“Necessity, the mother of invention.”
The Twin Rivals (1702), Act i. Compare: "Necessity is the mother of invention", Wycherly, Love in a Wood (1672), act iii. sc. 3.; "Art imitates Nature, and necessity is the mother of invention", Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs (written in 1658, printed in 1694); "Magister artis ingenique largitor Venter" (translated: "Hunger is the teacher of the arts and the bestower of invention"), Persius, Prolog., line 10.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Commonly misattributed due to Benjamin Jowett's popular idiomatic translation (1871) of Plato's Republic, Book II, 369c as "The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." Jowett's translation is noted for injecting flowery, if not florid, language familiar to his Victorian era audience. (See "Note on the Translation", by Elizabeth Watson Scharffenberger, ed., in Republic (2005), Spark Educational Publishing, ISBN 1593080972, p. liii http://books.google.com/books?id=9FLdTCiaI_MC&pg=PR53.) Jowett himself, in Plato's Republic: The Greek Text, Vol. III "Notes", 1894, p. 82, gives a literal translation of Plato as "our need will be the real creator," without the proverbial flourish. The Greek text is: ποιήσει δὲ αὐτήν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἡ ἡμετέρα χρεία. Perseus.tufts.edu http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0167%3Abook%3D2%3Asection%3D369c
Misattributed
“Necessity, the mother of invention.”
Love in a Wood (1671), Act III, scene 3. (This was already a common proverb before Wycherley, cf. Invention, Necessity.)
“Necessity is the mother of all invention.”
“Invention is the mother of all necessities.”
1970s, The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)
“Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.”
"Detached Thoughts : On Writing and Books", p. 129
Essays on Men and Manners (1804)
“Art imitates Nature, and Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”
Northern Memoirs, written in 1658 and published in 1694 along with another work by Franck, The Contemplative and Practical Angler
“[H]ere and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity.”
Veblen (1914) "The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts". p. 314
Part III: Growing Up, §II
Source: An Autobiography (1977)
