by Lawrence Bush on April 4, 2012
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway PT, one of the most highly publicized and least successful inventions of the past two decades, was born on this date in 1951. The Segway is a very neat, ecological, self-balancing, two-wheeled low-speed transport that unfortunately has little use in hard-core urban environments or highway-dependent suburbs and rural areas. Kamen — the son of MAD magazine illustrator Jack Kamen — also invented the first drug infusion pump, an all-terrain electric wheelchair, and the Slingshot, an inexpensive water purification system. He is the founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which runs student competition all around the world in robotics and other technologies; more than a million young people have participated so far. Among his many honors is induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005 and the 2006 United Nations Global Humanitarian Action Award.
“I don’t work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.” —Dean Kamen
by Lawrence Bush on April 2, 2012
Martin Cooper placed the world’s first cellular phone call in New York on this date in 1973. Cooper was a vice president of Motorola and led the team that created the phone. His call went to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, who was also working on cellphone technology together with Richard Frenkiel. The phone that Cooper’s team invented weighed two and a half pounds and cost $9,000 in today’s dollars. “The battery lifetime was 20 minutes,” said Cooper, “but that wasn’t really a big problem because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.”
“We had no idea that in as little as 35 years more than half the people on Earth would have cellular telephones, and they give the phones away to people for nothing.” —Martin Cooper
by Lawrence Bush on March 29, 2012
Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia was granted a patent for a pencil with a rubber eraser on its end on this date in 1858. Both the graphite and the eraser of Lipman’s pencil could be sharpened. Lipman also founded the first envelope company in the U.S., in 1843, and bought a patent for the postcard, created in 1861 by John P. Charlton; Lipman’s cards had a decorated border and no images, and became the first authorized cards that could be mailed, in 1870. (The U.S. Post Office would issue its own three years later.) In 1862, Lipman sold his pencil patent to Joseph Reckendorfer for a hefty $100,000, and Reckendorfer proceeded to sue the Faber pencil company for patent infringement — but in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled the patent invalid because Lipman’s invention was simply a combination of two already known entities. The modern pencil was likely invented in the late 16th century; before then, the penicillum was “a small brush . . . constructed of a hollow wood tube filled with neatly arranged animal hairs,” according to Jamie Phillips of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. March 30 is National Pencil Day.
“The combination, to be patentable, must produce a different force or effect or result in the combined forces or processes from that given by their separate parts. There must be a new result produced by their union; if not so, it is only an aggregation of separate elements.”—U.S. Supreme Court,Reckendorfer v. Faber, 1875
by Lawrence Bush on February 3, 2012
Facebook was launched from a Harvard dormitory room by Mark Zuckerberg, then 19 years old, and three classmates on this date in 2004. By summer they had an investor, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal, and an office in Palo Alto, California. Eight years later the company prepared an Initial Public Offering, was valued at $100 billion, and was on its way to having a billion users worldwide. (Zuckerberg and his colleagues had previously turned down a few buy-out offers by major corporations.”Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me,” he said.) Facebook has been a major force of communication in political uprisings worldwide and was a key tool in Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008. The technology has also been an object of fear and loathing among people who criticize it as undermining to privacy and as a source of obsession and fetishization of the self. In December 2010, Zuckerberg joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in signing the “Giving Pledge,” a promise to donate at least half of their wealth to charity over the course of their lives.
“The question isn’t, ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?” —Mark Zuckerberg
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway PT, one of the most highly publicized and least successful inventions of the past two decades, was born on this date in 1951. The Segway is a very neat, ecological, self-balancing, two-wheeled low-speed transport that unfortunately has little use in hard-core urban environments or highway-dependent suburbs and rural areas. Kamen — the son of MAD magazine illustrator Jack Kamen — also invented the first drug infusion pump, an all-terrain electric wheelchair, and the Slingshot, an inexpensive water purification system. He is the founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which runs student competition all around the world in robotics and other technologies; more than a million young people have participated so far. Among his many honors is induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005 and the 2006 United Nations Global Humanitarian Action Award.
