Patents

A patent is a state granted monopoly on an invention for a period ( perhaps 16 years ) in exchange for a full public disclosure of the invention. I became involved early in my career when I was an information scientist. In the information section. in addition to various other tasks. individuals were allocated areas of information to examine for items of interest to the Unilever Research Laboratory.

In those days ( late sixties ) there were few digital aids and my principal source was patent abstracts.( incidentally always pronounced patent not paytent ) ie. short summaries of the full patent. For training I went on a short course at Liverpool Library. A patent is a legal document under civil law and usually runs to several pages. The procedure is that an application is made to the patent office where it is examined for novelty and if the patent examiner deems it novel it is granted and then runs for the monopoly period provided appropriate fees are paid.

While the rules are fairly strict they are open to interpretation and the redress for infringement is by legal action. It is quite usual for disputes to arise over novelty. This is often held to be something not “obvious to those skilled in the art” . Clearly this is somewhat vague. There is a definite rule in the UK that perpetual motion machines cannot be patented. They are contrary to the basic laws of physics. Otherwise the patent examiner doesn’t concern himself with the underlying science purely whether the invention is novel.

There is an art to both writing and reading a patent. It is usual to set out at the beginning what the invention is ( “ what we claim is” ) first in very specific terms and then in increasingly broad terms. The object is to prevent a competitor from making something similar to the invention but not exactly the same. After the claims it is then usual to describe the invention in detail providing examples. The examples should be those specifically investigated but it isn’t uncommon for the examples to be fictitious in the sense they are what is expected but not proven.

When I transferred to product development some of my work was patented. Certainly in at least one case the development was fairly trivial and of no commercial value. This leads me to mention that this also is not too unusual; in fact I would guess that many patents of the period, perhaps 95%, fell into the same category. Unilever at the time employed patent lawyers in house whose job was to scour development work for patentable inventions. This is now discontinued. It is fairly expensive to take out and hold a patent which lapses if renewal fees are not paid. More recently Unilever takes out far fewer patents preferring the secrecy and lower cost.

There was at the time I secured patents a rather charming notion that the company bought the patent for a nominal fee ( one dollar equivalent in my case ). This was strictly unnecessary; as an employee I was contracted to provide all inventions to my employer. I recall the patent attorney ( an elderly man ) saying he liked to maintain the tradition. I seem to remember I was paid in cash although exactly the source I don’t recall. Of course where work is joint with other people then multiple inventors are named. Certainly in those days it was usual to specify the individual inventors although the company concerned may also be mentioned.

I only ever made practical use of my patents on one occasion. I was teaching a group of general librarians about locating scientific information and one task I set was to find one of my patents. This would be via abstract indexes. As well as specific patent indexes there is also Chemical Abstracts which basically abstracts and indexes everything published in chemistry and related areas.
I was left feeling rather cynical about the use of patents. I was only involved in one case where they seemed remotely useful. I was concerned with the development of liquid abrasives. A lot of effort had been expended in finding the right type, size and quality of abrasive which was a type of pure calcite containing few hard impurities. Colgate, who was a major competitor, tried to circumvent the Unilever patent by using chalk deposits as abrasive which would break up under abrasive pressure to something approaching the right size. As far as I recall Unilever decided against taking the matter to court as the outcome was

Various- Bowling Alone, Berlin Airlift.

Bowling Alone is the title of a book by Robert Puttnam an American social scientist at Harvard University. He has observed that in very many voluntary social groupings membership grew to a peak in the 60’s, then after a short plateau has fallen steadily ever since. The groups he examines are those where people meet face to face and he excludes those which are internet based and there is no interpersonal contact. He has examined a wide variety of organisation for example, scouts, churches, clubs .and he also takes a specific American example of bowling leagues.. At the rate of decline of bowling league membership he reckons that at some future date not too far away you will be “Bowling Alone”.

Published in 2000 the book aroused immense interest. It is quite unusual for such an apparently widespread phenomena to be discovered. It wasn’t just in America either as it appeared to be almost universal in the developed world. Tony Blair took it seriously enough to convene a cabinet meeting on the subject.

While Puttnam speculates on reasons there seems to be no concrete evidence. The most obvious cause is the spread of television but it seems unlikely this is the complete reason.

More recently Puttnam has investigated a more specific American issue which is the rise in mid life suicide, so called “suicides of despair”. Across the whole population life expectancy has been falling. This is not so apparent outside America. In a recent lecture Puttnam suggests this correlates with cultural changes such as income inequality, lack of political cross party collaboration, lower union membership and falling marriage rates.

Puttnam speculates that in the first half of the 20^th century with monopoly, depression and war prompted a cultural change towards group activity but has since changed to a more atomised condition.

While some social pathologies such as the turn towards nationalism, xenophobia and political popularism have spread globally there is nothing like America’s mortality crisis which suggests those cultural changes have yet to arrive. What is clear is that there are worrying early signs.

A commentary on the whole situation in the Economist points out that culture is a vague and unsatisfying answer to deaths-by-despair and there is a great need for investigation by scientists and economists to find more precise answers.

What this conclusion doesn’t say is that cultural changes are difficult for scientific investigation. The simplest form of investigation holds one factor varying while others are constant. This is impossible for cultural change where many factors interact. Economists face a similar problem and have become used to teasing out information from situations with many variables. Statistical methods developed by economists may be very useful

One issue will be finding someone to pay. Scientific work has both a Science Research National Body and much is also privately funded by industry and others. There is an Economic and Social Research Council but I would think its resources are limited. I would imagine it will also be difficult to secure private funding.

I am thinking in terms of high quality and objective research. Regrettably there are many pseudo scientific organisations who think more in terms of pursuing a political objective than in objective investigation. While Puttnam is a respected investigator sponsored by a respected institution I’m not sure his work has ever been checked or repeated. I note that a great deal of social and  psychological investigations, including some famous and much referenced, have turned to be not validated on repetition.

Berlin Airlift

The Airlift in 1948 was to supply West Berlin after Russia cut all surface supply routes. It is reckoned a major opening round in the Cold War.

As a child I was fascinated to know what was happening in the world. I saw odd snippets in news broadcasts but I had no overall knowledge. The initiation of the blockade was scary with newspapers talking of war. I was very impressed and interested when later about perhaps 1950 my primary school teacher gave a brief account of the airlift. Unusually for my school this was a man whose name I forget; we almost always had female teachers. I recall his talk vividly sketching the 3 main air lanes into Berlin. Around the same time he took boys for PE and he taught us forward roll which remains about the only gymnastic move I can ( or rather could ) perform.

Uncle Bill

My Uncle Bill was killed in 1917 during WW1. He had joined the Leicestershire Regiment under age at 17 as did so many others in the big 1916 recruiting push. Then in 1917 came the dreaded telegram to announce his death, something which hung over his family for the rest of their lives. His brother, my Uncle George, was also in the army but such were the fortunes of war that he served in India and later after the war’s end in Ireland. I don’t think he was ever called upon to fire a shot in anger.

My mother, the youngest of the girls in the family, was at the opposite end of the age scale to Bill who was the eldest. Her main memory was being teased by Bill. She kept his cap badge all her life and it is an enduring regret that it was lost when her house was sold. George, who was close in age to Bill, felt his loss keenly. He named his son Bill in memory of his dead brother. It was his lasting regret that as Bill had no known grave so he couldn’t visit it and mourn.

There the matter rested. We knew only that Bill had been killed, presumably by a shell, while on a mission as battalion runner. Battlefield communication was difficult in WW1. Radio was primitive and cumbersome. Telephone had its wires cut with great frequency. The common method was to use a messenger which was the role Bill was in when killed.

I was shown Bill’s name on the Coalville war memorial but as with the rest of the family I thought this was the nearest we would come. In the nineties basing ourselves at some friends in Castrol France who lived in the Somme valley we spent several days touring the battlefield. In France Castrol was based at Peronne which is on the Somme. There a castle has been converted into a museum of the war. Locally it is called the historial. Their presentation takes exaggerated care to treat German, French and British alike

The cemeteries are immaculately kept. All British and Commonwealth have a simple headstone noting name, rank and unit with a small section for families to add anything they wish. Most moving are the headstones where the identity is unknown. Rudyard Kipling composed the simple inscription “Known unto God”. It is a slightly eerie experience on a  summers day to pass along a track by fields of waving wheat to come across a small walled cemetery of war dead.

Even now many dud shells and other ordnance are being found. These are dumped at the roadside for bomb disposal teams to remove and blow up. At various places mementoes are sold. I bought a shell cap and Annette the rusted remains of a rifle for use at school for drawing practice. I declined an itinerant selling a pair of “genuine” German binoculars as I doubted their provenance.

During our tour we visited Thiepval where the gigantic memorial to all the soldiers with no known grave is situated. To my surprise Bill Baker wasn’t listed in the many thousands of names. On my return to Britain I mentioned this to my cousin. He has the original War Office telegram and this gave Bill’s army number. Armed with this I approached the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They quickly not only answered the puzzle but located Bill’s grave. He had been reburied after the war and the cemetery where he had been originally, closed. My family had lost track during this move. He is buried near Lens. The cemetery is less picturesque than the Somme valley being located in a former coal mining area where pit mounds are all around. I thought this was grimly appropriate for a boy from Coalville.

We visited on a grey day and I took photos for my cousins while reflecting it was a desolate place to end up. I also thought what a pity it was that Uncle George had never managed the small consolation of a visit having died a few years previously.

My father was 16 when the war ended. By then the carnage was well known. I can only imagine his feelings at being close to conscription age. He never spoke of it. In WW11 he was both rather old and, as a miner, in a reserved occupation. His only military service was in the Home Guard; this he didn’t take seriously not least because his Sergeant was his next door neighbour and good friend. What he later commented on was the all the extra shifts at work which may have contributed to his health breakdown a few years later.

Science and technology- the difference

When I’m asked what I do( or rather what I did before retirement) I now reply scientist or maybe if I’m feeling expansive I say “sort of scientist doing product development”. While the latter is true the simple answer scientist isn’t. I give it because it’s simple, meaningful, it conveys a picture, and  it is somewhat flattering. The problem is that when I say product development most people have no real idea what this means.

The  distinction is between science and technology. Very crudely put scientists aim to discover things about nature and technologists aim to apply scientific knowledge to useful things. For example scientists discover plastics and work out how they work and technologists use that knowledge of plastics to make useful things. There are more technologists than scientists. It is essential for technologists to have a scientific training. Science and technology lie close together and the boundary is fuzzy which is why the two are often lumped together.

When I explain this I’m usually challenged about what product specifically. My standard answer, in the consumer product area that many people know, is Cif abrasive cream  ( which used to be branded Jif ). Now I didn’t  discover the underlying science ( technologists don’t ) but I was trying to enhance its properties. I claim some modest success although what exactly got to market I’m not sure.

As will be clear by now ( I hope ) is that my answer should be I’m a technologist. As this means little or nothing to most I don’t say that. Also very strictly although it covers much of my working life it covers not all of it. The first few years would be in what is now called information technology. A little later for a short time I tried to be a real scientist.  When you try to get higher qualifications, as I did, it is very usual to undertake some scientific investigation. It is rather infra dig to include some technological work.

In truth I didn’t enjoy my spell of pure science. Partly because it was unsuccessful but mainly because in the very nature of things it is an investigation which may give interesting results but most usually doesn’t. The main objective is to show that you can do certain things and hence qualify for a research degree. These include doing a literature search, doing experimental work, writing a thesis and giving a presentation to colleagues and more senior academics about your work. In my case as a relatively mature student ( in my late twenties) I had done those things already so I found it relatively easy.

I was in an unusual position in that I was already a product developer ( albeit rather junior ) when I started a research degree. I’ll have to admit my motives were rather less than idealistic. I was surrounded by people generally better qualified ( in academic terms ) than I was and I wanted to establish my position and further my career. I was able to persuade my employer ( Unilever ) to give a years secondment and I went to Liverpool Polytechnic ( now John Moores University ). I very much liked my stay, found new friends in the people I worked alongside and enjoyed a return to student life. I finished up with a Master of Philosophy degree ( for historic reasons all research degrees are awarded in philosophy ) Because I was on full pay I was far better off than the other research students and even some of the staff.

I soon found a year wasn’t long enough and for some time I would go in on Saturdays. This only stopped when I had children. I didn’t find this, plus all the work I did at home, a burden as it was compensated by the freedom from 9-5 and the discipline of an industrial lab.

While I was full time in Liverpool I could indulge myself browsing bookshops sometimes. .As it was before children for the first time in my life I had some disposable income.. This didn’t last as while children are delightful they are also costly.

While I was on secondment I enjoyed  pub going with fellow students which was something I had never indulged in before. Looking back a very big part of my free time as an undergraduate was spent chasing Annette, adjusting to living away from home and worrying about money. This latter only eased in my industrial year.  

One reason I liked product development was that in enabled some creativity. With Unilever I worked on consumer products in the soap and detergents area. However most of my career was spent on industrial products. Latterly working part time in a small company there was a great emphasis on speed and economy. This meant that I was even further down the chain needing suppliers who not only did the basic science but could supply a lot of product information. Often a brief had to fulfilled in weeks ( sometimes days ).

In many ways the most interesting area was damage reclamation. After fire, flood or other disasters specialists undertake remedial work and I was concerned with developing products to assist them. To see the aftermath of say a fire is horrendous but it is remarkable what damage reclamation companies can do. Their demands sometimes seem bizarre such as hiding the persistent smoky odour after a fire. I tore out my hair trying to find and generate the “bluegrass” odour requested.