A Cry Heard Round The World: Kim Sun-Il died desperate and alone, but he did not die unheard.
Looking At And Longing For Mars: Reflections on a childhood dream.
A Robot May Not Harm a Human Being. Is The Opposite True?: Thoughts on the future rights of artificial intelligence.
Long After The Boys Of Summer Have Gone: What makes a relationship work?
Winter Of Our Feline Discontent: What the cat wants, the cat gets. But what DOES it want?
To Tell The Truth: There may be no honor among thieves, but can't we find it even in a few good men and women?
Should The Human Brain Retire?: We know that we cannot win forever. We know that machines will continue to improve. So why don't we let the human brain retire gracefully now, with honors?
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Published: Sep 16, 2005 01:40 PM
Sat - March 13, 2004
If You Build It, Will They Come?
—Jon Madonna, Chairman, KPMG International
Which isn't to say that some of their ideas aren't nuts.
To be sure, distinguishing crazy ideas from insanely great ones isn't always easy. The Wright Brothers must have seemed foolish before Kitty Hawk. Thomas Edison failed at hundreds of test designs for the light bulb before he discovered tungsten filaments. And no less august an authority than the New York Times said of his early propulsion experiments that Robert Goddard seemed "to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools" because he thought that rocket thrust would be effective beyond Earth's atmosphere. (So much for august authorities.)
But with inventors filing as many as 333,452 patent applications in the U.S. alone during fiscal year 2003, it's a simple mathematical truth that good intentions will not always lead to marketable inventions. That's where the value of a web site like Patent of The Week comes in: Providing us all with a chance to celebrate the remarkable achievements of men and women who might otherwise toil in obscurity.
We're talking about achievements that solve:
- • Problems in food science, such as an electrified table cloth to repel insects at a picnic ("Don't spill your drink!"), a motorized ice cream cone that feeds its contents against an outstretched tongue, and a device for tenderizing meat by detonating explosives (tender meat, surely—but is it juicy?).
• The inconveniences of busy families, such as a dining table with an integrated dishwasher and a microwave oven embedded in the dashboard of a motor vehicle.
• Pressing issues in personal hygiene, such as a flatulence deodorizer constructed of activated charcoal cloth (shown at left).
• Medical challenges, such as delivering a child more quickly by spinning the mother at extremely high speeds to generate centrifugal force. ("Hey, batter batter batter! Hey, batter!")
• The age-old quandary of how you get close enough to feed and observe flying animals (shown above).
What's extraordinary about these inventions is how earnest their creators appear to be. "If only we all wore charcoal underwear and sat on electrified picnic mats," they seem to cry, "Embarrassing odors and insect-laden picnics would be eliminated forever!"
And who dares challenge this wisdom? Certainly not the U.S. Patent Office, which continues to issue patents more than a century after patent commissioner Charles H. Duell famously urged the abolition of his department on the ground that "everything that can be invented has been invented." Visiting the Patent of the Week site, one can't help marveling at the short sightedness and lack of imagination Duell showed.
Short sightedness—and wishful thinking.