The President has been shot in the back by an assassin’s bullet. It is the 2nd of July, 1881 and President James A. Garfield is now the second President shot while in office.
Garfield was getting the best medical attention of the time, and that is not to say not that good. The president’s physician, Dr Willard Bliss was doing his best but his best was just trying to reach into the wound and find the bullet. Stuck his unwashed, unsanitary fingers and equipment into the gunshot hole to see if he could feel his way to the bullet. Not surprisingly, Garfield’s health was not improving.
This medical drama is filling the papers and Alexander Graham Bell was working in a lab in Washington he thought if he could create a device to locate the bullet it would be easier for Bliss to remove it.
Years earlier while inventing the telephone, what he became famous for, Bell had happened on a way to detect metal. He was trying to find a way to remove static from the phone call, he noticed that when he went near metals it would detect the metal signature.
Bell went to work creating a useable version that could detect metal at more than a few inches. He would fire bullets into wood and animal carcasses, he finally tested it on civil war Veterans.
When Bell believed the device to be ready, he asked to see Bliss and to try his device on the President. Bliss was sure that the bullet was on the right side of Garfield and wouldn’t let Bell look anywhere else. Bell thought the bullet was on the left side but Bliss didn’t let me examine the President’s left side.
Bell’s machine didn’t find the bullet.
He found out later that the bed that Garfield was lying on had metal springs that could have made finding the bullet more difficult. He ran tests at home with similar beds that Garfield was on and believed that they had caused some issues.
Bell, unfortunately, didn’t get a chance to test this out as Garfield died on September 19th, 1881 from septic poisoning, most likely caused by Bliss’s attempts at removing the bullet.
An autopsy revealed that the bullet was on the president’s left side.
The Metal Detector
These metal detectors work basically by having a battery that is making an electric magnetic field, that will create a magnetism in metal then it detects that magnetism.
A higher frequency will be more sensitive to smaller targets but very shallow, it will not be able to penetrate through very much material above the metal. A lower frequency will be able to penetrate more deeply through the material but it needs to find larger targets and will miss the smaller targets.
Decision Making
How do Bell’s metal detector and the failure to find the bullet in Garfield help with making decisions?
If you are trying to work through an issue at work or some problem, you might want to go with the high-frequency approach, however, this isn’t very deep.
This could be coming up with 20 quick-fire ideas for a sales pitch. The aim is quantity rather than quality. These ideas shouldn’t take up much time or effort. Also, they probably won’t create huge amounts of value.
The low frequency, high penetration thinking will take more time, and more investment and you are searching for a big idea to get a large return on that investment.
Who and When?
High-frequency ideas aren’t usually going to be high return ideas so you can delegate these off to others.
You are looking for a new widget to do X. Rather than using your time to look through all of the product guides and internet reviews you can get a new team member to narrow that field from 100 to 10.
Then you can do the low-frequency work to go deeper into each of those widgets to narrow it down from 10 to 1.
Angles
A big piece of metal is easily detected when its surface area is flat to the metal detector. If it is a large, long piece of metal but it is resting vertically in the ground so that little surface area is exposed to the metal detector it is going to be hard to find.
Your own biases, experience, and opinions are going to cloud your decision-making process. Just as the metal in the bed of Garfield caused interference to Bell’s machine, your own position on ideas could be causing you to miss some valuable opportunities.
Maybe you need to think about who has the best tools to find the metal, maybe someone else is going to be a better person than you.
This post was inspired by a piece from the Acquirers Podcast
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 