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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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...?
Those who don't study history are doomed to reinvent it. And then patent it. ?? And then profit!
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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/
"
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 ?
"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
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!
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.
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
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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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
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
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.
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...
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?"
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.
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
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
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.
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'