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The Myth of the Lone Inventor
Codex The Sloth writes "Malcolm Gladwell (who amongst other things, wrote "The Tipping Point") has written an article for the New Yorker claiming that the role of the lone inventor is over. The example of Philo T. Fransworth (the "inventor" of Television) who failed because (amongst other reasons) he didn't have the big resources of a company to allow him to focus on his innovations. The thesis is that it is rare to have a single innovation that makes a product workable and that getting all of the inovations together requires a (large) corporation. No doubt others feel different."
Ginger! Oh, tell me that the Segway isn't huge!
Come on, you KNOW it exceeded expectations!
DeKa enterprises is far from over, my friend. And Dean Kamen, the uber-inventor, will return. Oh, yes... Kamen -- the lone inventor -- will return.
it may take the resources of a corp to bring it to market, but the article makes lone inventors sound useless.. if there weren't any, the corps would have no one to fund.
I don't care what anyone tells you, I am the lone inventor of the Cleveland Steamer.
We're reaching a point where it's incredibly difficult for a single individual to develop new inventions of any significance because of complexity. There is still a role for innovation by individuals, however.
Even though software programs aren't inventions in the normal sense, I think this is one area where individuals can still have a huge impact, although we're also seeing most large software projects written by teams.
this has been said repeatedly. and it's always been proven wrong; just reading ANKOS is reassuring that there is plenty of open pastures ahead for the lone inventor. to be sure, though, the US "gubment" is sure working hard to make it come true.
ummm, that'd be FARNSWORTH....see first sentence of the article ...
This is almost certainly true. The days where one human could contain enough of our knowledge in order to make a technologically *useful* advance in that knowledge, in a short period of time, are long over.
Sure, one guy might have an idea, but it would take him years to get all the peices together - just determining if it's gonna work or not! (let alone actually manufacturing it, etc.).
Now, there are places where a good idea can make a difference immediatly - the internet being one of them. But even there, getting people to look at it requires resources...
Websuring done right! StumbleUpon
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
What about DVD's??
one guy working on creating a blue laser made DVD's a possiblity.
the new lone inventor won't create full product, but will create the one innovation that was bottlenecking an industry.
"...the role of the lone inventor is over"
Tell that to Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Moolenaar, etc etc... The role of the lone inventor is still very much alive when it comes to open source software...
my dad has developed & built a number of successful inventions/innovations that have gone on to spawn businesses & corporations. the lone person model can work quite well.y pes.html
www.karadon.com (an invention/corporation that was built from an idea facet of one of his previous successful inventions)
www.geocities.com/spdrcrn1tr0/protot
not to say i haven't developed a number of items as well. screw the corporations, do it yourself
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
As long as there are tools and imagination, there will be inventors... Anyone remember the guy with the wind-up radio for the third world? A guy called Trevor Bayliss had the idea watching TV about how batteries in Africa cost a month's wages.... So he built a prototype in his garage and was eventually successful. Source here http://www.engineerguy.com/comm/2574.ht m I think lone inventors will always be around, but corporations will determine whether they can make a financial success out of their idea.
Absolute horsefeathers.
Big corporations don't invent anything, and the worst place in the world for an inventive, brilliant, highly intelligent and competent person (like an inventor) is a stultifying, closed-minded, skeptical, gray, dull bureaucracy (like a big corporation). Nothing will take the joy out of invention like having to appease a bunch of self-serving arrogant skeptics.
The days of the lone (or small group of)
inventor(s) is just beginning. What about Linux, for example? Come on. This can't be serious.
The day we hand over the responsibility for progress to middle management is the day we better start preparing for a stagnant society.
Didn't Linux started by one, contributed by thousands ? I think this is a mindset thing. Don't think of invention as a burst of accident, but a gradual evolution.
role of the lone inventor is over
I don't know, didn't it just take one person to invent the "Sharpie marker CD ripping system"(R).
-DanThe1Man
(err, can't log in)
Ask the patent office... Things like one-click patent can be accomplished by single individuals easily.
S
You're saying the Lone Inventors are dead?
Thanks for spoiling it all Chris!
I have been pwned because my
When push comes to shove, all inventions boil down to one individual realizing the solution to a problem. Now it may or may not take a corporation to realize the invention, and bring it to market, but the fact is that teams are made up of individuals.
Farnsworth invented totally electrical TV , not TV. The article also incorrectly states that Baird et al did not get (partly) mechanical TV working when in fact they did, it's just that Farnsworth's system was vastly superior. Of course, it was American media, so they had to distort the truth in bias of Americans.
The free software movement has proven that in order to invent something these days you absolutely need to stand on the shoulders of giants. But it's also proven that this level of collaboration doesn't need to be driven by a lumbering behemoth or the almighty dollar. Innovation and collaborative invention can also be motivated by sheer passion and sharing. This is the article's only major flaw.
his has been said repeatedly. and it's always been proven wrong; just reading ANKOS is reassuring that there is plenty of open pastures ahead for the lone inventor. to be sure, though, the US "gubment" is sure working hard to make it come true.
I hope you realize that Steve Wolfram didn't do all that stuff in ANKOS alone -- as vain as Wolfram is, he still felt the need to list dozens of collaborators at the beginning of the book -- not to mention the well known falling out between Wolfram and Matthew Cook, who was reponsible for almost all of the work on rule 110, the most interesting discovery in ANKOS.
DifferentLY. Please.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I would say his mistake was not in being a lone inventor, RCA paid him a million dollars, and royalties on each TV sold... in the 40's that was tons and tons of money. His error was simply being too prideful about *HIS* invention... (ready for the mod down) ala RMS with the linux naming scheme...
If he would have taken his money, and been thankful and happy about it, where is the failure? there is none. Only in feeling somehow ripped off by RCA did he let himself fall to where he ended up.
It is unquestionably true that Apple's largest constituency is the homosexual demographic.
When I visited CompUSA, th Mac corner looked like a gay bar.
From my father's experience, I've learned that its downright difficult to be a lone inventor...
He started his own company to build and rent out his invention (a water treatment unit), and found that between bigger companies simply deciding it would be cheaper to not pay him, and buraucracy and red tape, it just wasn't worth it.
The sad truth these days seems to be that if you aren't a big company, nobody cares, except maybe the government (its always handing out loans to small businesses). Bigger companies will take advantage of you, simply because they can wait forever on their bills knowing that you probably can't afford to get them collected by force. Small companies (for the most part) still have to fill out all the same forms and get the same approvals from the government as a big company. Finally, if all that wasn't bad enough, its hard to attract clients in this economy when they believe you'll probably not last to the end of the year. They'll go with XYZ, Inc... they've been around for decades, they'll be there when the client wants warranty repair or whatever service.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
whats the definition of optimist?
an ethiopian in a dinner jacket
sssss-badda-boom-bah!
What other major website purporting to want to be taken seriously and to provide useful news, has a front page article riddled with spelling mistakes including "Fransworth" (should be "Farnsworth")? That's the least of the problems. What is the point of repeating this tired old collectivist Marxist bullshit that the "lone [whatever]'s day is over". Screw the New Yorker. In an industry (computers) that has always absolutely been dominated by individuals, even to the present day, it is really ironic that an organization such as Slashdot that relies on an enormous amount of recent individual technical innovation is so fantastically ignorant of history and philosophy that it feels a need to promote such crap. While Slashdot sometimes has interesting links, I am done helping out its advertising revenue stream - time to set my browser's home page to something else.
Second you must have the manufacture/ marketing/ sales etc. This is the bailiwick of larger corporations.
This has always been the way. Edison made such an impact because with his first small successes he built a corporation which could produce and market other more marginal products. Tesla, on the other hand, had some (literally) world-shattering ideas, but as he didn't have a large corporation of his own, he had to go cap-in-hand to people like Westinghouse and Morgan to get the funding to develop his ideas. (Yes, Tesla did start several companies to develop specific concepts, but they were all small, specific and all failed for one reason or another. If Tesla had had all the resources of Westinghouse at his command, rather than at petition, who knows what toys we would have now?)
This is not to say that Edison was a better inventor than Tesla (many would argue that Tesla left him in the dust as far as raw imagination and engineering skills went), but Edison had the marketing skills and business sense which enabled him to do more with what he had.
You will, I think, find this pattern in all revolutionary inventions over the last two-hundred years. The inventor was
You will probably find that the discoverer of the Blue Laser Diode was working with a corporation, and could make a deal with that corporation to produce the diodes. He could not have done it on his own. Similarly with the Clockwork Radio, IIRC the inventor used funds from the UN to start a company to produce these radios.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
http://www.petitiononline.com/amigaos/
This lone inventor will live forever!
The only way multiple minds can solve a problem is though division of labor. Given the impossibility of collective thought, the only way problems get solved and inventions get made is though the efforts of individuals -- lone inventors who may choose to share knowledge and results.
I concur with this guy, sorta, but not in the way he phrased it.
It's not over... it's just that the capacity to take one's invention to new levels is, well, diminished.
Once I heard someone say that "creativity is a process which stems from one source, not multiple ones."
Sure, others can add on, but the idea still originates from one person. And that person's role is still the same: to come up with good ideas.
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
Farnsworth is a poor example to use for this subject. He DID invent television mostly by himself without the benefit of a large corporation. What he didn't have as an individual was reasonable protection from RCA, whose goal was to monopolize the airwaves at all costs. When they couldn't buy him out, they harassed him with lawsuits and propaganda campaigns that repeatedly told people that RCA brought them TV. The real problem with lone inventors is that "those who have the gold make the rules". Few people, until recently, ever heard the story of Philo Farnsworth.
Another cool fact about Farnsworth is that he developed a working fusion device, called the Farnsworth fusor. It doesn't even come close to breakeven, but it does produce neutrons consistently.
I resemble that remark not to mention some other guys I know (search for "javasoft" for some humorous anecdotes).
Our heroic New Yorker author, with a single leap, bounded right over duos like the Wright Brothers and Atanasoff and Berry as well as small hunting packs like Id Software and small tribal clans like the Seymour Cray 34.
Seastead this.
      The liberal economist Galbraith made this claim decades ago because he wanted to persuade readers that the nature of one of the traditional engines of economic growth in America (i.e., technological innovation) had changed irrevocably. He hoped to further persuade readers that only socialism (and the abandonment of entrepreneurialism (the friend of the "lone inventor") and capitalism) could save America's economy. I wonder whether Gladwell has a similarly liberal agenda, and I note that The New Yorker is one of the most liberal periodicals in the U.S.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
if taken into better context, 'company' or 'corporation' could be correctly seen as either examples or subsets of 'organized resource managment institution'. This could mean one person who is extremely wealthy, well connected, briliant (even above that of a 'briliant inventor') or all of the above. That is the point that should be made. There is a very large bandwagon of anticorporatism, that much like the hippie movement of the 60's is fool (pun) of those who simply parrot rhetoric without first understanding it, then critically thinking about it, THEN formulating an opinion. It is a pathetic brown nosing attempt to gain favor much like a politician does, when people drop phrases and ideas like that. What a shallow attempt to generate emotionalism and detract from critical thought.
The point made all along is that sadly you must have many more resources than people could have in previous times. However, you must remember that money is NOT the only resource. Lets take a software engineering task: money buys coders, designers, program managers, CM folk, Q&A folk, administrators, etc. However these tasks are often combined onto different people (wearing many hats and all that) for very large companies, so it seems theoretical that it could be done even outside of large well funded organizations... oh wait it has!
Stop this blatant attempt to spread communism and socialism, which both are failures simply because they fail to address reality and live in this pipe dream utopia where humanity somehow will magically change given the right government. Instead, why not take lessons from history and be the master of your own destiny... work hard, work with others, make things happen instead of complacently sitting back and waiting for others to do it for you. THAT is what open source and free software should be about. Take out this political crap where you force your ideas and opinions on others through policy and law all in the ironic name of freedom. (it helps to be realistic about what 'rights' and 'priveledges' are)
Check out Lee Daniel Crocker's The Myth of the Lone Inventor...
The Myth of the Lone Inventor
Come on, everyone knows from Star Trek that Zephram Cochrane will single-handedly invent warp drive, and Dr. Noonien Soong will build Data, an android far ahead of anything else available.
while we all have heard the 'he who has the gold makes the rules' it would be better stated as 'he who controls the amount, value and distribution of the gold makes the rules" Remember that it was once salt that was the most valuable asset. This is not to confuse analogy with reality, but rather that to trully understand the underlying meaning it takes deeper thought that many would rather not worry about.
But not in the way that the editorial is saying. No one works alone, period. No one ever has and no one ever will. It's against human nature. We don't like to be alone and we don't trust our selves. We bounce ideas off of our friends, families and even complete strangers. We want feed back, we want to know that we aren't crazy. No one works alone.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Lack of a lone inventor is not the problem with the system. There are a lot of people today that can focus on a product and develop it. Having a big staff is not the issue, and sometimes it actually slows development. It's simply that the lone inventor is having trouble getting past the legal flacks of big business who throw down slap suits, suits designed to suck off your cash, suits designed to "discover" all of your company info through the legal process of discovery, suits to hold you in court while they come up with a product, suits to determine where your bank account is so that they could sue you there......
Corp. Flack to boss: "How many thousand lawyers do you want me to drop on company X today boss?"
Boss: "Enough so they never come back!...I want those basterds!...send all we got!"
This method of operation is being used to hunt the "lone inventor," so that disruptive technologies do not emerge to threaten the giants. They have people dedicated to keeping the walls of the empire safe, that's the advantage of being big.
What Mr. Farnswort lacked was the equivelent legal firepower of the MPAA and RIAA.....could you imagine his lawsuits against RCA?...He would have ended up owning the company....but RCA's lawyers combined with the unfortunate timing of the WW2 means that Mr. Farnsworth is simply out of time to collect on his invention. The big guys stole his stuff and stalled out untill the penalties were meaningless.....sound familiar?
Now....flash forward to todays system.....all of the corporate giants not only have lawyers that they could para-drop into any courthouse across America, but they have the DMCA to make that "taking" of private invention all "legal"...think of Sonic Blue's situation....being forced (I know that it was reversed later, but principle) to collect information for the MPAA about their customers.....I know, I can hear the cynics, "It's all legal though, gotta be, it was decided in a court of law, right?"
Until the "lone inventor" can defend himself in court on the merits of the case rather than the cash onhand, he will always be hunted....
Legal reform for this problem made simple: The loosing party pays ALL legal expenses for ALL parties!....just think...no more nuiscense suits, no more extortion by the big guys because I could get the BEST defense on contingency by the BEST professional who would WANT to help me defend my position! He wins, he charges plaintif company X whatever he wants (huge is fine with me!). Contingency has done wonders for the plaintif lawsuit market, perhaps by making legal defense profitable, we can reverse the trend!
No I don't. But then there is another story not many people remember about someone doing work on creating a pump mechanism that you place in a river. Using the kinetic force of the movement of the water to power a pump to take some of the water from the river and push it thorugh a hose up a hill. This was a device that was just submerged in the water without the need to dam the river.
There are many stories like this, and it does take time for the inovation to come about. Then there are the issues of funding etc. The problem is that there are only a small number of Investors to put their money behind these Inventors.
Now days a lot of people with a lot of money are only willing to get involved with operations/outfits such as this when they can make money out of short term stock movement.
These people really require some long term cash flow if they are going to make their invention take off. Then there is the possibility that whatever large corporation that they go to to try and market their idea, could easily take the idea and leave the inventor with nothing.
Let's see... there's Dean Kamen's bio-medicine revolutions, there's Steve, Steve and Mike in the garage working on the Apple I (which lead to the Apple II, and the boilerplate Rich&Famous deal for all involved), there's Larry Wahl, who just gave his wholly concieved invention away, and there's Cisco, and Fed Ex, and...
There are lots of great inventions spawned by only one or two people working in their spare time, and many of these grow into monolithic companies or worldwide phenomena on the back of that innovation. Many of these (Fed Ex comes to mind) were up against gigantic established players, and succeeded despite it.
So, the article is corporate self-congratulatory bullshit aimed at those who want to make a run at the establishment. Ignore it.
SoupIsGood Food
1. DSP research and development. I've worked as the student programmer for a 2 person DSP programming company that was actually successful. The owner, an experienced electrical engineer, was an astounding businessman, programmer, and scientist, who invented and ported sound technology to DSPs, and worked with larger companies on a freelance basis to put those DSP's into larger inventions. All while working at home after years in larger businesses. There's plenty of work out there to make the gadgets of future decades possible - but you have to do a lot of inventing and marketing to make it feasible, and be absolutely sure about each step. If you can't honestly explain exactly what you are doing, in a provable manner, to potential customers, everyone will get very frustrated. Be prepared for lots of legal work too. And be prepared for some insane assembly languages for dozens of different parts - for each new part, the language, compiler, and basic philisophy of the unit seems to change. If anyone can develop consistant tools for many parts between companies, and convince people to start using them, they could make lots of money.
2. Biotech and DNA technology development. Much like #1, but much more massive ammounts of legal work involved. The main thing is that, as much as possible, don't get involved in the touchy intellectual property-oriented areas. Instead, develop the tools which will allow others to study, graph, track, etc, various pieces of Biotech information. The easier and more consistant you can make the process of collecting information and organizing the information for medical researchers, the more they can get done, and hopefully, the more they will use your tools. You'll need to consider the equipment used in various experiments, the nature of the appropriation systems put together for research organizations, and how best to market your product. You can make deals with equipment providers (as long as you're not outright purchased this way), and get job satisfaction out of helping people develop ways to save lives.
Well... those are the two big ones I can think up off the top of my head. Anyone else with some other relatively open branches of computer science or electrical engineering? Any other great unfilled but potentially profitable needs that haven't really been getting companies attention?
:^)
Ryan Fenton
As someone who qualifies as a "lonely inventor" (see my latest invention) I can say with some authority that there are occasionally some definite advantages to working outside the huge corporate structure.
:-)
For a start, many of those working within the corporate machine have obtained their position as a result of a splended array of formal qualifications and their academic background.
Now, while such a background is extremely important, there are occasions when it actually makes the act of "inventing" an awful lot harder.
Some of the most interesting (and practical) inventions are the result of someone who didn't know (because they hadn't been taught) that something was impossible -- so they just went ahead and did it.
An unfortunate effect of gaining a depth of knowledge is that one's field of vision is often reduced as a result. Sometimes an important innovation comes as a result of applying knowledge gained in a totally different field to a problem.
It's been my experience that occasionally the "experts" get so close to the problem that they can't easily see the bigger picture -- a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees so to speak.
Of course the reality is that if "the lone inventor" does have a good idea, they're then left with no choice but to solicit the help of a large corporation and the resources that such an organization can bring to bear. There's usually a huge void between an idea or a working prototype, and a commercially successful product.
The inventor and his invention are just one piece of the puzzle.
Of course (as I well know), the biggest problem faced by many inventors, regardless of the quality or viability of their ideas, is getting the right "big corporation" interested enough to provide those missing pieces.
I shudder to think about just how many great ideas have never seen the light of day -- not because the inventor couldn't invent, but because (s)he simply had no luck in attracting corporate or investment interest.
Of course anyone wanting to invest in my X-Jet engine is welcome to contact me
The example of Philo T. Fransworth (the "inventor" of Television) who failed because (amongst other reasons) he didn't have the big resources of a company to allow him to focus on his innovations.
Where is the verb in that sentence? "The example" is the subject but it lacks a predicate (even though there are dependent clauses with their own predicates). It doesn't compile.
The fact that I'm loggin onto his http with a one man noncorporate sponsored OS, browser, and tcp/ip packet doesn't say alot for his theory.
.. wait- let me ask permission first.. nope, can't tell ya. Sorry, No comment.
But what do I know,
What would Larry have done without standing on the shoulders of Kernighan and Ritchie (for C), Stephen Bourne (for bourne shell) and Bill Joy (for C shell) ?
What would Bram have done without standing on the shoulders of Bill Joy (again, for original vi) ?
Software is the most proeminent example of a field where invention results of an incremental and collaborative process. There are brilliant individuals, but they are definitely not "lone inventors" - letting aside the fact that Kernighan, Ritchie, Bourne and Joy were all working in the Bell Labs...
...it was a book review, New Yorker style, not an article.
As they say on USENET, "watch your attributions"
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
This ran in the New Yorker. Of course it's going to advocate large corporations over individual inventors. Most of their readership are managers.
If Wired decided that they were going to run an article on inventors, do you think it would glorify the organization or the individual?
Your argument is as ridiculous as saying that every single government on Earth is as genocidal as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Pol Pot's Cambodia. The head of my CS department was a manager at IBM. He was paid from what I hear about $400,000/year. Based on the kinds of bonuses that he secured for his top subordinates, I would bet good money that he got a lot of innovation and hard work out of them. Bonuses that were frequently in the $17,000 ballpark. He got them bonuses that were higher than what some people make in 1 year in the US. You would have to be pretty foolish to think that people won't bust their asses for cash like that. Good corporations have regulations to make sure that people don't go off in every direction, so that there is a purpose to research. But good corporations will pay whatever they can to ensure that there is financial motivation to bring out the genius in every employee doing the R&D that they can.
I thought that Scottish guy John Yogi Bear had a lot to do with inventing television? Although I think his approach was more mechanical.
And it probably involved picnic baskets.
So the Lone Inventor can develop a business model based on emerging technologies. The first quick example here is Apple.
The other angle on this is the open source model, and seen with Linus Torvald, who gave away his work.
Of course, in some circles, they "eat their own young", in the sense that inventors will keep things secret so well that they will never get support or get funding. This falls into the category of "give me millions before I reveal my secrets", which not many business men will fall for.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...getting all of the inovations together requires a (large) corporation.
First of all, learn how to spel.
Second, explain why "large" should be parenthesized.
Third, please provide an iota of support for your forgone conclusion. Certain large scale enterprises require the cooperation of many individuals. This is neither insightful nor novel. That such cooperative ventures must manefest themselves in the form of a corporation requires a bit more than a leap of faith.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
So Farnsworth didn't really have a commercializable technology. Worse, he got to the demo level during the Great Depression, a lousy time to get funding for a long-term R&D project.
It took RCA well over a decade to make television work commercially. It was hard to build a good TV camera tube.
If you look at the tube designs, you can see the problem. The image dissector had no light integration; only the light falling on the beam spot at the moment of scan was sensed. In other words, only one pixel time's worth of light contributed to the output signal. Farnsworth put in all the amplification he could, with a photomultiplier-like arrangement within the tube. But it wasn't enough.
Zworklin's Iconoscope integrated light over the whole frame time, but didn't amplify the output within the camera tube. That wasn't enough either.
It was clear that using both ideas together would help the sensitivity problem, but it took over a decade at RCA and elsewhere to make that work. Both approaches came together in the image orthicon, which was big, expensive, complicated, and required lots of support electronics, but delivered a good image. The sort of thing you'd expect from a big industrial research lab.
adv.
In a different way or manner; otherwise: "Carol... didn't know different until Elinor told her" (Ben Brantley).
[dictionary.com]
Yes it can be used as an adverb, get over yourself.
Here is an article in the tech review from MIT about Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of MS, who is trying to build a business around lone inventors as the companies asset.
The story about Sarnoff and the Titanic is a myth, a legend out of the mind of ... Sarnoff.
Farnsworth won royalty payments and cross-licensing from RCA before the US was in WWII. He could have competed with RCA, but they had much more capital and more manufacturing experince than he. He was the brilliant inventor of electronic TV, but when the time came to produce the goods, he was barely an also-ran.
Edison was NOT working on his own when he came up with the Electric Light. IIRC, it was his TEAM of engineers that eventually came up with the electric light. However, I believe Edison discovered the effect that led to the invention of the vacuum tube.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Um, not wanting to sound too internationalist here, but when will you septics break out of your parochial "we invented everything" state of mind?
The Berlin Olympics were televised - German Technology.
About the same time John Logie Baird (a Scot) was conducting test transmissions in the UK - British Technology.
Come on guys, there's a big wide world out there, open your eyes, you might find there's something outside the USA of interest.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
You must be a teenager still living with mommy if you don't see the reason for marketing. Wait until you grow up and enter the real world.
One doesn't live on thin air... so the assumptions are incorrect.
The lone inventor does exist, but it is a endangered species... the survivers are those that have sources of income other then they labor and those that don't mind to spend years to get the invention done...
Cheers...
Although he's insane. Maurice Ward of Starlite fame? The English barber who mixed chemicals in his spare time and came up with that heat resistant polymer about 12 years ago?
He's insane because he refuses to sell his formula because he thinks he'll be cheated out of some money. He's like 68, if he gets 10 million or 10 billion, what's the difference to him? He can't do anything anymore, his body is finished. I'd take the money and just enjoy my last 10 or so years!
That's a hell of a lot of lap dances, or candy bowls full of coke, or Hummer demolition derbies! Or a giant mansion built on the side of a mountain! Some people!
I thought the main problem with Farnsworth
was that RCA basically defrauded the patent
office and took credit for his invention.
I'd suggest, given recent events with things
like the Skunk Works, which started out efficient
but is now nothing but, that small teams are
more important than large teams.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I was going to comment wihtout reading it, then i realoized how ignorant that would be. Ignorance is bliss.
The author of the article blithely rants on and on and on about the invention of television as the death of the lone inventor. Then he discusses the nature of complex inventions where several simple devices converge to make a more complex one. And all the while he forgets about Edison.
Let me first talk about Edison here. Edison is a prime example of the death of the "lone inventor." We all know he had a workshop of engineers working for him, developing vacuum tubes and sealing processes, searching for filaments for the lightbulb, designing movie projectiors, cameras, film, and emulsions. Edison did a lot but he did it in such a way as to uindustrialize the process of invention and shape it into engineering.
What about Steve Wozniack? The INDIVIDUAL who sat down and soldered together the Apple computer. Yes, I know he didnt build the first hobbyists computer, but he _arguably_ built the first PERSONAL Computer. Marketed it. And did it without causing legal patent problems, did it so that the licensing was all clear and above board.
There are inventions developed by individuals every day. It is true that marketing and manufacturing requires more money than the average person has. Look around, there are tool maufacturing companies that make submission forms available in machine shops in case you have a good idea that no one else has patented.
Here is the problem with this article. The author has never INVENTED. He does not realize what the difference is between invetion and marketing/manufacturing. He does not realize that some patents are sold or licensed for other puposes. The author has a romantic notion of what an inventor is; a tall, thin, blue eyed, wispy haired dreamer. Any African-American reading this should be pissed off, George Washington Carver looked nothing like that.
In fact, the author's entire article is based on the romantic ideal. The idea that the invention of television is a turning point of multiple dimensions, that it heralded the end of the depression, the start of a new form of communication, and the death of individual invention.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance there is a difference illustrated between romantic and classical thought. A classical thinker sees the parts, the forest for the trees. A romantic thinker sees the forest as a whole, for the magnificence of the forest. This article is an example of romantic thought applied to a classical discipline.
Quoth the poster:
Legal reform for this problem made simple: The loosing [sic] party pays ALL legal expenses for ALL parties!....just think...no more nuiscense [sic] suits,
While this might sound like a good idea on the surface, it would in fact have a devastating effect on the justice system. Even the most seemingly ironclad lawsuit is a crapshoot when taken before a judge. Law is a game of subtleties and minutiae; further more, it is inherently subjective. The mere fact that claims are contested is evidence of this: a case that seems airtight to a plaintiff is scoffed at by the defendant. The judge listens to the arguments as presented by each side (in effect, making the skill of the argument part of the case, for better or for worse), and renders his decision based on his legal training, precedent, his experiences, his ideology (again, for better or for worse), and a whole host of other factors. These factors introduce an element of chance into the proceedings, an element which one cannot discount.
What does this mean? It means that even the most solid case, argued by the most skilled attorney, can be lost. Now, if you make the loser pay the legal fees for both sides, then you are putting a potential plaintiff in the position of having to pay legal fees on a case that may have been perfectly legitimate, but cursed by bad luck; this problem is compounded by the fact that with the loser paying, both parties would have incentive to hire the best attorney possible: if a better attorney can win the case for you, and you won't have to pay if you win, then it is absolutely to your advantage to hire somebody better. This would inevitably lead to a chilling effect on lawsuits. While that may be viewed as desirable, the chill would extend not just to frivilous suits, but to legitimate suits as well.
Also consider enforcement: if Microsoft were found to be using code from the Linux kernel, and Linus decided to file suit against Microsoft, how would he be held to pay if he should lose? Would he be required to post funds in advance in escrow, in case he loses? How much should he post? Microsoft has quite a legal team. What if MS decided to hire additional lawyers, or specialists? Perhaps expert witnesses? Should Linus pony up every time they add a staffer to the payroll? If you institute a policy like this, quashing a lawsuit would be as easy as hiring everybody you know. The other options would be to make them pay afterward (what if they don't have the money), or require some sort of legal insurance (equally expensive).
Short answer is that, while it may seem attractive, having the loser pay the winner's legal fees, it would have dramatic negative consequences. A better idea, perhaps, would be to have a two-tiered system: bring your case before the court, the judge listens to the synopses. If your case fails a "straight-face" test, he can instruct you to pay the defendant's legal fees. If you pass the "straight-face" test, you move on to the trial court, and follow the current rules. This is, in fact, a derivative of the criminal system: before the trial, the prosecution must get an indictment. The indictment forces the prosecution to show some sufficient cause to believe that you committed a crime, before you go to trial. Incidentally, even now, there are some provisions for making the the loser pay the winner's legal fees; legal fees can be included in a judgement. This is just used semi-sparingly, to prevent the effects mentioned above.
Just for the record, I am not a lawyer, so feel free to correct me anywhere I missed a detail. My dad is, though (Oklahoma, Ohio, and Federal bar (USAF)), and we've discussed this at length. He's disgusted with the legal industry, too. :-)
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
This notion has existed in Japan (and perhaps other parts of Asia) for some time. I refer to it as the Manjusri Effect in an upcoming column here: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/shukan-st/articles/ . Fair warning: should be avoided by people who have no interest in the FIFA World Cup which will commence very soon. "Manjusri Effect" is taken from the proverb: "if three people put their heads together they will generate the wisdom of Manjusri" (the Buddhist deity of Omniscience). The related webpage noted in the article is here (under construction): http://www.issho.org/tl/ourmessages-fifa2002.html
The reason given (or one of them) is that individuals are subject to things like harassing lawsuits and the inability to concentrate on the work of inventing due to distracting influences- which is to some extent self-fulfilling, because you are talking about demands placed on the individual by a governmental judiciary system that is equally available to individuals and aggregates.
It's a bit like spam: if aggregate entities can have (or evolve) parts (lawyers) solely to attack and cripple the progress of individuals, then this criticism of the 'lone inventor' becomes absolutely unanswerable: by definition it becomes impossible for an individual to stand against aggregates because it's far too simple to immobilize an individual with harassing lawsuits. The only hope for an individual in this situation is to be assimilated or to 'fly under the radar' doing things that may contribute to society but won't be identified as mass market 'inventions' and fought over.
We may be seeing just this sort of issue arise with Linux and Free Software in general: this type of cooperation among unrelated individuals flew under the radar for some time, and now Microsoft strongly wishes to destroy it, and has taken steps (shared source licensing) to outmaneuver it: it is possible that the only counter to this will be another sort of aggregation, the definition of an 'open source community' inclusively as its own aggregate, and the using of this to fight defensive actions. At the very least, it's become necessary to take on aggregate threat appraisal, as seen on places like Slashdot. If everyone had to make their own judgement call on things like Microsoft's viral shared source licensing, with not everybody equally able to identify dangerous legal points or refer them to a lawyer, how easy would it be to neutralize the entire Free Software movement and place it in a position of awful legal liability and vulnerability? It's been necessary to have a way to get the word out about such things, and this in itself is a form of aggregation.
I suppose the question to be asking is, what FORM of aggregation is needed? Something like Microsoft or Enron is only one form of aggregate entity. It doesn't have to be that way- in fact it could be just about any way imaginable, because these things are a combination of natural social forces (tempting to get into 'psychohistory' here!) and legal frameworks defining what such an aggregate is and what its goals, needs, defining qualities are.
This latter cannot be accepted as a fait accompli: the legal frameworks must be subject to re-appraisal in the event that we ended up defining an aggregate entity with about as much future as cancer. It's quite possible to define such a thing with self-destructive, unsustainable qualities, and to set it free and let it rage and burn out. And there's enough of that about: the next level needs to happen, now.
It was fusion.
h v/ fusor/construction/index.html
... Loo.... he heheheh
http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~kronjaeg/
OK, so it wasn't a Waterloo, I just wanted to use that word today... Water
Philo was a genius.
When Edison's desk was opened fifteen years after he died, a sample of uranium nitrate was found among the last things he had been working with. The proponents of the Edison myth suggested that he had been on the road to nuclear energy in the early 1930's. But, Edison had no knowledge of nuclear physics, only a few weeks of education, not much contact with theoretical researchers. It is nearly impossible that he could have been working on nuclear energy, let alone contributed anything to its development. The age had changed. Edison was a great man of the nineteenth century. In the 21st, no one can tell you who our great inventors are, except that Bill Gates invented the mail merge. A scientist was Time's man of the year five years ago -- now he's forgotten.
The thesis is that it is rare to have a single innovation that makes a product workable and that getting all of the inovations together requires a (large) corporation.
wrong! the thesis of the article is medium sized corporations gain all of the advantages of size but retain the flexibility of smaller organizations.
re-read the article more carefully.
www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager/ai
I designed instant messaging for computers in 92
Gnutella in 99
P2P policing networks in 99
Auction sites in 92
Personal ads in 92
Developed a MMORPG in 92, but corporations beat me to release.
Hello, welcome to my life. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon and I can't get a job anywhere so I'm mowing lawns so I can get drunk.
I could make c3po AI if I had like 10-20 coders with me, but I won't since I can't make money doing it. And 10 years for a society that sucks that bad isn't worth it.
God spoke to me
this argument is found here where a certain Paul Moller has been developing nothing less than a flying car for 30 years, and has dozens of patents to show for it.
Correction on that URL for the Manjusri Effect. Should be here: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ shukan-st/st-articles.htm The article.
An example is automotive cooling systems. For the majority of the last century to water flowed through in the wrong direction. The cold water came in through where the oil was kept, then the warmed water flowed around the cylinders where everything is hot. Now you want your oil to be nice and warm so that it will flow well and cover everything, and you want the rest of the engine to be kept cool so that pistons don't get stuck and other high temperature nastyness. The reason the water flowed the way it did was simply because that was the way water flowed with gravity feed, but for nearly a century after the water pump was introduced into the system the water flowed the wrong way.
There is always room for innovation. Even very simple systems can sometimes do with a tweak. The role of the lone inventor is not over, as shown by such people as the guy in Thailand that is making spherical fire extinguisers that you operate by rolling them into a fire.
The corporate employee, however, builds whatever his employer tells him to build. Usually, this involves upgrading existing technology in some way. Corporations are slow and cautious; they cannot afford to invest much of their time into crackpot inventions (moving pictures ? bah !) that most likely will tank.
I think there is also a distinction between building a prototype and a complete product. An inventor usually only has resources to complete an initial "proof-of-concept" version of his device. The marketing, improvements, aesthetically pleasing translucent plastic shells, etc., are beyound his price range. Which is why his best choice is to sell out to someone, an inverstor or a corporation, who has those kind of resources.
In conclusion, inventors and corporations are interdependent. Coroporations cannot innovate, and investors cannot market their products. It takes both for some new technology (cell phones, TV, AC power) to take off.
>|<*:=
They might take a different stance on the innovation of one single person
(Times Rich List)
41= JAMES DYSON £650m Household appliances
His book is really worth a read if you can get hold of it (Against The Odds), the underhand tactics of big business is really eye opening.
Cheers,
Ian
The recent spate of web-based inventions (till the economy collapsed) are a prime example of lone inventors still being able to make it big. Take hotmail, napster, google....the list is endless, all these were started by lone inventors (phds or high school dropouts) who were funded by VCs for their ideas
The specific case of Shawn Fanning and napster is a good example. There's no doubt that peer to peer systems is one of the revolutionary ideas to come out of the www...and the discovery is generally credited to Fanning, a lone inventor.
ANy Lone Inventor can outthink an organisation!
I should know, I have already outwitted several governments already!
If you need proof, I suggest you check the recent episode of Star Trek entitled "Conspiracy"
Those Lying sons of bitches!
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
The New Yorker article says that Farnsworth finally got his TV "invention" working on 7th September 1927.
This Canadian article says that Scotsman John Logie Baird officially demonstrated working TV on 26th January 1926 (and actually had it working 4 months earlier than that).
Nice to see that Americans like to believe they invented TV - it was actually the Scots ! This makes the entire "Myth of the Lone Inventor" stuff rather tainted - Farnsworth did *not* invent TV ! Shamefully, most of America has been brought up on this lie - I visited a Science Museum in the US and was shocked to see no mention of Baird in its "inventor of TV" section.
and then cut there legs off.'
one of my favourite quotes from many a patent holding organisation.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If success is measured in terms of being referenced in a Matt Groening cartoon series, then Farnsworth was no failure!
Baz
These days Swan is airbrushed out of the story in the States.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
And if you look back... There was a guy called Paul Nipkow who 1890 already filed a patent for the mechanical-optical picture disassemblation, even though at his time there was no means to convert the light impulses into electrical ones to transmit them. Reconversation was possible already with the light bow lamp though.
Wonder why Farnsworth and Baird demonstrated their invention about 25 years after Nipkow's patent was filed. It surely has nothing to do with Nipkow's patent expiring just at this moment.
So, while the invention was already done 1890. the practical version using the Braun's tube (cathode ray tube) was demonstrated by Manfred von Ardenne in 1935 in Berlin.
Sique
In fact, Issac Newton summed it up somewhat earlier when he said "If I have seen further than others, it is through standing on the shoulders of giants" (precise wording not guaranteed, statutory rights not affected).
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
You are absolutely correct, of course (and coming from Scotland, I'm just a wee bit proud). But there is one caveat which should be noted in this case:
John Logie Baird invented what is called mechanical television, and Farnsworth invented electronic television (the ancestor of what we have today). The difference isn't quite clear to me, but it seems that mechanical tv cameras captured images with a rotating disc, with holes cut in; whereas Farnsworth's electric TV used an "iconoscope" - something which Google couldn't explain to me in the 2 minutes I had...
Either way, JLB should definitely get the accolade for the invention; but Farnsworth should be noted as a great inventor in his own right.
If anyone wants to clarify this further, I'll be as interested as anybody.
But then there is another story not many people remember about someone doing work on creating a pump mechanism that you place in a river. Using the kinetic force of the movement of the water to power a pump to take some of the water from the river and push it thorugh a hose up a hill. This was a device that was just submerged in the water without the need to dam the river.
I'm not surprised that not many people remember it. What you have described is a hydralic ram, which was invented by the Montgolfier brothers (of ballon fame) in 1793. See here for the details.
ARM are a smallish bunch of guys based in the UK, they "think" for a living, then sell the ideas to the rest of the industry.
So IP based companies can work, and leave the heavy lifting to others.
In the world of outsourcing this is a common model, and ARM are probably the best examples of how to be an ideas company.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Okay, I looked at your site, and read the first half -- I'll read the second half later. Here are my thoughts so far: (1) Switch to Linux. Linux can also handle real-time camera input for at least some cameras, and since it is open-source, you can get more info. None of this closed-source magician act. (2) To properly gain "blob" object recognition, you need to take two subsequent photographs, subtract them, and then take the 2-D FFT using small blocks (say, 32). The position of high values in the output of each FFT will tell you approximate movement vectors. You then take the movement vectors to map how blocks of pixels move. Then you identify the blocks of pixels in a recursive prediction function in order to identify those pixels that move together, and those that don't. (3) To extend this, you also need to allow for transformations (such as when a person turns their body.) So you also have to map how pixel blocks respond in more ways than just moving. (4) If you are finding it too expensive to live, come to a 2nd world country. (See www.escapeartist.com). Then hire your programmers *there*.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Invention starts with a single individual having a compelling idea. They don't start out as massively complex projects, they grow to be that way. A jet engine for example is a beautifully simple concept, but a modern jet engine now has complex control systems that the prototypes never had.
Television - Baird BTW, not Farnsworth.
Telephone.
Hovercraft.
Jet engine.
Pneumatic tyres.
RADAR.
Just some examples where individuals had such good ideas that they felt compelled to pursue them.
Large companies do not have inventions. The collective IQ of a large company is pretty damned low, for every bright spark, there's half a dozen PHBs making sure he doesn't rock the boat or upset the gravy train.
Where companies help is with continuing incremental development, marketing and sales of the initial idea, usually after it's already proven to have commercial applications.
It has to be said that Americans aren't really very good at invention anyway. It's the Scots especially and to a lesser extent, the English who are truly world class inventors.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Article doesnt mention Dysan or Bayliss. Oh well.
If you know them, you won't get hurt
If so then Farnsworth is a bad example to use for the main point of this essay. Farnsworth's problems are as likely to stem from autism as anything else. Other lone geniuses have managed to create major inventions and use the patent system to do so. The Bell telephone is the obvious example.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Philo Taylor Farnsworth built on Bairds ideas to produce an all electric television. It is quite incredible to me that this seems to go unnoticed by so many.
Indeed, http://www.inventorsmuseum.com/television.htm fails to even mention Bairds name!
An excellent resource for those interested is http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/baird . tml
If you really believe that the day of the lone inventor is over you really need to look at these websites. and They will hopefully dispel this myth once and for all. Jerry Scovel.
Polymerase Chain Reaction was discovered by Mullis while working at home, when he microwaved the DNA solution in a flash of inspiration. He got a Nobel prize for this discovery.
Einstein was working as a clerk in Swiss Patent Office when he came up with the theories of Relativity, as well as some other papers on the nature of light. He was 26.
Actually -
The exact opposite is true. REAL innovation and change in the industry only comes from the maverick innovators who won't accept the status quo. Big business does not keep the lone inventor out of the game. But incessant government bureaucracy that makes the lone innovator fill out myriads of forms just to start and maintain a business, let alone the expertise that one must have in accounting just to satisfy the IRS, are the things that drive most inventors out of the business. Get a grip.
Joseph Swan's lamp (carbon filament) was demonstrated in February 1879, Edison's in October.
Yhere was a pretty free market in electronic ideas at that time (see also the thermionic valve/tube) so drawing conclusions about the critical nature of a particular individual or team regarding these innovations is problematic, despite what the textbooks would have us believe.
A large thing that all inventors have in common is years of redesigns and years of development before anyone will take them seriously.
It was the same for the hovercraft, television, the pneumatic tyre, the aeroplane... All of them. People think that it takes a large corporation to invent things but that's not the case, it takes self belief and years of dedication but it can be done.
I'll even go as far as to say that the lone inventor is the only way truly world changing revolutionary technologies will appear. Corporations just won't risk money on the ventures and the mental straight jackets on governments are too tight.
Success doesn't come handed on a plate.
Deleted
We are all growing tired of this knee-jerk anti-Americanism that only breeds more ignorance on the part of the anti-Americans and Americans themselves. Try to enlighten instead of infuriating.
educate and ignorance goes away. Mock and ignorance flurishes and grows
Face it, you are just another of the army of mindless sheep that hates everything American. Funny thing is, you fail to realize that it is people like you that create the problem in the first place. When Americans see this crap they lose interest in the truth behind your rhetoric and see just another attack on Americans. If however you simply educate and present the facts then I believe you will find Americans are greatly interested in the truth. Going on, the further but related irony is that Americans very rarely hear credit given for the many things that Americans HAVE done. (Now don't get me wrong here, I find that shit silly, just as being 'proud' of you heritage is silly... you are who you make yourself to be not what your ancestors were) It becomes the same situation in which an intelligent debate breaks down to a petty argument... no one learns so no one wins
Or, RCA would have screwed him out of his rights even more(not unlikely given their patent policy), given him a meaningless token position, and slowly drained him of his will to live.
My god, this article is bad. It can be summed up as this: "Because Farnsworth screwed up, every lone inventor is a screw up."
if you are too stupid to look at the meaning underlying the words and comment on them then please restrict yourself to any small Skinner (is that correct spelling?) box for a period of 5 decades. I wish people like you would never speak or type on boards, unless it was boards devoted to spelling and grammar. Intelligence is primarily defined as the ability to adapt to new situations and stimulus... you sir are a fucking idiot then.
Well, the Baird Standard System actually was used in Britain, and people watched it, too. Here's a page on early television history (begins with Nipkow in 1884[!]) by one of the foremost television scholars around.
There's much more interesting stuff on this page, including a history of Phonovision, Baird's attempt to record his television experiments;
and information on the earliest known recording of broadcast television, which dates from 1933, incidentally somewhat earlier than the Berlin Olympics broadcast in '36...
Granted, we now use an electronic system for television, but where would we have been without the analogue version?
Interrobang, graverobbing dead media since 1996
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
You must be a teenager still living with mommy if you don't see the reason for marketing. Wait until you grow up and enter the real world.
*laugh* I still remember how anoyed I was the first time I wasn't carded. It was in the 1980's.
But I guess I'm still among the very young at heart.
-- MarkusQ
Get over yourselves. Writing an operating system, or scripting language, or a new improved pac-man clone are not inventions. Developements on prior art (maybe).
Although I agree with the thesis, there are examples to the contrary. The most notable is the invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) by Kary Mullis for amplification of nucleic acids circa 1987. This was a one-man deal and became a major invention in spite of the corporation Kary Mullis was working for. BTW he won the Nobel Prize for it.
Vandana Shiva -- Patents: Myths and Reality
Penguin India,ISBN 014029824X
A great book destroying some myths, pointing out that a great deal of patents are based on work carried out over hundreds or possibly thousands of years, gradual accumulation of wisdom by people who shared knowledge for whatever reasons.... and along come (mainly western) corporations and claim they have invented a process or discovered a plant and some uses for it and wish to charge everybody else for doing so...
Free software movement? sharing by farmers been going on for thousands of years but the big companies are trying to close it down fast....
(blurb from the publishers follows....)
"Dr Vandana Shiva in her most recent offering, demystifies patent laws and highlights the ethical, ecological and economic impacts of globalised patent regimes."
Hiya. Yeah, a lone inventor will not control a whole product, usually. But so what? If your patent is used, you get c. 10% royalty. Sure, the big corp will make a killing on your idea. Yet you still become rich. So why would I care if I control a product? I'm in the patent game for CASH.
Frankly, you can make big bux on a product without patent; just get in early then get out.
This is what large corporations and Venture Capital would like you to believe.
Inventors first of all like solving problems !
I recommend to all inventors always CONTROL
51 % OF YOUR IDEAS !!!!
Never allow anyone to control your ideas, hold
out for your deal. The world needs you more than
you need the world. BE PATIENT !!!!
The problem with "inventions" is that whether something is truly unique, different, etc. is a human judgement call.
Inventions are not "objective", and so it requires expensive experts to not only understand the technology, but be in a place to influence decisions (such as a judge).
The murkier something is, the harder it is for raw merit to play the biggest role.
The best is probably for a small guy to get a patent (requires roughly 8 grand), and hope to license or sell it to a big company for a decent fee.
However, they have bigger lawyers and deeper pockets, so don't expect to make a killing, because they have more power to keep you from big money than you have to get it.
IOW, they don't mind much paying you small royalties, but when it comes to multi-millions of dollars, then they will fight tooth and nail for it also.
Perhaps if Farnsworth settled for a small stream of income from them, he would be fine. However, he probably was chasing big rainbow profits, and that is what possibly made him fail.
Fuzzy definitions + complexity = death of "lottery patents"
Table-ized A.I.
Gladwell's article does less to discount the successes of lone inventors than to support the successes of hackers, working alone or within an established research lab.
It is entirely possible to "invent" within a single, narrowly defined discipline. This happens most often in science as discoveries of fundamental principles or emergent phenomena. The inventor may or may not reduce the discovery to a technology, but he probably has a deep understanding of his discipline.
The successful hacker must not only be grounded in scientific fundamentals, but also have an archivists understanding of technology. Each technology can be seen as a potential member of a hacker's tool kit. The best hackers exploit multiple disciplines, crack finished technology into modular components, and rebuild to suite their vision.
We happen to living in an independent hacker's paradise: open access to science and "dumpsters" full of juicy tidbits. It isn't all hardware, either.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
(* But it was too late. Something had died in him. "It's come to the point of choosing whether I want to be a drunk or go crazy," he told his wife. One doctor prescribed chloral hydrate, which destroyed his appetite and left him dangerously thin. *)
Sounds like the doctor had discovered a weight-loss remedy. I find that far more useful than television. Watching television makes you fat; so something is needed to counteract that. Sounds like the perfect co-business. It would be like McAffee having a virus creation and distribution branch.
(* Philo Farnsworth should have gone to work for RCA. He would still have been the father of television, and he might have died a happy man. *)
He probably would have been bored and unfulfilled being just another cubicle dweller in the beurocracy of RCA. He does *not* sound like the kind of person who likes beurocracies.
Table-ized A.I.
There's nothing wrong with your perspective to invention, but one thing to note is it appears you're going for the "bleeding heart inventor" approach, which is to say that you don't care if you profit off your invention, which is fine, but when it's introduced to the wider world it's almost certain if that others WILL profit from your idea instead of you.
I don't see why this point is so hard for everyone to grasp:
There is nothing "bleeding heart" about wanting to meet your goals and not worrying over other people's get rich painfully schemes. Getting sucked into a dream of acquiring "wealth" I don't need by pushing my invention on people who don't want it on its merits and have to be "marketed" to is about as profitable to me as getting hooked on heroin would be. (Which, I might add, is more than a metaphore in some industries.)Here is a major clue: life is a blast, if you take the time to live it instead of always trying to "succeed" at near impossible goals that weren't your in the first place.
As for your model of how the world gets changed, I would say you're sorrily simplifying it, and ignoring the impact of organizations on innovation & invention over the past 100 years.
The images pumped to us by "the market" would tent to agree with you, but in my personal experience the individuals with a passion for what they are doing come first and then, if they succeed, history is rewritten by whoever has the biggest megaphone. As one friend of mine quiped, he worked seventeen years for the pure joy of doing what he loved, only to becpme "an overnight success" when he finally got funded by people who then made his life hell. When he left the company that he had "founded" to go back to actually enjoying life, the company's story was that he'd "burned out". He couldn't care less.
-- MarkusQ
...that's why we have Sourceforge...
We see a story that basically describes the theft of an idea and the ruin of a man. The conclusion that the author wants us to draw from this story is that individuals are powerless to bring new ideas to market and it is better to join a corporation to accomplish this. What bunk! The moral I am getting from this story (as if I did not know this already) is that big corporations use whatever means are at their disposal, whether ethical or unethical, to make a buck and crush anyone who is in their way.
that myth was debunked back in 1988 by Bruno Latour, in his Science in Action. Latour gives the example of the Diesel engine, which Diesel himself never actually got to work right -- he needed the resources of many machinists to turn his theoretical model into an actual working engine. Indeed, for Latour all of what he calls "technoscience" (the large domain of which science and technology are subsets) operates this way -- it is a system of networked resources, not a product of a few lone geniuses.
Inventions later than the introduction of metallurgy weren't considered inferior because they failed to use the materials at hand. Inventions that are put together by robots are no less important or imaginative than those put together by hand. Inventions that are put together in bits and bytes through software that was created at the hand of others are no less inventions than any physical widget.
Every programmer who has done something that has Not Been Done Before is an inventor. It doesn't matter one iota that the programmer didn't write vi (or Visual Basic if you prefer), and to degrade the newest inventions because they are built on the work of others is to throw all of the nature of invention throughout human history out the window.
Kickstart
NOT "spel" before you jump on others.
At 1st I thought you were joking but the "manefest" convinced me otherwise.
Lone inventors a myth? Nonesense! What about Stephen Olson?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
How long has it been since there has truly been a "lone" inventor?
Objects and ideas are not created in a vacuum.
One of the problems with United States intellectual property law is that it tends to glorify and emphasize the lone creator, the single autonomous author.
I personally think most ideas occur in a singular person's mind. Others around him can instigate it, refine it, criticize it etc. But the formation of an idea seems like an atomic congnitive process.
Oh, and the thing about big corporations inventing most things is that individuals in these companies come up with most of the ideas many times in isolation. The reasons for multiple names in patent applications has got more to do with social and manegerial influence than anything else. I work for _big company_ and most worth while ideas have been those that people work on by themselves after work, not the assignements their managers hand them. Even my VP says so!
Hence, I dont buy the thesis that individual inventor is dead.