Posts Tagged: "thomas edison"

Theranos was based on the promise that a charismatic 19-year-old Stanford drop-out, Elizabeth Holmes, had developed a revolutionary technology that could perform important diagnostic tests by using a drop or two of blood. Whatever the outcome of a planned three-month trial set to begin next August in San Jose federal court, there may never be a full accounting of the destructive power of a good story well-told. The attitudes that allowed Theranos and Holmes to operate undetected and for investors to be duped out of more than a half-billion dollars do not appear to have changed. “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” a documentary released by HBO earlier this year, effectively dramatizes an extraordinary narrative. Gibney’s eye-opening film is important on several levels. However, its suggestion that “faking it ‘til you make it” is what many innovative businesses and professional inventors (like Edison) typically do, is inaccurate and disrespectful.

We hear politicos so often proclaim that what America needs is a Twenty-First Century patent system. NO! America most certainly does not need a Twenty-First Century patent system. America needs an Eighteenth-Century patent system. The patent system our founding fathers created recognized the contributions made by everyone in the innovation ecosystem were important and necessary. We had it right once. It is time to get it right again!

In 1790, the U.S. patent laws were first enacted and individuals could obtain a patent under the new federal government. For about a century beforehand, British citizens in the various parts of the American colonies could obtain patents for that region, and Britain and other European countries had patent laws as well. But the new American patent system was different: it was democratized in that anyone could participate, without the need for consent from the Crown. The origins of patent laws date back to the Fifteenth Century when Florentine regents sought to attract and keep innovators and their inventions. Elizabeth I was a keen ruler in passing various patent laws to encourage foreigners with ideas and inventions to relocate to Britain, as well as encourage domestic innovation.

The U.S. patent promise of exclusivity has become nothing more than lip service with no credibility for more than half a century. A patent system maintained by offering lip service must fail over time. The American inventor population is vanishing rapidly as a result of the changed laws and anti-patent movement. If the patent reward fails, both those who are inventors and those who would be inventors will be influenced not to pursue innovating and society will see an era of slow progress. Bad policy advice has misled Congress into belief that inventing without the participation of inventors will be fine. Reality will soon prove it was a fatal mistake that the U.S. should not have made.

Electricity may power our modern world but the phenomenon of electric activity has been observed for millennia. Studies into triboelectric charges, or electrostatic charging created by rubbing two objects together, extend back to the 6th century BC and the work of Thales of Miletus who found that rubbing amber on wool created a static charge. Starting in the 17th century AD, contemporary scientists began making contributions to the understanding of electric activity, including America’s own Benjamin Franklin… Today, we’ll attempt to draft a list of inventors and rank their contributions to the creation of electrical technologies, which enable today’s consumers to turn on lights, receive video content through a display monitor or make the day’s first cup of coffee at the flip of a switch.

Chien argues that it is impossible for someone to donate their technology without fearing that another will get a patent on it and defeat the well-meaning donation to the public. Such a statement plays into urban mythology and preys upon those who are convinced that patent applicants can and do steal innovations and get patents instead of the rightful inventor. If that were actually true I’d be all in favor of opening up the patent system, whatever that means. Unfortunately, Chien builds her argument on a factually erroneous foundation.

The history of film is a long one that, by some accounts, extends as far back as the early 1700s and the discovery by German physicist Johann Heinrich Schulze that silver salts react to light exposure by becoming darker in color. By the late 1800s, celluloid film had appeared and the ability to record motion pictures through a camera had become a reality. Indeed, it was none other than George Eastman, who in 1889 perfected the first commercial transparent roll film, one year after the name “Kodak” first began to be used to market his cameras. It was the Eastman flexible film advancement that made it possible for the development of Thomas Edison’s motion picture camera in 1891. Edison called his first generation picture camera a “Kinetoscope,” after the Greek words “kineto,” which means “movement,” and “scopos,” which means “to watch.” Edison filed a patent application on the Kinetoscope on August 24, 1891, and the patent ultimately issued on August 31, 1897.