![]() ![]() The group, now all grown up, has naturally not been in touch with one another for a long time, some being influential in their own right at the current moment (one of them is a mayoral candidate). Then, perhaps, a new generation of heroic inventors will emerge.Rosie Perez ("In Living Color," "The Flight Attendant") plays Flora, a detective hell-bent on solving the mysterious case of the dead teen 20 years ago, while her partner Sullivan (Željko Ivanek), attempts to stop her from pushing too hard and landing herself in trouble with powerful people. Biology is therefore ripe to yield a clutch of new patent classes-possibly for things (neurological computers? furniture grown from seed?) as unimaginable to present-day folk as the telephone would have been to a soldier at the battle of Waterloo. Today’s understanding of biology, though, is roughly where that of the physical sciences was in the 19th century. Most inventions up until now have been based on physics or chemistry. What remains to be seen is whether biotechnology will change things. But that it has actually happened had not, previously, been demonstrated. This combinatorial explosion no doubt partly reflects the fact that the number of possible combinations grows faster than the number of codes they are based on. That suggests invention now proceeds mainly by recombining existing technologies and chimes with the idea that inventions were, in some sense, more fundamental in the past than they are today. The introduction of new combinations of codes has, however, continued to expand in step with the number of patents awarded. ![]() After that, the growth rate of new codes fell off dramatically, and that of new patents slightly. The number of codes and the number of patents both grew exponentially, at the same rate, until the 1870s (about the time of Edison’s light bulb see chart). These days, by contrast, nine-tenths are for inventions that combine at least two codes. When Dr Youn and her colleagues examined the patent office’s files they found that nearly half the patents issued by the United States during the 19th century were for single-code inventions. Only when a patent proposal arrives that cannot be slotted into the existing classification is a new one created. Overall, those records cover 474 classes and more than 160,000 codes. The office has records of these codes going back to 1790. A class-subclass pair-say, 136/206 for class 136 (batteries: thermoelectric and photoelectric) and subclass 206 (solar energy type)-is a unique code, and every patent is identified by at least one such code. ![]() Subclasses delineate processes, structural features and functional features of the technology in that particular class. A class distinguishes one technology from another. To do so, they classify the various technologies responsible for an invention’s novelty using an elaborate arrangement of codes.Įach subject grouping in USPTO’s scheme includes a major component called a class and a minor one called a subclass. The authorities there sort patent documents into groups based on common subject matter. She drew her data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)-not a perfect indicator of inventiveness, but probably a fair proxy for it. And together they exemplify the two sorts of novelty that exist, in differing proportions, in any successful invention: discovery and recombination.ĭr Youn has looked at the balance between these things, and how it may have changed. ![]() Both devices changed the world, though (Shockley’s was the foundation on which IT was built). In contrast, William Shockley’s transistor, invented 70 years later, involved a lot of new physics that Shockley and his colleagues had to work out for themselves. None of these things was novel in the 1870s, but in Edison’s hands the combination became a patentable invention. Thomas Edison’s light bulb, for example, was not so much the product of a metaphorical light-bulb moment of discovery as of the bringing together of pre-existing components-an electricity supply, a heated filament, a vacuum and a glass envelope. And, in a paper just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Youn Hyejin of Oxford University and her colleagues have provided some. To have an impression that something has changed is not, however, to prove that it really has. ![]()
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