Posts Tagged: "national inventors hall of fame"

Helicopters and other aircraft are often used to combat fires which cannot be controlled by personnel on the ground and the practice is a fairly expensive one. Various online sources cite to a 2003 statement from the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that those agencies own, contract or lease 1,000 aircraft for aerial firefighting each year at…

Among the 2017 inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame is Howard Head, the inventor of both the laminate ski as well as the oversized tennis racket. Sunday, September 10th, marked the 42nd anniversary of the filing date for one of two patents for which Head has been inducted, affording us an opportunity to look back at the innovative contributions to sports from an engineer who just couldn’t stand his own poor athleticism.

Content delivery networks (CDNs), distributed networks involving proxy servers and data centers to provide high availability of content, are becoming increasingly valuable as Internet users continue to demand instant access to files or streaming media… Currently, the world’s largest CDN is Akamai, a CDN and cloud services provider based in Cambridge, MA, which operates 216,000 servers across 120 countries and within more than 1,500 networks to deliver up to 30 percent of Internet traffic worldwide. The success of Akamai’s business is largely based on the foundation of an innovative leap in Internet architecture developed by a professor and a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Both Tom Leighton and Daniel Lewin are members of the 2017 class inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Today, August 22nd, marks the 17th anniversary of the issue of the patent for which Leighton and Lewin have been recognized as major pioneers in the field of CDNs. The work of both of these innovators continues to serve as a basis for perhaps the most successful firm in the CDN space currently.

Inventor, Beatrice Hicks, is both a 2017 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame as well as one of America’s truly trailblazing women engineers, one of the first to enter the field of technological development in the mid-20th century. Hicks would go on to become instrumental in the founding of the Society of Women Engineers and her story is a wonderful reminder of the power of both a good education and the ability to believe in one’s self… Hicks’ major innovation in gas sensor tech is outlined by U.S. Patent No. 3046369, titled Device for Sensing Gas Density and issued July 24th, 1962. It claimed, in a density system, a chamber containing gas, a hollow case with an interior cavity in communication with the chamber, a sealed expansible and contractible bellows mounted within the hollow case and in communication with gas contained in the chamber, and an actuating portion to actuate an output means when the bellows moves to a critical position in response to the pressure-versus-temperature function of the gas.

The innovative work of Jones that led to his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame is on display in U.S. Patent No. 4676586, titled Apparatus and Method for Performing Laser Material Processing Through a Fiber Optic. Issued on June 30th, 1987, the patent protected an improved method of delivering laser energy to perform metal processing by generating a near infrared or visible wavelength pulsed laser beam, providing a single fiber optic with a quartz core having a diameter of less than 1,000 micrometers as well as cladding and protective shielding for the core end, focusing the laser beam onto the end of the core on a small spot with a diameter less than the core diameter at an including angle of less than 24°, coupling the beam into the fiber optic through air-core and core-cladding zones to transmit energy with a peak power in the kilowatt range, and then focusing the laser beam emerging from the fiber optic onto a workpiece at a power density sufficient for metal processing. The invention resulted in a laser beam delivery system with minimal optical losses and improved freedom of laser beam manipulation capable of being robotically controlled.

Soldering, the process by which two items are joined together by melting a filler metal with a low melting point and pouring liquid metal onto the joint, is a process which is used in many important metalworking processes today, from manufacturing electronics to installing plumbing pipes. Evidence of primitive soldering techniques, however, extend back thousands of years to sites from ancient Mesopotamia.

May 22nd, marked the 123rd anniversary of the issue of an early and important patent covering a drywall product for building construction. Its inventor, American-born Augustine Sackett, was a 2017 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. With the anniversary of the issue of this seminal patent in the field of building construction upon us, we’ll take a look back today at the history of gypsum use across the world and how Sackett’s innovation completely changed the American home building industry.

Improvements in fuel economy and reduced emissions are largely the result of fuel additives and exhaust catalyst equipment working to clean up the chemicals emitted when fuel is burned. This Friday, April 7th, marks the 25th anniversary of the issue of a seminal patent in the field of automotive exhaust catalyst. The inventor, Indian-born American inventor Haren S. Gandhi, is an inductee this year into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Today, we’ll take the opportunity to revisit our Evolution of Technology series to look back at the development of technologies which have left us with cleaner breathing air than we would have had thanks to Americans’ heavy reliance on automobiles.

One of the foundational elements of all electronic devices today is the transistor, a semiconductor device including three terminals which is capable of amplifying an electric current or voltage which is applied to one of the terminals and output through another terminal. It’s no understatement to say that modern electronic devices couldn’t function without a component that can process electrical signals in the manner accomplished by a transistor. Yesterday’s transistors have largely been replaced by today’s integrated circuits, which are capable of much more complex processing of electrical signals, but the discovery of the transistor was a huge turning point in the electronics industry of the mid-20th century… April 4th marks the 67th anniversary of the issue date for one of two patents for which this trio of innovators has been inducted into the Hall of Fame.

A recent market research report from consulting firm MarketsandMarkets predicts that the global market for all forms of non-volatile memory, including flash, embedded and many other forms of memory, will increase by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.96 between 2016 and 2022, when the entire sector is expected to be worth $81.51 billion USD. This Wednesday, March 22nd, gives us an opportunity to chronicle an important anniversary in the development of one seminal form of non-volatile memory. Some 23 years ago, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a patent for a flash electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) technology invented by Eli Harari, a 2017 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and a co-founder of the American flash storage developer SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK).

American inventor and businessman Thomas E. Murray is the pioneer behind many of the foundational elements of the modern day electrical grid, from the design of power plants that produced electricity and distributed it efficiently to insulated electrical cable to electric fuse boxes… Murray is also the great grandfather of Hilary Geary Ross — the wife of soon to be Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Perhaps a tenuous (or maybe fortuitous) connection to the man who will soon be in charge of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (an agency of the Commerce Department), but when we started reading about the significant contributions made byMurray we decided we had to profile this giant of American innovation.

Sunday, November 6th marks the 26th anniversary of the first U.S. patent issued to Baliga for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. U.S. Patent No. 4969028, which is titled Gate Enhanced Rectifier. It claimed a gate-controlled semiconductor power device having a body of semiconductor material with regions of opposing types of conductivity forming a p-n junction, two power electrodes disposed in ohmic contact with different regions of the semiconductor material, an insulated gate electrode disposed on a surface to control the conduction of opposite type conductivity carriers in a channel to either induce an opposite conductivity or repress the channel’s conductivity. The resulting semiconductor device achieves both forward and reverse blocking capability and can be switched on and off with a low power requirement.

October 25th, will mark the 56th anniversary of the issue of the seminal patent for high-performance carbon fibers, which were invented by Roger Bacon, a 2016 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. This American physicist’s chance discovery of ultra-thin, incredibly strong fibers composed primarily of carbon led to great business success for Bacon’s employer, Union Carbide, as well as multiple recognitions of Bacon’s own work which kickstarted development into carbon materials which continue even today… The patent for which Bacon is inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame is U.S. Patent No. 2957756, entitled Filamentary Graphite and Method for Producing the Same. Issued October 25th, 1960, it claimed a method for producing filamentary graphite by confining a graphite rod surmounting a carbon block within a closed pressure vessel which has a means for introducing inert gases, striking a direct current arc between the rod and the block while maintaining a pressure level within the vessel between 1,150 pounds per square inch (psi) and 1,400 psi to effect vaporization of the rod onto the block to form a boule, cooling the boule, fracturing the boule and removing the graphite filaments contained within the boule.

William Sparks and Robert Thomas were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame earlier this year for inventing butyl rubber, which was patented on August 22, 1944. Starks and Thomas mixed Vistanex with a small amount of butadiene in a washing machine. When the spin cycle concluded they were left with the first batch of butyl rubber which the world has ever seen. Compared to other synthetic rubbers, butyl rubber offered a similar strength and flexibility to natural rubber. It could be used in low-temperature settings without cracking and its high impermeability to air and gases made it a good solution as an airtight sealant.

The use of larger mirrors enabled the creation of more powerful telescopes over time. However, by the 1970s the size of the mirror itself was becoming a limiting factor on building better telescopes as larger mirrors were prone to deforming. To address this, scientists began looking at creating large mirrors for astronomical telescopes by fusing together many smaller mirrors in a honeycomb structure. This year, the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted a new member for his contributions to the production of large mirrors for astronomical telescopes: British-born astronomer J. Roger P. Angel. This Friday, August 19th marks the 30th anniversary of the issue date of the patent for which Angel was inducted.