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The First Phone Call Was 133 Years Ago
magacious writes "March 10 is the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call. It occurred between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson back on this day in 1876. But there is some debate about whether Bell is actually the rightful owner of the crown for such invention. Having worked on the idea of transmitting speech using electricity for some time, Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, either just before or just after his main rival for the title of inventor of the telephone, Elisha Gray, filed his own. Bell won the patent and Gray died in obscurity."
is such an important number that it's worth a news story by its own
Er.. no. Patents are good. It's only *some* patents that aren't, like software patents, and generally all obvious patents granted by shitty examiners.
The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
In short, patents are a good thing. Don't mindlessly follow the Slashdot groupthink please...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
But as the summary implies and history records the patent application in this case was a race to the patent office. Several people had developed working telephones at that point.
So while it is good that Bell benefited from this invention it is bad that other inventors did not.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
> So while it is good that Bell benefited from this invention it is bad that other inventors did not.
There was no need for him to profit, given the large amount of people inventing the concept, the idea was not non-obvious, and as such would have become public knowledge in the short term anyway.
Thus the patent, particularly since it was wrong anyway, only served to add cost and hinder innovation. It was of advantage only for Mr. Bell and of a disadvantage to all of society, or in other words the exact opposite of what patents were supposed to be.
In many cases the reality is that new things were invented by many people working in parallel and sharing the use of public knowledge. It might be better if patents recognise this by being granted to multiple people.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How could he have died in obscurity if we're discussing him today? I'm still trying to find out who, from the US, invented the automobile (according to Obama). Now, *THAT GUY* died in obscurity.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Not exactly.
I know a friend who is an inventor.
His thinking is very different and his inventions are also quite different - and which I feel are very good for the society.
Now, he is pursuing his inventions just because of the concept of patent. He is not at all a businessman - he is extremely shy and does not speak to anyone. So if concept of patents are not there, he would not even pursue his inventions because he is sure to lose out in the game.
Even now, somebody might make a fool of him, but atleast he has the hope to make money using his inventions. Such people would lose out - and thereby the society - if patents are removed.
Yup. Bell's "invention" was completely based on other people's ideas.
Just like how edison stole most of his "ideas" from Tesla.
Patents dont encourage innovation. The only make the first person to file it rich. Which discourages the sharing of ideas and information for fear that some rich jerk like edison or Bell will come along and patent your idea first. There are documented cases all throughout american and european history that Patents hampered scientific innovation and industrial progress.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Edison created something that could actually be used. That is including the electrical grid, switches, powermeters, bulb fitting and so on that was all needed to make the bulb glow. All this stuff didn't really exist back then. And a lot of new inventions that came out of that were indeed patented.
I think the patent system is put to good use in this case. If it were for Swan or some other introvert nerd, we would still be reading by candlelight.
Patents dont encourage innovation. The only make the first person to file it rich. Which discourages the sharing of ideas and information for fear that some rich jerk like edison or Bell will come along and patent your idea first.
You're completely contradicting yourself. Ones of the major *points* of patents is to encourage sharing of ideas. Without patents, everyone would hoard their ideas, because there would be no legal protection -- the second any rich person heard your idea, they would start mass-producing it, leaving you out in the cold.
The example here shows what happens when you share without a patent -- someone beats you to the patent office! But note that once the small investor gets there, he can share all he wants with legal protection.
Now this is the cue for anti-patent people to start listing a litany of cases where patents didn't protect some little guy. But that doesn't change the millions of cases where it does, that doesn't get the publicity.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I think the audio telephone was one of those ideas whose time had come. It's not as if it sprung from the head of some individual genius, a lot of people were working in that direction; take any one of them out of the picture and the result wouldn't be much different.
Ironically, the telephone was more or less an inevitable outgrowth of work on improving the capacity of long distance cables to carry telegraphs -- a digital medium. In a sense, we've come full circle.
One of the ideas that people were working on is what we'd call frequency division multiplexing: sending multiple simultaneous telegraph signals on the same wire but encoded on carriers of different frequencies. Once you started to work in that direction an audio telephone would be simple, relatively speaking. So somebody would have "invented" it, because plenty of people were working along those lines.
The lone genius inventor is a mythical idea, one that distorts our thinking about stuff like intellectual property. There are genius inventors, to be sure, but surely there were men like Thomas Edison or Nicola Tesla that lived in the dark ages. The reason we've never heard of them is that even a genius needs other people's ideas to build upon.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.