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Franklin's Glass Armonica
CoffeePlease writes "At the time of his death in 1790, when more than 5,000 of his glass armonicas had been built, Ben Franklin had collected no money from his glass armonica. He refused to patent any of his inventions, saying: 'As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.' Read more here and here. A historical/sci-fi novel by Louise Marley has come out on the subject also. It would be interesting to find out if any other early inventors shared Franklin's generous views on patents." There's even a FAQ.
Franklin suffered severe nerve damage in his hands playing this. The vibrations cause the neveres to goes nuts in his hand, and he basically told everyoe to stop playing these things. It wasn't until late 1790s when someone developed a piano like interface that these started bein used again...
Man, gotta love those 8th grade reports I did 8 years ago.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
... that Franklin didn't patent his techniques involving lightning. Without a doubt, this would have greatly distressed Doctor Emmet Brown.
"Derp de derp."
Franklin also invented a more efficient fireplace, which he also built and sold. He was offered a patent on this by the Governor of Pennsylvania but refused.
That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.
-BF
He thought the idea of intellectual property to be a bit kooky.
If you're curious, read more about Franklin in the excellent biography The First American
But, contrary to belief, not everything I do is for profit, or if so, very indirectly.
You see, I place value of the general welfare of my fellow person. I contribute to charties, and donate things I no longer need that are in good repair, so that they can either be given to the poor, or sold, and the proceeds used to help them. I've gone so far as to donate running cars.
Yes, either I benefit, or my descendents will benefit, in some small way, from these acts, so a Randian might consider them quite rational. But, and this is the important thing, the general welfare of "clan Hollan" was not in my mind when I undertook these acts.
While it is all fine and good to be able to participate in a free market, we are not without compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves, whatever the reason. I, for example, had the good fortune to study a field (Computer Science) that has blossemed to fill an as unquenched thirst for skill in the market place. However, to argue that this was a calculated optimal decision on my part, as opposed to a calculated risk would be arrogance. In fact, I chose it becase I liked it and was good at it.
So, I can certainly empathize with those who's fortunes have not been as good as mine, though I do not feel a particular obligation to help the less fortunate.
Nevertheless, parting with that for which one feels no desire to exploit, so that the lives of others can be, in some small way, enriched, is no great misery, and in the minds of the recipients, might translate into the most wonderful gift of all.
You could've hired me.
Funny to see this on slashdot, I'm about 1/3 the way through Carl Van Doren's biography on Franklin. Right away I see the correlations between the armonica and his experiments with electricity, namely rubbing spinning glass (Leyden) jars with cloth. This is really a fabulous book, btw. It's amazing how active his mind was, and how un-pretentious he was, even after achieving fame. The fact that he didn't patent his inventions is, really stunning, especially given his thrift. This was not a man who cared nothing for wealth. He was just incredible well-scrupled, and early on devised a very involved person code which he lived by very well (although as I said I'm only 1/3 through the book). If you want to read about a truly great thinker, check out more on Benny.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
I don't remember any Beethoven compositions for glass harmonica but am not at all sure there weren't any. Glass Harmonica was very popular for a while. More recently composers including possibly Stravinsky and Hindemith (from vague memory, don't hold me to that) have composed for it as well.
"As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
They should make this the first line of The General Public License.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Inventors contemporary to Franklin may have had similar feelings about patents for a variety of reasons. First, the patent process that they knew of in England may have been unfair and/or corrupt (sound familiar?). From what I've heard, English IP laws of that era bore little resemblance to the IP law envisioned by the founders. They were more about aristocratic control. Many argue that our IP laws have been corrupted in a similar fashion; just substitute "aristocrats" with "corporations".
Secondly, it was easier to dismiss the value of IP in Franklin's time because mass production and interchangeable parts were not generally available. Post-revolution, Eli Whitney and others developed the mass production techniques. As the industrial revolution progressed, the quantity and quality of labor required to make physical copies of a device shrank dramaticly in proportion to the labor required to invent a device.
Thus, it seemed a folly to Franklin to patent his stove when the idea took 1 man-week to sketch, and perhaps 2 man-weeks *per unit* to produce.
On the other hand, Edison's lightbulb and the ribbon machines used to manufacture them took years to develop. Once this was done, each lightbulb took only a fraction of a second to produce. Therefore, it now makes perfect sense that the knowledge of how to make the bulbs is far more valuable than even a truckload of the bulbs themselves.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Is it just me, or does the quote sound more like a BSD license model? There is clearly no mention of requiring others to give derivative work away for free.
Of course, ethical considerations suggest that they do that, but these do not need to be codified in the license. In that way, Franklin's appears to be more in the BSD direction.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.