The First Phone Call Was 133 Years Ago 196
magacious writes "March 10 is the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call. It occurred between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson back on this day in 1876. But there is some debate about whether Bell is actually the rightful owner of the crown for such invention. Having worked on the idea of transmitting speech using electricity for some time, Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, either just before or just after his main rival for the title of inventor of the telephone, Elisha Gray, filed his own. Bell won the patent and Gray died in obscurity."
Antonio Meucci (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Antonio Meucci (Score:5, Informative)
Meucci was the real owner of the idea of the phone. But he was almost forgotten, only recently it received some credits.
Re:Antonio Meucci (Score:5, Informative)
H. Res. 269
In the House of Representatives, U.S.,
June 11, 2002.
Whereas Antonio Meucci, the great Italian inventor, had a career that was both extraordinary and tragic;
Whereas, upon immigrating to New York, Meucci continued to work with ceaseless vigor on a project he had begun in Havana, Cuba, an invention he later called the `teletrofono', involving electronic communications;
Whereas Meucci set up a rudimentary communications link in his Staten Island home that connected the basement with the first floor, and later, when his wife began to suffer from crippling arthritis, he created a permanent link between his lab and his wife's second floor bedroom;
Whereas, having exhausted most of his life's savings in pursuing his work, Meucci was unable to commercialize his invention, though he demonstrated his invention in 1860 and had a description of it published in New York's Italian language newspaper;
Whereas Meucci never learned English well enough to navigate the complex American business community;
Whereas Meucci was unable to raise sufficient funds to pay his way through the patent application process, and thus had to settle for a caveat, a one year renewable notice of an impending patent, which was first filed on December 28, 1871;
Whereas Meucci later learned that the Western Union affiliate laboratory reportedly lost his working models, and Meucci, who at this point was living on public assistance, was unable to renew the caveat after 1874;
Whereas in March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, who conducted experiments in the same laboratory where Meucci's materials had been stored, was granted a patent and was thereafter credited with inventing the telephone;
Whereas on January 13, 1887, the Government of the United States moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation, a case that the Supreme Court found viable and remanded for trial;
Whereas Meucci died in October 1889, the Bell patent expired in January 1893, and the case was discontinued as moot without ever reaching the underlying issue of the true inventor of the telephone entitled to the patent; and
Whereas if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell:
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.
Attest:
Clerk.
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Well that sucks, I was always kind of proud that my birthday is on the same day as Bell.
I guess historical fame through massive fraud still counts as quite an achievement...
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Re:Antonio Meucci (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the audio telephone was one of those ideas whose time had come. It's not as if it sprung from the head of some individual genius, a lot of people were working in that direction; take any one of them out of the picture and the result wouldn't be much different.
Ironically, the telephone was more or less an inevitable outgrowth of work on improving the capacity of long distance cables to carry telegraphs -- a digital medium. In a sense, we've come full circle.
One of the ideas that people were working on is what we'd call frequency division multiplexing: sending multiple simultaneous telegraph signals on the same wire but encoded on carriers of different frequencies. Once you started to work in that direction an audio telephone would be simple, relatively speaking. So somebody would have "invented" it, because plenty of people were working along those lines.
The lone genius inventor is a mythical idea, one that distorts our thinking about stuff like intellectual property. There are genius inventors, to be sure, but surely there were men like Thomas Edison or Nicola Tesla that lived in the dark ages. The reason we've never heard of them is that even a genius needs other people's ideas to build upon.
Re:Antonio Meucci (Score:5, Interesting)
for instance, if you look here [nau.edu], you'll see three groups, each of which has a strong case for being said to be the inevntor of the modern computer (Konrad Zuse, who built a programmable electro-mechanical computer in 1936, Anastoff and Berry who build a digital computer -- that was not general purpose or programmable in 1942, and Eckert and Mauchley, who built a vacuum tube base, programmable, general purpose computer in 1946). I won't get into the details, but it becomes a religious thing at some point -- I once fell out with a friend because I refused to accept Anastoff as the sole inventor of the computer. (My friend was from Iowa).
Re:Antonio Meucci (Score:5, Informative)
"In 2002 the U. S. House of Representatives passed a bill recognizing Meucci's accomplishment and stating that "if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell."
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meucci
Re:Antonio Meucci (Score:5, Funny)
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Well... american technology history rewriting, according to the president of the USA america even invented the automobile. I am glad Daimler and Benz are dead already and have been for a long time :-)
I am not even sure if Edison really was the inventor of the lightbulb afair a russian was first but did not patent it!
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Never heard of the Russian angle but Swan in the U.K. invented one at the same time as Edison. Big patent battle, ended up joining forces and cornering the market.
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Never heard of the Russian angle but Swan in the U.K. invented one at the same time as Edison. Big patent battle, ended up joining forces and cornering the market.
Alexandr Lodygin [wikipedia.org] was the Russian guy. He came up with a carbon-filament incandescent bulb in 1872, and got a patent (Russian) on it in 1874. So he's got a true working model, he just never properly commercialized that. He's also the one who patented (whether he was the first to invent or not is debatable) tungsten filament, so the modern lightbulb design probably owes more to him than to Edison.
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It is universally acknowledged that Edison did not invent the light bulb. What he did was make it practical by devising a filament that lasted more than a few hours before burning out.
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> of the lightbulb afair a russian was first
Yes, this is true. A russian has invented the first lightbulb.
However, as far as I know, Edison invented the first *working* lightbulb.
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Well... american technology history rewriting, according to the president of the USA america even invented the automobile. I am glad Daimler and Benz are dead already and have been for a long time :-)
I've _never_ heard it claimed that the USA invented the automobile. But you say it came from a President - curious what you mean. It _is_ accurate to say that Ford's assembly line was the invention of the mass-production concept.
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Not that it matters much, but Congress passed a resolution on June 11th, 2002, recognising him as the inventor of the telephone.
Also, people should know that Meucci sent his patent designs to the lab where Bell worked. And they went "missing".
There's a whole shady side to that story which is not really acknowledged in the official history.
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Could be similar to the radio fiasco between Tesla and Marconi. Even though Tesla was eventually awarded the patent, Marconi is usually mentioned when you ask people who invented radio.
Similar to the lightbulb, which wasn't invented by Edison, or the transistor which wasn't invented at Bell Labs.
Gray died in obscurity (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, the light bulb was only invented in 1879.
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Edison created something that could actually be used. That is including the electrical grid, switches, powermeters, bulb fitting and so on that was all needed to make the bulb glow. All this stuff didn't really exist back then. And a lot of new inventions that came out of that were indeed patented.
I think the patent system is put to good use in this case. If it were for Swan or some other introvert nerd, we would still be reading by candlelight.
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Perhaps you might like to take a trip to Cragside, the home of Lord Armstrong in Northumberland. To quote from the Wikipedia article
In 1870, water from one of the estate's lakes was used to drive a Siemens dynamo in what was the world's first hydroelectric power station. The resultant electricity was used to power an arc lamp installed in the Gallery in 1878. The arc lamp was replaced in 1880 by Joseph Swan's incandescent lamps in what Swan considered 'the first proper installation' of electric lighting.
Re:Gray died in obscurity (Score:5, Informative)
And not by Edison, who just got the patent...
Edison was one of the original patent/FUD trolls. A lot of people seem to think those tactics are new but in reality businesses have been engaging in them for a long time. Edison even went so far as to electrocute animals (including an elephant) during the "war of the currents" to try and scare people away from a competing product. He also tried to change the term from "electrocuted" to "Westinghoused".
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That's because he was a stubborn prick, and dead set in his ways. Even though Edison was against the idea of capital punishment, he invented the electric chair just to show people how dangerous AC was.
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not that the phone patent wasn't obvious. it's like a telegraph, but with microphones and speakers.
Do you even understand the engineering problems involved?
It's like saying that a cellphone is obvious, as it's just a phone and a radio. It's true on the surface, but there are a lot of design issues to solve to make the concept work.
Research (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Research (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. Bell's "invention" was completely based on other people's ideas.
Just like how edison stole most of his "ideas" from Tesla.
Patents dont encourage innovation. The only make the first person to file it rich. Which discourages the sharing of ideas and information for fear that some rich jerk like edison or Bell will come along and patent your idea first. There are documented cases all throughout american and european history that Patents hampered scientific innovation and industrial progress.
Re:Research (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents dont encourage innovation. The only make the first person to file it rich. Which discourages the sharing of ideas and information for fear that some rich jerk like edison or Bell will come along and patent your idea first.
You're completely contradicting yourself. Ones of the major *points* of patents is to encourage sharing of ideas. Without patents, everyone would hoard their ideas, because there would be no legal protection -- the second any rich person heard your idea, they would start mass-producing it, leaving you out in the cold.
The example here shows what happens when you share without a patent -- someone beats you to the patent office! But note that once the small investor gets there, he can share all he wants with legal protection.
Now this is the cue for anti-patent people to start listing a litany of cases where patents didn't protect some little guy. But that doesn't change the millions of cases where it does, that doesn't get the publicity.
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Patents allow free sharing of ideas once they are patented and deeply discourages any sharing before that. Given 2 inventors, each with the same problem about 90% solved (and with a DIFFERENT 10% unsolved), they will tend not to communicate at all, each fearing that the other will beat a path to the patent office and render years of their own work moot.
Just because patents are supposed to encourage sharing of ideas doesn't mean they actually accomplish that goal.
The essential problem is that the patent syst
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and this is different from me having to come up with $40,000 a year to patent my ideas how?
If I make $35,000 a year $40,000 in fees to patent things might as well be $100,000,000 to me.
Make filing patents FREE or low cost, and I'll accept your point completely.
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you completely missed the point that if I don't have 50K in cash to file 40 patents a year, then its pointless for me to become an inventor, as companies will just steal my ideas.
Well, first of all, it doesn't cost that much to file a patent, and you certainly don't need to file 40 patents a year (?).
Second, think about what you're saying. You're saying that it's pointless to become an inventory, because you can't afford to file patents. And since you can't file patents, then companies will steal your ide
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The US doesn't award patents based on who is first to file. In cases of disputed patents, the patent is awarded to the first person to have invented it.
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Bell got the basic idea for the liquid microphone from Gray's caveat, which he gained access to when the examiner summoned Bell to defend an earlier version of Bell's application in light of Gray's caveat. The liquid microphone led Bell in a new direction that significantly improved the invention.
But here's the hitch: Gray didn't have a working telephone. He only had a better microphone... and at the end of the day it was only an intermediate step: a liquid microphone wasn't practical in production; Bell ha
The Revisionist (Score:2)
The Centennial Exposition was our coming-out party.
It's heart and soul the grand Corliss steam engine which powered the exhibits - a breath-taking 45 feet high and with a flywheel 30 feet in diameter.
Eliza Gray was an electrical engineer of national reputation, an inventor with a huge and lucrative patent portfolio.
Doesn't it seem at least passing strange t
Progressing By Leaps And Bounds (Score:1)
To hearing "the call to the number you have requested can not be completed at this time" or "the number you have dialed is out of network or turned off".
133 (Score:5, Insightful)
is such an important number that it's worth a news story by its own
Re:133 (Score:5, Funny)
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Indeed - apparently no one died that year - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/133 [wikipedia.org]
A very good year indeed. Also, 133BC was not too bad: apparently only two people died that year - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/133_BC [wikipedia.org]
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Errr not ver 1337 are you? Now clearly the 1337 anniversary will be more significant but after all this is the telephone therefore 133 Telephone anniversary or 133t to give it its correct name is a highly significant geek anniversary.
Can't believe this wasn't obvious.
Re:133 (Score:5, Funny)
is such an important number that it's worth a news story by its own
But of course! It's a happy octagonal Harshad integer, and a Blum semiprime. We should read news stories about it every day!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/133_(number) [wikipedia.org]
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and the second call (Score:5, Funny)
Gray was a professional inventor (Score:2, Interesting)
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Progress and inventions (Score:2)
This is a classic example why patents are bad. When the time is ripe for a technology to emerge it will emerge in several people's minds and not just in a lone genius' mind. This is called progress and mere progress should not be patented. There are no inventions but there is progress.
At the time patent duration was shorter (Score:5, Informative)
At the time patent duration was shorter, per the patent act of 1790, and was decided by a board, not to exceed 14 years. In addition, it wasrequested that you have a working prototype of your invention that you could demonstrate for the patent office for the purposes of the parent examination process. There were other hard requirements: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Act_of_1790 [wikipedia.org].
So it's a little disingenuous to claim this as an example of why patents are a bad thing.
-- Terry
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At the time patent duration was shorter, per the patent act of 1790, and was decided by a board, not to exceed 14 years
That's an improvement over the current system.
In addition, it wasrequested that you have a working prototype of your invention that you could demonstrate for the patent office for the purposes of the parent examination process
That's another improvement over the current system.
So it's a little disingenuous to claim this as an example of why patents are a bad thing.
If it was harder to get a b
The real reason Bell got the patent (Score:4, Funny)
They gave it to him instead of others who developed a phone, because they thought history would prefer that somebody named "Bell" invented the telephone, like how Sir Thomas Crapper is credited with inventing the flush toilet even though he really didn't invent it.
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They gave it to him instead of others who developed a phone, because they thought history would prefer that somebody named "Bell" invented the telephone, like how Sir Thomas Crapper is credited with inventing the flush toilet even though he really didn't invent it.
He didn't invent the toilet, but he did invent the ballcock! This makes Crapper and the ballcock perhaps the most hilarious inventor-invention combo ever. The fact that a ballcock is a primary component of most toilets is just icing on the cake.
133? (Score:2)
pah... (Score:2)
When it's 3213 then it may be considered 'news for nerds'... otherwise it's just the aniversary of the phone...
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no... no you didn't...
And Tomorrow.... (Score:4, Funny)
And tomorrow marks the 133rd anniversary of the first telemarker.
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A telemarker is someone who practices a particular form of skiing.
A telemarketer, perhaps?
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A death anniversary, surely?
Died in Obscurity?!! (Score:4, Insightful)
How could he have died in obscurity if we're discussing him today? I'm still trying to find out who, from the US, invented the automobile (according to Obama). Now, *THAT GUY* died in obscurity.
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How could he have died in obscurity if we're discussing him today? I'm still trying to find out who, from the US, invented the automobile (according to Obama). Now, *THAT GUY* died in obscurity.
His name was Uncle Benz and he invented the ricer.
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And for the first time in weeks, I *DON'T* had mod points... very disappointing. That was pretty funny.
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I thought the first automobile was invented by Gottlieb Daimler, over in Germany.
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Hydrogen and electric cars in the beginning of the 19th century? Cite your source.
Don't forget Philip Reis (Score:3, Informative)
...who also invented an early telephone [wikipedia.org]. In 1861!
Oblig. Fam. Guy (Score:2)
Bell. Well, we did it Watson. What an afternoon. We finally perfected the first telephone.
Watson. Yeah, uh, hey listen, somebody called me today. Uh, whoever it was, said some very sexual things, very angry, sexual things.
Bell. Oh, really? Probably just some teenagers somewhere...
Anybody Here Remember Rotary Dials? (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah? Well the rest of you can GET OFF MY LAWN!
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Actually, I remember the old, fully automated systems: one picked up the phone, turned a crank, spoke (e.g.) "Hello, Mabel. I would like to talk to Frank at the garage", waited a moment, and magically one was connected to Frank!
Voice recognition and no need to memorise the number!
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There are still two rotary dial Western Electric 554 phones hard wired into my parents' house that are fully operational and used on a nearly daily basis. They have the finest sound quality and reliability of any phone I've ever used.
Good old family history (Score:3)
I like this story. See, I married into the family... Mr. Watson is my wife's great great grandfather. He left his family with an estate in New Hampshire which we go to every year and in this estate there are 2 telephones. An interesting family tradition in her branch of the family is to give the male children the middle name of Watson. Anyway, to place a call, you crank a generator which causes a bell to ring at the other end of the line, then the person at the other end of the line picks up and the call is connected.
Today we all have cell phones (and ironically, the cell phone reception isn't that great - verizon or AT&T - we brought an iPhone last summer to the estate, and it browsed the web painfully slowly - a 28K modem with AOL and all the ads would beat it), but how many people can say that they have talked on a phone made by hand by the inventor of the telephone in this day and age where cell phones can make video calls and store books and play video games and browse the web?
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how many people can say that they have talked on a phone made by hand by the inventor of the telephone
Not you, according to the article/Wikipedia entry. It would seem Meucci got there before Gray/Bell.
Wrong number (Score:2)
Other person: Oh I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong number. What did you dial?
Bell: Three.
Other person: Ah, this is two.
Bell: Oh, simple mistake to make, sorry to bother you.
*hangs up*
Elish Gray hardly obscure (Score:4, Interesting)
I love how everyone loves to paint poor Elisha Gray as this hard working guy, but, he was actually by no means a poor man himself. He had a nice little business that he sold to Western Union for a healthy chunk of change. Viewed in that context, what we're really talking about here is the then giant Western Union, via Elisha Gray, versus the then tiny Bell, fighting over the telephone. If anyone was the "tiny" guy fighting the system at that time, it was in fact, Alexander Graham Bell!
Edison almost invented it (Score:2)
With regard to telephones, Edison was obssessed with increasing telegraph line capacity. He invented several multiplexing schemes. One scheme would transmit/decode messages at different frwquencies multiplexed on the same line. His competitors made the conceptual leap of using ALL frequencies to t
How nice... (Score:2)
To commemorate this historical event, it appears AT&T knocked out all the phones here at work....
Had to unplug the Adtran unit for about 20 seconds to hard reset it, to get the voice T1 circuits to come back up again.
Sadly... (Score:2)
Gray didn't die in total obscurity (Score:2)
Gray and a Bell exec named Barton got together after Grey's Western Electric was bought by ATT, and set up the wholesale telco business Graybar to supply equipment to the Bells and the independents.
he didn't get the patent, but he didn't camp out by the side of the railroad tracks, either.
Bell's answerphone (Score:2)
I always liked the I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue joke about the first telephone. They were doing famous people's answerphone messages. Here's Alexander Bell's:
"Hello, this is Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the first telephone. If you've invented another telephone, please leave a message after the beep."
Graybar (Score:2)
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Alexander Graham Bell:
Well, we did it Watson. What an afternoon. We finally perfected the first telephone.
Thomas Watson:
Yeah, uh, hey listen, somebody called me today. Uh, whoever it was, said some very sexual things, very angry, sexual things.
Alexander Graham Bell:
Oh, really? Probably just some teenagers somewhere... damn them.
Thomas Watson:
Well, well that's, that's the thing. I mean, there's, there's only two phones, in the, well, in the world and one of them is in my office and the other one is in your office and those two didn't even exist until a few hours ago.
Alexander Graham Bell:
Yikes, I could use a distraction right now.
Re:the message: (Score:4, Informative)
Watson, come here. I need you.
Re:the message: (Score:4, Funny)
Watson, come here. I need you.
"Oh Mr. Bell, you have no idea how long I've been waiting to hear you say that!"
Re:the message: (Score:5, Funny)
No, I'm sure it was:
"This is the second notice that the factory warranty may be expiring on your car!....."
Re:the message: (Score:4, Funny)
But I WAS FIRST POST!
Sincerely,
Elisha Gray
Antonio Meucci here (Score:3, Funny)
I sumbmitted the story four times but it was rejected.
They don't care. They don't have to. (Score:2)
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I love phone.
I had to part with that promiscuous whore, lamp.
Re:Such advances! (Score:5, Funny)
More like "can you hear me? CAN YOU HEAR ME? HELLO?? *beep*beep*beep* Ah f**ing Verizon!"
Re:Patent sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Er.. no. Patents are good. It's only *some* patents that aren't, like software patents, and generally all obvious patents granted by shitty examiners.
The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
In short, patents are a good thing. Don't mindlessly follow the Slashdot groupthink please...
Re:Patent sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
But as the summary implies and history records the patent application in this case was a race to the patent office. Several people had developed working telephones at that point.
So while it is good that Bell benefited from this invention it is bad that other inventors did not.
Re:Patent sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
> So while it is good that Bell benefited from this invention it is bad that other inventors did not.
There was no need for him to profit, given the large amount of people inventing the concept, the idea was not non-obvious, and as such would have become public knowledge in the short term anyway.
Thus the patent, particularly since it was wrong anyway, only served to add cost and hinder innovation. It was of advantage only for Mr. Bell and of a disadvantage to all of society, or in other words the exact opposite of what patents were supposed to be.
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Not exactly.
I know a friend who is an inventor.
His thinking is very different and his inventions are also quite different - and which I feel are very good for the society.
Now, he is pursuing his inventions just because of the concept of patent. He is not at all a businessman - he is extremely shy and does not speak to anyone. So if concept of patents are not there, he would not even pursue his inventions because he is sure to lose out in the game.
Even now, somebody might make a fool of him, but atleast he h
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More than one person inventing or discovering something at (roughly) the same time does not immediately make it obvious. If you look at the amount of time spent developing the first telephones, how to construct a working telephone was not an obvious matter, even among practitioners of the art.
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I don't think that's really the the point. The patent system isn't about making inventors money, its about providing them a monetary incentive for invention. As long as the potential for profit is there to be chased it doesn't really matter who gets it (within reason of course).
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How about just give them money then? You don't have to give them a monopoly.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1156061&cid=27145551 [slashdot.org]
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And those companies that have thousands of patents, if those companies actually make stuff themselves, they are also vulnerable to extortion from companies that just own patents and don't make any stuff.
Because companies that don't make any stuff, won't infringe on any patents, so
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As I said, you still have to register your invention to be eligible for the prize.
See: http://www.uspto.gov/go/fees/ [uspto.gov]
Lotteries and bookies are familiar with the concept. They manage somehow, some even make money in the process.
And some companies might even sponsor an endowment or even the prizes every year.
Sure inventors or the companies they work for won't get billions of dollars in prize money. But should they need or get that in the first place?
The marketing budget for US drug companies tends to be bigger
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The fact that Bell was able to patent his invention means that (1) he was able to profit from it, and (2) his invention was fully disclosed and available to the rest of humanity.
In this situation (and perhaps most), it appears that Bell and many others were working on this and the discovery was inevitable. Thus, Bell won the lottery, but this fact probably provided no gain for society at all. Even the disclosure parts sounds pretty useless--since it was a discovery whose time had come, it would have popped into common knowledge quite rapidly.
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How will we ever survive?
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Not another reference to asthma ?