Slashdot Mirror
Alexander Graham Bell - Patent Thief?
DynaSoar writes "MSNBC is carrying an AP article reviewing a book, due out January 7, that claims to show definitive evidence that Bell stole the essential idea for telephony from Elisha Gray. Author Seth Shulman shows that Bell's notebooks contain false starts, and then after a 12-day gap during which he visited the US Patent Office, suddenly show an entirely different design, very similar to Gray's design for multiplexing Morse code signals. Shulman claims that Bell copied the design from Gray's patent application and was improperly given credit for earlier submission, with the help of a corrupt patent examiner and aggressive lawyers. Shulman also claims that fear of being found out is the reason Bell distanced himself from the company that carried his name. And if Gray Telephone doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, Shulman also noted that both of them were two decades behind the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis, who produced the first working telephony system."
In the history profession, we used to have an idea called "Great Men" (the idea that great, unique individuals make history). But in recent decades, this idea has fallen out of favor in the history field, in favor of the idea that mass movements and attitude shifts within the larger society "make" the history (the so-called "Zeitgeist" idea). Traditionally, inventions like the phone, radio, etc. have been attributed to a unique individual genius. Yet, the more we learn, we see that theses inventions seemed almost "in the air" of the times, with any number of people developing them independently of one another. It seems that if Edison hadn't "invented" the phonograph, someone else would have (and someone else probably did, or was at least working on it at the same time).
I used to be a big proponent of "Great Men" history myself, but stuff like this gives me pause.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Brought to you by the isn't-this-just-a-little-bit-too-late department.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So he's sort of the Bill Gates of the 19th century.
Proverbs 21:19
Bell Stamp: I invented the telephone.
Gray: You stole it from me, Elisha Gray.
Bell: Read the patent number, bitch!
stuff |
Long before the mentioned men 'invented' the telephone in 1834 italian Antonio Meucci invented it - that was aknowledged by the US House of Representatives in 2002 - "if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci
Just saying it like it are.
Now that you mention it, this news rings bell.
I'm another victim of this type of fraud. It seems that there needs to be a safeguard against this type of thing.
I invented a little button that allows you to buy things by clicking a single button once, but I keep getting threatened with law suits!! THIS NEEDS TO STOP! I WANT MY ROYALTIES! Damn you patent squatters!
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
first Leibniz, now this Reis guy. What's up with the German's and saying "oh look at us vee did it loooooong ago"?
I don't think you have to look much farther than calculus (Newton and Leibnoz) or evolution (Darwin and Wallace) or the incandescant light bulb (Edison and a cast of hundreds) to see that this is so.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
...every major invention was stolen from me. Any day now I'm going to invent everything, including a time machine. I'll get stuck in the past when everyone will start stealing my ideas. I'll die penniless in 1926.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
We're debating patents how many decades old when there are patents now that are obvious rip offs and trolling? Yes, this is an interesting historical debate about how broken the patent system IS and has been but don't we have more pressing current matters with the patent office?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Really. There is a missing time, and then government official help him, cause they are all corrupt, and then evil lawyers came in to shut everyone up.
The more you look at it the more people that would have been involved.
Please. How about some, oh I don't know, evidence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even the article concedes that Gray's invention wasn't for spoken words over the phone, it was for multiplexing morse code signals to make a more efficient telegraph. Sure, Gray may have been the better technologist, but Bell should get some larger props for seeing the point that you wouldn't need telegraphs any more at all. Saying that Gray invented the telephone because Bell borrowed some of his ideas is like saying that Reimann invented Relativity because Einstein used some of his math. In both cases, it was the application and vision of a technology that is more interesting than the mechanism itself. Neither Bell nor Gray's inventions are even relevant now, but the idea of spoken communications at a distance is.
This is my sig.
Don't forget that the patent establishment has invested a huge amount of money and effort, over the last 150+ years, to promote a mythology to support its claims to perpetuate its system of exclusive privileges. The myths are deep and taken as real by many who should be more skeptical. I debunked the main myths on Free Software Magazine.
One of the big old myths is the "inventor" and "invention" myths. In fact, innovation is well understood (since the mid-1800's at least) to be a social effect, driven by market demand for new products and enabled by technological progress. Produce a new material in cheap enough quantities, and dozens of "inventors" will come up with similar new applications for it.
Of course there cases of lone inventors who work outside the rest of society - these are so rare they prove the general case that invention is the result of a social network. And this social network, which may be less obvious in some industries, is absolutely central to the innovation process in software, which is why the concept of software patents is to utterly bogus and corrupt.
Patents of all kinds are just a form of protectionist economics, along with trade barriers, subsidies, legislated monopolies, and so on. These work for those who can work the system, everyone else pays the cost.
My blog
And Bell's legacy continues in both spirit and in deed by all of corporate America to this very day.
I thought this was established historical fact. What with the patent clerk who let Bell have the patent owning up and all.
I've known about this for years, since I was a teenager.
A patent can be on an idea not yet realised, so long as you detail the process involved.
So Bell's patent could have been a process to transmit sound along wires. He didn't need to prove it was possible.
There's been many patents lodged that haven't been made into a product, only for someone else to implement the same idea years later.
Nothing like beating a dead horse. It's like trying to figure out who poisoned one of the presidents back in the early 1800's. He's dead, the person(s) who did it are dead, and so are their children.
Oh, I guess we'll have to give reparations like the BS with the blacks over slavery.
Anyone who believes patents aren't a necessity in a free market system is a fool. If it weren't for patents we'd have one or two large corporations who manufatured and sold us everything. Anybody who came up with a new idea would have it copied by one of the large companies and brought to market faster and cheaper than the person who initially invented it.
Edison just patented the idea of running current through a wire to make it hot and glow in that way. He wasn't original in that aspect, it was one of basic science demonstrations to burn up a wire with electricity. He just patented it for use of lighting, but he did not have a working lightbulb or anything else beyond the common science demo. Then when someone else invented de glass lightbulb to prevent oxidation, he claimed his wire glowing patent and became rich and famous.
Then why is it that the huge corporations like Intel and IBM are the ones with the giant patent portfolios? Maybe because they are using them to destroy small competitors?
On the other hand, let's say there are 4.5 billion people in the world (I'm not sure how many there were back then). That's a lot of people; is it really so strange that two people with have the same idea, given that they have the same technology, the same lack in technology, etc...?
I am willing to bet that Eddison himself knew this.
The fact that he claimed invention was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration would imply to me that all you need to do is brute force it.
Of course, an argument could still be made that the patent system encourages brute forcing out the correct thing. My friend worked for the material sciences (or some such) lab at the university. He pulled stuff apart all day. There was an off chance that something wouldn't actually pull apart, and then the real fun begins. The amount of people that are making substances to pull apart is probably quite huge (relative to the one person whom would be credited with inventing the awesome new composite), but in a non-academic situation (and are even school labs purely academic?) the fact that you will get years to make money on it is encouragement to pay people to try and pull it apart on the off chance it is you that succeeds.
As far as finding new uses for the new awesome material the patent system probably helps a whole lot less.
That is why I personally think our system is broken. It should be designed around encouraging the raw R&D (create new material, like Goretex) not the marketing of it (jacket that breathes while being waterproof), which is surely the way things are going now.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The system is essentially a "finders-keepers" deal, as it sits.
If you want to fix the patent system, then you will reconstruct it roughly as follows:
- Accept all submissions that pass a basic sanity check
- Keep all submissions secret for X [days|weeks|months]
- If two submissions are received for the same "invention" within this timeframe, then disallow it as obvious
- To help facilitate a baseline for obvious, allow the general public to submit their obvious ideas at no charge (no need to check this overwhelming amount of info - but keep it handy for posterity).
- Require patent applicants to outline the level of investment necessary to realize a given patent - the system was designed to protect the investments of entrepreneurs so, if little to no investment is required, then there is no need for a patent on a given idea. Also, patent suit awards could be derived from this information accordingly.
Just some common sense, people.More
Anyone who believes patents aren't a necessity in a free market system is a fool. If it weren't for patents we'd have one or two large corporations who manufatured and sold us everything. Anybody who came up with a new idea would have it copied by one of the large companies and brought to market faster and cheaper than the person who initially invented it.
The problem here is that you are putting too much value on ideas. Ideas aren't really worth that much. If anything, its the implementation of the ideas that is worth something. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
#!/
Today I have more respect for Bell.
Check out the Wright Brother's patent story for how the pursuit of patents and copyrights is the ruin of more than more inventor.
http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Sky-Hammond-Curtiss-Airplane/dp/0060956151/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198767099&sr=8-2
From the review at Amazon:
"The first flyers were so secretive and desperate to cash in on their invention that their behavior actually "retarded" the development of aviation."
The Wright Brothers felt they had "invented flight". They were trying to interpret their patents as broadly as possible. Eventually, WW I forced the US Government to force the Wrights to share the patents with other companies. The Wright brothers did not come to a happy end. That part of the story is never told in elementary school history.
Patents and copyrights are broken. They've always been broken, and I suspect they will be broken to a certain extent. They just happen to be extraordinarily broken at the moment.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Yep. And if stuff like that did not make you pause the fact that you gave an example which was simultaneously invented by at least two people should.
Radio was invented nearly simultaneously by Marconi and Popov in 1895 and surprise surprise it was all based on a work by German (Hertz) from a few years before that. Similarly, while Marconi invented very little (most inventions were done by Hertz, Popov and Ducretes) he gets the credit because he successfully drove it through the patent system.
Yet another history repeating... http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/theressomethingaboutmary/historyrepeating.htm
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Sorry folks, but the free market decided where the telephone originated from. To even hint otherwise is to foolishly doubt the perfect, well-oiled machine that is our free market system, plus you're just hating America. You see, people aren't corrupt. Certainly people with connections, corporate, government, or otherwise aren't corrupt. The free market is self correcting and will automatically counter any sort of dishonesty and fraud and what is left is simply the best of all possible worlds.
Even if many inventions were actually the result of several people rushing to create the same thing, doesn't the possibility of fame and fortune help to drive all of them? Patents help to create that possibility - that the inventor will get to make a fortune, rather than having his/her idea copied and dominated by people who simply have better manufacturing capacities.
Only one runner wins a race, but all the runners compete with the prize in mind. I don't think you can assume that since there are many runners, the prize isn't important.
I do understand that patent trolling makes the whole system look useless, but I think that reform is the answer, not abandonment.
I should have said this in my parent post, but the X Prizes are a good example. Would teams compete so hard to design efficient cards if there were no prize money, and if big auto companies could simply take their designs without paying for them?
We just had a story on the Automotive X Prize recently. I'm excited to see what it will produce.
"
The patent was later given to Tesla.
I worked for the Gray Telephone and Telepgraph company in Los Angeles in the 80s. It had been renamed "Teleautograph" and made those funny "telewriter" things. They were getting out of that and selling fax machiens and over the power line email terminals when I left in 1989.
Need Mercedes parts ?
This is not to insult him, Mr. Reis was a relatively undereducated man, and deserves more recognition for his brillance.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Thank you. I was going to comment along the same lines but I also wanted to point out that there is more to "inventing" than simply conceptualizing an idea, you have to make it practical and economical as well. John Logie Baird created the first working television system which he designed around electromechanical principles, but when the money men saw the superiority of an all-electronic system his invention died off. Like so many innovators before him, he wasn't able to make it practical.
Similarly, Nikola Tesla developed a working wireless system well before Marconi, but because Tesla essentially left the technology to sit on the shelf it took Marconi to popularize and promote it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1nWMach6Qo
I wish I had mod points. True, very true. I've had any number of ideas over the years that - within a couple of years - became highly successful products. Of course, I lacked the financing and technical know-how to make them into those successful products, which is why I'm not a billionaire. Consider the MP3 player - anybody could have figured out it was going to be a big product. But you had to put in the time to make a compact device with good battery life and a decent UI, which was the hard part.
whoever invented the phone is a PITA and their phone is a PITA
rudest gadget anyone ever came up with
why is it the phone gets priority over:
-- the person in your office talking with you
-- your current task you are working on
why is it the phone allows rude people to thrust themselves into your office and even into your home?
the phone is definitely a modern invention that was NOT progress
Samuel Morse had it right
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Isaac_Newton/
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
I think you've got it backwards, actually. Implementation is cheap, once the idea is understood. If the only barrier was implementation, then there would be nothing new, only things that we knew could be done, that we have finally become able to produce.
The reason for the patent system is to keep people from hiding their ideas away. The alternative to the patent system isn't free information, but severely protected, jealously guarded information. Products would be more expensive, because you'd have to safeguard the ideas that went into them by building misdirection into the product. Ideas could actually be lost, in cases where the inventor dies with his secret, which, of course, he'd be unable to share with anyone without endangering his livelihood.
I don't disagree that the patent system is completely screwed up right now, but the solution is not to throw it away. It has a purpose.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Edison definitely thought he knew this. He was a hack who had to use experiments to do everything, which is why he hired so many people to do the grunt work. To Edison, science was an industrial business process of data collection.
Contrast this with the efforts of such as Tesla, and you see an example of genius at work. Genius is about intuition. It's about having a massive jumble in your head that you assemble into a coherent system by deduction, then test afterwards.
Patents are about protecting people like Edison and those who make science a clever trick to hold over your fellow man and money off them. It's about protecting them from people like Tesla, who are idealistic and want to communicate the truths they see to be self-evident and see them exploited to the greatest degree possible, even if there's nothing in it for them.
Patents are, and have always been, economic weapons used to keep other people from knocking the King of the Castle down from his perch. They are uniformly bad for progress.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The system works.
Lawyers, guns, and money... the shit has hit the fan
What?
Did Massachusetts recognise Cerruti as the inventor of the telephone?
I just wish that we could put an end to the one answer myth.
It is both.
The phonograph is actually a prime example of the Great Man idea. No one was really working on the idea of recording sound until Edison invented the phonograph.
The incandescent light bulb, the airplane, and radio where all inventions that where well on the way.
The real answer is that sometimes it is a brilliant flash from the blue and other times it is a lot of great people working on a problem and one of them gets there first.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What is less known about that particular quote, is that it's actually a finely-crafted insult from Newton, aimed at Hooke.
The two men had a very acrimonious relationship, and Hooke had accused Newton of "borrowing" ideas from him in the past. Hooke was a short man, and Newton's quote was basically saying "I have indeed made use of the discoveries of great men, but you are not one of those men". The implication is that Hooke was a midget in scientific terms, as well as in physical stature.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Certainly you are right that the patent system has a lot invested in the "great man" mystique. I don't have a problem with this. What I have a problem with is that the patent system grants two orders of magnitude more patents than the number of great inventors justifies.
In general, if society determines that a precious resource is scarce, the reward is vastly amplified. Your argument would justify a patent system where 1 to 10 percent as many patents were awarded, but the patent itself in those cases had far more profound powers. the concept of software patents is to utterly bogus and corrupt Your argument doesn't support this assertion. Your points would be better suited to putting forward an argument that there is so little shortage of innovation in modern society that we would be better off without the patent system altogether, as there is no practical way to implement the patent system where the benefits outweigh the abuses.
I personally believe that Shuji Nakamura's work deserved a full measure of reward. Nor do I believe that cases like Nakamura are especially rare. The problem is that we've drowned the good work in sheep dip sea of patented mediocrity.
The patent system is now and always has been corrupt. Bell deserves the credit in my mind because at least he built something and demonstrated making it work. This is the long existing problem with the patent system. Simply put make a real product, make it work, show it working and make it available OR : NO PATENT FOR YOU!
The system needs to be reformed, any patent help by someone not actually using that patent to make available an actual product based on that patent needs to loose the patent. DONE. Going forward NO patents for anything that doesn't actually exist, and work. You have oh say 5 years from the filing of the patent to put the damn thing on the market, or it becomes invalid. If it goes off the market the patent also becomes invalid.
No more of these patent IP holding companies that come out of no place when someone works up a brilliant concept to which they can then under some insanely broad banner claim rights to the idea.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
In most of these cases, there's some communication between the individuals working on the same idea, but most of the work is done in private. Often the appearance of their work is different, though, even if it's fundamentally the same. (The calculus is a good example.)
Even then, scientists and inventors were not that insular -- the foundations of all of these discoveries had been slowly generating through previous works. In more recent times, the communication within the scientific community makes this standard -- WW2 through the Cold War is full of examples where the same thing was invented twice.
First of all, the Gray patent was for sending multiple telegraph signals over one wire, nowadays known as analog frequency-division multiplexing. Bell either had the same idea, or borrowed parts of Gray's ideas, and by accident, made a telephone. It seems a bit of a stretch to call Gray's idea a "telephone", as it was more like sending beep-boop-bork tones over one wire. Nothing to do with voice. ANd it's also a stretch to claim Bell "stole" the Telephone idea. Independent inventions happen all the time.
"Genius is about intuition. It's about having a massive jumble in your head that you assemble into a coherent system by deduction, then test afterwards."
Of course, lock a genious in a cellar for fifty years of uninterrupted invention and what do you get?
I mean, really. If you had an average genious and stuck them in a cellar in 1957 and let them out today, would they have a bunch of marvellous inventions? Or would they have a bunch of stuff that would have been marvellous inventions in 1958?
Even the best genious requires the input of the entire world to create the massive jumble from which they take the intuitive leaps, and the progress of a million monkeys building upon eachothers advances inevitably outpaces the single geniouses.
"It's about protecting them from people like Tesla"
I'd say it's more about protecting them from competition and further progress. They could always libel, ostracise and marginalize people like Tesla. They might not be able to do the same thing to another businessman who took Teslas ideas and produced competetive and cheaper or better products.
"They are uniformly bad for progress."
Without a doubt.
it's possible that it's because they are actually spending R&D dollars that others don't have. Unlikely, I know. But possible.
Edison was more commercial, but again, you simply cannot use that fact to discount his contribution or the number of inventions he and his team created. The breakthrough with the lightbulb wasn't knowing how to make a lightbulb -- everyone in the field had the basic idea already -- it was findng a filament that didn't burn out after ten seconds. Edison's team tried THOUSANDS of filaments before they found one that worked. By applying brute force, Edison and his team did more good than any number of people who had great ideas but couldn't productize them.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
He really didn't invent the chair with extra legs and the electric hammer?
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
What an odd hobby you have.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Next time you need a cop, ambulance, or a fireman, be sure to break out the signal lamp. :)
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Trade secrets are very hard to keep in any case. There are a million ways that trade secrets leak out, most trivially by people taking a good look at the products in question. If a secret could be really kept, the person holding it would not seek a patent. There would be no point. Secrecy is a cheaper and more efficient protection for a market, if it's possible. The patent protects ideas that cannot be otherwise protected. So in fact you have it completely backwards: the patent system protects ideas that are otherwise unprotectable.
And since disclosing ideas before they are patented is harmful to getting a patent, the patent system actually discourages disclosure and promotes secrecy.
Society gets the worst possible deal - monopolies in exchange for ideas that would become public knowledge anyhow, and increased secrecy in areas where collaboration is needed for innovation.
It's not a sane system. It exists because of the logic of power and money and history, not economic logic.
My blog
What most conventional histories of Edison and the light bulb ignore is that Edison's group developed a lot of the infrastructure for an electric lighting utility. These included improved dynamos, metering systems, etc.
"Ideas could actually be lost, in cases where the inventor dies with his secret, which, of course, he'd be unable to share with anyone without endangering his livelihood."
First of all: Sure, nobody uses trade secrets today, eh? And second of all, an 'idea' is not worthy of a patent. If it were then I'd have a pile of patents every week.
With the quality of 99 out of every 100 patents being granted today, nobody would care if the 'idea' would forever be 'lost', because first of all those patents do not describe anything nobody else has already thought of, and second of all they are written in a language that only a patent lawyer can read (e.g. useless for everybody else).
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Actually, no. There is always a relationship somewhere. All technologies these days (and for the past decades, or maybe centuries) is based on something previously in existence, be it a technology, ideas, concepts etc.
Also, you are correct the lack in technology is a great factor. Most creations are made to solve a given problem already in existence. You can see it on the F/OSS movement: scratching your own itch, I think they call it.
The problem is there are always too many things to consider, so a correct historical analyzes is usually not possible. Historical researchers can only do so much.
morcego
In one of his F&SF essays, Isaac Asimov, asserts that the expression assumes the third definition of "prove": "To determine the quality of by testing; try out."
That is really the only sense in which an exception could be said to prove a rule, at any rate. Now I seem to remember the essay applying that idea to the expression:
"The barber cuts everyone in town's hair, except for those who cut their own. Who cuts the barber's hair?"
Patents are not part of a "free market system", and like Copyright (big C not little c), they are a stain on a free and democratic society. Additionally, Democracy and Freedom are more important than capitalist 'free markets', so I guess the entire point is moot.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This Great Men vs. Zeitgeist theory was played out in Philosophy of Science in the 70's (see Karl Popper's "Science: Conjectures and Refutations" and Thomas Kuhn's "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research").
I personally believe the famous quote by Sir Issac Newton, "If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." I interpret this to mean that there is a requirement for both - the air of discovery and a certain talent for combining data.
Interestingly enough, the same issue was played out in the invention of Calculus. There was a requirement and two very talented individuals came up with exceedingly similar solutions. In this case, there is enough evidence to discount collusion, but it is still an interesting case study.
>Implementation is cheap, once the idea is understood.
Oh, like fusion?
In science where patents aren't part of the problem there is still the "first come - first served" problem, but in that case the secondary contributions doesn't have to be dismissed - they can actually improve parts of the first contribution with only a small risk of the risk of costly lawsuits. It's more the cost of pride that can cause problems in the science world. (OK, you may miss the Nobel prize - but it's just a frosting on the cake if you take a wider view)
Even if patents weren't we would still have had progress. There are always people that tends to keep secrets (look at the military) and some inventions are never documented (some persons are bright but can never stop and put down their ideas on paper). Leonardo daVinci was quite the opposite - he actually left a lot behind for others to take up. Not everything may be useful - like the helicopter.
And as conceived before - the persons that benefits most from patents are the lawyers. Safe money regardless of the outcome of a case!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
In 1876, a working model was still required by the USPTO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_model
The next thing to remember is to put next things next.
This is a fantastic point, because being able to produce a product that works is much more important than the idea itself. Invention is not so much about ideas as it is about putting ideas to work in a way that is both affordable and usable.
Typically if someone comes up with an idea there's a dozen others who have thought of it too, it's the one who goes ahead and makes it/markets it/sells it that usually separates the successful one.
How is this considered Science? Why is this in the science section?
Answer: We don't know what science is anymore and think anything technological is scientific.
Example: Look at the Sci/Tech section of google news. It does not contain any science, but is entirely geek garbage tech that is mostly M$ coverage. From Google this is not surprising, but could not be further from science. This confusion between science and technology is very common and in my opinion comes from a collective preference for entertainment over reality. Slashdot is no different.
Not very impressive, Timothy.
Ironically David Sarnoff founder of RCA(originalparent company of NBC and MSNBC)performed a similar sleight of hand by "inventing" television ,conveniently bypassing Philo Farnsworth. This stuff happens all the time. It's the "investor" rather than the inventor that sells the product which is what it's all about anyway Most inventors forget that the invention(even when patented) is of no profit to them without the means of sales and distribution and fail to prepare adequately for this.
Marcel Sislowitz
Actually, here is a nice little time line describing how Tesla was the first to demonstrate, patent, etc a radio.
http://www.mercury.gr/tesla/marcen.html
From other sources, it appears that Marconi directly used Tesla's inventions (patented) in his demonstration of cross Atlantic radio communication.
Other than being a good business man and furthering the use of radio, he really had very little to do with its invention.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I for sure know, the telephone was invented in Jamaica, as a taxi driver there told me: "yah man, dis is de place of the first telephone. It was an old man who invented it. But he had nobody to call and so he had put it away"
Meucci had a voice link from his workshop to his mother year's before Bell's "patent". He'd been suing Bell for years when he ran out of money/died. It's pretty well established that Bell stole his patents. I think If you read the page linked to in the relevant foot note, you will see it's not as cut and dried as you selectively quoted. And who is Tomas Farley anyway? I can't see anything in Wikipedia quoting him as an expert on anything.
What we do know is that Meucci's sample hardware submitted to the Patent Office was "mislaid", and that one of Bell's close business associates worked at the Patent Office. Coincidence maybe, but worth investigating deeper than pulling a random quote from Wikipedia by an unknown source.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
If you want to get worked up over something like this, look up the stories of Philo T. Farnsworth or Nathan Stubblefield.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro was in attendance. Dom Pedro was an acquaintance of Bell, meeting him at the Boston School for the Deaf.
Apparently the judges were going to ignore Bell and his telephone. But Dom Pedro attracted their attention by going to the exhibit and greeting Bell. Bell gave Dom Pedro the receiver. As Dom Pedro listened to Bell recite Hamlet, Dom Pedro heard every word and exclaimed "My God, it talks!" The papers covered this historic event and the telephone was launched.
How disenchanting for Elisha Gray. He was at Dom Pedro's side at the Centennial Exposition.
On this same day of Bell's demonstration to Dom Pedro, June 25, General George Custer met his unfortunate death in the hills of Little Big Horn, Montana. Alexander Graham Bell
So there you have it.
Bell was reading Hamlet from the the main building one hundred yards away,
If Elisha Gray has a telephone ready for public demonstration in the spring of 76 why is he standing on the sidelines when Bell strikes gold at America's first World's Fair?
In June of 1877 the future AT&T is not only a viable commercial enterprise but a clear threat to Western Union. If Gray hasn't spent the year sleeping at the switch why doesn't he have a marketable product to compete with Bell?
To the Wrights, the central problem of flight was control in three dimensions, an insight that evolved naturally from their work with bicycles, and eluded others like Langley with far greater resources. Elisha Gray was an electrical engineer. Bell an expert in speech and hearing. Bell needed a technician to construct his apparatus.
But there is no question that he was headed in the right direction and moving very quickly near the end.
Elisha Gray was my great, great, great grandfather.
That is all.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
There is little doubt that since "necessity is the mother of invention" several individuals would be working independently to solve the same problem. The "social effect" can be little more than trying to fill a need (or more aptly trying to satisfy demand). If there is demand for a solution, then naturally you would have more than one person looking to meet that demand (and possibly earn a living doing it).
In addition, as the technical aptitude of the populace increases the likelihood that someone would build "a better mousetrap" increases. Taking this into consideration, these social effects could be simply what you would expect statistically given a large enough population.
So the real question becomes, does the likelihood of multiple individuals creating a similar solution to solve a particular problem diminishes the justification of the patent system? No. It simply rewards the first one who created a working solution.
The next question becomes, does the patent system improve society since it rewards the innovator with a temporary monopoly in exchange for disclosing the method to how the problem was solved? Yes. Before the patent system, there were secret societies and guilds that kept their monopoly by keeping their methods secret and exerting political pressure within a township. We have the technological savvy today because others are able to learn from these disclosures.
So why is the patent system being attacked? Well on one side you have an overworked and poorly equipped staff of the patent office that must deal with applications written by lawyers that have mastered the art of bullshit. On the other side, you have a generational shift from the "That idea was so simple, I'm surprised that I didn't think of it first" to the "That idea was so simple, it is blatantly obvious and I could have gotten a patent on it earlier if I wanted to." Of course this is a gross simplification of the generational shift, but it does accurately portray the attitude of most of the comments posted here on slashdot.
Is the patent system perfect? Hell no.
The controversy over the patent system has more to do with patentability of software than the existence of the system. So does software algorithms deserve patent protection? No. Does a method of performing something tangible that may include a software component deserve a patent? Maybe. I leave it to the reader to look at the many slashdot discussions that have been made in the past...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
What good did all of those people with the same idea do us?
It took one person investing a lot of resources into it to find the working solution. The geniuses will continue to do their research, but the unglamorous part needs to be profitable or no one will want to do it.
In what way did Eddison's patents hold back Tesla? (this is a real question, I thought Tesla was very theroretical, and didn't realize that he was hampered by patents at all).
Eddison took the theroretical and made it something I could buy, and it was an expensive thing to do. He could do it quicker than anyone else, because he was willing to sink the resources into it. In 15 years we all win from his brute force effort (and if the monopoly is not abused too much we could all win instantly).
I (as you) believe that people like Eddison typify what the patent system was supposed to do, we just look at them differently. The extreme case of this brute forcing an invention is in the medical industry. Do you really think we would have drugs developed without patent protections?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
perhaps this theory of determinism over individualism is more fitting when looking at niche inventions. when society needs a certain concept, or innovation, and there exists a finite number of solutions, and within those, a single - or even several a la Edison/Tesla - feasible solution, it is more like that the individual is less important.
in terms of history at large, i don't know that it is so easy to say that the individual does not account for the majority of the history. looking at post ww1 germany, it is clear that almost any strong-minded person could have stepped in and scapegoated any aspect of german society. this occurred similarly in spain, post spanish-american war. low and behold, both countries ended up under the tyranny of fascism. of course, we know that while the inception was similar, the outcomes of the two countries were certainly different. - on a side note, here, ww2 is constantly referred to as the war that ended fascism, though franco was the de facto king of nationalist/fascist spain until the mid 1970s.
so, it may be true to say that it is circumstance (determinism) that is the greatest father of history, but also that individualism (or the "great man" as it was put) certainly changes outcome.
in the immortal words of socrates, "i drank what?"
"I used to be a big proponent of "Great Men" history myself, but stuff like this gives me pause."
I've always liked the term 'One in a Million'. Ok, so if your idea is one in a million. Think about how many others across the globe had that idea. Not to discredit great ideas or anything. But stories like this certainly give me pause as well. Give credit where credit is due certainly. But giving credit to the person who hit the patent office first and talked to the right people is a bit stupid.
I should have been a patent lawyer so I could have helped pick the winners.
I think you've got it backwards, actually. Implementation is cheap, once the idea is understood. If the only barrier was implementation, then there would be nothing new, only things that we knew could be done, that we have finally become able to produce.
And the evidence for this assertion is... what exactly?
The reason for the patent system is to keep people from hiding their ideas away
That is the justification. But if you look at how the patent system is actually being used, people still hide away a lot of important stuff, and the actual underlying inventions are often developed at universities and with public funds.
I don't disagree that the patent system is completely screwed up right now, but the solution is not to throw it away. It has a purpose.
It has an intended purpose; whether it actually accomplishes that purpose is something that has never been established.
FWIW, I don't think sudden changes in the patent system are a good idea. But there are a bunch of things that need to be implemented over time:
* standards for patentability need to be raised considerably
* patent holders need to submit working samples and schematics/source code for any product they intend to protect
* the presumption that an issued patent is valid needs to be removed; during a court challenge, the patent holder needs to defend the validity of the patent
* it needs to become easier to challenge patents
* lack of enforcement or use needs to lead to a loss of the patent
* we need to use public policy to decide what classes of inventions ought to be patentable
* groups like MPEGLA may need to get broken up under anti-trust enforcement
Does that mean if L. Ron hadn't invented Scientology somebody else would have? ;)
Scary thought.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Can't we have one meeting that doesn't end with digging up a corpse?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The logic of power and money is economic logic. Try again, this time with reason and logic.
Further you point out that the patent system discourages disclosure prior to a patent being issued? Can you name a system that encourages disclosure that early in the process and still rewards innovation? (Scientific method perhaps, but the rewards for innovation are weak absent a patent system.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"free market" is core to Freedom. All other systems are designed to reduce your freedom.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Arguing over religion is like arguing over who's invisible friend is better.
>The idea on how to implement is still being formulated
I'm the immediate parent AC of your post.
I think you've actually made my point: the parent of my post was dividing the matter into two parts: (1)Idea & (2)Implementation. You're further subdividing it into (1)Idea (concept) / (2)Implementation Idea (design) / (3)Implementation (construction). By your subdivision, yes, the "middle" part is hard, and the last part is *relatively* easier. Of course, we can do an infinite regress on your part (3). The "patent line" could be drawn at any of those stages.
I didn't realize that when Edison said that invention is 99% perspiration, he was talking about the walk down to the patent office.
*ducks*
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Alexander Graham Bell was the Bill Gates of his time.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
....or Steve Wozniak. *ducks
No, it's not surprising at all. It is, in fact, the exact phenomenon under discussion. Try to pay more attention.
In what way did Eddison's patents hold back Tesla? (this is a real question, I thought Tesla was very theroretical, and didn't realize that he was hampered by patents at all).
Let me just throw out some quotes about that subject:
Thomas Edison did not fully understand the light bulbs that he himself had invented. Though the carbon filaments would work from AC or DC current equally well, Edison himself believed his electric lights would only work with DC. It was to be years before he learned of his error. In any event, when Tesla first arrived in America in 1884, Edison had a large vested interest - both financial and emotional - in the DC power plants which he had been building, and which the "robber baron" J. Pierpont Morgan had been financing.
When Tesla arrived in the United States and sought Edison's backing for his new AC devices, therefore, Edison refused to listen.
"Hold up! Spare me that nonsense. It's dangerous. We're set up for direct current in America. People like it, and it's all I'll ever fool with."
Nonetheless Edison offered him a job, promising Tesla fifty thousand dollars if Tesla could redesign Edison's breakdown-prone DC generator designs. Tesla agreed and worked for the better part of a year redesigning the dynamos, also adding new automatic controls of Tesla's own design. The new generator designs were a vast improvement over Edison's originals. Upon completing the job Tesla went to Edison to collect the $50,000 promised for the task.
"Tesla," Edison replied, "you don't understand our American humor." And Tesla was never paid.
That's how Edison and Tesla got started, with Edison, who didn't have a clue why or how anything he was doing worked, ripping Tesla off. Eventually, after working labour gangs to survive, he caught the attention of Westinghouse and developed our modern AC power systems.
The agreements between Westinghouse and Tesla called for Tesla to recieve a royalty of two dollars and fifty cents for every horsepower of AC equipment sold. The royalties would be enough to make Tesla one of the wealthiest men in the world. (Were such royalties to be paid on equipment in use today, the royalties on AC generators alone would be worth more than seven and a half billion dollars.)
Tesla later realized that his would prove a burden to adoptation, so we ripped up his contract and gave up the rights. He was still a young man.
Here's another quote regarding how Edison reacted:
Dogs and cats began disappearing from the neighborhood around Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey.
Unable to challenge AC electricity on technical merits, Edison turned to using scare tactics instead. "Just as certain as death [AC power] will kill a customer within six months," he declared. Leaflets about the dangers of AC current were printed and distributed. Lobbying efforts were made in New York State to limit legal levels of electricity to 800 volts, making AC distribution impractical "as a matter of public safety". Perhaps most horrifying, though, were Edison's weekend demonstrations of the dangers of Tesla's work. Taking one of the frightened pets stolen from the streets of West Orange, Edison would place it on a sheet of metal, bring forth two wires attached to an AC generator, and announce to spectators, "Ladies and gentlemen, I shall now demonstrate the effects of AC current on this dog."
Edison's efforts to discredit AC electricity were, in the long run, unsuccessful. This did not, however, make Edison's lies or killings any less repugnant.
Later in life, Tesla would attempt to use subterfuge to create Wardenclyffe, a highly efficient means of wireless energy transmission that would be available freely without need for wires, passing it off to J. P. Morgan as a means of communication. When Morgan found out that he was attempting to create a means of transmission that was beyond control or metering and free for all, he axed the project beca
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Don't discount the entire field of engineering that quickly. The devil is often in the details.
We conceived of moon rockets a long time ago. It still took quite some time to actually implement one. The light bulb was an old idea. A workable one took a lot of effort.
Tesla was a genius, but there's no intirsic goodness in being a poor businessman and letting yourself get screwed.
See, I would say that being a good businessman and screwing other people makes you intrinsically evil, while refusing to screw people when you can, but instead sharing freely with them makes you intrinsically good.
Evil is a precursor to success in business.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Unfortunately this is not true. Well before Edison it was tried and even patented (check Wikipedia if you don't believe me or other "more trustable sources" if you like). Edison had the breakthrough of having something that actually worked and easy to manufacture and cheaply. That is the main difference.
I think this is a great idea. There is incentive to invent, but market competition is still in full force.
Where do I go to sign the petition? :)
If I recall (it's been a few years), quite a few people were working on the telephone around that timeframe (late 1800s). I think there may have even been some prizes offered for the first who could do it. And it was actually Thomas Edison who invented the vibrating carbon type phone that we used for years. But at first he didn't realize it, because he was going deaf.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I am imagining a sketch of a man, with an old style telephone. A wire is drawn, and on the other end, there is a large carrot, or perhaps an ear of corn. In the text, the inventor's frustration is palpable.
"Exchange of voice via galvanic intermediate is straightforward enough, but who are you speaking with? Produce experiments have FAILED as have tests with furniture, livestock. I fear the problem may be insolvable. There appears to be no use for this technology."
He did not yet see what we take for granted today, that the phone is to be used for speaking with cheese, or Dell sales reps.
His name was "Edison", not "Eddison".
HTH. HAND.
Arguing over religion is like arguing over who's invisible friend is better.
That's not true.
Religion is a set of rules governing behavior of a human population. Religions are not subject to scientific testing, because you'd need to study a population of humans over several generations, with a control, and you'd be dead before the experiment was half over.
That's what makes them so much more interesting, debatable, and generally difficult to deal with than science. All you have to work with is deduction, observation of the aftermath of a bunch of experiments started by men long dead, and no control group. Yet, this problem domain is the most important there is, because it governs how we live.
Just because you like your problems neat and tidy, provable and falsifiable, that doesn't mean the world is obligated to reduce itself to your level.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You are free to not to answer the phone.
Note the caller ID, route them to the voice mail or simply make them phone back.
The whole thing about answering the phone ASAP was a successful campaign conducted by the phone companies to reduce the overhead and usage rates to free resources.
I think we've seen that the body of human knowledge is more important to our superiority over other animals than any innate talents. If modern babies were swapped with those of early homo-sapiens, I suspect the modern babies would grow up hunting for food and wearing animal hides, while the early homo-sapien babies growing up in our society would be educated and literate.
We need to look no further than to the fall of great civilizations, and the disparity between the richest countries and poorest countries to see that this is true. We still have a very small number of people who live, more or less, like their ancestors did as hunter-gatherers. At some point, we all lived that way, they have simply not developed the ever-growing body of human knowledge that we have.
This is why I think intellectual property should not belong to any one person. It should be added to the body of human knowledge, and free for anyone to use. That's the system (or lack of a system) that's allowed us to become the dominant species on this planet, and given us all the comforts we now enjoy. It's also the system that's going to help us solve larger problems we are facing and will continue to face as a race.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
Woah! I had just the same idea!
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I don't think facism ended with Franco. The Baath party in Iraq was of indirect Nazi descent.
It was a Vichy-sponsored, Nazi-inspired national socialist party which was founded in Vichy-controlled Damascus and spread to oust the British colonial government in Baghdad. The party then dropped its anti-communist element and allied with the Soviets to prolong their rule. Like national socialism in Germany, the Baathists worked largely on the ideals of a racial struggle between their own pure race and those they considered defilers of that race. Its shift in Iraq to pro-Sunni and anti-Shiite came later, and probably out of convenience.
The Baath party of Iraq was founded as a single-party pro-Vichy, pro-Nazi ruling group for racial Arabs. The Bath Party of Syria used to be the same party, but important rifts had formed between the two parties long before Saddam Hussein's regime ended. Baghdad was the traditional capital of the ideal pan-Arab world many true believers in that movement envisioned, which is probably why the more radical portions of the party ended up there.
In short, Saddam Hussein's government was not only eerily similar to Hitler's, but it was a family resemblance.
Eretzy Isroel
Weekly Standard
Paul Johnson, a historian at Hillsdale College
Dissent Magazine
Free Republic
Syrian Embassy
a well-bibiliographied attack on the Bush family as supporters of the Baath party
International Socialist Review article in support of Iraq vs. US invasion
These references run from very conservative to very liberal, and from very Arab to very Western. Although several of them probably show strong biases, they weave an interesting story when read together.
While I agree with part of what you wrote, I can't agree with all of it.
/. knows either. Most proposals I've seem are simply stupid, radical and/or based on ideologies. Maybe someday we will have one that works. We can, after all, still hope.
There are observable evolutionary changes. But I do agree with you that, at this point, it is less of a contributing factor than the sum of human knowledge.
Again, I don't agree with you that intellectual property should be banished. However, the current system is, for the lack of a better word, stupid. Eating an egg is eating and egg, no matter from which side you start. Also, you can't compare the "way to make a quick buck on the internet" IP with "way to cure a deadly disease" IP. And, first and foremost, we have to remember we are dealing with humans on both ends of the scale. From a point of view of a patient that is dying of a rare disease, the research on what ails him is more important than on a more common disease that causes blindness. The same way labs will research what will give them more money.
It is all the same thing. Call it greed, self interest, human nature. Like it or not. It is a fact, and unless people deal with fact, things don't work.
There's gotta be some way to bind a balancing point. Something what will serve the needs of the whole, while keeping the parts motivated. Probably something that is bad for everyone, as most compromises are. I don't know what it is. I don't think anyone here on
morcego
That's a bit incoherent. That's like saying the idea for a microchip can come straight from a guy looking at a handful of sand. It's all an incremental process, and every part of that process starts with someone looking at his current tools and saying, "What if?"
If we already had every tool and process we'd need for profitable, efficient fusion, we would be done, because we absolutely have the "idea" of fusion. The same was true for the first guy who ever looked at a horse and said, "Hey, I bet it'd be cool to ride one of those." He had to invent processes, tools, training methods, all to realize that comparatively simple idea.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think it can be said that the greatest advancements in human achievement have come with the availability of vast quantities of fresh clean water, and surpluses of food so unimaginable as to end up wasting upwards of half of it.
When people are fat, well fed and free to frolick in cool streams under a noon-day sun, they tend to spend more time thinking, and less suffering.
Your post is frankly a non-sequitur. The existence of patent monopolies means a free market system simply doesn't. You're just spewing emotive FUD. People are supposed to make things faster and cheaper - that's the free market at work.
Marconi is not famous because of the patent. He is famous as being the first one to propose using radio waves to send signals beyond LOS and that they could be used as a replacement for telegraph lines. At the time, his contemporaries believed Hertzian waves were only line of sight and so useless beyond a very short distance. It was his expiraments and work with the UK postal system that made people see the commercial application of Hertzian waves and drove much of the research that evolved into modern day radio. Marconi was obsessed with sending wireless waves from the UK to the USA, and it is his being the first one to have a commercially successful ship-to-ship system that got him the fame. I highly suggest the book Thunderstruck by Erik Larson which details the race and competition in regards to radio research as well as the publicity stunts and history that got Marconi's name engraved into history.
What you are saying is that Edison is credited with inventing something just because he had the breakthrough of having something that actually worked? What were they thinking?
It already has been started many times over.
Think about what we know of Scientology, outside the complete storyline, everything else exists or has existed in some form throughout human history. We have had con men preying on people suffering from depression and significant events in people's lives. Scientology does this. It created some story to draw people in a sort of make believe world, Look at WoW or Star Wars or a number of other stories. It uses force to keep people inside the organization in line and there is quite a bit of speculation that this extends to people outside it. Look to the mafia, gangs, older religions, some governments and so on. I'm willing to bet that there isn't one thing inside or dealing with the church of Scientology that isn't directly and accurately comparable to something else that has already happened before it's formation. It is difficult to make comparisons that are accurate and undistorted but I'm thinking there wouldn't be too much of a problem here.
I think the most unique thing L Ron was able to do is group them all together and get the government to recognize it as a human right in the form of a religion. Without that last tidbit, it would just be a cult several levels more complexed then the Church/cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of course there would be differing degrees of evilness and righteousness. Make up your own mind on which is where.
The thing is Tesla was clearly willing to work anyway. He ripped up his contract entirley. Why did he not just drop it to $.05/HP for example?
The patent system was not meant to protect those with a strong drive to create, it was to protect those willing to create driven by there desire for money. The theory is more people are motivated by money.
The proper place for Tesla in a functioning system would be as a professor, where he could do and share his research and allow others to do with it as they pleased (as he did when ripping up his contract).
Imagine one of these things hooked up to a hydro dam like the one he built in Niagra Falls, supplying power without the need to run cable.
I can imagine it, and would be shocked if it was as efficient (even with the saved up front) as running down a wire, but I do think genius is capable of soving things that would not be solved for a century and a half later. The thing is that it is easier to protect genius with tenure (in academics)/patronage by big companies (even non-genius works this way in OSS). The patent system is supposed to spur the greedy to invent.
And I think we can both agree that the patent system can't be blamed for Tesla getting screwed by Edison.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I think your missing the point because of shaky wording. Suppose the person with the Idea made a product. You can then replace Idea with product in his post and have an accurate reflection of the problem he attempted to point out. At least it was what I see as him attempting to point out. I read Idea as actually having a product and not just a thought as it seems to me that you need an actual product/device to get a patent. Well, maybe that has changed now?
I will even take it one step further. If anyone with an Idea stood the risk of loosing out on the potential from the product resulting from that idea because of some mega company that can produce and put it in stores faster and cheaper then the inventor, they wouldn't be so quick to invest in that idea. We would also suffer in quality because now you don't have to do anything better to sell your version, just beat the competition to the market or put it out there cheaper. There would literally be one or two large corporations eventually who manufactured and sold us everything because they could copy whatever and bring it to the market faster or cheaper. You would likely have to partner with one of them because they would have the distribution channels already in place which would probable slow you down the most. How much money and effort would you be willing to put in on making something and having it taken by someone else. How much more money and effort would you throw at it to make it better then the companies that originally copied it when all they have to do is copy it again.
There is a need for patents. Maybe the time or scope should be adjusted, or even the process could need a good overhaul. Think about it, how many times have you seen a commercial on TV for something that looks like a cheap knockoff of something already on the market to see the commercial claim it is the original product and not to buy the fakes you see everywhere. I can't think of any specific brand names right now but I know there are quite a few of them, I'm always surprised to find they were the original version/manufactures.
And I think we can both agree that the patent system can't be blamed for Tesla getting screwed by Edison.
It was the patent system that was responsible for people like Edison getting the capacity to do the screwing. It was the underlying concept of property rights that provided the motive to hobble our infrastructure. The same sorts of underlying principles have led to the current oil crisis.
So no, I don't think we can agree on that. Capitalists, whatever their nature, deserve summary execution. They're guilty of crimes against humanity, one and all.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
blah blah blah who cares. Arguing over religion is like arguing over who's invisible friend is better.
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw this, and I'm astounded this wasn't posted yet...
Debatable, sure. More difficult to deal with? Absolutely.
But, more interesting than science - NO WAY!! There are
so many things , physical, theoretical or logical that
I find far more interesting than any aspect of any religion.
I've yet to find anything in religion as interesting
or confounding as Godel's Incompleteness Theorems.
And, your description of religion is somewhat off the mark.
What you've described are more correctly referred to as morals
or ethics, which may exist without religion.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I thought it was common knowledge that Bell was an asshole. Look at what he did to David Bowie in The Prestige.
Hey man, at some point during our teenage years, don't we ALL go "I should make up a religion, or start a cult! It'll be hilarious! People believe in all this crazy shit as it is, and pray to some fictional entities all the time anyways!"
:)
Problem is, someone actually took that guy's fantastical creation too seriously (or maybe he himself is the one who took it too seriously)...
Pretty much sums up the whole fucking "religion" right there.
You could easily be a genius and let yourself get knifed in the back because you are 'dumb enough' to turn your back on someone. This is called business sense, everyone else calls it hindsight.
As the founding chairman and ceo of napster I can tell you that there was a lot of naspter elements in the air prior to 1999. The ability to put those elements together into a product that the average person can relate to is what matters. If Bell had better influence with the patent office, and as a result he was better able to execute, thats just as important as understanding how to move bits across a wire. The truth is that all ideas are cumulative, and the ability to execute is where the credit generally goes.
No, the breakthrough was the invention (not by Edison) of a decent vacuum pump that allowed practically anything to be used as a filament. Before he could achieve a better vacuum, everything he tried vaporized.
--Gene
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Actually that may be more insightfull than you realize.
From what I remember from US history:
One of the main beefs between Britain and the US shortly after the Revolutionary war (besides impressment of US seamen) was that in order to industrialize quickly the US chose to ignore most if not all British patents and copyrights.
And in fact, pre-Revolution america had been denied many manufacturing technologies such as textiles because Britain wanted to be able to make money off of us from their imported goods and didn't want local competition.
Stealing of ideas and copyrighted materials lasted to some degree through most of the 19th century -I remember reading that Charles Dickens came to the US to unsuccessfully sue for royalties on some of his work that had been published in the US without giving him any compensation.
On the other hand, I think that Britain also ignored US copyright in this case since I recall both Ben Franklin and Samuel Clemens complaining about their works being pirated abroad.
I'm just sayin'
The problem wasn't simply in finding a durable filament.
The problem was in devising an entire system that would be safe, practical and economic for home use.
It was not realized [as late as] 1879 that the solution of the great problem of subdivision of the electric current would not, however, be found merely in the production of a durable incandescent electric lamp. ... The other principal features necessary to subdivide the electric current successfully were: the burning of an indefinite number of lights on the same circuit; each light to give a useful and economical degree of illumination; and each light to be independent of all the others in regard to its operation and extinguishment. The Invention of the Incandescent Lamp
You need switches that won't electrocute the child who touches an exposed copper bar and not the insulated handle.
Fuses to prevent fire.
I have An idea of a flying machine. Now please impliment a working machine, It's simple right?
Skinner hates Chomsky, Tesla hates Edison.
If this is true, why does RCA spend fantastic sums in developing first black and white and later color television? The first all-electronic color TV sets appear in 1954 but color TV does not reach the commercial take-off point until 1965.
Just look at bakeries and eateries and think how a patent on bread would be like and how it would be exploited, or lets say copyrights on a pizza designs and PMAA (pizza manufacturers association of america) suing anybody who copied those designs at home (of course eat the pizza and the would charge you with destroying evidence).
So the reality is, the exact opposite is true. People would tend to by from local manufacturers (where all the conditions of manufacture are competitively fair and equal, like wages, environmental protections, working conditions etc.) because of warranty repairs and product access and people generally prefer to deal with people the know and can get hold of.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
No, that's an ethical or moral system. Some of those are based on religious beliefs, but others are not - they're completely distinct concepts.
Religions are not subject to scientific testing, because you'd need to study a population of humans over several generations, with a control, and you'd be dead before the experiment was half over.
Morals can't be objectively tested because they're opinions, not facts. Religion (at least most modern ones) can't be tested because they're based on making non-testable claims, and the ones that do make verifiable claims end up being false. And as a side note, just because it would be hard to test, doesn't mean that it's "beyond science" - it just means that you might have to rely on more indirect methods.
That's what makes them so much more interesting, debatable, and generally difficult to deal with than science. All you have to work with is deduction, observation of the aftermath of a bunch of experiments started by men long dead, and no control group. Yet, this problem domain is the most important there is, because it governs how we live
What makes morality interesting, etc. is that it's opinion, but those opinions affect others and are based on things common to all of humanity. There's no way to scientifically demonstrate that slavery is evil, for example, but that belief still has tremendous effects on human beings. On the other hand, religion is interesting, etc. because it's based on not being reasonable and making rationalizations. Nothing is more fun than an improvised defense of some made-up "fact".
Just because you like your problems neat and tidy, provable and falsifiable, that doesn't mean the world is obligated to reduce itself to your level.
And just because you take ancient myths seriously doesn't mean you're better than anyone else.
Should there be definitive proof, would legal action be possible to invalidate all patents predicated on this one?
at the time of Tesla patents had to WORK to be accepted.. most of his stuff was just ideas or prototypes that never did quite what the drawings said. Until about the 1970's that stuff wasn't patentable. In that environment, it was guys like Edison that used brute force that were rewarded because they had "something" to actually patent so they "won".
That's why Bell vs Gray was such a race... you couldn't just publish a vague drawing then slap down competition like the companies do now. They had to not just get to the PTO, but have verified signatures that the device worked with them.
But without the ideas, there would be nothing to implement, would there? One might even say that patents are instructions for implementing an idea.
Today he'd be classified as a purebred asshole with guaranteed membership of the Gates/Ballmer club.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What the hell are you talking about? His TEAM were the talent. He wasn't. Telsa's advances in Electrical Engineering make it possible for practically all modern conveniences with electric field theory/quantum theory.
Many of Tesla's lack of business savvy have also been shown that his compassion towards helping humanity move forward superseded his need to be the world's first billionaire. He wasn't a greedy prig of a man. Edison most certainly showed that title suited him just fine.
No one is denouncing the value of a prudent business mind to make products and drive Industry. That is applauded. It's when a business man controls the progress of Industry and exploits it is when we want to shat on his grave.
you're right, and it's just sort of a furthering of the irony in the adage of ww2 being the war that ended fascism. i wasn't stating that fascism ended with Franco, just that Franco was an obvious fascist, and a big name during ww2, so it was blatantly obvious that ww2 didn't end fascism.
in the immortal words of socrates, "i drank what?"
As interesting as this is it doesn't really change much. I'm reminded of the New Zealander named Richard Pearse who may have preceded the Wright bros as first in flight. However due to lack of documentation of his achievements it is difficult to really prove accomplished his goal. He also wasn't one much for attention and didn't have any real public records of his work either (newspapers, photographs, etc.). In the end it is an interesting but mostly irrelevant piece of history.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Am I the only one around here who read "Sasha Gray" the first time around?
Actually, Edison borrowed his ideas for a certain British doctor (Smith I think) who demonstrated working lightbulbs at least 10 years earlier. Edison was largely a successful business man and a great publicist. He was definitely a monopolist and not really an inventor (he largely stole ideas or paid other people to think up ideas and put them in his name). If history was fair we would have been forgotten and the greats like Tesla and others would be remembered.
So the real question becomes, does the likelihood of multiple individuals creating a similar solution to solve a particular problem diminishes the justification of the patent system? No. It simply rewards the first one who created a working solution.
Your answer is silly. Of course it reduces the justification; if for no other reason than a 1/x chance of a patent is worth less than a 1/1 chance of patent.
In addition as the population increases the trade off between restricting billions of people from using an idea versus encouraging (NOT enabling) a few to implement an idea shifts.
In any case any patent system which doesn't recognize the reality of multiple independent reinvention is badly broken; it's an unfair lottery where somebody can expend enormous time and effort and not only get nothing in return but may be forced to pay their competitor to stay in business. At least with no patents they have the first mover advantage. Business is hard enough as it is without making it even harder.
---
Copyrights and patents are privileges, not rights.
You are operating under the assumption that the patent system is fulfilling that purpose, which is precisely the point most commonly disputed. The patent system as it stands today is not used to get products released with full documentation, it's used to prevent products from being released at all, and the patent filings don't comprise meaningful documentation of the invention.
Your proposal is for a patent system that gets products released with full documentation. What we have is a patent system that is being used to block inventions. The claim is that "no patent system at all" would be an improvement, even if it wouldn't necessarily be as good as the system you would like to see.
Throwing away the patent system would be a lot easier and more reliable than trying to fix it.
You may draw a corollary from the theorem: Any invention not invented by at least two people is a crackpot idea (i.e. Scientology).
Religion is actually very boring compared to science. It's like a daytime soap opera. Seen one, you've seen them all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
... and then they built the supercollider.
> Arguing over religion is like arguing over who's invisible friend is better.
Nice metaphor, pity it requires proof that all religious entities are imaginary like invisible friends. I'd say it's difficult to prove for transcendent ones.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
s/who's/whose/
GP poster simply stated that Meucci invented the telephone before bell. It doesn't imply any pissing contest. About Meucci's device having "any bearing on the development of the telephone", does it change anything? You simply can't say anything about phone development if the idea wasn't copied. Maybe it would have never been popular, maybe we'd have meucci brand gigabit dsl happily serving tons of data.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
All you have to work with is deduction, observation of the aftermath of a bunch of experiments started by men long dead, and no control group.
But deduction tells you that with the massive numbers of religions, the fact that most modern religions are exclusive (with the head of the religion stating that others are wrong) and that no dominant religion holds even half of the world's population, you come to the conclusion that by definition, over half are wrong. When you accept that half must be wrong, you can deduce that all are wrong. Logic, applied to religion, results in a failure of religion. You appear to be applying logic to the debates between small points when the logic applied to the large points already renders the discussion moot.
Just because you like your problems neat and tidy, provable and falsifiable, that doesn't mean the world is obligated to reduce itself to your level.
I don't care if my "discussions" are illogical. I just want to make it clear that such discussions are not logical or scientific arguments and can never be. Which makes them come back down to the sentence you are apparently annoyed over. They are just arguments over whose invisible friend is better.
Learn to love Alaska
Was he unhappy with this arrangement? While it seems on the surface that he must have been, dying alone, forgotten and next to broke as he did, I suspect that the only thing which truly bothered him during life was that his explorations into science were hampered by lack of funding. --Though, with a guy like Tesla, all the money in the world probably wouldn't have been enough given the scope of his visions. --The guy wanted to create a system whereby the biosphere would be charged with energy which devices like lawnmowers and cars could freely tap into. I, for one, am actually quite happy he didn't achieve this end, though with the saturation of the low-power EM spectrum that we're seeing today, I'm not sure if we actually managed to avoid that particular nightmare vision.
Nonetheless. . , it would be nice if we lived in a world which valued and respected its creative minds without first asking, "So how much did he make?"
-FL
How many people/companies in this day and age patent an idea (software implementation, invention, etc) with absolutely no working prototype? As I understand, having a working prototype is not even a requirement to filing a patent, simply the idea of the device or process.
Franco was not a fascist - he was a conservative with strong religious convictions. He co-opted the Falange movement as a convenient political front for what was simply a military coup. Franco made no attempt to save Primo de Rivera (the leader of the Falange imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Republicans), as it was not in his interest - Franco was an uncharismatic figure, and saw Primo de Rivera as a potential opponent. I suggest you read a good book on the Spanish civil war (such as Anthony Beevor's "The Battle Of Spain") and also look at the post war political history of Spain. You might also benefit from reading about Fascism rather than making the common mistake of confusing it with regimes of Hitler and (beyond the first few years at least) Mussolini. Just as Stalin's regime is not a Marxist one, Franco's was not a Fascist one.
I am shocked that an article discussing who is the real inventor of the telephone doesn't even mention Antonio Meucci. He was the first to invent the phone, and even the Congress has acknowledged that if he had had the money to renew his patent, Bell would have never obtained his own patent.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
How does Franco's lack of interest in saving another Fascist (Rivera) make him not a fascist? Are the bases for you argument - 1. Franco allowed a Fascist to be imprisoned after creating a facade of support 2. I should read more During the Mexican revolution, were Madeiro and Huerta not similarly-idealed revolutionaries? Shortly after fighting for Madeiro and supporting his presidency, Huerta had Madeiro inprisoned and later killed as part of his usurpation. These are the things that happen during a revolution. The concepts superficial support followed by coups and murder are shown quite well during the Mexican Revolution, and most were committed by men who were, during Diaz' reign, part of the same movement (Huerta, Madeiro, Carranza, Villa). A fascist or any revolutionary ruler of any type usually sees himself/herself as the best possible option for rule. This, of course, is part of the problem of militarist/violent revolution, as it always falls victim to the adage, "absolute power corrupts, absolutely". Surely Castro's post-revolutionary executions or Mao's government-sanctioned famine are evidence of that. Taken from Wikipedia, "Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology [...] that considers individual and social interests subordinate to the interests of the state or party [...] Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, and opposition to political and economic liberalism." Taking more from Wikipedia, and from Mussolini, the coiner of the term "Mussolini defined fascism as being a right-wing collectivistic ideology in opposition to socialism, liberalism, democracy and individualism." Franco led a nationalist, statist, right-wing rebellion that put individual interests aside for the interests of the nationalist state. The movement was certainly anti-communist, militaristic and toltalitarian. I don't understand how you decide that he is was not a fascist. Whether or not Franco would have aligned himself as a Fascist, or whether he has been identified historically as a fascist is of little importance. What is important is that the characteristics of his regime so closely resemble Fascism. Hitler called his party the National Socialists (Nazi), yet clearly, he was far from socialism. I'm fairly familiar with the Spanish Civil War, and the Spanish-American war that set the groundwork for a tattered Spain. I'm more interested in anarchist, and socialist movements, and the Generations of '98 and '27, but I didn't read my Spanish history on the back of a napkin. Your passive-aggressive declaration regarding my "reading about Fascism rather than making the common mistake..." is baseless and not well-received. I do, however, like your /. name.
in the immortal words of socrates, "i drank what?"
What makes my invisible friend any more or less real than 'God'?
You can neither prove nor disprove that God exists, just as you cannot prove or disprove that my invisible friend exists.
QED
I know this might be a little against the slashdot grain, but I think this speaks to the idea that there is a God who is the master scientist and who inspires men and women with the secrets of His creations as a Father teaching His children. There is a speech given by a leader in my church that talks about the subject of the scientific method and how it compares and contrasts with divine revelation. The leader was a nuclear physicist for many years who helped pioneer the technologies behind nuclear submarines.
I thought it was an interesting mix of faith and science in a world where the two, for some reason, have become separated.
Despite his authoritarianism, Fascism still cannot be attributed to Franco. His political convictions were much more in keeping with the monarchist and staunchly religious groups that backed his uprising - groups antithetical to the Fascism of the Falange, which is why Franco was keen to utilise its popularity but sideline its leaders. Fascism, as defined by the its early protaganists, was intended to be a modernising force and as such quite anti-monarchist and anti-clerical. The authoritarian aspects reflected a belief that democracy was too weak to cope with events such as global economic depression, and that a strong leadership was needed to counter Bolshevism. With the Nazi regime colouring our perception of the politics of inter-war Europe, it's difficult for many people to appreciate now that many felt then that democracy was a bankrupt concept, and a clash of ideologies was imminent. It was in this atmosphere that conservatives in Germany as well as Spain allied themselves with the populist Fascists. The difference was that in Germany it was the extreme right wingers that managed to end up manipulating the conservatives.
As for anarchism, my knowledge of that is limited to groups such as the CNT who were so badly treated by Stalin's stooges during the Spanish Civil War. Socialism on the other hand, is close to what I'm currently studying, as I'm hoping to do a part-time masters degree on the Paris commune in the not too distant future.
Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anti-clerical, I don't know that defines Fascism. I think Franco asserted, as Fascism dictates, that the Nation-State is the key to government. I think that he also realized the role of the Catholic church as and the concept of a pro-establishment State. While there were certainly monarchist groups in northern Spain, Franco's regime most clostly resembles (and by resembles I mean shares all aspects with) Fascism. During both Hitler's and Franco's regimes, it wasn't just the conservatives who aligned themselves with the Fascists, as many moderates also joined. This isn't exactly a rare occurrence, as it happens in most modern political systems, wherein the moderate left aligns itself with the right. This was especially true in Spain, as the left was highly disorganized, and the anarcho-socialist groups were very nuanced, making the strength and order of the Fascist right appear much more stable. One could draw close similarities to American politics from this, even including Franco's motto - "God, Family, State". Anarchists have always been treated badly, as that is the nature of the lesser known (Indigenous groups, Africans, anarchists...). Since you're studying socialism, I would highly suggest Voltairine de Cleyre, and Emma Goldman. Goldman argues that socialism and anarchism are not separable concepts. Given that socialism is defined by the complete equality of human beings, it would not be possible to have one person rule over another, thus anarchy (an - absence of, archos - rulers). Of course, you've probably already read those two authors, but if not, I highly recommend them. Joe
in the immortal words of socrates, "i drank what?"
Bull. If any religion were even remotely true at least one person could just ask for a miracle while someone documented it. The bible says that miracles happen, so where are they?
It's impossible to *prove* that a god doesn't exist, as I'm sure you're aware. It's trivial however, to prove that one exists, if it does. All we'd have to do is have one miracle performed while we watch. Make the moon vanish temporarily and have the tides change appropriately, give Jupiter rings, turn the sky red across the whole world, speak to everyone at once, all would be adequate proof.
Hundreds of religions, thousands of years, and so very little evidence.
Psst. The emperor's new clothes... they aren't really as good as he thinks.
You're stuck in the "There's no long bearded man in the sky" view of religion. You need to realize that these personifications are part of the means of communicating wisdom through an oral tradition.
It's silliness to take these personifications literally, but you can see how different civilizations through the ages solved their problems through their mythologies, and look at how it turned out for them.
If you're going to have an active idea how you want your world to work, rather than a purely reactive one, it helps to have an awareness of some of the things people have collectively tried before.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth