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Nope, that was An Wang

"I don't think the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, which apparently has no physical existence, will be much more durable."

Umm, the Inventor's Hall of Fame is a real museum in Akron, OH. I've been there, it's a fairly interesting place (beats the Football Hall of Fame (Canton, OH) hands down). The museum has no busts, it trys to present inventions and the science behind them in a very understandable way with many hands-on exhibits.

Their website is http://www.invent.org/

The Modern Incandescent blub is really based on the research and patents of Irving Langmuir who worked for
General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

His invention of gas-filled incandescent lamp in patented in 1913 is the one we use today.

He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Langmuir's lamps gave up to 20 lumens per watt which was a very large improvement for that time.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/bios/langmu ir.htm
http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/92.html

Anyhow there is a whole back story where J.P. Morgan the main investor in the Edison General Electric company realized the Thomas Edison's Electric lightblub and DC current system was inferior, removed Edison from the company. Then aquired there biggest compeditor Thompson-Houston and changed the name to General Electric in 1892. Irving Langmuir was really the first true hard core scientist that went about perfecting electric lighting for the General Electric company.

Anyhow I am all for eliminating incandescents at this point and I do live in California.

RF lighting such as (Microwave-powered sulfur lamps) and LED lighting are the most efficient and make Compact Fluorescent lanps look just as obsolete as incandescents...

this has been done.. with mineral oil, sunflower oil..

but... no one has done this yet with your basic transformer coolant:
http://www.cooperpower.com/FR3/

or, you might be able to use an EDM oil.. head to:
http://www.edmzap.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Scree n=CTGY&Store_Code=f&Category_Code=edmsinkfluid

• EDM Clear-3 Dielectric Fluid, 5 gallon pail Code: CLEAR3-5 Price: $80.00
• EDM 30 Dielectric Fluid, 5 gallon pail Code: EDM30-5 Price: $50.00
• IonoPlus 3000 Synthetic EDM Fluid, 5 gallon pail Code: Ionoplus3000-5 Price: $120.00

Places we've talked about this before:

http://www.markusleonhardt.de/en/oelbilder.html
http://www.markusleonhardt.de/en/oelrechner.html
"OilComputer.com - These are the pictures of my oilcomputer"

http://www.hwspirit.com/reviews.php?read=16
"Sunflower Oil cooled PC (stage 1)"

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/ 11/1756259&from=rss
"Aquarium Full of Oil For PC Cooling"

History's REAL solution to this problem:
http://physics.kenyon.edu/coolphys/thrmcmp/newcomp .htm
"Some of the latest supercomputers actually have their working parts immersed in a liquid fluorocarbon coolant to improve the efficiency of waste heat removal."

http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/35.html
"The amount of silicon chips used in CRAY-2 caused a problem because they overheated so intensely during use. By immersing CRAY-2 in a cooling bath of liquid fluorocarbon, Cray kept the chips from melting. Cray's theory for success with the CRAY-3 was to substitute revolutionary new gallium arsenide integrated circuits for the traditional silicon ones."

PDPs with magnetic core memory could be made to pick up where you left off after a power interuption. Execute op, increment PC... not only was the memory non-volatile, it was practically immune to the transient power spiking that typically comes before and after a power failure.

I can remember sitting in the dark in a University computer center waiting for the power to come back on so I could finish my work...

Just ask Jack S. Kilby, who filed the first patent for the integrated circuit, but Robert Noyce was granted the patent, despite the fact that he filed his patent way later than Jack. Jack got his recognition later on, but it just shows how things can turn out at the patent office.

It is legal for me to carve a replica of a wooden chair with a sawblade.

Are you sure? IANAL, but just because it would be easy and very unlikely that you would be sued, this action wouldn't necessarily be legal if the wooden chair design was patented (with utility or design patent). This might not be usual case today, but I wouldn't be surprised if it became more common in the future -- certainly I've seen a number of simple automotive parts (brackets, etc.) that are covered by design patents, probably to prevent pirating.

Of course it would still be very easy to do, and maybe a good case for showing the inadequacies of patents. A great example of a very important but very simple physical design that was extensively "pirated" was Eli Whitney's patented cotton gin. The cotton gin is considered a precursor to the the mass production age and delivered unprecedented southern prosperity, but could easily be copied with a simple wooden box and a bunch of nails. This was technically illegal, but the device was such an important innovation and even Eli couldn't keep up with the demand, so after fighting to receive his patent, he either didn't renew it or the government didn't let him depending on which story you read.

Next they'll tell us he was actually from the year 1865 sent back in time 5000 years to protect a hot, but dumpy looking cave-chick from the Steam powered Terminator sent from the same future to kill her before she fathered the distant ancestor of Rudolf Diesel...

The Rock will portray Otzi in the movie...

An Wang is worth historical mention. He
invented the basis of core memory, the predecessor of RAM, in 1949. Core memory was as critical to computers of the late 1950's and 1960's as RAM is now. Prior to Core, memory solutions included drum (like today's magnetic disk), vacuum tubes, the Williams Tube, and Delay Lines - all of which were problematic.

Here's another link to his biography. (Note that it took several years of lawsuits before he got any money.)

With the royalties from Core he founded Wang Labs, which until about 1990 was a player in the calculating and computing markets. In 1965 Wang Labs built one of the first electronic desk calculators, and built several successful pre-computer desktops, like word processors and such. But Wang Labs never successfully transitioned into the general purpose PC market (AFAIK.)

Core was expensive. According to This, 131K cost $823,500 in 1968 - about $.75/bit. Cost of memory dropped below $.01 per bit in the late 1960's or early 1970's. Now, 256MB=$60 =~ $.0000022 per bit. Today, that 256MB would cost $1647905221.37 - a bit steep for a desktop.

Info on how Core works as well as some interesting historical information is here.

Unless you don't count The National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, USAF Museum in Dayton, nor the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta ( near Dayton ).

But I agree, the Rock Hall is a bit of a bomb and not going to Cedar Point while in the states is a crime. Make sure you make this part of your trip early in September before (a) Cedar Point closes and ( more importantly ) (b) the weather turns to shit.

Air conditioning, as opposed to refrigeration, dates from 1911, when Willis Carrier published his famous paper Rational Psychrometric Formulae. Carrier showed how both air temperature and humidity could be controlled simultaneously. Previous cooling systems mostly controlled temperature, usually at the expense of humidity control. Carrier put the basic theory underneath the technology, which took it from one-off demonstration systems to a usable technology.

Viking Link

Sorry, somehow the above link didn't cut and paste correctly.
Try to see the Smithsonian exhibit when it's near you. Firsts are often disputed, but I think if you do enough research, you'll find:
First electronic computer (Atanasoff) despite ENIAC
First Laser (Gould) despite Townes Nobel Prize
First Settlement in America (Vikings) despite Columbus, Chinese. However the "skrallings" were already established in North America

Yeah, that Jonas Salk sure was one corporate whore. And awful folks like Tishler, Conover and Sheehan, damn those antibiotics. Who needed them? I'm sure they would have made it to all those poor people eventually.

The question is whether Salk et. al. would only have made their discoveries if their research was funded by a private company, as opposed to if they worked eg. at a research university and their research was funded by the university and government grants. I can't conceive of a reason why there would be any difference. I'm certainly not aware of any suggestion that Salk was motivated by the promise of monopoly patents rather than a desire to save millions of children's lives.

Now, the question you have to answer is this: what if Salk et. al. had their own companies, and prevented anyone else in the world from developing killed virus vaccines, or antibiotics, for the 17 year patent period? Back in the 50's, only the vaccines or antibiotics themselves were patentable. If invented today, the entire fields of killed virus vaccines and synthetic antibiotics would likely be signed off on by the USPTO.

By the by, you might be interested to know that Jonas Salk didn't patent the polio vaccine. Incidentally, he is a national hero.

By contrast, Lloyd Conover wasted 27 years of his life defending his tetracyclene patent in court. For his efforts, he got inducted into the USPTO Hall of Fame. (As were Tishler and Sheehan. Salk, as mentioned above, did not merit an invite.)

Incidentally, I had never heard of Lloyd Conover before in my life.

Short Bio for George

Vermifax

Heinrich Hertz: Hertz lived from 1857 to 1894 and was the first to demonstrate experimentally the production and detection of Maxwell's waves. This discovery of course lead directly to radio. [more..]

Guglielmo Marconi: The Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, repeated Hertz's experiments and eventually succeeded in getting secondary sparks over a distance of 30 feet (nine meters). [more..]

Nikola Tesla: Inventions related to radio ( the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in 1943 in favor of Tesla) X-rays, the vacuum tube amplifier. [more..]

Lee De Forest: American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947. [more..]

Ernst F. W. Alexanderson: The engineer whose high-frequency alternator gave America its start in the field of radio communication. [more..]

It seems we can't truly give credit to any ONE inventor. For without all of the above, and countless others, I'm sure, radio and many other innovations would not be where they currently are. Hope these links help.

I'm posting this here because I think there are many on the open source community that don't realize the immense harm that would come to distributed control of IP if patents are abolished or weakened. If that happens, the guys with the most money win by default, since the smaller guys will have no protections whatever.

The following is a letter I wrote to LWN a few weeks ago outlining part of my argument. It will rub a lot of people the wrong way, but we can't afford to destroy the patent system unless we really want Microsoft and other huge companies to call all the shots. I don't think a lot of people here have thought these issues through.

Letter to LWN (at http://www.lwn.net/2000/0420/backpage.pht ml)

I've gotten several challenges to my assertion about patents as a desirable thing
(mostly asking for examples of small inventors that actually did profit from
patents) so here's my quick response, FWIW:

Anyone saying patents don't do immense public good, and provide worthwhile,
needed, and *effective* protection of small inventors against large corporations
is simply ignorant of the history of even quite recent technology. Many
inventors started small, but because of patent protection were indeed able to
profit greatly from their inventions.

From the "gararge-shop" POV, well, just off the top of my head, there are the
examples everyone is familiar with: Bill Hewlett and David Packard (HP,
instruments), Steves Jobs and Wozniak (Apple, home computer), and outside the
computer industry, folks like Edwin Land (Polaroid, polarized materials and
instant camera), Chester Carlson (Xerox, xerography), Henry Ford (Ford,
affordable automobiles), Thomas Edison (GE, light bulb, motion pictures,
phonograph...), and Alexander Graham Bell (AT&T, telephone), all of whom
profited greatly from their patented works. (One could argue for the inclusion
of Jeff Bezos in that list, although around here, that's a bit like whacking a
hornet's nest with a stick...)

But the classic twentieth century example of patents providing exactly the kind
of protection I'm talking about is probably that of Philo T. Farnsworth, whom
you may never have heard of, although you likely use his invention (electronic
television) every day. Farnsworth was the prototypical individualist inventor
who persevered against all odds and eventually defeated David Sarnoff and
Vladimir Zworykin of the immensly powerful RCA. RCA was truly the Microsoft of
its day in terms of control of the market and underlying technologies through
acquisition - often under severe economic and other pressure. RCA had a policy
of never paying royalties for any technology - a policy they managed to uphold
until they met Philo Farnsworth, who just wouldn't give up.

Farnsworth fought virtually alone against all of RCA's power for seven years
before the final court rulings that his patents had clear validity and
precedence over Zworykin's, forcing a tearful RCA lawyer to sign a royalty
payment agreement to Farnsworth. (Farnsworth publicly displayed television
*five years* before Sarnoff unveiled RCA's infringing version to the world
amidst great fanfare at the 1939 World's Fair, leading many to believe Sarnoff
and RCA were the inventors of television - sound like anyone today?)

Farnsworth's experience is, if anything, a case study for the need to
*strengthen* patents and either streamline patent appeals or extend the length
of patents when thier commercial utility is impacted by unsuccessful challenges.
(World War II intervened, and the government outlawed television for the
duration of the war (the technology was needed for radar, night vision and other
inventions Farnsworth then worked on), and so Farnsworth's patents expired
before he could profit from them.

Do you still think patents are a bad idea? I'd argue experience shows that
patents should be strengthened and perhaps that the duration of Farnsworth's
patent should have been extended, due to RCA's clear abuse of the patent system
and the courts. (I also think the government should have been upright enough to
grant extensions in the name of fair play to all inventors whose inventions were
commandeered for the war effort, but that's another issue entirely.)

History clearly shows that often patents are all that stands between real
progress and innovation and the acquisition by force so typical of a Sarnoff or
Gates. Strong patent law is the *only* effective defense against large
companies stealing technology from small inventors. (What RCA tried to do could
be accurately portrayed as theft.) I'm amazed more people don't get this, but
they tend to avoid history, and fail to recognize that our American forefathers
were wiser than we are in pretty much every way.

Although it's not perfect, there are very good reasons the patent system is the
way it is, and we meddle with it at our peril. It would be nice to see a
balanced discussion of this issue rather than the knee-jerk reactions that are
more common in the open source/free software community.

Dub

P.S.: I recommend spending some time browsing through some of the links below
to see how many of the great inventors of recent history were independent - the
protection provided by the patent system allowed them to develop and in many
cases profit handsomely from their inventions. You might be surprised at the
diversity and "ordinariness" of many of these inventors of important
breakthroughs - they're not such an elite group as you might imagine (the list
is somewhat US-centric - our culture celebrates invention, and so links for US
inventors are much easier to find):

National Inventor's Hall of Fame
MIT's Invention Dimension Archive
Good Internet Public Library list of links to Inventor information

http://www.invent.org/ would be where to get more information on Inventure Place, which is the National Inventor's Hall of Fame and Museum. It's a lovely looking building, in Downtown Akron. Also, it's very easy to get to, since Akron is just south of the Ohio Turnpike, easy access from New York and Chicago.

I'll be there to see the exhibits.


Dragon Magic

This is a national hall of fame. National? I guess this means that it only pertains to one Nation. Nobel is an obvious exception. Why? I have no idea except that making things that blow things up has to be included.

Look at one of the sponsors. USPTO. Dah, Dah, Dah,, dum de dumb, dum de dumb (I'm humming the Darth Vader theme song from Star Wars).

Okay, software folks are left off, but consider this. Most ppl here seem to think that hardware patents are okay, but object to software patents. So if software should be considered into inclusion then this sort of implies that software patents are okay. Hmmm, the inductees are also identified by their patents.

Great! One day one click may be inducted. Sorry folks, but I'm going to bed.

Alan Turing is not in the Inventors Hall of Fame, and yes, the Hall of Fame houses international inventors of repute--not just Americans. The web page is at http://www.invent.org. The front page has a link that allows you to nominate people. Why don't you go nominate Alan Turing? :)

The entire list of inventors at Inventure Place is at http://www.invent.org/book/bo ok-text/indexbyname.html. If you ever happen to pass through Akron, Ohio, I suggest you stop in there. It's got a load of cool hands-on exhibits, mainly aimed at kids but still fun for geeks.

Alan Turing is not in the Inventors Hall of Fame, and yes, the Hall of Fame houses international inventors of repute--not just Americans. The web page is at http://www.invent.org. The front page has a link that allows you to nominate people. Why don't you go nominate Alan Turing? :)

The entire list of inventors at Inventure Place is at http://www.invent.org/book/bo ok-text/indexbyname.html. If you ever happen to pass through Akron, Ohio, I suggest you stop in there. It's got a load of cool hands-on exhibits, mainly aimed at kids but still fun for geeks.

The Inventor's Hall of Fame can be found here.

From the page: Inventors selected for induction are honored annually at a ceremony held in Akron, Ohio.

Is Woz going to be there?

The Inventor's Hall of Fame.

Whoa! That's two compressed into one! There's Rudolf Diesel and then there's Nikolaus Otto. Kinda like saying Nikolai Edison, :))

Boojum

It seems to me that the first electronic switch, the triode, invented by Lee DeForest has to be the greatest hack of all time. After the triode, all of electronics has been incremental improvements.

Long before the space program. See this page for details.