Patent Wars - Disputed Inventions & Discoveries Quiz

Answer: Elisha Gray

The telephone followed a common pattern of many inventions. A scientific breakthrough (electromagnetic waves) led to the possibility of exciting applications (transmission of voice). A long period of experimentation by many people produced increasingly refined devices until finally an inventor produced a practical model for widespread usage. Credit for the invention is often given to the person producing the application put into use, rather than the first inventor.

In 1833 Gauss and Weber sent signals via electromagnetic transmission, an early version of the telegraph. By 1857 Johann Reis had developed a primitive phone that was difficult to use, produced indistinct voice, and had low transmission rates.

Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci had developed forms of the telephone from 1854 and filed a patent caveat for his invention in 1871. (A patent caveat was used until the early 1900s in the U.S. to protect intellectual property of an ongoing developed and had to be renewed yearly to keep it active). Many historians and his home country of Italy recognize Meucci as the telephone's inventor.

Alexander Graham Bell filed for his patent on 7 March 1876 and started to build telephone systems within one year. In 1875, one year before Bell's patent, Elisha Gray had received a patent for transmitting musical tones. On February 14 1876 he filed a patent caveat for a telephone on the same day Bell filed his patent application for his working telephone. Many people believe that Gray's application actually arrived first, but Bell's patent application was processed first.

Answer: His early lightbulbs burned out after a very short time

Historians believe that over twenty other inventors produced electric lightbulbs before Edison, but they suffered from dimness, high cost, and a short life. However, Edison in 1879 was able to generate a bright, long-lasting, and efficient lightbulb that was commercially practical.

As early as 1802 Sir Humphrey Davy produced a battery that was used to power a lightbulb. Over the next seven decades inventors struggled to develop filaments and vacuums or non-reactive gases to produce brighter and longer lasting lights. In 1840 British scientist Warren de la Rue used a platinum filament in a vacuum, bit it proved too expensive for widespread use.

In 1850 Joseph Swan produced a lightbulb (almost thirty years before Edison) using carbon paper filaments in a vacuum tube, but these had too short a lifetime to be practical. He developed a longer-lasting lightbulb in 1879, the same year as Edison.

Edison's device had the advantage of being able to work in a large scale electric utility, whereas Swan's light was not suited to do so. In England, Edison and Swan merged their companies into Edison and Swan United Electric Company, known as "Ediswan".

Answer: Carl Friedrich Gauss

The first primitive telegraph was invented in 1774 by Georges LeSage, one which required a wire for each letter of the alphabet. The first working telegraph system was built in 1816 by Francis Ronalds, using static electricity. In 1832 Baron Schilling produced a system that was used over 5 miles in St Petersburg, using underground and underwater cable to communicate between Peterhof Palace and a naval base.

Gauss and Weber constructed their telegraph system in 1833, using binary pulses to transmit numbers and letters. In 1837 William Cooke and Charles Featherstone had installed a telegraph system used by railways in Britain. Different symbols were transmitted by different voltages.

Morse developed his system at the same time, and by 1852 more than 23,000 miles of telegraph wires had been installed in the U.S., about four times as much as the next five countries combined.

Answer: Gottfried Leibniz

Many of the applications of calculus, such as planetary orbits, calculation of areas or volumes, and approximations via power series, had been known to Arab, Indian, and other European mathematicians before Newton and Leibniz. Their genius was building a complete system that incorporated both differentiation and integration.

Modern historians now believe that Newton and Leibniz developed their discoveries of calculus independently. Newton claimed to have developed calculus in 1666, but kept it in his notebooks and did not publish it at that time. Leibniz started to work on the problem in 1674 and first published about it in 1684. Unfortunately the question became quite heated and evolved into arguments between English-speaking countries and German ones.

Newton's habit of not publishing some mathematical findings reappeared when English mathematician Joseph Raphson published a method for finding the roots of an equation. It was later discovered that Newton had found a similar method in his unpublished works. So it is now known as the Newton-Raphson Method.

Answer: Reginald Fessenden

Marconi is generally credited as the inventor of radio for building the first long distance transmission of sounds. In 1897 he received a British patent for the wireless transmission of telegraph signals. A year later he had set up a radio factory and received favorable publicity for using his system for communicating with the injured Prince of Wales on the royal yacht. By 1903 he was able to communicate between Europe and North America via radio signals.

Marconi's efforts and some of his equipment was based on a series of developments by other scientists and engineers over an extended time period. These include the discovery and early work with radio waves (Maxwell and Herz), development of radio wave signals (Chandra Bose, Oliver Lodge, and Edouard Branly), and development of radio receivers (Popov and Tesla). In 1872 William Ward theorized that the atmosphere would be able to carry radio waves, a fact that allowed radio waves to be used for more than line of sight transmissions.

The early work, including Marconi's, was used to transmit telegraphic signals. In 1900 the Canadian American inventor Reginald Fessendon demonstrated what is thought to be the first transmission of voice over a distance of 1 mile. By 1907 the distance had increased to 200 miles.

Answer: Farnsworth invented the first totally electronic television

Facsimile machines using telegraph lines had been in use since 1856. The German Paul Nipkow invented a disk system to hold raster line images that could be read back and transmitted. Holes were punched in the disk, and light was shone on the rotating disk to reconstruct line images on the screen. In 1909 Rignoux and Fournier used the Nipow disk to transmit crude letters.

In 1925 Baird used improvements to this method to transmit moving pictures that were able to show human faces. By 1927 he was able to transmit television pictures between London and Glasgow, a distance of about 400 miles. These are considered mechanical televisions that would soon be supplanted by electronic televisions.

The path to the electronic television started with the invention of the cathode ray tube in 1897 by Karl Braun. The initial tubes were only able to generate faint images on a selenium-coated metal plate. By 1922 the tubes had been improved and the Hungarian Kalman Tihanyi developed charged storage technology. In 1926 Takayanagi demonstrated a prototype TV system, but failed to file for a patent.

By 1928 Farnsworth demonstrated a practical television system that had not moving internal parts, the first electronic television. The US Patent Office granted Farnsworth the patent for his television over other claimants, and he sold the rights to RCA.

Many people contributed to the invention of television. Baird invented the first working mechanical television that was able to transmit over long distances. Farnsworth is regarded as the inventor of the electronic television that was used most of the 20th century before digital television became the preferred technology.

Answer: Mendel's findings were forgotten and rediscovered by de Vries

Mendel intended to work with mice, but the abbot at his monastery forced him to switch his investigation to sweet peas. He performed experiments on a seven properties of the peas and realized that the results could be explained by dominant and recessive hereditary traits.

His work was published in an obscure scientific journal in 1886 and received little or no recognition in the scientific community. Most people considered it a work by an amateur on better methods of hybridization, rather than inheritance; and it was rarely cited in the next 35 years.

Interest in heredity was spurred by Darwin's evolution theory and his concept of the selection of species. In 1897 de Vries conducted similar experiments to Mendel and published his work. While reviewing his paper, a friend brought Mendel's work to the attention of de Vries, who did not cite it in his work. Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak also conducted similar experiments, but did cite Mendel.

Mendel certainly deserves credit for the discovery of inheritance. Unfortunately, like many other achievements by non-prominent scientists, their work is forgotten and later rediscovered.

Answer: Nikola Tesla

Frequency hopping is a method of transmitting signals by rapidly switching among frequency channels using a pseudorandom sequence known to the sender and receiver.

In 1899 Marconi experimented with frequency methods to minimize interference. In 1903 Tesla alluded to frequency hopping in a patent. A book published in 1908 by Jonathon Zenneck implied that Telefunken had experimented with frequency hopping. German military forces in WWI made limited used of frequency hopping to avoid interception by British forces. In the early 1930s several related patents were granted and the US army had developed a communication system known as SIGSALY to make use of the feature.

Hedy Lamarr had been married to an Austrian industrialist and arms dealer, became familiar with military technology, and became a dedicated opponent of the Nazis before divorcing him. With the help of composer George Antheil she was granted a patent for a system to control torpedoes (which could be jammed) by using piano rolls to define changes in frequencies. The system would have been difficult to implement and the US Navy never implemented it.

Answer: Colossus

The Enigma machine, invented by Arthur Scherbius, was the name of the machine that was used to encrypt German military communications during WWII. The initial efforts to decrypt the messages was accomplished by Polish mathematicians led by Marian Rejewski prior to the outbreak of the war. The efforts at Bletchley Park attempted to decrypt messages from updated and more complex Enigma machines.

The Turing Machine is a mathematical model of an abstract computer and not an actual device.

The original efforts at Bletchley Park used electromechanical devices known as "bombes" that replicated the actions of the Enigma machine. When the Germans shifted to a four rotor version of the Enigma, efforts were made to develop faster methods. Tommie Flowers of the General Post Office developed an early version of the computer the Colossus Mark 1 and later an improved Mark 2.

The Colossus was somewhat of a dead end for the development of computer. It did not use the stored program (von Neumann architecture) for its software. Instead it used looped tapes and plugboard settings to define the steps for the computer to take. It preceded the first modern computer, the ENIAC; but for security reasons the accomplishment was not revealed until many years later.

Most, if not all, of the Colossus computers were destroyed after WWII. In 2008 Tony Sale, a veteran of GCHQ, with the help of volunteers was able to construct a functional version of the Colossus Mark 2 computer, which is displayed at Bletchley Park.

Answer: His work was not declassified until much later

Clifford Cocks (1950- ) developed a public key encryption scheme for the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in 1973 soon after graduating from Cambridge. It is equivalent to to the public key RSA cryptography later developed independently in 1978. For obvious reasons the British Government did not disclose this discovery, and Cock's efforts were not disclosed until 1997, 24 years later.

Later in 2001 he developed one of the first identity-based (IBE) encryption schemes.