author
Goodwin Brooke Smith
b. 1870
Best known for a practical early-20th-century guide to invention, this little-known writer focused on turning ideas into workable, marketable results. His surviving work suggests a hands-on interest in patents, business sense, and the real-world challenges inventors face.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Goodwin Brooke Smith was an American writer born in 1870 and died in 1929. He is chiefly remembered for How to Succeed as an Inventor, a book that presents invention not just as inspiration, but as a process that also depends on judgment, persistence, and business know-how.
The book’s subtitle makes his approach clear: he wrote about the possibilities of invention, the dangers to avoid, the kinds of inventions still needed, and how to develop new ideas to a money-making stage. In other words, his work aimed to help readers move from raw ideas to something practical and useful.
Very little biographical information about him is easy to confirm from widely available sources, which makes him one of those authors known more through a surviving book than through a well-documented public life. Even so, his writing captures a distinctly practical, entrepreneurial view of creativity that still feels recognizable today.