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Inventing the Telephone, Independently
An anonymous reader writes "There is a nice article about the history of the telephone at AmericanHeritage.com. Most of us know that Alexander Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by mere hours to claim credit for the invention of the telephone, but did you know that two other inventors can also claim the invention, including Thomas Edison? Similar disputes about independent invention and patent ownership can be found regarding the television, the airplane, and the automobile. Maybe it really is true: the economic benefit of encouraging patents is like that of encouraging window breaking."
Ah! here's the link to Thomas Jefferson's take on patents. http://www.usewisdom.com/sayings/patentsj.html
Even back in 1876, the USPTO ignored prior art.
Philipp Reis' version of the telephone is from 1860.
Antonio Meucci's version of the telephone is from 1854.
Meucci's version is not really the invention of
the phone either, the principle probably was discovered
by Page in 1837, but Meucci *did* file for a US
patent, which he did not get simply because he
ran out of funds.
So in 1876 there was a rush to get a patent
on the phone, where four guys competed, none
of whom was anywhere close to being the
original inventor of the phone.
Thomas
And Benjamin Franklin was generally against patents. He declined to patent his invention of the Franklin Stove.
According to Article I, sec. 8 of the US Constitution patents are supposed to promote the progress of science.
IMHO, copyrights can't survive the information age, but patents are far more evil. The imposition of patents in most cases is nothing short of plain physical coercion. The fact is that 99% of invention is progressive, just another stage built upon the countless other layers of understanding and invention already out there. The only competition that patents promote is trying to lock out new inventions that might allow new technology to bypass your patent portfolio.
That simply isn't true. There are issues with the patent system, but if you feel that 99% of the time they cause harm, you really just don't understand the entire issue. I can think of at least one industry that would literally die over night if patents were suddenly done away with.
Pharmaceutical research would pretty much grind to a halt without IP laws. It can take up to a billion dollars to push a single drug from discovery, to lab testing, past regulation, and into production. No one is going to drop a billion dollars just to have their closest competitor copy what they just achieved at not cost to themselves. It simply would not happen.
This is the case in a lot of leading edge fields. In a lot of fields you need to create something that is amazing complex and capital intensive. You need to drop millions or billions of dollars on developing a product before it becomes viable. IP protection is the only thing that gives you any sort of assurance that if you find something, someone just can't steal it.
I am not saying that the current IP system is all roses. In fact, it down right sucks in many ways. That said, claiming that IP in general is a great evil that needs to be done away with is utterly ignoring the role it serves in helping to spur R&D work.
...The article says: Bell was not the first to invent the telephone (that's why in Italy we honor Meucci for that, even though the idea was probably even earlier) but he was the first to patent it, because he was richer and had better lawyer. It seems that nothing has changed in the past 150 years after all.
Ander
@=
Well, if by "light bulb" you mean electric light, the phenomenom was well known in scientific circles back in 1820, as the folowing quote from "Oersted and the Discovery of Electromagnetism" at http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/fgregory/oersted.htm
shows:
"Since I expected the greatest effect from a discharge associated with incandescence, I inserted in the circuit a very fine platinum wire above the place where the needle was located."
In other words, a current through a thin wire made electric light.
Not very practical though, only known power source was galvanic batteries (Which quickly ran down), and needed expensive platinum wire to keep the filament from melting or burning up right away.
The obvious solution was to encase a cheaper filament in a vaccum (ie: bulb), but good vaccums were difficult to achieve, and good filaments were also a problem at the time. They needed to be cheap, very thin, mechanically strong, electrically conductive, (but not too much) and with stand high temprature, not an easy combo to come by.
After some twenty years of research, English physicist and electrician, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan successfully demonstrated a true incandescent bulb in 1878 (a year earlier than Edison) http://www.maxmon.com/1878ad.htm
Not that they were the only two working on it, just the first two to produce a practical version that got public attention. (As I recall, a German and a Canadian also demonstrated similar lights at about the same time, but I can't remember their names.) }:-P
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
source
There was no TV patent dispute: Farnsworth invented it, RCA attempted to steal it and failed. The history of RCA under Sarnof is truly disgusting. The company fortune was built on patents stolen from Major Armstrong who invented the super regenerative, super heterodyne, and FM radios as well as the phase lock loop. Armstrong committed suicide after he lost - in one of the worst court decisions in recorded history.- the FM case to RCA
Most of the abuses of the patent system would simply disappear if only individuals could own patents - instead of companies.
Innovation 'expenditures' (time&money) are pulled from leisure time. In other words: We won't spend our time inventing before we hunt and gather food. So while the previous million years people spent the bulk of their day just trying to survive, we now complain when there are three people in queue at the checkout.
Actually, historically, it looks like patents did nothing. From (pdf warning) Against Intellectual Monopoly: They go on to quote from these studies, both for patent and copyright. With one exception (Copyright in France, and only France, not all of Europe) copyright and patent were introduced and
They do then, however show that in areas where there was no protection, innovation ran rampant: take software as an example. Unprotected by patent, software has nonetheless come a long way, and now with patents looming ugly I think we can all see that innovation is going to be stifled, or at least reserved to big companies that have patent portfolios with which they can bargain with other big companies
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Baird stuck with mechanical scanning and display well into the thirties, long after the superiority of a pure electronic system had been demonstrated.
I have a feeling that Meucci's mental problems and personal life problems delayed the original patent, but that there is little doubt now that he actually invented the telephone.
It's almost certain that Bell stole the patent for the telephone with a little help from Edward B Grant at Western Union (who kept putting off Meucci's attempts to give a demonstration) and certain individuals at the Patent Office who coincidentally 'lost' Meucci's paperwork. Far from being innovitive, Bell was nothing more than a slimy shit - at least as far as being involved in the actual invention of the telephone is concerned.
The United States started fraud proceedings against Bell, which were only dropped with the death of Meucci in 1896.
And to think it took until 2001 for the US senate to recognize the fact that Meucci did actually invent it. This great milestone would not have been achieved without the deep investigative work of Basilio Catania.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
It may be argued that the telephone was invented around 1860 by Antonio Meucci who called it teletrophone.
e phone
Despite a public statement by the then Secretary of State that "there exists sufficient proof to give priority to Meucci in the invention of the telephone," and despite the fact that the United States initiated prosecution for fraud against Bell's patent, the trial was postponed from year to year until, at the death of Meucci in 1896, the case was dropped.
The first American demonstration of Meucci's invention took place in 1860, and had a description of it published in New York's Italian language newspaper. Meucci invented a paired electro-magnetic transmitter and receiver, where the motion of a diaphram modulated a signal in a coil by moving an electromagnet. This resulted in a good fidelity, but a very weak signal. Meucci is also credited with the early invention of the anti-sidetone circuit, and of inductive loading of telephone wires to increase long-distance signals. Unfortunately, serious burns, lack of English and poor business abilities resulted in Meucci failing to develop his inventions commercially in America. Meucci demonstrated some sort of instrument in 1849 in Havana, Cuba, but the evidence is unclear if this was an electric telephone or a variant on the string telephone using wires.
Meucci was born in Florence, Italy. He studied chemical and mechanical engineering at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and later worked in theatres as a stage technician. Besides electric voice transferral, he invented and patented many devices that were based on chemical and mechanical processes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_tel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci