Inventors and Inventions

Rarely one person, rarely one moment.

An invention is a new device, process or method. The popular model — a lone genius and a flash of insight — describes very few real cases. Invention is usually incremental, collaborative, and dependent on enabling technologies arriving first.

Simultaneous invention

The same invention frequently appears in several places at once. Calculus was developed independently by Newton and Leibniz; the telephone patent race between Bell and Gray came down to hours; natural selection was arrived at by both Darwin and Wallace; the light bulb had numerous near-simultaneous developers.

This is evidence that inventions become possible when their prerequisites exist, and that whoever gets there first is often a matter of weeks. It undercuts the great-man reading of technological history considerably.

What a patent does

A patent grants a time-limited monopoly — commonly twenty years — in exchange for full public disclosure. The bargain is deliberate: the inventor gets protection, society gets the knowledge published rather than kept secret. To qualify, an invention must be novel, non-obvious and useful.

A patent is not proof of being first, nor of the thing working. It records who filed a sufficient description and satisfied an examiner, which is why patent priority and historical priority so often disagree.