How important is getting credit?
In honor of Inventors Month the current issue of Brain Aerobics Weekly has a trivia quiz that focuses in part on people who didn’t get credit and/or monetary reward for what they invented. For some it was by
choice. Like Benjamin Franklin who didn’t patent his inventions because he thought they should benefit everyone, Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web for the global distribution of information, wanted his idea to improve communication among all people. He was given credit, but never directly benefitted monetarily as, for example, the inventors of Google have.
Thomas Edison, on the other hand, was a genius, but one of his best ideas was to create an “invention factory” (his term) or what today we call a corporation’s research and development (R&D) department when he brought together a group of engineers and scientists to his Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory in 1876. By the time of his death in 1931, Mr. Edison held over a thousand patents, but most of his invention team received no recognition in the history books.
Think: If you were an inventor, how important would credit and monetary reward be to you?
Two heads are better than one
Time Magazine featured a series of articles about Thomas Edison earlier this summer (http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999143_1999213_1999214,00.html) and in one noted that while Thomas Edison was certainly a diligent, top-drawer inventor, he was not always a visionary. Although credited with inventing motion pictures, if Mr. Edison had had his way, movies would be limited to the peep show variety watched by a single viewer at a time – more YouTube than Cinerama. He simply couldn’t imagine special theaters built for large audiences. Fortunately for us, according to the Time article by Richard Corliss, Mr. Edison’s attention was diverted by another project, and he left much of the film experimentation to his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, whom Mr. Corliss describes as “a scientist with a gift for the theatrical.”
Think: Have you ever brainstormed expanded uses for a common product? Try it!
Inventions that bite
According to his Wikipedia biography, while living for a time in Canada, Scottish scientist Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, who invented radar to detect enemy planes prior to World War II, was once pulled over for speeding by a radar-gun toting policeman. As a result he wrote this poem:
A Rough Justice
Pity Sir Watson-Watt, strange target of this radar plot
And thus, with others I can mention, the victim of his own invention.
His magical all-seeing eye enabled cloud-bound planes to fly
but now by some ironic twist it spots the speeding motorist
and bites, no doubt with legal wit, the hand that once created it.
Think: What modern inventions can you think of that were created for one positive purpose, but have over-stepped their bounds?
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