Larry Jaques wrote:
On 26 Sep 2008 04:38:39 GMT, the infamous (Curt Welch)
scrawled the following:
"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)
I remember hearing about how the guy who invented intermediate wipers
got screwed by the auto companies maybe 20 or 30 years ago. My reaction
then, and pretty much my reaction now is - any idiot could have thought
that one up.
How's the air up there, Curt? Pretty thin?
Whey I see something like that, my thought is that this "inventor" was
no inventor at all. He had one idea in his life, and expected to get
rich from it. Real inventors create 10 ideas a day better than that
one. Yes, some people are much better than others at creating good
original ideas, but what's hard, is finding the one which is practical
at the time you find it, and which isn't so obvious that 10 other guys
didn't think it up at the same time. Dreaming up new ideas is easy.
Finding new solutions which are practical is not so easy. That requires
a lot of research and investigation to understand what will be needed,
and at which point in time it will become practical. And then creating
a design that works, and is affordable for the application.
So, what petty idea was stolen from you to get you so vitriolic?
I've invented 100's of things in my life. It's what most good engineers do
just as part of their job. Nothing has been stolen from me.
At the same time this guy made the invention of his life - a timer to
control a motor, real inventors and creative engineers were at work
creating the SR-71 blackbird - something so advance and creative it
probably included a 1000 items more noteworthy than this timer, and none
of the engineers creating all those inventions every day expected to get
anything in return except another day's pay.
True, with the type of contracts they have to sign to get work
nowadays. That's truly sad, too. The better companies share the
wealth and/or fame with their more inspired workers. THAT is the way
it should be, at least in most instances.
Now maybe there's more to this story and I'd like to see the movie to
find out. But mostly, I think the inventor probably had a greatly over
inflated ego. I don't doubt the auto companies ripped him off, but I
also don't think he deserved much more than about a day's pay for his
"invention" (from what I understand of it).
I haven't yet seen the movie, but to hear you rant like this without
having seen it is quite interesting. Tell us the real story behind
your acrid response, sir.
It's not the movie I'm ranting about. It's the idea that something so
trivial would be given so much attention and that the guy who says he
"invented it" felt he deserved so much for so little.
However, I just saw a longer trailer for the movie today which implied all
the auto companies were "working on the problem" at the time, and this guy
came up with some unique solution. I really don't have the faintest idea
why this was a hard problem to solve, but maybe there was something to it I
just don't yet know. Even without power electronics to control the motor
you just activate each cycle with a relay that included an R/C delay
circuit and a transitor to drive the relay. If the transistor wasn't
viable because of cost or reliability in 1962, use a small timer motor
which has cam closing the contacts to activate each cycle. This is trivial
stuff for 1960.
The idea that the such a device would be useful is likewise trivial. When
you find yourself having to turn the wipers on and off every few seconds
because of a light drizzle, it becomes obvious almost instantly to any good
inventor that the car should be turning it on and off for you. The only
question about this invention (which is the real question about 99% of all
inventions) is at which point does the market develop for it. That is,
when does it become cheap enough, and reliable enough, that the customer
will be willing to pay what it costs to be included? But that is not an
engineering question, it's just standard marketing question answered by a
little bit of insight combined with market research. It's just normal day
to day engineering and development work.
There are engineering ideas that are once in a life time types of
inventions that deserve special attention and wealth to the creator. And
maybe, there is something about this guy's solution that deserves such
attention. I just don't see it yet. I will no doubt see the move when it
comes out (I see most the big movies) so I'll find out if if there is
something I'm failing to understand when I see it.
I think mostly, the movie is just an attempt to leverage the appeal of
the old theme of "little guy being screwed by large corporation and
standing up for himself" angle. I only wish it was over something more
significant than the "invention" of interment windshield wipers.
Just -try- to tell me that you've never used them, Curt.
I use them all the time. They are extremely useful. But it wasn't a big
invention that resulted from a stroke of genus. They come under the
classification of stuff I consider obvious. I'm not sure (it was a long
time ago and I was in grade school), but I'm fairly sure it's one of the
millions of things I thought up before I heard they existed. It's just
obvious engineering.
Some things that I didn't think up and which are really cool, include the
invention of the www. I was working in that area, and knew about all the
issues, and problems, but yet, the particular combination of a text server
with embedded hyper link tags in the pages to allow for embedded click-able
links in the pages was a stroke of genus. I'd played with the Mac
hypercard application, and I'd used ftp servers and gopher and the like to
find data on the internet. And I even personally owned a NeXT at the time
the www was invented on a NeXT and I had written internet server
applications. But it never occurred to me to put those technologies
together in that combination. But, it was one of those things that 30
seconds after looking at it, you instantly knew you are looking at
something that is going to change the world.
There are many inventions like that which are just so much thinking out of
the box, and so cool, and so simple, and so powerful, that the person who
first creates it deserves to have their name go down in history. But
interment windshield wipers aren't one of those. They are a weeks worth of
work for any junior engineer.
If there is something behind this story which irritates me, it's the patent
system and intellectual property rights in general. I think it's good that
a company can invest big R&D dollars and feel safe in being able to recoup
their investment with the help of intellectual property laws preventing
other combines from copying there ideas and profiting from the research
they didn't pay for. But what irritates me, are the squatters who take
advantage of the system by simply patenting every obvious idea they can
dream up, 5 years before the obvious idea becomes practical in the market
place. So when the market develops to the point that it's time to do the
weeks worth of engineering to put that interment feature on the wipers, you
find some idiot filled a patent for the obvious idea 5 years ago and now he
thinks you should pay in 10 million dollars for this "invention". In fact,
he didn't invent anything and invested almost nothing in his R&D effort. He
was just an intellectual property speculator.
I have to wonder if the true story about this math teacher who "invented"
the "interment wiper" was just someone who thought he had invented
something big, when in fact he hadn't done anything substantial at all, and
was ignored by the auto industry because of the fact they didn't think he
had done anything worthy of reward. But then, using intellectual property
law, he forced their hand and made them pay out just to keep from looking
like the big bad auto industry had "stolen" this guy's "great idea".
But maybe I'm wrong, and maybe his solution wasn't obvious and was a great
idea. I'm looking forward to finding out more when the movie comes out.
--
Curt Welch
http://CurtWelch.Com/
http://NewsReader.Com/