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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."
...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.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
#!/
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
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.
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.
Accept all submissions that pass a basic sanity check
I'm not sure what this means.
Keep all submissions secret for X [days|weeks|months]
Oh, I disagree. I think that the PTO should publish all submissions immediately, regardless of whether or not they ultimately are patented. First, because government business should always be done in the open if at all possible. Second, because if an inventor tries to submit an invention and only later withdraws it (perhaps after he decides he'd rather not publish at all) then I don't see why we should honor his wishes to such an extent that he can avoid publication. Third, because rival inventors should be able to be informed about what the PTO is actually doing on a day-to-day basis.
If two submissions are received for the same "invention" within this timeframe, then disallow it as obvious
Well, that would be grossly different from what obviousness has meant in the past. Traditionally, an invention is obvious if any person having ordinary skill in the art (e.g. a generic electrical engineer) and a comprehensive knowledge of prior art and absolutely no imagination whatsoever, could reasonably have made the invention at that time.
That two people have a brilliant idea at the same time isn't obviousness, it's just coincidence.
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).
Why? And who cares? Ideas are not patentable; only inventions are. An invention might have originated from an idea, but it is far more mature. Basically, an idea is pie-in-the-sky wishing, while an invention can actually work. People dreamt of flying via machines since classical Greece, at least, but that doesn't mean that that should have meant anything when we finally figured it out.
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.
I disagree. The application process fulfills this role already. It's time-consuming to file for a patent, and often somewhat costly. This means that if an inventor doesn't himself think that the invention is economically worth the trouble, he won't bother, and the invention will just be in the public domain rapidly, if anything happens. Since you're only increasing the applicant's burden, this won't change anyway. If he feels that he can recoup the costs of getting the patent, plus make enough of a profit that it outweighs his best alternative, then he'll pursue one. You don't need to do anything here, and for God's sake, you don't want to weed out the starry-eyed inventors who have no grasp on finances. We want their inventions to be publicized, regardless of whether they're really viable.
There's a number of things that can improve the system, but not these, IMO.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
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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