Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

being first

Alberto Santos-Dumont, Wilbur and Orville Wright, or the one-time Smithsonian champion Samuel Pierpont Langley? It depends on how one frames the question.

[Addendum 12/20/03: Maciej Ceglowski has a wonderful entry on the whole who flew first thing. The Wrights’ is a fascinating story of genius invention hampered by their litigious and anti-social mood.

I believe that the Wright patent story drives home the intellectual bankruptcy of our patent system. The whole point of patents is supposed to be to encourage innovation, reward entrepreneurship, and make sure useful inventions get widely disseminated. But in this case (and in countless others, in other fields), the practical effect of patents turned out to be to hinder innovation—a patent war erupts, and ends up hamstringing truly innovative technologies, all without doing much for the inventors, who weren’t motivated by money in the first place.]