American Inventor Research Articles

John Haven Emerson (1906-1997): The Ultimate Pioneer of the "Iron Lung".

John Haven "Jack" Emerson (1906-1997) was an American inventor who made significant contributions to the field of respiratory therapy. He is best known for his improvements to the iron lung, resulting in Emerson's iron lung, which became a vital treatment for polio patients during the epidemics of the 1950s, saving countless lives. Over his career, Emerson held 35 patents and developed numerous innovative devices. He also contributed to the design of flow valves for the U.S. Army, diving equipment, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy tanks. Emerson's forward-thinking approach led him to be among the first to recognize high-frequency ventilation as an effective technique. Despite not completing high school, his ingenuity earned him recognition from the American Thoracic Society, where he became the first non-physician to receive such an honor.

Does Accelerated Patenting Information Dissemination Affect Managers’ (Un)Ethical Behavior? Evidence from the American Inventor’s Protection Act and Crash Risk

Does Accelerated Patenting Information Dissemination Affect Managers’ (Un)Ethical Behavior? Evidence from the American Inventor’s Protection Act and Crash Risk

The American Inventor of Modern Thermodynamics

The American Inventor of Modern Thermodynamics

Early Patent Disclosure and R&D Investment in Family Firms

AbstractThis paper shows that the American Inventor's Protection Act, which introduced the disclosure of patent applications after 18 months, that is, before a grant decision is taken and, hence, before it is known whether the respective technology will receive legal protection, is associated with a reduction of family firms’ research and development (R&D) investment. This suggests that early disclosure of patent applications is perceived as a threat to family firms’ innovation activity and discourages their R&D investment. This finding deserves our attention because family firms account for a large share of the US economy, and a reduction in their R&D investment can have long‐term consequences.

Voices from the past: The pioneering use of the phonograph in neurology.

Since its discovery by the American inventor and industrialist Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in 1877, the phonograph attracted much interest in the field of medicine. This article describes the earliest pioneering examples of the use of the phonograph in neurology. In France, the use of the phonograph for obtaining audio recordings of delusions and speech or language disturbances was first proposed by Victor Maurice Dupont (1857-1910) in 1889 and in Italy by the physician Gaetano Rummo (1853-1917), who had studied at La Salpêtrière under Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893). The applicability of the phonograph to the record of speech disturbances was illustrated in England by John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) and William Halse Rivers (1864-1922), and by William Hale White (1857-1949) and Cuthbert Hilton Golding-Bird (1848-1939) in 1891. Since then, audio recordings have been used rarely in neurology, a branch of medicine where the visual aspects dominate, to the extent that inspection can be enough to reach a definite clinical diagnosis. In the mid-20th century, the advent of audio and video recordings supplanted audio recordings alone, relegating them to a very marginal role.

Regulars - Columnist: The Eccentric Engineer. Electrical engineering: The forgotten great African American inventor

Credit where credit's due' is not a phrase that rang true for Granville T Woods. The man who would go on to be known as the 'Black Edison' didn't have the easiest start in life for an engineer.

Charles Goodyear: Keeping the World's Wheels Turning

Nineteenth century American inventor Charles Goodyear survived decades of hardship while developing his vulcanization process to make rubber a viable industrial material.

Regulars - Columnist: The Eccentric Engineer. Electrical engineering: The forgotten great African American inventor

Credit where credit's due' is not a phrase that rang true for Granville T Woods. The man who would go on to be known as the 'Black Edison' didn't have the easiest start in life for an engineer.

“Le domaine du Cant et du Puff ”: Villiers, Anti-Americanism, and the French Edisonades

Abstract This essay builds on recent scholarship on romans d’anticipation and the popular press to read French Edisonades by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (L’Ève future, Contes cruels), Alphonse Allais (“La Vérité sur l’exposition de Chicago,” “Supériorité de la vie américaine sur la nôtre,” etc.), and Gustave Le Rouge and Gustave Guitton (La Conspiration des milliardaires) as marking a fundamental anxiety about France’s slipping world-power status in the face of America’s industrial and economic ascendancy. In these fin de siècle technological fictions, the American inventor emerges as an ambivalent figure hovering between scientific genius and hucksterish humbuggery. The real-life rivalry between Thomas Alva Edison and Charles Cros over the 1878 invention of the phonograph led to satiric forms of resistance to the United States as a land of vulgar mercantile utilitarianism threatening to decenter Paris as the cultural capital of the nineteenth century. Although evolving drafts of Villiers’s metaphysical novel seem to highlight the divine creative potential of “le ‘Sorcier de Menlo Park,’” L’Ève future retains less idealistic references to Edison’s commercial side as a Barnum-like businessman from America. Meanwhile, Le Rouge and Guitton’s fantasy of French scientific triumph over American millionaires counters the troubling lure of technical wonder and speculative energy from the land of the almighty dollar.

The Wales Endoscope: The First American Cystoscope

IntroductionPhilipp Bozzini, a German army surgeon, in 1807 invented the Lichtleiter, the predecessor of the modern cystoscope. By the mid-1800s, several new instruments were created including one, a variation on Bozzini's instrument by Antoine Desormeaux in Paris. The William P. Didusch Museum of Urologic History acquired the Wales endoscope, a rare and unique cystoscope that was invented around the same time in the United States. MethodsWe researched the life of Philip Wales and the description of his cystoscope as well as Horatio Kern, the instrument maker that produced Wales' instrument. We examined the Wales cystoscope acquired by the William P. Didusch Museum. ResultsPhilip Skinner Wales (1837-1906) was a surgeon who entered the United States Navy in 1856 and served throughout the Civil War. He organized and held charge of the Naval Hospital at New Orleans during the operations of Admiral Farragut's fleet in the Mississippi River. He was one of the first surgeons to attend President Garfield when he was shot. He was Surgeon General of the Navy (1879-1884) and founded the Museum of Naval Hygiene in Washington D.C. which later, combined with the naval laboratory and Department of Instruction, became the prototype of the Naval Medical School.In 1868 he published a series of papers in the Philadelphia Medical and Surgical Reporter on “Instrumental Diagnosis,” with a paper entitled “Description of a New Endoscope.” The instrument contained a metal shaft with an acute beak and used an ophthalmologic mirror to reflect light down the channel. The surgeon peered through the center hole to look into the bladder. Wales used his instrument multiple times in his private practice. Wales writes that the advantages of his cystoscope were that it was simple to produce and cheap compared to Desormeaux's endoscope. Furthermore it was light, weighing approximately 2 pounds. The main drawbacks of Wales' cystoscope were the inadequate illumination, as the light source was external and projected from the outside through a narrow channel into the bladder, and that without an optical system the image appeared relatively small. Horatio Kern, a well-known instrument maker in Philadelphia, that also supplied surgical sets and instruments for the U.S. Army during the Civil War, produced Wales' cystoscope.While he was Chief of the Bureau of Medicine, a subordinate embezzled Navy funds and Dr, Wales was court-martialed. Though he was eventually exonerated, he lived the rest of his life in disgrace in France. ConclusionThe Wales endoscope is unique in that it had an American inventor, was simple in design and cheap to produce. It is an important historical artifact and is one of the earliest and rarest cystoscopes developed.

Pre-grant Patent Disclosure and Analyst Forecast Accuracy

We examine the relationship between pre-grant patent disclosure and analyst forecast accuracy. We take advantage of the passage of the American Inventor’s Protection Act (1999), which mandates the pre-grant public disclosure of all information in patent application documents within 18 months of the initial filings. We find that, on average, the pre-grant patent disclosure of corporate inventions significantly improves the accuracy of analyst forecasts about the patenting firm and this improvement is greater for firms with higher research and development intensity. Nevertheless, improvements in the accuracy of analysts’ forecasts are smaller when firms issue more original and scientifically broader patents. Also, this effect is weaker for firms in states without legal protection for trade secrets. This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting. Funding: Ali Mohammadi gratefully acknowledges support from the Danish Finance Institute. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4420 .

Proprietary Costs: Why Do R&D-Active Firms Choose Single-Lender Financing?

ABSTRACTWe examine whether proprietary costs drive R&D-active firms' choice of private loan structure. We find that R&D-active firms are more likely to choose single-lender over multi-lender private loan financing. This is consistent with the theory that high-ability entrepreneurs protect their proprietary knowledge by communicating it to a single lender while disclosing generic and less sensitive information to the public. This propensity, however, significantly decreases after the enactment of the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA), which accelerated public disclosure of firms' patent details in filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This accelerated public disclosure potentially caused R&D information to spill over to rivals, increasing the proprietary costs of single-lender borrowers. AIPA enactment also increased the spread on R&D-active firms' single-lender loans. These findings contribute to the voluntary disclosure and financing choice literature by linking R&D-active firms' choice of single-lender financing to the proprietary costs of public disclosure.Data Availability: From public sources identified in the study.JEL Classifications: G12; G14; G21; M41.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND COMPUTER VISION – A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN?

After becoming independent in 1957, Malaysia continued as an agricultural country but quickly grew into a manufacturing nation in a relatively short time. Literally from nowhere, the manufacturing sector now commands more than 38% of the nation’s GDP overtaking the agriculture sector which commands just slightly above 7%. In addition to the multinational manufacturers who are mainly in the electrical and electronics sectors, there are also other smaller producers who produce for the rest of the world. Nevertheless in order to compete, they cannot just rely on manual labour whether local or foreign, to produce high volume and high quality goods at a competitive price. With intense competition, even the old way of making many products to satisfy the global appetite for good products from both the brick-and-mortar shops to your huge online shops is no longer adequate.
 Manual operations in the manufacturing process can come in various forms, ranging from the very simple but monotonous and repetitive to the highly complex or sophisticated. In the quality department many of the local manufacturers have chosen to use human labour to ensure their quality is maintained. For many of these highly repetitive but relatively simple tasks, the human operators need to be properly trained for an appropriate length of time before they can perform effectively. Other than the intelligence of these operators, their ability to detect deviations from the desired patterns are also utilised. And this is where artificial intelligence and computer vision can help.
 The term artificial intelligence was first coined at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence by John McCarthy in 1956. While there are many definitions, Ray Kurzweil, an American inventor and futurist defines it as machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by humans[1]. On the other hand, computer vision deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human visual system can do. This paper shows how artificial intelligence combined with computer vision can be used to improve productivity and effectiveness in three different areas.

BIKE WORKING ON WATE

H2O otherwise known as hydroxy or Browns Gas is the gas produced from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen from electrolysis and allowing the gas to stay in a premixed state for use on-demand without the need for storage. In 1918 Charles Frazer, a North American inventor, patented the first water electrolysis machine act as a hydrogen booster for internal combustion engines. Yull Brown, a Bulgarian born Australian inventor patented and attempted to popularize Browns Gas as a cutting gas and fuel additive during the 1970’s and 80’s. During the 2000’s there was a huge influx in Browns Gas devices coming to the mark, with many sensational claims of bringing dramatic reductions in fuel consumption and exhaust emissions in internal combustion engines.

Innovation on the choice of debt financing source: evidence from innovative firms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how the innovative firm’s proprietary information has an impact on its debt financing preference. This study also examines the impact of industry-level competition on the debt financing orders and investigates how two exogenous shocks impacted on innovative firms’ financing policies.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses the three types of debt data, including bonds, private debt placements and bank loans and patent application data, in the USA from 1987–2008. The number of patents applications and industry-level competition are used as proxies for a firm’s innovation and industry-level sensitivity. In addition, to minimize endogenous concern, this study uses the propensity score matching analysis and difference-in-differences.FindingsThe patents are the primary determinants for innovative firms to choose the debt types. The paper shows that innovative firms have the debt preference order – public debt, private placement and bank loans. However, as competition increases, innovative firms devise the order reverse. Finally, the paper provides evidence that the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA) and the tech bubble crash made investors depend more on firms with more patents.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to study the impact of the AIPA on innovative firms’ financial policies using the propensity score matching analysis. The findings imply that both patents and industry-level competition are important factors to understand the capital structures for innovative firms.

Mandatory Innovation Disclosure Increases Crash Risk: Evidence from the American Inventor’s Protection Act

Mandatory Innovation Disclosure Increases Crash Risk: Evidence from the American Inventor’s Protection Act

A Research on The Formability of PVC Sheet in Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) Technology

Nowadays Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) is really a new technology of forming metal sheet after its formation and long development in about five decades. Although it was invented in, 1967 by Leszak, an American inventor, but the applications of the innovative technology have just been popular from 1990 because of the advance of controlling technology. This technology is especially adapted to small batch, unique or single productions. In almost all cases, the workpiece material sheets are metal such as aluminum alloys, bronze, mild steel, stainless steel and even Titanium with lot of researches, papers and thesis... Nonmetal sheets are rarely applied in this technology because of rare application. Nowadays, on the rise of the development of composite materials such as, PVC, thermoplastic resins... that have been a lot of applications on living life and technology. In this paper, we dedicate all of our work in the examination some parameters of forming that influence on the deformable ability of PVC plastic by empirical method under the support of DOE and Minitab software. This paper also provides our own experiences in forming PVC sheet that we had performed in the recent decade.

The innovation consequences of mandatory patent disclosures

We investigate the effect of patent disclosures on corporate innovation. Using the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that increased patent disclosures, we find an increase in innovation for firms whose rivals reveal more information after the AIPA and a decrease in innovation for firms whose own disclosures are divulged to competitors as a result of the law. These findings suggest patent disclosures generate both spillover benefits and proprietary costs. Our findings provide justification for patent disclosure requirements by demonstrating positive externalities: rivals' disclosures facilitate a firm's innovation. However, we also highlight that mandatory patent disclosures can impose proprietary costs on firms. These results broadly contribute to our understanding of the real effects of disclosure, such that forcing firms to share proprietary information can be privately costly but beneficial to other firms.

Patent disclosure and venture financing: The impact of the American Inventor's Protection Act on corporate venture capital investments

AbstractResearch SummaryWe investigate the effects of patent disclosure on corporate venture capital (CVC) investments in technology startups. Toward this end, we focus on the passage of the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA), which mandated public disclosure of patent applications. Theoretically, technology disclosure enables CVCs to better evaluate startups and thus, could increase the likelihood of investment relations. Conversely, such disclosure may already satisfy the technology‐acquisition objectives of CVCs, reducing CVCs willingness to form an investment relation after disclosure. Our empirical analysis finds that patent disclosure through AIPA increased the likelihood of receiving CVC investments for startups—specifically in industries where patents have higher information significance. We provide evidence that the observed pattern is mainly driven by a reduction of information constraints regarding startups with patent applications.Managerial SummaryReceiving corporate venture capital (CVC) funding is an important success factor for technology startups. Would disclosure of a startup's innovation increase or decrease its chance of receiving CVC funding? On the one hand, disclosure by startups would reduce uncertainty and search costs for CVC investors, which could increase the chance of CVC funding. On the other hand, such a disclosure would reveal the startups' technology to the corporations, which would in turn reduce corporate incentive to use funding as a window to the startup's technology. Thus, disclosure could also reduce the chance of CVC funding of startups. In this paper, we study the above issue by examining the case of the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA), which mandated public disclosure of patent applications. Our results suggest that innovation disclosure significantly improves the likelihood of CVC funding of startups.

A research on a new structure of forming tool in Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF)

Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) is really a new technology of forming metal sheet nowadays and in recent decades. Although it was invented in, 1967 by Lezak, an American inventor, but the applications of the innovative technology were broad from 1990 because of the advance of controlling technology. This technology is especially adapted to small batch, unique or single productions. There are many forming parameters that influence to the formability of the metal sheet workpiece such as diameter of tool, the revolution per minute of the tool tip, the vertical feed rate after each orbit, the velocity of tool in horizontal plane…. Among of them, in our own experiences, we recognize that in almost all cases, the revolution per minute of the forming tool when forming ferric material sheet such as mild steel, stainless steel, hard steels… should be as small as possible to get the biggest ability of deformation of the workpiece sheet to get rid of failure on the lateral edge of the sheet. The tangential velocity of forming point on the spherical tool tip should be selected to attain the situation of rolling but no sliding of the surface of the spherical tool on the one of the sheet material. The paper recommends a new version of a forming tool in which the tip of the tool is a very hard ball (such as the quenched ball in a ball bearing) that is freely rotate by the friction to modify the contact point on the spherical surface of the tool to avoid the abrading and keep the spherical shape and the situation of rotating but no sliding on the surface of the workpiece sheet as mentioned above. The manufacture of the innovative forming tool is performed and then empirical processes verified it. The models formed by the typical tool are better in comparison with the ones of normal forming tool.