Necessity is the mother of invention

'Necessity is the mother of invention' is an English-language proverb. It means, roughly, that the primary driving force for most new inventions is a need. 'Necessity is the mother of invention' is an English-language proverb. It means, roughly, that the primary driving force for most new inventions is a need.     'When the need for something becomes imperative, you are forced to find ways of getting or achieving it.' The author of this proverb is unknown. It is commonly misattributed to Plato due to Benjamin Jowett's popular idiomatic 1871 translation of Plato's Republic, where in Book II, 369c, his translation reads: 'The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.'  Jowett's translation is noted for injecting the kind of flowery language popular among his Victorian-era audience. 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. Before Jowett's translation, the phrase was familiar to England in Latin, though seemingly not in English. In 1519, the headmaster of Winchester and Eton, William Horman, used the Latin phrase Mater artium necessitas ('The mother of invention is necessity') in his book Vulgaria, of unknown provenance. In 1545 Roger Ascham used a close English version, 'Necessitie, the inventour of all goodnesse', in his book Toxophilus. In 1608, George Chapman, in his two-part play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, used a very similar phrase: 'The great Mother / Of all productions, grave Necessity.' But the earliest actual usage of the proverb 'Necessity is the mother of invention' in English is usually ascribed to Richard Franck, who used it in his book Northern Memoirs, calculated for the meridian of Scotland (1658). In an address to the Mathematical Association of England on the importance of education in 1917, Alfred North Whitehead argued that 'the basis of invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.' and in contrast to the old proverb 'Necessity is the mother of futile dodges' is much nearer to the truth.