Before delving into Kennedy's pivotal patent, it's essential to understand the prehistory of foot attire. Footwear, dating back to ancient civilizations, often consisted of simple leather pieces bound by rawhide laces. However, these early versions were rudimentary at best, serving the primary function of foot protection rather than the nuanced utility and fashion statement of modern shoes.
On March 27, 1790, Harvey Kennedy introduced a game-changer in the world of footwear with his patent for the shoelace. Kennedy's design wasn't just about keeping shoes fastened; it was about innovation in ease of use, durability, and the potential for mass production. The specifics of Kennedy's original patent are a testament to the ingenuity of the era, showcasing a leap in both the functionality and manufacturing of shoelaces. His design emphasized a uniform, tight fastening mechanism that could be easily adjusted and secured, a departure from the cumbersome ties of the past.
From Harvey Kennedy's groundbreaking patent, the shoelace underwent numerous transformations. The industrial revolution and advancements in textile manufacturing introduced new materials and weaving techniques, making shoelaces more durable and affordable. The introduction of synthetic fibers in the 20th century further revolutionized shoelace production, allowing for a vast array of colors, styles, and functionalities, from waterproof options to those designed for athletic performance.
Beyond their practical purpose, shoelaces have woven their way into the cultural fabric of societies worldwide. They've become a medium for personal expression, with different lacing techniques and colors signifying various cultural and subcultural identities. From the meticulous lacing styles of punk boots to the vibrant and diverse shoelaces of sneakers in street fashion, shoelaces have transcended their utilitarian origins to become symbols of individuality and fashion.
As we commemorate the anniversary of Harvey Kennedy's patent, it's worth reflecting on the impact of such a seemingly simple invention. The shoelace is a reminder of how innovation can emerge from the pursuit of solving everyday problems, leaving a lasting legacy that spans centuries.
In honor of this occasion, let's visualize the journey of the shoelace from its inception to the present day, illustrating the evolution of this indispensable accessory. Through images, we can appreciate the diverse forms and uses shoelaces have taken over the years, from the sturdy laces of Victorian boots to the reflective threads of modern running shoes.
Today, the shoelace continues to evolve with technology. From eco-friendly materials to "smart" laces that adjust automatically, the journey of the shoelace is far from over. As we lace up our shoes each day, we partake in a ritual that connects us to centuries of human innovation and cultural expression.
Harvey Kennedy's patent for the shoelace, though a small stitch in the fabric of history, has left an indelible mark on the world. It's a testament to the idea that great things often come in small, intricately tied packages. Here's to many more years of tying knots, making statements, and walking the path of innovation— one lace at a time.
]]>In the spirit of International Women's Day, Retro Patents celebrates the monumental contributions of women inventors and patent holders who have shaped our world. Women have been pivotal in the realm of innovation, yet their stories have often been overshadowed. Today, we spotlight the brilliance, resilience, and ingenuity of women whose inventions have not only paved the way for progress but have also broken barriers in a predominantly male-dominated field.
The legacy of women inventors dates back centuries, with contributions that have transformed everyday life. For instance, Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper in 1903, a simple yet groundbreaking invention that has ensured the safety of drivers around the world. Hedy Lamarr, famously known as a Hollywood actress, co-invented a technology for radio communications during World War II, which laid the groundwork for today's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Let's not forget Dr. Shirley Jackson, whose research led to the development of caller ID and call waiting — innovations that have redefined telecommunications.
In more recent years, women inventors have continued to excel and inspire. Dr. Patricia Bath revolutionized the field of ophthalmology with the invention of the Laserphaco Probe in 1986, making her the first African-American female doctor to receive a medical patent. This invention significantly improved the treatment of cataract surgery, restoring sight to individuals who had been blind for over 30 years.
Sara Blakely, with her invention of Spanx, transformed the fashion industry and redefined women's undergarments. Her innovation not only led to a billion-dollar business but also empowered women to feel more confident in their appearance.
Despite these significant contributions, women inventors and patent holders have faced numerous challenges, from gender bias in the patenting process to lack of recognition and support. However, their resilience and determination have paved the way for future generations of female inventors. Organizations and initiatives around the world are now dedicated to supporting women in STEM fields, ensuring their work is celebrated and their contributions recognized.
On International Women's Day, Retro Patents not only celebrates the past and present achievements of women inventors but also calls for continued support and recognition of their work. We encourage our readers to learn about and share the stories of women inventors, both known and unsung. Let's inspire future generations of women to pursue their innovative ideas and to believe in the power of their inventions.
The inventions by women have shaped every aspect of our lives, from the way we communicate to how we move through the world. It is essential to recognize and honor the achievements of women inventors and patent holders, not just on International Women's Day but every day. Their contributions remind us that innovation knows no gender, and that the pursuit of knowledge and invention is a path open to all who dare to dream and innovate.
On this International Women's Day, Retro Patents salutes the brilliance, creativity, and indomitable spirit of women inventors across the globe. Here's to celebrating their achievements and ensuring their legacies inspire countless innovators to come.
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Tetris, with its endless gameplay of falling four-block shapes, presents no scripted ending, challenging players to continually improve their stacking strategies to survive longer. This victory by Willis is even more notable as it comes as Tetris nears its 40th anniversary, a testament to the game's enduring appeal and complexity. Maya Rogers, the CEO of Tetris, lauded Willis’ victory as an extraordinary accomplishment that pushes the boundaries of this legendary game.
The journey to this point was chronicled by gaming YouTuber David Macdonald, who noted that early Tetris players struggled to surpass the initial levels. Techniques such as "hypertapping," where players vibrated their fingers rhythmically to move the controller faster, and "rolling," a method combining multi-finger techniques, gradually enabled gamers to reach unprecedented heights in the game. However, as players ventured into these uncharted territories, the game presented new challenges, such as intricate and confusing color patterns at higher levels, making the gameplay progressively more difficult.
These challenges were further elucidated by a Tetris-playing AI program, StackRabbit, which helped to identify specific conditions that could lead to a game-ending glitch. This AI program, though playing a modified version of Tetris, demonstrated that certain gameplay events could trigger glitches, paving the way for human players to explore these possibilities in the original game. Gamers, inspired by StackRabbit's findings, compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet detailing the specific game levels and conditions most likely to cause a crash.
Armed with this knowledge, Willis embarked on his record-setting journey, meticulously planning his approach to exploit these identified glitches. His reaction upon reaching the kill screen was one of utter astonishment and disbelief. In a live-streamed video, he can be seen overwhelmed by the magnitude of his achievement, a moment of pure, unscripted emotion that resonated with viewers and gamers alike. This accomplishment not only marks a milestone in the history of Tetris but also stands as a testament to the evolving relationship between players and video games, where boundaries are continuously pushed, and the impossible becomes possible.
But when Atari launched Space Invaders on their home console in 1980, the market began shifting and a demand for more and more games we could play at home was born. This craze had everyone coveting the latest game release and companies were scrambling to crank them out. The market became flooded with sub-par games all trying to go viral. This created a backlash against video game consoles.
At the same time, personal computers were on the rise. With plenty of demand, the price of owning one was in reach for many families and people began choosing them over the alternative of owning a gaming console. Personal computers also offered gaming options and included many other features as well.
This marks the beginnings of the great video game crash of 1983. The blame for this crash can be attributed to the saturation in the number of home consoles and available games and to increased interest in personal computers.
The crash lasted around 2 years from 1983-1985 and resulted in the bankruptcies of several home computer and video game console companies. Many companies producing video games, mainly third party development companies were forced to close. Because of this, toy stores, the main retailer of video games, decided that this was all just a passing fad and stopped carrying them in the stores.
The day everything starting looking up was when Nintendo Entertainment System came on the scene. Nintendo attributed Atari’s downfall to the over production of no-good 3rd party games and resolved themselves to make fewer, high quality games. In order to do this, Nintendo created a “seal of quality” which it put on games that met their high standards.
In retrospect, this video game crash, which was felt primarily in North America, left us with 2 long-lasting effects. First, the home console market which before the crash was largely dominated by the US, moved to Japan. As time progressed into the 1990s Japanese companies such as NES and Sega became the leaders of this industry. Another direct result of this event was the increase in regulations to control third party software development. Preventing the use of unlicensed games and the creation of anti-piracy software were the main bi-products.
Despite this rather large hiccup in the video game industry, it has survived and is thriving today. We can look back at this scary time in its history and learn that more isn’t always better and quality is king!
]]>The 60s are a considered a golden era for toys. Many parents had more money to spend on their children, many families had more children than later generations and there were so many more toys to choose from than ever before.
]]>The 60s are a considered a golden era for toys. Many parents had more money to spend on their children, many families had more children than later generations and there were so many more toys to choose from than ever before.
Here are 10 of the top toys that shaped a decade of children growing up in the 1960s:
1. Dolls- Some of the most popular dolls during this time were Chatty Cathy, Suzy Homemaker, and Barbie. Chatty Cathy was the second highest selling doll of the decade. When you pulled her ring, she would say one of 11 phrases at random, such as “I love you” or “Let’s play school”. The Suzy Homemaker Doll offered a line of tiny appliances that could be purchased separately such as a washing machine, ice cream maker and hairdryer. Suzy and her appliance line were one of the main competitors for the Easy Bake Oven. Standing at 11.5 inches tall, Barbie was the only doll in the US at this time that was an adult. She gave little girls the opportunity to dream about what their future would look like and act it out. She also had many purchase separately accessories such as clothes, shoes, cars, and a dream house.
2. Slinky- Inspired by a metal coil that fell to the ground and kept moving across the floor, the Slinky was created by Richard James. It began selling at Gimbel's department store in Philadelphia in 1945 and quickly became a child favorite. With the ability to travel down flights of steps and appear to levitate for a short time after being dropped, the slinky provided hours of entertainment to not only children of the 60s, but today’s children as well.
3. Etch-A-Sketch- The Etch A Sketch is a mechanical drawing toy invented by French electrical technician Andre Cassagnes. Not given much attention at its debut in 1959 at the International Toy Fair in Germany, The Ohio Art Company decided to take a chance and invested in the product changing its name to “Etch a Sketch”. Using television advertising, the toy became one of the hottest gifts for Christmas 1960. Etch A Sketch has gone on to be inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998, and has sold over a million units world wide.
4. Hot Wheels- Hot Wheels were created by Elliot Handler, husband of Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie. His vision was to create a car that was cooler and performed better than anything on the market at that time. Hot Wheels were designed to be more fantasy, with loud paint jobs and superchargers, as compared to Matchbox cars which were more like a smaller version of a real car.
5. Lite Brite- Released in 1967, the Lite Brite was a light box that illuminated small colored plastic pegs that fit into holes in a panel, which created a picture either by template or freeform. Children could spend hours creating an endless number of light up masterpieces.
6. G.I. Joe- G. I. Joe is considered the first action figure and was developed in 1963 by Stan Weston. He was made to represent 4 branches of the US Armed Forces: Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Marketing in the 1960s suggested that boys did not want to play with “dolls”, thus the term “action figure” was coined.
7. Play-Doh- Play-Doh was originally created in the 1930s as a cleaning product that would remove soot from wallpaper. But as coal-heated homes began transitioning to natural gas, the product started losing sales and the company, Kutol products was facing bankruptcy. In the 1950s they began marketing it to elementary schools as a modeling clay and renamed it “Play-Doh”. After successful demonstrations in stores like Macy’s and Marshall Field’s and a series of TV commercials during popular children’s programming, sales began to climb and reached nearly $3 million by 1958.
8. Mr. Potato Head- Mr. Potato Head was created and developed by George Lerner and began being manufactured by Hasbro in 1958. Originally, it only included accessories such as arms, legs and shoes that could be attached to a real potato, but after receiving complaints about rotting vegetables and stricter safety regulations, they began including a plastic potato in the kit in 1964. These days you can buy a Mrs. Potato Head and many accessories including cars and a boat trailer.
9. Easy Bake Oven- Introduced in 1963 by Kenner Products, the Easy Bake Oven was a small toy resembling a real oven that used an incandescent light bulb as a heating source to bake small cakes. Easy Bake Oven comes with packets of cake mix (also sold separately) and small round pans. Once the cakes are mixed and added to the pans, the pans are pushed into a slot in the oven and then pushed out of another slot when finished baking. Hasbro still manufactures the toy today and has sold over 16 million Easy Bake Ovens since the 60s.
10. Tonka Trucks- Named after Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, Tonka was a division of a company that originally sold metal gardening tools. In 1955, the toy construction equipment took priority over the garden tools and the company renamed itself Tonka. The iconic yellow dump truck that put Tonka on the map came out in 1964 and has sold 15 million units since that time.
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So what made it sell so well??? Coming on to the scene in August of 1982, one big thing going for the Commodore 64 was how easy it was to use. It booted up to a user-friendly screen with the Commodore Basic Operating System ready for instruction. You could write your own program, load software from a cassette or floppy, or stick a cartridge into the back and it would do whatever asked of it.
Another part of its success was that it was sold at regular retail stores and not just electronic stores. You could pick one up at places like Sears, Toys R Us, Fred Meyer, K-Mart and Montgomery Ward. It was the most affordable computer on the market at that time and because it could be plugged directly into the back of a home television without any modifications, the general masses could work it with ease.
Not only was it easy to use, affordable and found at most stores, it also had a plethora of options and features. Approximately 10,000 commercial software titles were made for it including development tools, games, and office applications. It had a TV port, 2 joystick ports, and a cartridge port.
Sadly, demand for the 8 bit and 16 bit machines declined rapidly in the US during the 1990s due to PC compatibles dominating the computer market. It continued to be profitable in the UK and other European countries but eventually its demise was caused not by lack of demand, but because of the cost of producing the disk drive. In 1994, Commodore announced it would be discontinuing their machines stating that the Commodore 1541 disk drive actually cost more than the C64 itself.
]]>If you weren’t around during this slice of American history or can’t remember, never fear, let’s take a brief glimpse into this vintage era that shaped not just how we listened to music, but shaped the music we listen to today.
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Boomboxes first started showing up on the streets of the US in the late 1970s. Not only did we want our hair bigger and our cars faster, we wanted our music louder. So when Sears and K-Mart began carrying boomboxes on their shelves in the urban areas of NYC, LA, and DC they were a big hit. What consumers found in the boombox was not just portability but also that wonderful sound of booming bass. As the music got louder and the bass got heavier, boomboxes got larger and heavier as well. By the time the mid 1980s rolled around, some of us were carting suitcase-sized boomboxes around on our shoulders!
The portability factor of these boxes was key to their rise in popularity as well. Before we had Walkmans or iPods this was the only way to share your music and listen on the go. Urban youth turned them into status symbols. This led to the rise in more extravagant boxes. In the late 70s it was vertical turntables, in the 80s it was double deck cassette players, so you could listen and record at the same time. Some even had input/output jacks for microphones or headphone jacks. Models like the JVC RC-M90 and the Sharp GF-777 were considered supreme because of their ability to drown out the competition in street music battles.
As they became bigger and better, musicians began jumping on the fad as well. Many would even go so far as to say the dawn of hip-hop might not have happened without the influential booming bass from boomboxes. The Beastie Boys had a signature boombox and The Clash carried one at all times. LL Cool J not only wrote a love song about a boombox, the JVC RC-M90 was featured on the cover of his first album “Radio”. This box is one of the most sought after boomboxes to this day, and if found could set you back somewhere around $800.
But as the 1990s came into view, technology like the Walkman and better car stereos began replacing the need to carry a heavy box, and subsequently, boomboxes quickly starting disappearing from our city streets. But although gone is the booming sound, the iconic image of the boombox remains a powerful reminder of that page in history when music went mobile for the first time and brought us all a little closer.
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A new print just in time for the Holidays!
Legos have been named the “Toy of the Century” twice. The Lego was born in 1947 when the company bought their first plastic injection machine. The brick was not invented then but took final form in 1958 when the shape of the stud and tube brick was patented. The interlocking principles make it unique and offer unlimited building possibilities. In February of 2015, Lego replaced Ferrari as Brand Finance’s “world’s most powerful brand”.
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Retro Patents prints have always been classic, clean and timeless and that trend continues with the introduction of our BLACK print variant. All of our current prints are now available in this gorgeous and high end print color scheme, which features a rich black background with stark white artwork. We heard the feedback and understand that sometimes you need a darker themed print for your space.
We hope everyone enjoys this new print variation!
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“Good artists copy, great artists steal”
This quote is often attributed to Pablo Picasso but did you know that he actually ‘stole’ it from a host of writers and authors before him? Steve Jobs then credited the quote to Picasso and the cycle of plagiarism continued.
Why do I care about copying in the startup world? Well I’m writing this post as a disgruntled victim of a daylight robbery. It’s an article I’ve wanted to write for a long time. As a founder in the tech world, I’ve witnessed a growing trend of rip-off merchants. I’m talking about the type of founders who literally copy your idea, brand and business model wholesale. The copycats of our industry.
It’s never been easier to start a tech business. That also means there’s never been as many copycats in the tech world. If you’re reading this and you’re thinking of starting your own company, please take note.
Earlier this year, my co-founder Aidan and I launched Retro Patents to marry our two passions of tech patents and minimalist art. We announced this on Product Hunt which has become the de facto platform to launch a tech business. Everything was going smoothly until we read the following tweet from a supporter of ours.
“Maybe of interest. Although you guys have received way more upvotes”
Joey Tawadrous (@joeytawadrous) July 18, 2017
To our amazement, we found that a clone had spring up with the exact same type of website and product concept. They even launched on Product Hunt like we had with the same marketing copy to rub salt into the wounds. It was depressing as we’d spent months building up a loyal following and a solid niche in the market. Thankfully the good folks of Twitter called this out for what it really is, blatant plagiarism. A complete lack of originality.
“You also can't be "Quite unique" or "very unique". It's binary. You are or you're not. And they... are... not. #GrammarNazi #MrRyanC6English”
Alan Metcalfe (@alanmetcalfe) July 18, 2017
“Nothing worse that seeing a business being fully ripped off, right in front of everyone's eyes. Keep up the good work @retropatents”
Andrew Lynch (@ourlynchpin) July 18, 2017
“This is quite a nasty rip off. Keep up the good work Retro Patents, you'll win out in the end”
John Sherwin (@johnmpsherwin) July 19, 2017
The reason this infuriated us so much was that we’d seen the impact of copycat syndrome with a host of other tech businesses. Another print startup, Mapiful had had the same issue with copycats like Grafomap and Your Own Maps. This founder of Mapiful, N-E Jansson, wasted no time in defending his turf.
“Err. Total rip off. Carbon copy of Mapifuls editor (design registered). Could at least have written your own copy.”
N-E Jansson (@n_e_jansson)
The Ecommerce space seems to be the industry most impacted by this negative trend. There are so many tools to support Ecommerce businesses like Shopify, Magneto and Squarespace. If you have an idea and a product to sell, you can get it up and hosted in days. This is awesome for so many founders who want to create and capture value online. The negative to this is that these businesses become easy targets for the rip-off merchants.
The word plagiarism derives from the Latin plagiarius, referring to "kidnapper." Roman satirist Martial in the first Century AD gave us its real meaning when he wrote an epigram accusing another man of being a ‘plagiarius’ for kidnapping his writings and passing them off as his own. Two thousand years later, the act of ‘kidnapping’ original works is just as taboo. From the school and college environment right through to the workplace and professional arena. We go out of our way to punish those who have stolen our ideas. Why is this?
I think former PayPal CEO and legendary investor Peter Thiel best sums this up in his book “Zero to One, Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”. The graph below shows how all technological progress is dependent on going from 0 to 1. From something to nothing. The opposite of this is globalisation. Going from 1 to n by copying and expanding.
Original image by @stefania_druga
If you choose the path of plagiarism then you’re destined to go from 1 to n. You’re not really a startup as you’re not creating anything new. You’re capturing value without adding anything back into the equation.
Square is a classic case of inventing a new vertical. It wasn’t a smooth ride according to their key inventor but they got there. They persevered though and Square went from 0 to 1. This made it easier for small merchants around the world to accept payments. Their competitors just changed the shape of the device, not the state of the art.
Another clear example of this strategy is Rocket Internet. You cannot find the word “startup” on their homepage. They’re not interested in building startups. Their strategy is to replicate validated business models in new and emerging markets.
The allure is easy to understand. By copying you remove a lot of the upfront hurdles a startup will encounter. You may even make a lot of money doing this. But if you’re not obsessed with your business, then no amount of copying can help you as a founder. It takes real passion to get through the trough of sorrow when running a startup. The kind of passion that drives you to create something from nothing. Instead of copying and exploiting.
To be clear, I’m not against competition at all. Competition is the force that makes the world of commerce go round. It allows for efficiency and cheaper prices for consumers. What I am against is the flagrant passing off of a business and a complete lack of original thought. This doesn’t help technology progress. It stifles real innovation.
It’s easy to forget that we live in a golden age for the creators of the world. The world has never been more connected. There’s never been more tools to help you get started. There has never been more available capital. It’s a great time to be a tech founder.
Just please remember to go from zero to one. Be a pioneer, not a plagiarist.
]]>Did you know that the Square card reader was almost called a “Squirrel”?!
In this first part of our ‘Inventor Tales’ series, we speak with Sam Wen who is the named inventor in the USPTO for the Square card reader.
The backstory to this interview with Sam is a serendipitous one! When we launched Retro Patents in January 2017, we were inundated with well wishers and supporters from around the world, it was awesome 🌎
But one particular share on Twitter stood out:
It’s easy to forget that a public company (SQ) all started with a simple product that was shaped by the hands of a few talented engineers and designers.
After a few exchanges back and forth, we asked Sam if he’d be willing to share some of the stories around the invention process for Square. We wanted to get the core of the innovation process itself and strip back the layers of abstraction.
So Sam kindly agreed to provide some more context about his role and highlight some of the challenges and takeaways from building the Square card reader. In his own words…
Retro Patents: How did you get involved with Square in the first place?
Sam: I was working at a large defense contractor in Saint Louis and going to night classes, trying to get out of the defense industry. One of my professors offered to introduce me to a personal friend who was building an interesting startup. I listened in and found it to be a very cool idea with a very cool mission. I started working with Jim McKelvey the very next day.
What was the biggest challenge you faced with this particular invention?
Sam: The earliest readers were very simple devices; it was really just a simple LR circuit that directly send the raw, analog swipe signal into the microphone port. The problem is that microphones are often designed with band pass capabilities to filter noise. Unfortunately, depending on the speed of the swipe, we’d see every kind of filtering technique in the resulting signal read by our software. We had to work on this particular algorithm for quite some time before it would become ready to ship.
In addition, these were the days before iOS’s Accelerate framework, and some of the more advanced computational SDKs for Android, so any more advanced, frequency domain techniques for reading our signal was not possible. The entire algorithm in those days were done in the Time domain.
Any funny stories on the trials and tribulations (debugging it, launching it, setbacks etc)?
Sam: At the time, the tentative name was “Squirrel” (later changed when we realized that SquirrelPOS was already a company), and the Square reader was going to look like an Acorn. In fact, the original software written to support reading credit card data from the reader was called AcornKit.
Another funny story was that we made some initial prototypes out of aluminum. By then, we already had the algorithms, and were playing around with final industrial design. We couldn’t figure out why the aluminum prototypes performed so poorly, until we used an oscilloscope and realized the aluminum was conducting the electric potential in our fingers and acting like an EKG!
What are you most proud of with this invention?
Sam: Honestly, the fact that people use it and that it serves a concrete purpose. I get an immense feeling of satisfaction and responsibility when people use the Squares to power their business.
At Retro Patents, we celebrate innovation in tech, gaming and design 💡❤️
Massive thanks to Sam for his support and openness in chatting about the invention of the Square card reader.
If you want to check out the patent print itself, you can check it out here. If you enjoyed this post, we’d be really grateful if you could share it online, thank you 😄
While recently going through a Product Hunt book collection posted by none other than Mr. Mars, Elon Musk’s Favourite Books, one title stood out.
Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
by W. Bernard Carlson.
It must have been an inspiring read for Elon. After all, the most successful electric car company in the world, Tesla, was named in honor of this great inventor.
The book starts off by going through Tesla’s early life in Serbia. Born the son of an orthodox priest, Tesla nearly became a missionary himself. Thankfully, his father had the good sense to send him to an engineering polytechnic in Graz, Austria where he began to develop his love for theoretical and applied electrical engineering.
Tesla’s early life is interesting and tragic (his brother died horse-riding when they were kids and his father at a young age too). It then tracks his emigration to the US and chronicles his early years as a hungry yet voracious innovator in New York working in the Edison company.
The book really gets interesting though when it starts to unravel how Tesla created some of his most famous inventions such as the AC Induction Motor and the Tesla Coil. How Tesla invented was a magical combination of imagination, theory and persistence.
It was the combination of these three forces that drove Tesla to become one of the most important inventors of all time. In modern terms, we’d classify Tesla as the difficult genius who could move mountains to finish what he had started.
“Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.” — Elon Musk
The most fascinating takeaway from the book is how Tesla adapted the world to his perspective. The author Carlson uses an analogy from The Innovator’s Dilemma to describe how Tesla differed from other inventors of his day.
This type of innovation is focused on optimisation. It’s about squeezing every possible efficiency from a given product. You take what already exists, tweak it and make it more efficient. The main conclusion from The Innovator’s Dilemma is that some great companies fail due to the fact that they focus on incrementally improving an existing process that is working for them.
Managers want to make more revenues. They keep working on what is selling but this leads to a innovation blindness and technological stagnation. The innovative lifeblood that made the company in the first place disappears and this optimisation phase actually causes their downfall. They try to satisfy a growing market and the company eventually gets disrupted by a another startup with better technology. The semiconductor industry is a good example here.
As Carlson explains, adaptive innovators are made of different stock from disruptive innovators like Tesla. They start from the outside and work their way towards a product. Market research, competitive analysis and verified data is needed to shape the product that they create to capture that market. It’s an extroverted approach to invention.
This type of innovation is focused on creating something completely new. It’s about intuition, imagination and creating markets that don’t exist. More often than not, the founders of these companies are too far ahead of their time. They have a vision for the way that things should work and they venture out to shape this vision into reality. Often the products they create will fail due to a lack of customers. The inventions might be brilliant but they can’t be commercialised at scale. But sometimes these moonshots change the face of technology. The AC Induction Motor falls into this category.
Carlson describes Tesla as a disruptive innovator. He started from the inside and made the exterior world adapt to his vision of the future. There was no market research or consumer insights studies backing up his hunches. Tesla took a contrarian stance at the time. He hitched his wagon to the AC star even though the streetcars of the time were all using DC motors. It was an introspective approach to invention.
Tesla and his financial backers sold his patent to Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company for $60,000 ($1,584,000) in today’s dollars) in cash and stock with a royalty per AC horsepower produced by each motor. Westinghouse also hired Tesla for a large fee of $2,000 ($52,800 in today’s dollars). This seed money allowed Tesla to work on some of his other inventions such as the Tesla Coil and his contributions to X-Ray and Radio. His blind faith in his own disruptive process paid off.
At Retro Patents, we’re inspired by the people who see the world a little differently. Those who realise that they can step outside of the status quo and crate a version of the future that they’ve imagined.