"I sold it to Old Man Honeywell."
I wanted to comment on the original op ed but I never got around to it.
Creativity, whatever the word means is not an interesting subject.  It takes more intelligence to be observant of the implications of one's creation than to make the thing. As I've said too many times, inventiveness as such is amoral and preadolescent. And even then the best inventors are observers first.

The quote is from my grandfather. He had 20 patents, but marketing bored him. Business bored him. He owned a regional phone company in Minnesota.

Phone dials had a coil spring.  Metal expands and contracts with changes in temperature. The central mechanism above is a coil spring mercury switch.