravda newspaper. The emergence of TRIZ was prompted by the need to accelerate the inventive process, excluding elements of chance from it: sudden and unpredictable insight, blind search, abandonment of options, dependence on the mood, etc. In addition, the purpose of TRIZ was to improve the quality and the level of inventions by removing psychological inertia and enhancing creative imagination.

From 1989 to 1998, Altov was elected president of the TRIZ Association. On his initiative in 1997, on the basis of the association, the International TRIZ Association was created. During this period, the recognition of TRIZ began abroad - in the largest countries of the world. TRIZ received the greatest development in recent years in the United States, Japan and other countries. Today, TRIZ has gone beyond the framework of inventive problems in the technical area and is also used in non-technical fields - business, art, literature, education, politics, etc.

In the early 1990's, Altov and Zhuravlev moved to Petrozavodsk where the writer died in 1998, leaving behind dozens of scientific and literary books. Altshuller's literary heritage is enormous. His books have been translated in almost all countries of the world. Now the mass introduction of TRIZ has began in pedagogy and other areas of human activity. In 2003, a memorial plaque in honour of the great writer and scholar was opened in Petrozavodsk.