RoR: Forum

An Wang is credited with invention of core memory, and rightly so. In addition, he had another idea that failed to save his company...

About 1988 or so, I wrote an article for Credit Union News about new computer interfaces. As president of his company An Wang wanted a way for several people to be logged in to the same computer and to share the same "desktop" presentation. One person could load in a spreadsheet and another could change it and everyone else would see all that. In addition, voice could be carried, as well.

Unfortunately, An Wang was probably the only person in the world with an IBM mainframe who saw the wisdom in this. His company failed. Today, we have WebEx.

Post 1

Friday, March 11, 2005 - 12:18pm

Everyone knows that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. The matter is somewhat more complicated than that. I encourage anyone who is interested in the story to read Killdevil Hill by Harry Combs and Martin Caidin. (The other standard biography is The Bishop's Boys. Killdevil Hill is somewhat more technical because Caidin was a sciece and science fiction writer.) The "airplane" had been worked out almost 100 years earlier by Cayley. Still, nothing much came of it. The Wright Brothers solved the key problem: the propeller.

Before them, no one understood that a propeller is a wing.

The "screw propeller" works in water because the medium is dense. Screw propellers failed to pull or push much of anything through the air.

In order to do this work -- and other important work -- the Wright Brothers built a wind tunnel. I saw one of theirs (not their first) on display at the Wright-Patterson aviation museum in Dayton. The workmanship was breathtaking. Aside from the pure engineering, the outer wood itself was carefully formed rich, finished, and polished far beyond mere necessity.

These were men who clearly loved to work well.

(Not to raise the specter of ghosts gone by, but somewhere around here, I have an old Murray N. Rothbard essay about "The Government Airplane." Samuel Langley was president of the Smithsonian. He consumed $100,000 of other people's money and only managed to drop his airplane in the Potomac, twice. The Wright Brothers spent about $14,000 of their own money and were successful. Of course, that was because they invented the propeller.... which Langley overlooked...)

Post 2

Friday, March 11, 2005 - 2:37pm

Hi Michael (and Jeffrey),

Let me put in a plug for Brazil on this "inventor of the airplane" thing. There is a Brazilian named Alberto Santos Dumont (called lovingly just "Santos Dumont" in Brazil), who is considered down there - and in South America in general - as the real inventor. My mouth fell open when I was first told that after I had moved there.

Here is a bare-bones news story in English for anyone interested:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3320713.stm

He was one of those wonderfully eccentric inventors who seemed to spout up all over at the turn of the 20th century and it is a shame that chauvinistic sentiments on all sides has kept his name from being more widely known to Americans. The patent issues and press disputes were fairly bitter at the time.

Who did what first and under which conditions? International communications at that time were not highly developed and Santos Dumont and the Wright brothers worked completely isolated from each other, so I think they both did. At any rate, he was one of THE pioneers of aviation. His influence was felt mightily throughout the world - especially Europe - during the birth of this field.

Santos Dumont was devastated by seeing his "invention" used for dropping bombs on human beings in WWI and sadly committed suicide in 1932. Such a shame. Who know what this delightful man (and mind) might have have come up with next?

Michael

(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 3/11, 2:42pm)

Post 3

Friday, March 11, 2005 - 7:07pm

As an electrical engineer, my list contains these:

1. Cooley and Tukey: (re)invented the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) that revolutionized the world of digital signal processing (has anyone heard of cell phones, for example?). But , apparently, Gauss knew the algorithm (no surprise in that, in my opinion). (1962)

2. Nicola Tesla: Electric Transformer, ac induction motors and many others (in whose honor the unit of magnetic flux density is named). (1890s)

3. Hertz (yes, the Hz in 60Hz): first experimental verification of the existence of radio waves, predicted nearly two decades before that by James Maxwell. (1885?)

4. Vladimir Rokhlin (at Yale): invented what are known as fast multipole algorithms that are revolutionizing world of computational physics. [He and Weng Cho Chew (at Illinois), happen to be my personal heroes in this field!] (1985- to date)

coaltontrail

Post 4

Friday, March 11, 2005 - 10:14pm

How about Edwin Land - did more than just invent the instant camera.....

Post 5

Friday, March 11, 2005 - 9:40pm

A very good book on this topic: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767908171/102-6709175-7436929

Post 6

Saturday, March 12, 2005 - 7:35am

Michael Stuart Kelly wrote: "Let me put in a plug for Brazil on this "inventor of the airplane" thing. There is a Brazilian named Alberto Santos Dumont (called lovingly just "Santos Dumont" in Brazil), who is considered down there - and in South America in general - as the real inventor. My mouth fell open when I was first told that after I had moved there."

Yes, indeed! It so happens that I collect banknotes with aviation themes and Brazil has two distinct series (change of currency valuations) with Alberto Santos-Dumont on them. His autobiography appears in English from Dover books as My Airships. Santos-Dumont exemplified many of the qualities of the innovator. For one thing, he grew up socially isolated, but well-off, his family being owners of a successful coffee plantation. One result for him was that he had the opportunity to play with mechanical devices, taking them apart, improving them, and inventing new machinery for the plantation. His wealth also allowed him to build airships (dirigibles and balloons) and to fly them over Paris. I personally believe that the dirigible would be more prominent today if aviation were not controlled by governments.

All of that said, the fact is that Santos-Dumont was indeed granted an award by the International Federation of Aeronautiques for his "airplane." However, when the Wright Brothers read about this, they quit their three-year experiment in a cow pastrure outside Dayton and packed up for Paris. In truth, Santos-Dumont built a flier that was little more than a cruciform box kite which not so much flew as carried the passenger on directed crash.

Santos-Dumont could not circle.

When Wilbur Wright showed up at the LeMans airshow -- Orville was in America -- the brothers were jibed and jeered as fakers. When Wilbur Wright turned a circle over the LeMans racetrack, he silenced his detractors and made them his supporters.

(I did not say anything above about Philo T. Farnsworth. He was but one of several "inventors" of the television. SImilarly, Nicola Tesla sued Guglielmo Marconi for patent infringement. It does not detract from one person to acknowledge that another had a similar idea. This is one of the fallacies in patents -- and Ayn Rand's view of them. The Wright Brothers invented the airplane. That is the simple truth. The full story is somewhat more complicated. Alberto Santos-Dumont deserves recognition for his achievements as well.)

Post 7

Saturday, March 12, 2005 - 5:09pm

Well, let me put in a plug for New Zealander Richard Pearse as the first person to 'fly' a mechanically controlled aircraft.

And as for the argument over patents that Mr Marotta is trying to foment, both the Wright Brothers and Richard Pearse invented an airplane at roughly the same time, and entirely independently of each other. That the Wright Brothers and not Pearse are credited with inventing the airplane may or may not be historically accurate, but it is at least accurate in all practicial terms since it was they and not he who were in a position to patent and to develop the invention industrially - and so they did, and all credit (both legal and moral) is due to them for that.

That this somehow shows a 'fallacy in patents' as Mr Marotta suggests is as ludicrous as the many other slaps at Ayn Rand he routinely indulges in.

Post 8

Monday, March 14, 2005 - 12:15am

How about that fellow named Crapper whose first name escapes me?

Post 9

Monday, March 14, 2005 - 1:10am

That would be Thomas.

Post 10

Monday, March 14, 2005 - 6:10am

"That the Wright Brothers and not Pearse are credited with inventing the airplane may or may not be historically accurate..."

As Marotta points out the Wright Brothers plane was the first to actually have steering. I believe that Pearce's didn't.

Is Marotta going to SOLOC-4? If so I can unload some old Czechoslovakian notes on him that are no longer exchangable.

"Andrew Moyer - Industrial production of penicillin"

It was based upon ideas already developed by the Brtisih scientists Florey, Heatly and Chain. Unfortunately they had no patent and didn't profit from it.

Post 11

Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - 12:35am

Can I ad some Belgians to your list?

Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone.

Zenobe Gramme, inventor of the dynamo, the thing you need to produce electriciy.

Leo Bakeland, inventor of Bakelite, the first plastic. The black, brittle plastic you find in old lightswitches and electric installations of very old houses is bakelite.

Paul Janssen, founder of Janssen Pharmaceutica, now Janssen-Cilag. Had over 700 scientific publications to his name.

Christian de Duve, Nobel Prize medecine. His research enabled to know the interior structure of living cells. Discovered the lysosomes.

Georges Lemaitre, formulated in 1927 for the first time the hypothesis of the Big Bang.

Gerard Kremer, aka Mercator. Famous map-maker. Developped the Mercator Projection. Almost all maps we use now are Mercator projections. He was the first to publish a book of maps, which he called Atlas.

Post 12

Thursday, May 26, 2005 - 1:52pm