Inventors, do not waste your time inventing things people don't want.

[Oldpath05]

I invented the internet........

 

[PILOON]

Interesting discussion.
In my teens I actually also came up with an 'invention' but as a minor could not patent.
It had to do with my father's employment and a product they manufactured.
They did test runs and the product went into production and is still used today.
As an employee he also could not patent however he was well recognized for it and enjoyed many enjoyable years with that firm.
LOL, he was paid to play golf (with clients) well past normal retirement age.

 

[RSKY]

I worked for a company that build tires. It was in the employment contract everybody signed that any patents the employee got while employed became the property of the company. So the tire company held patents for catfish feeders and many other uses.

RSKY

 

[Gem99ultra]

These accounts of inventor abuse, or omission, is so true. Makes me sick. I also got paid by my employer for my invention - $1.00. yep, one whole dollar.

 

[TractorGuy]

I invented the internet........

WOW! We have Al Gore on the forum! :cool2:

As was said above, most corporations these days have employee agreements claiming they own any invention created by said employee. As I understand that became common when the guy that invented the push button release on Craftsman ratchets successfully sued Sears for some of the sales of all those ratchets.

My former employer had a deal where they would use their attorneys and apply for patents on your behalf if they deemed it a viable product. If the product ever went into production they would pay you 20% of the profits. The problem was they then controlled whether or not any production would ever commence and many of those patents just sat in the file cabinets after they were attained.

Every now and then the little guy wins but not without a fight.
Robert Kearns - Wikipedia

Retailer, Inventor Reach Settlement in 2-Year-Old Lawsuit

 

[s219]

Didn't Henry Ford say that if he asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse? Sometimes I think inventors do need to push us forward with things we didn't know we wanted. Steve Jobs was famous for doing that (not as sole inventor, but through leading teams). Think about the string of products he pushed out. And in every case, the product was ridiculed by the establishment but went on to up-end the industry. I remember when the iPhone was announced, Nokia, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile executives mocked it. A few years later they had all been knocked off their pedestals and faded into irrelevance in the phone business.

So yeah, I think sometimes inventors need to take a risk and invent something we don't want. It's harder to do. If you need to sell it to executives at established companies, it might never get traction. If you can figure out how to bring it to the market on your own, and sell it, maybe it can be a big deal.

 

[tallyho8]

Uh, was your father John Renshaw Carson?

Single-sideband modulation - Wikipedia says John Renshaw Carson was born 1886 and the first to patent SSB in 1915.

If you have ever used SSB it is a miserable minimalist mode. Everything sounds like Donald Duck and the slightest error in frequency makes it worse because SSB lacks a means of self-centering.

Quite often the situation with fundamental inventions such as SSB the concept can not be put into use fast enough to be useful. The patent serves as documentation which prevents anyone else from patenting it 20 years (formerly 17) in the future.

SSB took a long time to catch on because it is difficult to build mixers to transmit and demodulate. And as I said above, it is not pleasant to listen to.

This is my father's patent for broadcasting without sidebands. I do not pretend to know nearly as much about it as he did.

US264571A - Radio transmission and carrier wave modulation
- Google Patents

 

[ericm979]

These accounts of inventor abuse, or omission, is so true. Makes me sick. I also got paid by my employer for my invention - $1.00. yep, one whole dollar.

There's a legal theory that they need to pay _something_ for patents, so payments of $1 for giving a patent away is common. But it's not true of "work for hire" which is what being an employee is- they're already paying your salary, and that counts.

 

[ericm979]

As was said above, most corporations these days have employee agreements claiming they own any invention created by said employee.

That's not legal in California- they only own the ideas you come up with while working. If it's done on your own time and not related to your work, it's yours.

 

[PILOON]

My cottage neighbor was the director of research for Union Carbide and as such had 200+ patents in his name.
But then he had paid staff that did all the actual lab work so in that case I guess it was fair.

Recall his story about researching for bug sprays.

They discovered that the oils in citrus fruit (oranges) was a very effective repellant.
He said the vitamin C was the trick but that could not be patented so onwards to DEET.

Now knowing that tidbit of info I rub orange peels on me when the bugs are out.
(Also doses of vitamin C works as you'd sweat dosed with C.)