Historically Making the Future

Two weeks ago my daughter and I went to the World Maker Faire in Queens New York, for what was a great day of inventors showing cool new products of “stuff”. “Stuff” is the new digital and for a guy who has always worked at the intersection of digital and physical, I love this. Soon after we went through the rain and long line to enter we entered into the first tent where projects for kids and adults were being led by enthusiastic 20 somethings in geek chic attire (more geek I must say than chic). A woman asked Juliette (my 7 year old daughter) if she knew which president of the United States was an inventor. Being arrogant (though not 7 as I sounded), I jumped in with the response saying “several were inventors.” The woman handed us a card with a picture of a president on one side and a description on the other. She then corrected me by  saying that it was only Abraham Lincoln who held a patent (a rather obscure one actually, but not as obscure as my own patents. Read of his here). That was interesting to me, as with so many other makers like myself it is not Lincoln we look to in American history as a politician/innovator combo, but rather President Thomas Jefferson, and founding father Benjamin Franklin. According to most accounts both of these would have been more at home running a booth at the Maker Faire than representing the country in tax policy. Upon further reflection there is actually a dichotomy that we are now facing, where we again look to these unpatented inventors at the dawn of our nation to see where politics, bureaucratic stiffing,  piracy and invention collide. I think my surprise over Lincoln was not so much that he had a patent, but that someone at the ideologically open source Maker Faire was sharing this with pride. For me, someone who has authored 6 patents, I am always defending what is perceived, lately especially, as being an old convention that limits innovation rather than encourages it.  The villainous Patent Troll must be a popular Halloween costume in Silicon Valley this year for example. What do we think of Lincoln then, and what would Lincoln and the founding founders say to each other and to entrepreneurs and inventors in 2012?

Here is the contradiction. The patent system is built into our constitution, and for good reason. The discussion of Patent protection and intellectual property was a part  of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and the movement proposed by James Madison was "to secure to authors exclusive rights for a limited time". It was adopted with very little dissent as a part of the commerce clause. All of this makes sense. Patents were a way for the new country to protect the inventions of its citizens while at the same time making sure that those inventions can be replicated and not lost to secrets once the inventor is no longer alive. This is one reason I like patents. While it does create a short term monopoly it also allows for long term free use. Until very recently my thought was that inventors, and companies who have inventions coming out of them, were faced with either creating a patent or keeping things as trade secrets. A mix of these two things is used by nearly everyone in technology businesses including the company I am CEO of Nanotronics Imaging. The idea of open source lives somewhere outside of these two choices that most of us face, but it did not start with Linus Torvalds or Wikipedia, but rather has its roots as far back in the United States as Benjamin Franklin and indeed our 3^rd President. 

Thomas Jefferson in a letter in 1813 said this of ideas: 

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

This in itself doesn't speak to patents, but judging by the fact that he never applied or received one we can assume that he didn't think much of them, even if he had not oppose the inclusion of US patent law into the constitution. Similarly Franklin said of his inventions "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously." 

The question that I have always had was whether these ideas were scalable, as neither man needed patent royalties for personal wealth or the survival of a business. Nor did they, as brilliant as they were, provide an economic solution to open sourcing. Perhaps this is why patent law remained, even with these grand gestures of two of the nations preeminent founders and inventors. Maybe they could not think of how the romantic notions of open source could create a nation of leading innovations. 

Chris Anderson (of Wired Magazine, not TED, fame) comments on the power of Makers both in numerous Wired articles and his new book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.  Anderson speaks both as a prophet and the messiah of Makers, and he is in a great position to do so. Not only is he the Chief Editor at Wired, but he has two start-ups that very much grew up in the style of the Maker/DIY movement. Most importantly they use micro-controllers called Arduino, which have taken a rather old kit concept and made a powerful electronics tool. The way this is possible, as my father (a Maker not only now but of the 70’s and 80’s Homebrew Computer Club era) claims is the internet. The internet has of course allowed for rapid creation of social networks, searching, and democratized publishing (I am actually publishing these thoughts just because I want to), DIY commerce and DIY products. Arduino and 3-D printers are just two examples that use Wikipedia style collaboration to enable the creation of stuff. In addition to patents and trade secrets, Nanotronics Imaging also uses Arduino and other open source tools happily and more often every day. 

Anderson starts out his new book with a wonderful story about his grandfather who was a towering influence in his life. His grandfather had invented a sprinkler system that was patented. Though he received royalties on that patent, they never made him a rich man. He was not an entrepreneur who created a company, but just a smart guy with an idea. This was how a tinkerer became an inventor most of the time. Anderson, in honor of his Grandfather, set out to create a sprinkler system in a Maker Movement way. He open sourced the idea, and created a terrific product that might turn out to be a thriving company. This is inspiring to many of us who dream about a lot of ideas, know we can’t do everything alone, and don’t want to hand it over to a bigger company. It is also something that Jefferson and Franklin would have very much liked.

Despite being the original American Makers, Jefferson and Franklin were not Thomas Edison. This is obvious, but they did create a world for Edison to be the most vigorous defender, and largest owner of patents in American history. So while Jefferson and Franklin were inventing in as open source of a manner as was conceivable in 18^th and early 19^th Century America, they were not creating large, sustainable businesses from those inventions. They were diplomats, journalists, scientists and politicians, but they did not spark a wave of industrialization through  inventions. Can it be thought of that DIY is for hobbiests and small business but unrealistic for creating large businesses? Maybe. It would be hard to find a DIY tech business in the Fortune 500. Without the trade secret of Google’s search, ad and mapping algorithms, Google would not be a giant tech employer, and enabler of technologies and ideas for us all. If Apple hadn't patented those highly touchy screens, they would be less successful. If GE hadn't patented their medical imaging devices, they wouldn’t have spent the huge amounts of money to develop them. So our wealthy founding fathers who were incredible, being Utopian by night working on inventions that they would freely share, and pragmatic during the day when they approved the commerce clause.

So we are in the luckier  place than our heroes and technological founding fathers, even though  there remains many similarities.  Our tool kits are better, not just because Arduinos and 3-D printers are in them, but because with those items are a world of collaborators available to share and participate in making our ideas better than they were when they were just our ideas. Ultimately this may very well work. My guess, and my own leaning are a mix of libertarian euphoria, communal comfort and boring old pragmatism. That is what our tools are, the libertarian Open Maker, the communal sharing  limited monopoly of patents, and the boring old practical way to protect ideas through secrecy. I think that in 2012 this is where we are. In 2050 I would guess that things will look a little different. There will be less boring secrets. As we all know keeping secrets with anything now is very hard. The mix of patenting and open sourcing may move in the direction of the open source, but only if other regulations than just patent law change. There is less friction than ever to open a small business in some areas. Opening a website for just about anything or creating an app is practically something anyone can try. There are however much larger barriers for entry into the world word of making stuff, even if actually putting them together gets cheap. Think of those Edison inventions for instance. Creating the incandescent light  was not about just creating the bulb itself. It involved huge political hurdles, and infrastructural issues to become practical. When those changes occurred they were the start of what would become General Electric, a company creating enormous wealth, and employing 500,000 and more people at any given time. Moving ahead 100 years just within that one company GE invented an MRI imaging machine that is used in hospitals around the world. It also created wealth and jobs, but it required FDA approval, and years of Hospital buy-in. These two inventions, it could be argued, would never have had a commercial viability as open source projects, and therefore would never have been funded. They would never have created so many jobs, and have enabled technological revolutions that far exceed our ideas of technological disruptions.

Juliette gave me the Abraham Lincoln card about his invention that was handed to us at the Maker Faire. It sits on my desk as a reminder to balance my responsibilities.  I think that no matter how many great new inventions we saw at the Maker Faire it was this card that has the largest impact on me.

Nature's Intellectual Property

I just watched the Charlie Rose interview with Liv Ulmann and Kate Blanchett about the new production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, playing at BAM in New York. Liv Ullman, a terrific actress herself, is the director of this play, and she said something that strangely applied to the rest of my days conversations. She spoke about that moment when observing an actor that you are directing, when the actor gets it exactly right. The moment is so moving that words cannot describe why it is so perfect. The director is left with a dilemma. Should she tell the actor that he or she got it right, and try to figure out why, or just leave it and be happy it is there? There is risk in both of these approaches. Speaking of it may intellectualize a purely instinctual and brilliant act of the subconscious mind. On the other hand, not speaking of it may mean that it was simply one moment, which may never again be repeated. I know what she is talking about, both from my days in theatre and now working in science. There is a sense of the complexity of inspiration that is humbly rooted in our knowledge of all we don’t know. Human psychology and character development are so deeply intertwined with life experience, theatrical experience, and character interpretation. There is this same thing that happens with invention, and can be equally as fragile.


There are different strongly held beliefs in how to handle intellectual property. Invention of a new technology is not entirely different from the process of bringing a character to life. Like the play, the invention is a unification of previous ideas. Views on how to handle these ideas have varied, and distinguished inventors have disagreed on whether the patent system is truly the best place for them to be revealed. There is an idea, that until the open source movement in software, seemed quant. Benjamin Franklin said after inventing the open stove; “as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” This is a highly romantic ideal that has not been very practical. Even not for profit Universities and hospitals now routinely seek patents in order to finance further research. Patents actually do half of what Franklin was suggesting. They do allow others to make and understand the exact invention. They just can’t do it freely for 20 years. By the way, Thomas Jefferson agreed with Franklin on this account. Luckily for them they made their money in other ways, not relying on science and technology for an income. Most private inventors and corporations don’t have this benefit. There is another way that inventions are handled in modern society, which is through trade secrets. The concept of trade secrets is best known in the food and beverage industry. The secret formulas to Coca Cola or to KFC have been famously guarded. This is true though in nearly every product and process, even ones who have extremely strong patents. The truth about trade secrets may be much less brilliant, but more mysterious than a patent. I feel that in most cases a trade secret is something in a process that makes a product unique, even if the company or inventor doesn’t know what it is. I think that it is very possible that Coca Cola does have a secret recipe, but that the recipe by now must have made its way to competitors. The only explanation then on how Coke is still different is that something in the way they make it is different, so they keep making it the same way. This is not so much invention, but chance.

Nature works in similar ways to the trade secret method. There is no patent on trees or minerals. They have come into their present form through a process that worked to keep them intact. Recently while working here in Paris with a very renowned polymer chemist, we were discussing a strange natural phenomenon. For 75 years chemists have been able to create a synthetic rubber which has the exact same chemical structure as natural rubber that comes from the Hevea tree. This was a major development, but strangely when we look at the properties of the natural rubber and the equivalent synthetic, the results are different. With all of our technical and analytical knowledge, we don’t know why this is. For this reason Natural Rubber is still used for many applications. When I was discussing this with my father, he suggested that this was somehow natures “trade secret”. He is right. There is something that for the last billion or so years has been refined to create the latex that is so unique. Nature is not an intelligent being, so likely it does not know why. It just happened, and continues to happen the same way over and over. The same thing is true of silicon, which has a near perfect structure. We would love to create something this perfect in a lab, but we haven’t had the billions of years of trial and error yet. I think with the prototype to evaluate, we should be able to do it faster.

This brings me back to the actors, to instinct and to chance innovation. Perhaps most of what we do is about freezing a process on stage, in a factory or in a lab at the exact right moment. It is also possible that this ability to know when and how to do this is what makes great directors, inventors and companies.