2012 Innovation Quotes #6

Our Favorite Quotes

On the Language of Innovation - The Patent Argot - The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“The difficulty of forming a clear conception of the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.”

-Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1873, Discussing how even the intelligent and well-informed continued to find the technology surround the telegraph inscrutable.
 

And

"An idea does not pass from one language to another without change."

-Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864 - 1936), The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913

And

“In patent applications and legal documents, too, the inventors had reason to think about their topic in the broadest possible terms: e.g. The giving, printing, stamping, and otherwise transmitting signals or the sounding of alarms, or the communication of intelligence.  ...Confusion inspired anecdotes which often turned on awkward new meanings for familiar terms.” 

-Describing inventions in the time of the telegraph - The Information by James Gleick, 2010

How "Business Methods" Got Their Start

This week's addition to the Way Better Pagtents Inventions, Inventors, Innovation and IP Reading List is for the Still Life With Flow Chart™ Crowd — the creators of business methods patents.




The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick — A roadmap to the evolution of the information age we live in and the information inventions that got us here.

This is an information and content dense book.  One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the discussions on how inventors and the public struggle with how to describe truly novel inventions, how hard it is to find the vocabulary to explain what the "telegraph" is to people who used the Pony Express to send their messages.  How inventors at Bell Labs were troubled by the lack of order in how to describe their science.  The discussions of the Babbage mechanical computer and Alan Turing's views on his own inventions create an inventive continuum of the information age.  From drum based message systems to the internet, Mr. Gleick explains where it all came from and where it's going.  It is a very nice catalog of prior art for those who think sending data across the wire for the purpose of conducting business is new.

(We added the link to buy the books at Amazon for two reasons - the pictures of the covers look good and if you buy one of the books from the link on, Amazon pays us a little change.  This helps us keep our product cost low. )