Posts Tagged ‘Patents’
“Give credit where credit is due”*…
In the early 19th century, a young woman revolutionized the lumber business…
As a young woman, Tabitha Babbitt was a weaver in Harvard, Massachusetts. She used to watch the workers at the local sawmill. Observing them use the difficult two-man whipsaw, she noticed that half of their motion was wasted. It had two handles which two men would pull from side to side. However, the saw only cut the wood when it was being pulled forward. This meant the second or reverse pull was fairly useless other than to get the saw back to starting position which was a waste of energy. Tabitha proposed creating a round blade to increase efficiency. Eventually she came up with a prototype, attaching a circular blade to her spinning wheel, using the pedal of her wheel to power it. As the blade spun, no movement was wasted. The circular saw was connected to a water-powered machine to reduce the effort to cut lumber, meaning that wood could be cut faster with half the manpower. The first circular saw she allegedly made is in Albany, New York State USA. A larger version of her design was later installed in the sawmill.
But – Tabitha was a member of the Shakers, a Christian sect founded circa 1747 in England who had emigrated and settled in revolutionary colonial America. Their core beliefs centred round a perfect society, created through communal living, gender and racial equality, pacifism, confession of sin, celibacy and separation from the world. As such, they valued hard manual work, a simple lifestyle, and thrived on the forestry industry.
However, their beliefs prohibited any member applying for patents as they believed intellectual properties should be shared by the community with no restriction. Because she did not patent it (and according to wiki the reference to her invention exists only in Shaker lore), there is controversy over whether she was the first true inventor of the circular saw.
Two French men patented the circular saw in USA after reading about her saw in Shaker papers. One of the patentees, Stephen Miller argues she wasn’t the first inventor based on the date she joined the sect. He contended that it was invented at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village by Amos Bishop or Benjamin Bruce in 1793 – or not by a Shaker at all.
Samuel Miller obtained a patent in UK for a saw windmill which supposedly used a form of a circular saw in 1777 though the type of saw is only mentioned in passing, making it seem as though it was not his invention. Walter Taylor a few years later in same area of the United Kingdom seemed to have types of circular saws at his sawmill but in fact he only ever received patents for improvements to blockmaking.
However, it appears Babbitt’s circular saw design was much larger than other circular saw mechanisms and enough modifications were made to differentiate her invention from the rest. Her basic design was also the one that soon was copied at various American sawmills, popularising the use of circular saw in mills.
Tabitha was also credited with improving the spinning wheel head, inventing a process to manufacture false teeth, and inventing a process for manufacturing the then semi-revolutionary type of nail known as “cut nails” which replaced forged nails, a claim to fame she shares with a few other inventors including famed inventor Eli Whitney…
An unsung hero: “Tabitha Babbitt” from the Mills Archive, via Mathew Ingram‘s When the Going Gets Weird (also source of the image above).
* Attributed to Samuel Adams, who used the phrase in a late 18th century letter
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As we investigate innovation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed the first patent for an integrated circuit (U.S. Patent 3,138,743). In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby didn’t yet have the right to a summer vacation. So he spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design known as the “tyranny of numbers” (how to add more and more components, all soldered to all of the others, to improve performance). He finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to the management: a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached. Kilby pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave– proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he had solved the problem.
Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later). Kilby has been honored in many ways for his breakthrough, probably most augustly with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
“Every living thing is made of cells, and everything a living thing does is done by the cells that make it up”*…
And so, as Charudatta Navare explains, we need to be thoughtful about how we talk about them, as prevailing scientific narratives project human social hierarchies onto nature in misleading ways…
When you think about it, it is amazing that something as tiny as a living cell is capable of behaviour so complex. Consider the single-cell creature, the amoeba. It can sense its environment, move around, obtain its food, maintain its structure, and multiply. How does a cell know how to do all of this? Biology textbooks will tell you that each eukaryotic cell, which constitutes a range of organisms from humans to amoeba, contains a control centre within a structure called the nucleus. Genes present in the nucleus hold the ‘information’ necessary for the cell to function. And the nucleus, in turn, resides in a jelly-like fluid called the cytoplasm. Cytoplasm contains the cellular organelles, the ‘little organs’ in the cell; and these organelles, the narrative goes, carry out specific tasks based on instructions provided by the genes.
In short, the textbooks paint a picture of a cellular ‘assembly line’ where genes issue instructions for the manufacture of proteins that do the work of the body from day to day. This textbook description of the cell matches, almost word for word, a social institution. The picture of the cytoplasm and its organelles performing the work of ‘manufacturing’, ‘packaging’ and ‘shipping’ molecules according to ‘instructions’ from the genes eerily evokes the social hierarchy of executives ordering the manual labour of toiling masses. The only problem is that the cell is not a ‘factory’. It does not have a ‘control centre’. As the feminist scholar Emily Martin observes, the assumption of centralised control distorts our understanding of the cell.
A wealth of research in biology suggests that ‘control’ and ‘information’ are not restricted at the ‘top’ but present throughout the cell. The cellular organelles do not just form a linear ‘assembly line’ but interact with each other in complex ways. Nor is the cell obsessed with the economically significant work of ‘manufacturing’ that the metaphor of ‘factory’ would have us believe. Instead, much of the work that the cell does can be thought of as maintaining itself and taking ‘care’ of other cells.
Why, then, do the standard textbooks continue to portray the cell as a hierarchy? Why do they invoke a centralised authority to explain how each cell functions? And why is the imagery so industrially loaded?…
We need better metaphors to describe cellular life: “The cell is not a factory,” from @charudatta_n in @aeonmag.
* cytologist and author L.L. Larison Cudmore
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As we avoid anthropomorphism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the first patent for a life form (U.S. No. 4,259,444) was issued to Ananda Chakrabarty (who had done his research at GE). Chakrabarty had developed Pseudomonas bacterium (now called Burkholderia cepacia) which can be used to clean up toxic spills (as it can break down crude oil into simpler substances that can even become food for aquatic life)– an ability possessed by no naturally occurring bacteria.
The application had been originally denied by the patent office, on the grounds that under patent law at that time, living things were generally understood to not be patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
Chakrabarty (and GE) appealed (to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences), lost, and appealed again ( the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals) and prevailed…. At which point, the Patent Office (led by director Sydney Diamond) appealed in civil court.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled (5-4, Diamond v. Chakrabarty) in Chakrabarty’s favor. As Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the majority, life can be patented if they are the outcome of “human ingenuity and research” and not “nature’s handiwork”– a ruling that cleared the way for patents to be issued on genetically-engineered mice and other animals, seeds, and more.
“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself”*…
Ian Leslie on why we need to take control of our influences and what we can learn from artists about how to do so…
We live in age of social influence, and while there is no shortage of advice on how to take advantage of that – how to influence others, how to build a following, how to change minds – there is a dearth of thinking on how to be influenced. Which is odd, because that seems, to me, to be one of the key questions of the age…
Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality. We get infected by harmful behaviours: smoking, anorexia, even suicide are all subject to social influence. We swallow conspiracy theories and false beliefs. We become mindless creatures of habit unable to imagine new possibilities. Conforming to influence can generate anxiety: we become worried that we’re not conforming well enough. There are externalities to be considered, too. Over-conformity is a kind of free-riding. The over-conformer takes from the shared pot of memes but fails to contribute to it. A society with too much imitation is liable to decay and degenerate, because it stops creating, thinking and innovating.
Each of us, then, has to try and strike a balance. Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy.
But it’s harder than ever to strike this balance, because we live in societies where influence is everywhere, pressing upon us from all sides. We can instantly find out what strangers think, or at least what they say they’re thinking, on any given topic. We can consult with our friends every second of the day. It’s easier to outsource your opinions than ever; it feels good, it feels safe, to side with a crowd. There are higher costs to non-conformity, too: online communities assiduously police the boundaries of acceptable thought and behaviour…
… on the one hand, we have access to a broader range of information and insight than any generation in history, which ought to make us all more interesting. On the other, it’s very difficult, amidst the crossfire hurricane of influence, to think and act for yourself – to be you.
I could leave it there, with the conclusion that we’re all being influenced all the time and we’re not remotely prepared for how to manage these influences, and that maybe we should think about that a little more. But I want to add this: that there is a group of people who have a lot to teach us about how to live in the age of influence, because they have confronted this question with a special intensity for hundreds of years.
Artists (in the broad sense – painters, novelists, composers, etc) are pretty much defined by the struggle to be themselves; to absorb influences without surrendering to them; to be open to others and stubbornly individual. Consequently, artists have a different relationship to influence than the rest of us do. The core difference is this: artists do not absorb their influences passively. They choose their influences, and they choose how to be influenced by them…
Read on for sound advice: “How To Be Influenced,” from @mrianleslie via @TheBrowser.
Apposite: “The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety,” from @chaykak
* Miles Davis
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As we steal like an artist, we might recall that it was on this date in 1790 that the first U.S. patent was issued to Samuel Hopkins for an improvement “in the making of Potash and Pearlash by a new Apparatus and Process.” It was signed by then-President George Washington.
A number of inventors had been clamoring for patents and copyrights (which were, of course, anticipated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution), but the first session of the First Congress in 1789 acted on none of the petitions. On January 8, 1790, President Washington recommended in his State of the Union address that Congress give attention to the encouragement of new and useful inventions; and within the month, the House appointed a committee to draft a patent statute. Even then the process worked slowly: Hopkins’ patent was issued over six months later.
“If locusts are ravenous sociopaths, cicadas are more like frat boys – clumsy, loud, and obsessed with sex”*…
… and they are, themselves, the object of other species’ obsessions…
This spring’s emergence of periodical cicadas in the eastern U.S. will make more than a buzz. Their bodies—which will number in the billions—will also create an unparalleled food fest for legions of small would-be predators, including many birds and mammals. But some animals may benefit more than others, and any boost predator populations get from the coming buffet of winged insects will likely be short-lived, researchers say.
Tiny chickadees and mice have been known to wrestle these chunky bugs for a quick snack. Raptors, fish, spiders, snakes and turtles will gulp them down when given the chance. Captive zoo animals, such as meerkats, monitor lizards and sloth bears, will do so as well if the insects show up in their enclosure. Observers have even reported seeing domestic cats trap two cicadas at once, one under each forepaw.
This spring, three species of cicadas (collectively referred to as Brood X or Brood 10) will crawl out of the ground where they have spent the previous 17 years. They will coat the limbs and leaves of trees, sing, mate, lay eggs and then die. Uneaten corpses and body parts will add nutrients to the soil, bolstering the ecosystem and its denizens long after the boisterous insects disappear. But the famous periodicity of cicada broods can set some predators up for feast-then-famine scenarios—population booms followed by food insecurity and then sudden drops in numbers.
“In response to this superabundance of food, a lot of the predator populations have outrageously good years,” says Richard Karban, a University of California, Davis, entomologist who studies periodical cicadas. “But then the next year, and in the intervening years, there’s no food for them, so their populations crash again.”
Predators could be part of the reason that these slow-flying, defenseless and colorful cicadas emerge periodically instead of perennially. Over millennia, synchronized periodic emergences as a dense mob could have led to higher adult survival rates. Thus, the insects evolved to adopt their unusual life cycle—most of which is spent feeding underground—explains University of Connecticut evolutionary biologist and ecologist Chris Simon, who studies cicadas. “The predators are really important in driving the whole story,” she says. The success of the species effectively banks on sheer volume…
Most bird species do not travel to take advantage of cicada emergences… They live and eat in the same areas year after year, picking off the insects opportunistically instead of traveling to the cicada motherlode… cuckoos are an exception: they migrate to take advantage of insect outbreaks all over the country…
Despite all the eager predators, the life-cycle gamble on high-volume emergences pays off for periodical cicadas. Most survive predation to mate and then drop dead to the forest floor. But even if they go uneaten, their ecosystem impact does not stop there. Cicada bodies contain about 10 percent nitrogen, which is more than the concentration found in dead leaves and other typical forest litter, says Louie Yang, a University of California, Davis, entomologist, who studies resource pulses and phenological shifts. Plants such as American bellflowers will take up the nitrogen from the dead cicadas, and herbivorous mammals and insects will selectively feed on the higher-nitrogen fertilized leaves, he adds.
Patterns such as this one illustrate the ecological lens that periodical cicadas can provide on biological communities and evolutionary timelines. “I love the reciprocity of the whole system,” Yang says. “I think this kind of stuff happens all the time, but it’s usually hard to see. When these pulse events happen, it makes it really obvious—we can see that pulse pass through the system.”…
Billions of emerging insects will likely trigger predator population surges: “Brood X Cicadas Could Cause a Bird Baby Boom.”
Oh, and given climate change, 17-year cicadas could become 13-year cicadas: “The cicadas are coming. And they’re changing dramatically.”
* Catherine Price, 101 Places Not to See Before You Die
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As we bear the buzz, we might recall that it was on this date in 1923 that insulin became publicly available for use by diabetics. Frederick Banting had discovered insulin in 1921, and refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. He and his co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1. They wanted everyone who needed their medication to be able to afford it.
Today, Banting and his colleagues would be spinning in their graves: Their drug, which many of the 30 million Americans with diabetes rely on, has become the poster child for pharmaceutical price gouging.
The cost of the four most popular types of insulin has tripled over the past decade, and the out-of-pocket prescription costs patients now face have doubled. By 2016, the average price per month rose to $450 — and costs continue to rise, so much so that as many as one in four people with diabetes are now skimping on or skipping lifesaving doses…
“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”*…
… It’s illuminating to point out that all three transformative technologies of the twentieth century – aviation, the automobile, and the digital computer – started off in patent battles and required a voluntary suspension of hostilities (a collective decision to ignore patents) before the technology could truly take hold.
The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn’t what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.
If you are someone who believes that the Internet and computer software are a transformative technology on a par with aviation, you may find it interesting to note that there is now a patent cease-fire in effect in the world of software, the occasional high-profile infringement case notwithstanding. The reason for the cease-fire is simple: if companies like IBM, Xerox, and Sun were to begin fully enforcing their patent portfolios, it would mean an apocalypse of litigation for all software developers. Everyone understands that the health and growth of the Internet are contingent on ignoring the patent system as much as possible.
At the same time, more patents are being granted than ever before, for broader claims, and with an almost complete disregard for prior art. Entire companies – and not just legal firms – are basing business models on extracting money from the patent system without actually creating any products. And the boundaries of patent law are expanding. For the first time in history, it’s possible to patent pure mathematical ideas (in the form of software patents), or even biological entities. The SARS virus was patented shortly after being isolated for the first time.
But if the patent system doesn’t even work for the archetypal example – two inventors, working alone, who singlehandedly invent a major new technology – why do we keep it at all? Who really benefits, and who pays?…
Learning from (the unhappy experiences of) the Wright Brothers– Maciej Cegłowski explains why the U.S. patent system is counter-productive: “100 Years of Turbulence.” Eminently worthy of reading in full.
See also, Bruce Perens: “Software Patents vs. Free Software.”
* Bill Gates, Challenges and Strategy Memo, Microsoft, May 16, 1991
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As we apply our intellects to intellectual property, we might recall that it was on this date in 1976 that Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne signed a partnership agreement that established the company that would become Apple Computer, Inc.– a company all about the IP– on January 3, 1977.
Wayne left the partnership eleven days later, relinquishing his ten percent share for $2,300.
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