Re: Patents (was Re: google reads your mail)

It's frequently helpful to have a working example. The counter-current continuous digestor was quite a tricky design - which is why Johan Richter could never get any of his versions to work - and potential users would set set up industrial scale trials. ' The provisional patent I'm working on is a lot simpler, and won't need a working example.

Who'd done quite a much development work as Thomas Edison.

Both inventors patented much the same invention at much the same time, and found it expedient to set up a joint company to exploit them.

What exactly stopped him getting the patent on the idea? Because that’s what patents are -- a Government-granted monopoly on an idea.

The patent went to the person who thought of the idea, not the one who made it work.

Only after Edison fought unsuccessfully to overturn Swan’s patent, I believe.

If you can't reduce it to practice - lawyer-ese for making it work - it isn't a valid patent. As far as I know Johan Richter never applied for a patent because he never had a scheme that looked like working. My father made a fuss about his localised counter-current wash at pulp outlet of the digestor, but not in terms that lead me to think that it was a patent-winning innovation. There was definitely some ingenuity involved but I wasn't close enough to the action to have much of an idea. I do remember a pneumatic subtracting circuit that got the revers flow right.

The digestor got computer control with a Ferranti Aurgus 400 computer a few years later, and that worked more reliably when they went over from Paxolin printed circuit boards to expoxy-bonded glass fibre.

The US patent went to Thomas Edison who had made his idea work in the US, and the UK and European patents were taken out by Joseph Swan who had made his version work in the UK. By setting up a joint company, Edison and Swan avoided a lot of expensive litigation

That gets it backwards. Swan sued Edison in the British court for patent infringement when Edison tried to sell his lamps in the UK and won.

Edison started countersueing Swan in the US in 1882, but his legal team didn't like their chances, whence the joint company.

That’s not what “reduce to practice” means. Remember, it only applies to the wording of the patent application. All it means is “make the description sound plausibly as though it *could* work”.

If “reduce to practice” really meant “prove it works”, then none of that notorious stream of patents on perpetual-motion machines would ever have been granted.

That self-evidently makes no sense at all. If it works in one place, it works in both places.

Except that ...

Why didn’t his team like their chances? Didn’t Editson already have his own patent? Why was that considered weaker than Swan’s patent?

Except that Edison and Swan used slightly different carbon filaments. Edison ended up with bamboo-derived filaments, while Swan used parchmentised cotton threads before going over to carbonised nitrocellulose.

Swan had got there first. Read the history.