"An invention is the removal of technical contradictions." - Altshuller

"They wrote a letter that stated that the country was in ruins after World War II, and that there were not many resources to recover it, and suggested the use of TRIZ”. Of course he had to prove this, so Altshuller put together a graph of innovation, and found there were two valleys in the graph. One was in 1937, with Stalin's first pogrom, and the other was in wartime." In 1949, Altshuller was arrested, interrogated and tortured.

"He was in jail because, firstly due to his allegiances," says Zion Bar-El his colleague, "and because it's against the law to make the Russian people creative."

"Altshuller was in the labor camp along with many other representatives of the intelligentsia," says Fey. "He realized that in order to survive, not physically but mostly spiritually and mentally, he had to ask these people to teach him. Every night after they went back to the barracks, they would teach him: physics, math, art history, literature, whatever was available. This allowed these people to survive longer than they would have without Altshuller."

Zlotin, who worked with Altshuller in Russia for nearly two decades, relates his surprise at discovering Altshuller's vast knowledge of Verdi operas: "I said, how do you know these? You had time to go to opera? He said, 'Never, but my neighbor in the barracks was the world's best specialist on Verdi's music, and he would sing me all his operas at night.'
"For Altshuller, this camp was first a place of education,"

It was this wide-ranging knowledge across "unexpectable" areas that allowed Altshuller to develop a problem-solving methodology applicable to just about any discipline you'd care to name.

Stalin's most brutal despotism, though, couldn't dim Altshuller's creativity. Until his death in 1998, Altshuller burned as brightly as any of Edison's filaments, and often in just as rarefied an environment as a vacuum.