The power of ideas

My wife and I take our two basset hounds for a walk almost every day. We are very lucky to live close to the forested area that is owned and maintained by the New England Forestry Association. The path we usually take leads along a wooded trail that climbed to the top of a hill where there is a breathtaking view down into the town of Littleton MA and all the way to Maine on a clear day (see the pix below). Now my wife works in patent law and of an evening last Memorial Day weekend on one of our walks I started to tell her a story I had been told previously by a colleague about the power of ideas. The story is close to my own heart as it talks about the importance of ideas as against their implementation.

My colleague story was about how Thomas Edison did not actually invent the light bulb he invented an improved filament for the light bulb. Edison filed his first patent application for "Improvement In Electric Lights" on October 14, 1878 (this and other very interest facts can we found on Wikipedia page on the Incandescent light bulb. The light bulb had been invented and patented a few years previous but the implementation in that patent was almost unusable. Nonetheless the idea of the light bulb had been patented and Edison knew that without the patent to the crappy light bulb he would need to pay licensing fees for every light bulb he made. He resolved this by buying the patent from the original inventor which allowed him free rein in the light bulb business.

To understand how truly rare and insightful these ideas can be, consider the idea of the computer. It had been 72 years now since Alan Turing gave us the idea of the Turing machine which is the basis of today's computers. But with all of our technological advances with the silicon chip etc, and all our laughing at the idea at punch hole cards, the fact is that today fastest super computer is fundamentally the same machine as that built by Turing during the second world war,The machine that would become the heart of Bletchley Park, during operation ULTRA, to help decipher the German enigma machine. A machine so key to the outcome of that conflict, it was according to Winston Churchill "... thanks to Ultra that we won the war."

My wife told me that in legalese, this notion of the idea as against its implementation is one of the differences between ‘Freedom to operate’ and patentability. (Now a word of caution here, I am not a patent legal expert, and getting your patent legal advice from a blog is ... well lets just say not wise). Where as patentability checks an invention for novelty, non obviousness, and that is has a utility, ‘freedom to operate’ on the other hand is the legal right to use and sell your invention without stepping on anyone else patent, In my light bulb story above because the idea of light bulb had already been patented, abiet with a terrible implementation, Edison still needed to buy the 'freedom to operate'.

My long winded point here is that anyone can come with ideas so put aside some time to think and the next time you do let your mind loose a while and think in terms of freedom to operate, think in terms of the light bulb, or the computer, or renewable energy.