Posts Tagged: "hall of fame"

Thanks to the work of Howard S. Jones, Jr., one of the 2018 inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the United States was able to advance antenna technology in the latter part of the 20th century. Jones’ innovative work in developing conformal antennas has been crucial for the development of enabled enhanced capabilities for spacecraft, rockets and other aeronautical technologies. This March 1st marks the 41st anniversary of the issuance of the U.S. patent for which Jones has been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Today, we return to our Evolution of Technology series to explore the early development of antennas and see how Jones was able to make a great step forward in improving our nation’s defense systems.

The synthetic elastic fiber known as spandex, a name which comes from an anagram of ‘expands,’ is used in a wide range of clothing and apparel from sportswear to casual clothing to undergarments. Spandex also has applications in medical dressings such as diapers and bandages… This Tuesday, February 27th, marks the 56th anniversary of the issue of the original spandex patent. The inventor of spandex, Joseph C. Shivers, Jr., is a 2018 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame… His induction to the National Inventors Hall of Fame comes posthumously, but modern society continues to reap the benefits of Shivers’ inability to let go of a problem many years ago.

December 28 marks the anniversary of the issuance of a patent covering a bandage technology commonly known as the Band-Aid®, invented at Johnson & Johnson… In order to speed up the process of tending to his wife’s cuts and nicks, Dickson came to the idea of preparing a length of adhesive tape with sections of gauze, allowing Josephine to snip off a strip of tape and quickly apply the adhesive bandage. When the couple considered how useful such a product might be in households across the country, Earle brought the idea to his boss James Wood Johnson, another one of the three co-founding brothers of J&J. Band-Aid® brand adhesive bandages first hit the consumer market in 1920.

Most fields of chemical science designed to look at biological process involving living molecules suffer from a rather serious drawback— studying those molecules within a living body without interfering with any other processes. Over the past two decades, however, an entirely new scientific field has opened up which enables the study of chemical reactions occurring within living systems with no interference to any biochemical processes native to that living system. Bioorthogonal chemistry was pioneered by Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, a 2017 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. This Thursday, October 5th, is the seventh anniversary of the date of issue of the patent for which Bertozzi has been inducted. As we often do, we’ll return to our Evolution of Tech series to see how this particular innovation was developed and how it helped to unlock a completely new field of scientific research.

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…

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.

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).

65 years ago today, American chemical researcher Allene Jeanes was issued a patent for a polysaccharide innovation which had major implications for the U.S. military, helping to save the lives of soldiers injured on the front lines of the Korean War… If this were the only contribution made by Jeanes to the body of chemical science and engineering knowledge, that might well have been enough to inclusion in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. However, Jeanes is also the pioneer behind another chemical innovation involving polysaccharides, discovering an emulsifier and food stabilizer — Xanthan Gum — which is found in the ingredient list of a great deal of processed foods available in grocery stores today.

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.