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Nathan Myhrvold and the Business Of Invention
elwinc writes "There's a great New Yorker story about Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures company, whose business model is to nurture ideas, write patents, and sell them. Apparently they're filing about 500 patents a year including a passive thorium reactor which consumes waste from conventional reactors. On the lighter side, you can read how Nathan has achieved 'dominant T. rex market share.'"
Though we've discussed Myhrvold and his company in the past, the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas.
Yup. Interestingly, that's exactly what happened with the Wright brothers.
We think that they invented the world's first aircraft (untrue, but let's not go into that now). They thought their big advance was solving the problem of aircraft control (which they had, but in a cumbersome and essentially dead-end way, with wing warping).
Did they advertise this for the benefit of humanity, like Santos-Dumont did? No, they patented it and tried to force all aircraft designers to pay them money. Of course, this only worked in the US, so before long France, Britain, Russia and Germany were designing all kinds of aircraft, while development in the US had ceased.
When WW1 came we had to buy fighters from the French - we had no industry of our own.
I sometimes laugh at the plaudits offered to the Wrights, when the only thing they really did was SUPRESS American development of aircraft for 15 years.....