“Necessity, the mother of invention.”
George Farquhar (1677–1707) Irish dramatist
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 <br class="br">Misattributed
“Necessity, the mother of invention.”
William Wycherley (1640–1716) English dramatist of the Restoration period
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.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
“Invention is the mother of all necessities.”
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
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.”
William Shenstone (1714–1763) English gardener
"Detached Thoughts : On Writing and Books", p. 129
Essays on Men and Manners (1804)
“Art imitates Nature, and Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”
Richard Franck (1858–1938) German composer
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.”
Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic
Veblen (1914) "The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts". p. 314
Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer
Part III: Growing Up, §II
Source: An Autobiography (1977)
