Posts Tagged: "history"

The government was looking for a multi-purpose four-wheel-drive vehicle. Only American Bantam Car Company responded to the request within the given time, which was just 49 days to produce a working prototype. The government was impressed with Bantam’s design and shared the blueprints with several other companies, which not surprisingly soon followed with their own very similar designs. Adding insult to injury, the government applied for a patent in the name of Colonel Byron Jones as the inventor despite the fact that he did not work on the design of the vehicle.

QUINN: ”I always refer to myself as a geek or a nerd. Do you wear that too as a badge of honor?” KISLIUK: ”Oh, absolutely. When my neighbors needed something fixed — it’s a little geeky but — I would grab my bucket of tools and walk up the street. I was proud they would ask me — even more so if I could actually fix it! So I think only a geek would be proud to spend their Saturday helping their neighbor fix something.”

The Polaroid-Kodak dispute involved patents covering instant photography, which at the time was among the most valuable technologies. It was the case that launched 10,000 patent suits, many by non-practicing entities. But as one observer pointed out, by the end of the long dispute, the Polaroid-Kodak battle was “little more than two aging giants dueling on the decks of the Titanic.” Digital photography would soon eclipse instant photography, and both litigants were on the road to insolvency.

Any story about innovation that starts with Leonardo da Vinci is one worth telling. The fact that the great French philosopher René Descartes also plays a starring role in the history of the contact lens makes this story of innovation all the more noteworthy. Conceived in the earliest parts of the 16th century, 34 million Americans wear thin film contact lenses over their eyes for some form of vision enhancement. The first true contact lenses was created by Swiss physicist A.E. Fick in 1888, when the lens maker fabricated a spherical glass segment for the correction of refractive errors in a wearer’s eyes.

The first decade of the 21st century saw some major advances in bionic arm technologies. The first half of that decade saw a team of researchers working together at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago’s Center for Bionic Medicine crafted a bionic arm for Jesse Sullivan, a high-power electrical lineman who lost both of his arms in May 2001 as the result of electrocution. The bionic arm is myoelectric, meaning that it is capable of detecting electrical signals generated by the muscles of the human body. To increase the control signals that can be detected from the body, doctors at RIC’s Neural Engineering Center for Artificial Limbs performed a series of nerve-muscle grafts to move nerves which used to travel to the arms into the chest muscles. By increasing the number of control signals that can be read from the patient’s nerves, doctors were able to outfit Sullivan with a working bionic arm that could be controlled naturally from his nerve impulses.

Of all of the types of microphones in use today, the electret microphone is the most commonly used version; 90 percent of all microphones used today are of the electret variety, resulting in almost two billion electret microphones being manufactured every year. Invented during the 1960s by a team of researchers working at Bell Laboratories, the electret microphone possessed superior characteristics, like improved sensitivity and greater cost-effectiveness, over the commonly used carbon microphones of that time. The discovery of the electret microphone enabled some great advances in many of the technologies mentioned above which rely on microphones that are small in size and can create clear audio signals.

Starting before World War II and continuing throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, short sighted and now discredited government antitrust policies, coupled with judicial hostility toward patent enforcement and patent licensing, converged to reduce the enforceability of patents and to restrict the ability of patent owners to license their inventions. The result: foreign competitors began to capture entire industries that should have been dominated by U.S. companies that had pioneered the relevant technologies.

The next major development in bicycling technologies comes in the 1860s, when the first attempts are made at adding a driving mechanism. This would be the start of the pedal bicycles that we see traveling along streets and sidewalks all over the world. These models began utilizing rotary cranks which were attached to front wheel pedals to power the bicycle forward. These velocipedes were often commonly known as “boneshakers” due to their rigid metal frames and wheels; rubber wheels weren’t introduced until later, in the late 1870s. The frame, constructed of iron, could easily reach up to 100 pounds in weight. Although these look like contemporary bikes, these models had a much lower gear ratio, resulting in a bike that traveled much slower than today’s versions.

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.