SO GOOD THEY INVENTED IT
TWICE
Despite, or because of, the
current economic recession there seems to be an increase in the rate of
inventing. What can those pursuing patent applications learn about the process
from the inventions of the past? If we think about the most common inventions
we use today, they seem to have been produced fully realised. But many of our
favourite inventions had to be recreated in the form that we are now familiar
with. The steam engine, printing, television and aeroplanes initially had no
widespread use until their design was improved to such an extent that it almost
became another invention. The word ‘almost’, in this context, is something the
lawyers can argue about until the cows either come home, or they get replaced
by robotic bio-reactors. I am interested in how the inventions that we are
familiar with came into existence, in a form that is better than their original conception.
Steam engines eventually gave
us the railways and the ability to travel long distances quickly. Printing was
massively speeded up by the linotype and made cheaper. John Logie Baird’s
mechanical television was superseded by the EMI electronic version which
revolutionised the way we understand the world, for better or ill. What does
this tell us about inventions and how designs develop?
It’s getting better
What these inventions have in
common is that they all had a step-change in their usability that may not have
been imagined by the first person to have the initial idea. The first
‘atmospheric’ steam engines worked by sucking steam into a double walled iron
cylinder which was cooled by a water-jacket. As the steam condensed back to
water in the cylinder it created a partial vacuum that allowed atmospheric pressure
to push the piston down. While the downward force exerted was enough to drive a
water pump, it was too weak to power a locomotive. These first ‘atmospheric’ steam
engines were able to pump water out of mines, but they were not good enough to
create a railway. The evolution of the railway system needed high pressure
cylinders that were made from cast iron, and eventually steel, before they
could be used to drive a locomotive. The growth of the railways corresponded
with the increasing availability of steel made possible by the Bessemer
This beam engine at Wollaton Industrial museum is more
modern than the early ‘atmospheric’ engines, but this video illustrates the
difference in the scale of early pumping engines and steam locomotives.
On the railways the change
from static pump engines to locomotives was not made with the application of
steel cylinders alone. A whole system had to evolve. Steel also made possible
the control system that depended on cables to operate signals and points (or
switches, in the USA
A similar step-change
occurred with the newspaper industry. The linotype machine enabled a skilled
operator to created line of type as fast as several people working as typesetters
assembling words from individual letters. The resulting increase in efficiency
changed printing from an expensive low volume process to a cheap mass produced
product. It was the linotype machine that established the newspaper industry as
we have known it.
It is not just steam engines
and printing that were initially just not good enough. Baird’s mechanical
television system used a clumsy rotating disc which directed the varying output
from a lamp to different parts of the screen. By matching the movements of a
similar disc in a camera which exposed different parts of a scene to a
photo-sensitive electric cell, the view could be re-created at home. The
resulting image was composed of only 30 lines and flickered a lot. A team at
EMI designed a purely electronic version which had an electron beam scanning a photoreceptive
cathode plate. They realised that their 405 line electronic television was
better and could be improved further in the future. Just as the first
atmospheric steam engines were not up to the task of powering railways, Baird’s
electromechanical television was superseded by the purely electronic ‘high
definition’ system developed by EMI.
The Name of the Game
If steam power was the
paradigm for the 19th century it was electricity that defined the 20th
century. Despite the improvement to Baird’s patent made by the EMI team, television
would not have prospered without the widespread availability of electricity
made possible by the electric grid. Neither Railways nor Television could have
developed without a supporting system. Railways needed signalling and a means
to change points and television needed electricity. In Britain
By contrast, the golden age
of motoring was when not many people had cars. The first cars were difficult to
drive. As well as the familiar controls there was a lever to manually advance
and retard the timing of the ignition system. This had to be continually
adjusted as engine speed varied. To avoid crashing gears together the engine
speed had to be matched to the speed of the wheels when changing gear. Automatic ignition advance and retard and synchromesh
removed these problems and made the driving process easier. Although these changes internal to the motor car
were needed to improve its performance to the point of acceptability, it was
the publicly funded road system that made the explosion of car ownership
possible. The motor car is a slightly different example of the interaction
between the development of the invention and the system to support it.
Historic attempts at making
parishes responsible for road maintenance and later raising funds through
turnpike trusts failed to create useable road networks. Only government
taxation created a road system with any quality. It was investment in roads
funded by the public that made driving accessible to millions. While the
infrastructure system for the railway was entirely the affair of the railway
companies, the motor car could only develop with a publicly funded road
network. The symbol of personal freedom that is the car only exists as a result
of the collaborative effort from mass society through money from taxation. The
support of technical innovation by infrastructure was the name of the game
since the start of the industrial revolution.
While the jet engine might
appear to have re-invented the aeroplane, flying would not have developed into
a mass industry without the development of reliable radio communications and
air traffic control. Just as steel cables coordinated the railways in the
previous century, Radar controls the flow of air traffic to a density that
makes possible the present era of cheap mass flight. While the jet engine is
significantly more efficient than the piston engines of the first generation
aeroplanes it is the economies of scale combined with safety that are made
possible by radar.
Automatic for the People
The widespread ownership of
telephone and an efficient connection system is the most important factor in
its success. Just as steel cables enabled a relatively small number of men to
control a railway network; it was the automation of telephone exchanges with
the electromechanical Strowger system that realised the potential of the
telephone. 1936 was a watershed in technology. The 405 line VHF black and white
television standard produced by EMI was a harbinger of the age of electronic
devices that would revolutionise the world. The electric grid is subtly
different from the railway system in that it gave rise to more inventions using
electricity than the number of inventions needed to created the grid.
The Strowger telephone exchanges enabled calls to be
connected by the caller without the help of a telephone operator.
The electricity grid is a
system that is half way between the age of railways and the age of the
internet. The railway network needed several inventions to make one system. If
we ignore the complexity of hardware behind the internet and treat the
protocols that enable it as a single entity, then it seem that the World Wide
Web gives rise to many more things than the system itself. It is also possible
to exaggerate the speed with which change occurs. The electric age took over 30
years to develop. The first photocopier to use electrostatic xeroxography produced
its first print in 1938 but some wet duplicators were still used in 1980s.The
last manually operated telephone exchanges were only phased out in Britain in
the 1960s. The age of the human telephone operator was finally ended by the
1930s Strowger equipment and the and 1950s T-bar system. (Fans of the 1960s TV series
of ‘Dr. Who’ can hear a recording of a T-bar exchange used as background noise
inside the Tardis when it is ‘ticking over’)
No More Heroes.
With the benefit of hindsight
we can see that the success of the EMI television system over Baird’s design is
not just symbolic of the end of the age of purely mechanical devices and the emergence
of the electronic era, it was really the end of the age of the lone inventor
working without support. This process had already started in the 19th
Century. Although Thomas Edison had over 150 patents to his name, most of these
were really thought up by his employees. Edison
created what was in what was in effect the first technological research
institute.
While Edison
is remembered more than his workers, Bell Labs is as known as its founder,
Alexander Graham Bell. The organisation is the research division of the AT and
T telephone company and is focused on communication technology. The labs pursue
commercial and patentable ideas but along the way they have made scientific
discoveries. Karl Jansky was researching radio interference there in 1933 when
he discovered radio emissions from the Milky Way galaxy. As well as starting
the scientific discipline of radio astronomy Bell Labs advanced it even further
in 1964 when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected the cosmic microwave
background (CMB ). This relic radiation was emitted when matter first
formed and is the only direct evidence for the ‘Big Bang’ origin of the
Universe. The research effort at Bell Labs is usually directed at commercially
valuable devices and these devices outnumber the discoveries that belong to
‘pure’ Science.
Edwin H. Land was another
inventor who started a research institution. Known for his invention the
instant self-processing photographs he was able to use resources from his
Polaroid Corporation to undertake fundamental research into human vision. After
retirement he founded the Rowland Institute for Science which continues
research within Harvard University
Polarising filters had to be
re-invented through a radical change to their manufacturing process for them to
find other uses but Jacques Cousteau made a small change to an already existing
valve, originally designed to enable car engines to work on gas. In 1943 he
realised that it could be used it for the automatic regulation of compressed
gas for diving. In the 1930s some divers were already using modified submarine
escape equipment to swim underwater but they found that it was necessary to
adjust the pressure of the flow from the cylinders as they moved up or down.
Cousteau’s automatic demand valve freed divers to swim up or down at will
without water entering their mouth or air being wasted by bubbling out of the
mouth piece.
What came to be known as the
‘aqualung’ gave Cousteau a large income which launched a writing and
documentary film making carer lasting until his death in 1997. Like Bell MRI scanners that are now widely used in medicine while
working a Nottingham University
Come Together.
The Laser is an example of an
invention that sits halfway between science and technology. The possibility of
the creation of a coherent beam of electromagnetic radiation was predicted by
Einstein in 1917. For the next three decades the idea was worked on by
theoretical physicists until a laboratory experiment detected lasing in 1950.
By 1953 a microwave version of the laser, the maser, was demonstrated at Columbia University
Theaodore Maiman suggested that the power of a laser
could be described as one “Gillette” if it could burn through one razor blade.
Subsequently the laser became
so important that patent disputes arose and the attribution for the creation of
the first laser is still debated. The light emitting version of the maser is an
example of the device that was so good they invented it twice. Today lasers are
vital to the transmission of signals for the internet. There are now ten main
types of Lasers. They vary from tiny
diode Lasers in CD and DVD players to massive 500 terawatt neodymium-doped phosphate glass
lasers designed to produce hyrdogen fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.The proliferation of types of
lasers suggests that inventions can evolve like living things. Even though they
are based on ideas that can be owned there is a sense in which the course of
the development of inventions is outside the control of those who originally
designed them.
There is one similarity
between the development of the helicopter and the evolution of living cells.
The ancient ancestors of animal cells benefited from the acquisition of the
‘energy factories’ known as mitochondria. It is widely believed that that these
organelles were originally bacteria which were absorbed by cells and stayed on
as symbiotic additions. Even today, Mitochondria have their own RNA which is
separate from the DNA and the RNA of the cell in which they live.
Similarly, ancient plant cells obtained their photosynthetic Chloroplasts by
acquiring Cyanobacteria. By an analogous process helicopters
gained a huge increase in their lifting capacity when their piston engines were
replaced by more efficient gas turbine engines. The US
The gas turbine engines have
since become standard in all helicopters. The inclusion of gas turbine engines
into helicopters illustrates that the re-invention of a design is really the
moment of convergence of ideas. Rather than different devices moving smoothly
through time to intersect at a moment of history, some elements of inventions
seem to have been held in abeyance. The Camera Obscura was known to ancient
Chinese and was established as a drawing aid by the 18th Century.
Only the advent of light sensitive chemistry in 1826 allowed it to be
transformed into the photographic camera. By the end of the 19th
century the replacement of photographic glass plates by flexible film enabled
the mechanism of the sowing machine to mutate into the cine camera.
Keep the Customer Satisfied
If inventions evolve like
living organisms then the course of their development will necessarily be
influenced by the environment in which they operate. While the laser was
initially seen as an invention with little use, the World Wide Web is famously
not an invention. Tim Berners-Lee deliberately chose not to patent the system
he devised at CERN . Unlike Bell CERN researches the fundamental aspects of nature, but nonetheless it was
employment from CERN that enabled Tim Berners-Lee to spend a year creating
the protocols that enable the World Wide Web to function in a way the internet
was never originally imagined. Unlike Bell Labs and other corporate research
facilities CERN is a ‘pure’ science institution but the internet has
become the high seas of commerce. The World Wide Web is not so much an
invention as an ocean of information over which capitalism sails. It has become
the environment in which other inventions operate.
The types of systems that can
operate on the internet are less physical than the industrial products of the
last 150 years. As the internet becomes accessible by mobile devices it can
combine with satellite global position systems to give location based services.
As well as showing a consumer what shops and restaurants are nearby there could
be a subscribed service whereby they could offer discounts to the scheme
members as they walk into the vicinity. The reduced prices offered by the
retailer could be reclaimed from the subscribed system that the consumer has
already paid into. As these pre-contributed funds would be separate from the
consumer’s bank account the system would be different from a debit or a credit
card. It would be a form of saving account. The operators of the system could
operate on small profit margins as their overheads would be hard working
electronics.
The consumer would worry less
as they would not be racking-up a bill but spending already saved money. The location
aware discounts might appeal to the wandering tourist. In that case different
operators would be competing with each other in the same area. In either case the navigation satellites needed
to enable this system are provided by governments. Even the Galileo system started
with the intention of funding it by private investors but they pulled out. Just
as the road systems are provided by taxations the location based service
industry will be dependent on government subsidy.
Whether the world needs this
type of corporate trading is debatable. A location aware trading information
system could form the basis for an allegiance between community based credit
unions and local businesses. The FOAP website already allows users of smart
phones to offer photographs for sale. In a two way advertising system owners of
smart phone can be made aware of what types of photographs people are looking
for in connection with a specific area and potential buyers can see what is
already available. It would not take too much of a tweak to put users of food
in connection with allotment producers. This type of electronically enabled
localism may be important from now on.
The current economic crisis
has built up over decades as property prices became based on exchange value
instead of use value. So much money has been sucked out of the western economy
by property price inflation banks it may be beyond the ability of banks or
governments to help. Perhaps the future will see a return to interest in
concrete reality. The recent advent of 3D printing offers intriguing
possibilities. Freed from reliance on mass produced technology based in
factories who knows where this will lead to? The financial disasters of the
last few years might concentrate our attention on real objects and real needs.
Future Days
The latest invention to be
re-invented is the Maser. The radio version of the Laser has remained a
relatively obscure device used in a few specialist applications. Their need for
high vacuum, cryogenic temperatures and strong magnetic fields has restricted
the use of Masers to applications such as atomic clocks and satellite
communications. The National Physical Laboratory has developed a crystal formed
from p-terphenyl doped with pentacene that can generate the masing process at
room temperature. It is expected that this huge improvement in the operation of
Masers will make them cheaper to operate and much more common. The new
re-invention of Masers is already being discussed in terms of medical
diagnostic applications. Perhaps the new Masers could be used to activate drugs.
Light sensitive drugs are already
being researched at the National Cancer Institute, Maryland
If the maser beams were very
narrow the area of activation of a drug could be limited to the inside of a
tumour. By moving the beams around the point of intersection could be made to
correspond to a 3D shape inside the tumour. The co-ordinates of this volume
would have to be precisely mapped out by MRI or other means. If the area to be treated was very small some form of
motion compensation might be needed. This technology is already used for robot
assisted radiotherapy. Another possibility for a maser generated region of
radio energy would be the modification of surgical plastic implants. If it were
possible to make a type of plastic that shrinks under the influence of a
specific wavelength of radio waves it could be used to gradually correct the
shape of tissues over a period of time through repeated sessions of
irradiation.
At a much larger scale the
region of constructive interference produced at the intersection of maser beams of different wavelengths could be used to melt ice. If the designated wavelength was the same as that
used by microwave cookers the region of ice just in front of a drill bit could
be melted. When drilling into ice sheets the need to pump hot water into a
drill string could be obviated in favour of melting the ice in front of the
drill bit. If the process was successful perhaps the drill string could be
replaced by a discrete probe that was steered by maser induced patch of melted
ice in front or to one side of it. If sub-ice lakes such as Lake Vostok or
Speculating about opportunities
is fun but the future is always uncertain. In a speech to mark the occasion of
the opening of the GPO tower in London the then prime minister, Harold Wilson,
said that he had been told that in the future most telephone traffic would be
computers talking to each other. That comment now seems to be prescient. The
Internet has been made possible by a combination of computers and a telephone
system, but the World Wide Web has produced a paradigm shift that could
scarcely have been imagined in 1965. The internet in sense created the home
computer as a mass phenomenon. In the 1960s an article in New Scientist
magazine predicted that by the 1980s families would have home computers that
used magnetic information tapes borrowed from public libraries. How wrong can
you be?
Whatever form future inventions
take they will often be transformations of earlier developments or they will
combine elements from other inventions. The split differential drive for motor
cars was originally produced in China
Synchromesh
Apple v Samsung
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