Meaning
Difficult or pressing circumstances stimulate ingenuity, forcing people to devise solutions they would never have sought in easier times. It is said to encourage improvisation or to explain why a clever makeshift fix appeared when it was needed. Neutral to mildly uplifting register; a stock phrase of journalists and managers praising improvisation. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The idea is ancient, but the wording is not straightforwardly Plato's. Plato's Republic says something like 'our need will be the real creator', and the now-familiar phrasing owes much to Benjamin Jowett's 1894 translation, 'The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention'. In England the sentiment circulated first in Latin: William Horman printed 'mater artium necessitas' in his Vulgaria (1519). Roger Ascham wrote 'Necessitie, the inuentour of all goodnesse' in Toxophilus (1545), and Thomas Hobbes used 'need (the mother of all inventions)' in Leviathan (1651). The earliest full English version of the modern wording is usually given as Richard Franck's Northern Memoirs (1658): 'Art imitates Nature, and Necessity is the Mother of Invention.' The ultimate author is unknown, and the Plato link rests on translation rather than Plato's own words.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- necessity is the mother of ingenuity
- necessity is the mother of innovation
- necessity, the mother of invention
- need is the mother of invention
Usage Examples
- Necessity is the mother of invention: when the power failed, the cooks rigged a kitchen out of camping stoves.
- Stranded without a corkscrew, she decided that necessity was the mother of invention and pushed the cork into the bottle.
- The team had no budget for scenery, so necessity became the mother of invention and they built it from shipping crates.