Posts Tagged: "elisha gray"

The Difference Between Eastern and Western Innovation Management

In the intellectual property (IP) space, knowledge workers come from both Eastern and Western cultural backgrounds. In Silicon Valley and other hubs of innovation, the melding of societal variations most often goes smoothly. However, sometimes not-fully-assimilated Eastern managers get named to groups heavily involved with patents and trade secrets by well-meaning CEOs or founders. What have they missed? That these Eastern managers do not always sync with Western wage earners put in their charge—especially when it comes to workstyles and idea formation.

What can Alexander Graham Bell Teach us about Patent Filing?

The popular story goes that Alexander Graham Bell and the second man to file USPTO paperwork related to invention of the telephone, Elisha Gray, did so on the same day, Feb. 14, 1876, when time of day of receipt was not recorded. The exact order in which their paperwork was received that day by the chief patent examiner and how remains in dispute even now, according to the prologue of The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876. Over time, historians seem to have sided with Bell, and Gray has more or less faded into a footnote of history.

The Myth of the Sole Inventor

The canonical story of the lone genius inventor is largely a myth. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb; he found a bamboo fiber that worked better as a filament in the light bulb developed by Sawyer and Man, who in turn built on lighting work done by others. Bell filed for his telephone patent on the very same day as an independent inventor, Elisha Gray; the case ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which filled an entire volume of U.S. Reports resolving the question of whether Bell could have a patent despite the fact that he hadn’t actually gotten the invention to work at the time he filed. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly at Kitty Hawk, but their plane didn’t work very well, and was quickly surpassed by aircraft built by Glenn Curtis and others – planes that the Wrights delayed by over a decade with patent lawsuits.