First Internet message and ...

[Paul Koning]

> On Nov 26, 2019, at 9:09 PM, TeoZ via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> Patents are generally used to document who invented what first. Commercial success building on old research and patents tends to be what is remembered.

"who invented what first" -- sort of.  More precisely, who filed a patent application first, and then depending on whether the patent office noticed the prior art.

One of my favorite examples is the patent issued to Abraham Lincoln for an invention that actually has prior art going back about two centuries.

> So what if some guy in 1761 heated up a wire until it glowed releasing light, it took many people over a long time to come up with a usable cheap light bulb design and the inventions that brought electricity into cities and peoples houses to power those bulbs that people will remember.
> ...
> The people who invented something epic tend to not have commercial success because pretty much most ground breaking patents tend to expire before they truly become useful and because of the need for other inventions to make them commercially usable.

There are lots of examples like this.  Columbus is a good one: not the first European to set foot in America, but the first whose visit led to a large and lasting historic impact.  Or the one I have been investigating recently: FM radio wasn't first done by Edwin Armstrong, but his work led to the current use of FM while the earlier work of Idzerda did not.

Incidentally, that demonstrates the limitations of patents as a source of historical evidence: Idzerda has a US Patent, but Armstrong's patents, filed some years later, do not cite that prior art or make any mention of it.

	paul