Faster Cars and Smellier Air

The invention of a successful new machine takes hard work and brains. It usually also requires lots of capital. This typically comes from investors whose involvement is predicated on the expectation that they will be able to exploit the machine exclusively for a period of time. Easier said than done!

I’ve been reading a book about experimentation with steamboats in the early United States. It’s pretty dismal stuff, and kind of a nice counterweight to all the upbeat inventor success stories I have read before. Historical Biography selects for winners, but sadly, history itself is replete with losers.

Apparently, a federal patent office overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction isn’t unique to our era. Patent Office troubles plagued the inaugural generation of American steamboat experimenters. Without them, a successful steamboat might have been achieved earlier, and we might have stood on stronger commercial footing in our ensuing conflict with Great Britain.

It seems to me that those of us in consumer software development should be glad that compilation to byte or machine code provides our work with some degree of protection outside the expense of a formal patent. But we still have to worry about somebody else obtaining one on flimsy grounds and coming along to clobber us. I’m not sure that I’m against all software patents, but a lot of them sure seem to have been granted for ideas that I don’t consider novel.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Science & Technology, Public Policy, Transit, Vehicles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.