The historian Thomas Hughes has talked about reverse salients in the development of complex technological systems. "A salient is a protrusion in a geometric figure, a line of battle, or an expanding weather front. As technological systems expand, reverse salients develop. Reverse salients are components in the system that have fallen behind or are out of phase with the others" (Hughes, 1987).
Reverse salients attract inventors--solving such a problem is a sure way to fame and fortune. Therefore, reverse salients create the opportunity for multiple simultaneous inventions. The invention of the microchip serves as an example. The reverse salient, in this case, was the problem of the 'tyranny of numbers'. In the late 1950s, a new aircraft carrier "had 350,000 electronic components, requiring millions of hand-soldered connections; the labor cost--for wiring those connections and testing each one--was greater than the total cost of the components themselves. Production of the first 'second generation' (i.e. completely transistorized) computer--the control data CD 1604, containing 25,000 transistors, 100,000 diodes, and hundreds of thousands of resistors and capacitors--lagged hopelessly behind schedule because of the sheer difficulty of connecting the parts" (Reid, 1984).
A solution was arrived at independently by two inventors--Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, both of whom filed patents for a 'monolithic circuit', in which all the components could be made out of silicon.
Kilby and Noyce arrived at this idea via different routes. Kilby had just gone to work for Texas Instruments (TI), and was assigned to work on a project called the 'MicroModule', a product he was sure would not work. When he arrived at his new job, everyone else was off on vacation, so he tried to come up with an alternative lest he be forced to work on a bad idea. TI was heavily into silicon, so he studied that material carefully and realized, as he said in his notebook on July 24, 1958, "The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor" (Reid, 1984, p. 65). Integrating all these components on a silicon wafer would avoid the need for soldering. He built a prototype; when it worked, TI embraced the idea, and Kilby filed a patent application on February 6, 1959.
Kilby was a quiet, introverted type who preferred working alone. Noyce, on the other hand, was as good at inventing companies as new technologies; he was at that point working for Fairchild Semiconductor, a company he had founded with seven colleagues. He would soon be involved in the creation of Intel. Noyce was one of the engineers who created the archetype of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. In 1958, Fairchild was making silicon transistors on a single wafer "and then we cut them apart into tiny pieces and had to hire thousands of women with tweezers to pick them up and try to wire them together again...The answer, of course, was don't cut them apart in the first place--but nobody realized that then" (Reid, 1984).
Noyce was in the process of patenting another idea--putting a silicon oxide layer on top of a chip to protect it from contamination--when the patent lawyer kept pushing him to imagine other applications. Noyce realized one could print circuit components right on the oxide layer; first he thought of using copper wire, then silicon. Eventually, six months after Kilby, he had the monolithic circuit and filed a patent on July 30, 1959.
Even though Noyce's application was second, he was the first to get the patent. It is not unusual for one application to be processed faster than another, so Kilby's lawyers filed for an interference proceeding, in which a special Board of Patent Interference tries to determine who invented first. Kilby's notebook entry was six months prior to Noyce's, so he was granted the patent. Then Fairchild's lawyers developed a new tactic--they attacked an unfortunate picture in Kilby's patent application which showed wires sticking out of the chip--not at all what an integrated circuit really looked like. After ten years of dispute, and several reversals, Noyce won the patent battle.
By this time, it was irrelevant--the two companies had settled years earlier, granting each other licenses for integrated circuit production and sharing royalty fees from other companies. Furthermore, Kilby and Noyce happily shared credit as co-inventors.
Most inventors are not so willing to share credit. Indeed, one of the greatest motives behind patent disputes is getting credit for being the first to invent something--the money that comes along with the credit is often secondary in the minds of the inventors, though not in the minds of their backers and companies who rely on licensing their patents.
The dispute over the invention of the radio is a case in point. There were many contenders, but two inventors emerged with stronger claims than the others. Lee de Forest invented and patented a wireless telegraph receiver he called the audion in 1906. He didn't understand how it worked, but work it did. It was Edwin Howard Armstrong who figured that out in 1912, and greatly amplified the sound by feeding the oscillating current back and forth many thousands of times. Armstrong also saw that this receiver could be turned into a transmitter. Unfortunately, Armstrong lacked the $150 necessary to apply for a patent right away and did not do so until 1914, at which point his application was put into interference with one by de Forest. Armstrong was the initial winner, but he refused an opportunity to settle with de Forest, thereby ending further appeals because Armstrong wanted to be known as the sole inventor of the circuit that made radio possible. Eventually, the Armstrong victories were reversed, on the grounds that a notebook sketch by de Forest's assistant made on August 6, 1912, showed a circuit that could have achieved the feedback effect--even though it was clear from the entry that the experiment had failed (Lewis, 1991). Armstrong ended-up battling the mighty Radoi Corporation of America over patent infringement. Heveered close to bankruptcy, and killed himself on January 31, 1954--the forty-year anniversary of the day he and David Sarnff, the future president of RCA, had spent a happy night using Armstrong's powerful receiver to copy telegraph messages from all over the world. It was Armstrong's widow, Marion, who successfully pursued a long series of court cases that resulted in his posthumously being recognized as the inventor of FM.
No businessman would have invented the telephone. It's got to be a maverick--some guy who's been working with the deaf and gets the crazy idea that you could actually send the human voice over a wire...A businessman would have been out taking a market survey, and since it was a nonexistent product, he would have proven conclusively that the market for a telephone was zero. (Reid, 1984, p. 70).
If Gray had filed an application for a patent and Bell for a caveat, we should in all probability have today the Gray Telephone Company in place of the Bell Telephone Company. *(Lloyd Taylor, IV, p. 6)
Alexander Graham Bell was eventually upheld as the inventor of the telephone, but only after years of litigation with rivals, including Elisha Gray, Daniel Drawbaugh and many others. The controversy with Gray was especially bitter, because on the day Bell submitted a patent application for a device that could, among other things, transmit speech, Gray submitted a caveat for a device that would serve the same function. (A caveat was a statement of intention to perfect and eventually patent an invention--it was filed with the patent office and could be used to establish an inventor's priority). Indeed, Gray practically accused Bell of stealing his idea: "And, notwithstanding there were suspicious circumstances early in the history of the telephone, it was not until eight or ten years--at least, a long time after the telephone was in use--that I became convinced, chiefly through Bell's own testimony in various suits, that I had showed him how to construct the telephone with which he obtained his first results" (Taylor, Unpublished Manuscript, IX, p. 6).
Basically, there are three possibilities:
1) Gray was the original inventor of what we now call the telephone; Bell simply borrowed his ideas.
2) Gray and Bell arrived independently at the idea for what we now call the telephone, in which case Gray deserves equal billing as inventor.
3) It is only hindsight that makes it appear as though Gray and Bell were inventing the same thing. The case of radio is instructive, here. The courts eventually concluded that de Forest had invented the same regenerative circuit as Armstrong, even though de Forest didn't understand how it operated and his only experiment with it failed. Simply put, de Forest and Armstrong's devices were embodiments of different mental models--they were not viewed in the same way by the inventors, and only hindsight has made them appear to be the same.
In the mid 1870s, one of the reverse salients lay in the area of multiple telegraphy. The telegraph had transformed the world. Messages could now be sent over great distances, much faster than any human messenger could have carried them and almost regardless of weather conditions. The importance of the telegraph was illustrated in the American civil war; Lincoln spent much of his time at the telegraph office, communicating with his generals and assessing reports from the field. Both sides tapped and cut each others telegraph lines.
The telegraph transformed commerce as well as war. Stock quotes could be sent from New York to Chicago with great rapidity. The result was that many of America's large cities were festooned with uninsulated wires from telegraphs, utilities and burglar alarms, which could become crisscrossed and tangled, creating dangerous shorts which interrupted communications. The wires were expensive to install and maintain. This created a reverse salient. If a way could be found to send multiple messages over a single wire, it would eliminate the salient. This was the problem that attracted Gray, Bell, Edison and a host of other inventors.
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