In article ,
spaco wrote:

Has anyone read that patent? I haven't. But many patents are issued
for their unique method of implementation, not necessarily the overall
idea. ----In other words, the feature that got the patent could have
been a non-obvious or super cheap(at the time) timer and switch
mechanism rather than the "idea" of intermittent wipers.
Guess I'll have to see the movie, too.

The patents are listed in the Wikipedia article on the inventor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns

Use http://www.pat2pdf.org to obtain the patents.

Joe Gwinn


In the Twin Cities, there's an inventors club that meets monthly. This
sort of thing is exactly what they meet about. The mentor of that club
puts on a one day seminar now and then that explains how to go about
patenting things. The point is, as some other posters have said, ideas
ARE a dime a dozen. It's the people who push them that make them go.

One saying around the company I worked for was: "Prove that you can
sell $100,000 worth of them (it) in the first year or forget it."

Hey, Tom, are you related to the folks who made the movie? Was all this
just to sell more tickets? ---Just kidding.

Pete Stanaitis
----------------------------



Tom Gardner wrote:
I'm seeing previews for the movie about the invention of intermittent
wipers
in '63. Think how things have changed in 45 years. Today, a manager at a
design firm would tell a group of engineers to design such a system and
have
several designs on his desk by the end of the day. True, they didn't have
555s in '63. So, is it that a unique idea is a lot more important than the
actual design?

If you remember some of my previous posts about nurturing ideas that lead
to
designs, this has been an area of extreme interest to me. In the movie, it
looks like Ford screws the idea/design guy, which makes me sick. Designers
and model builders need more respect but idea guys need to be revered!
(coming from a guy that has had very, very few, if any, original ideas)