Who Gets the Credit?

Most paternity suits over inventions and ideas are matters of judgment and of degree. Of course, readers and audiences like clear cut stories of little guy inventors versus big, thieving corporations, stories with triumphant, stand-up-and-cheer courtroom verdict scenes. There are some in real life, but lots of inventions—the telephone and television, and in this post, lasers and computers—had several near-simultaneous inventors with competing patent claims. Fighting and negotiating those claims—to academic promotions, to prestige, to big money, and to lasting fame—has a long history.

The two accepted genres of laser history are: Gordon Gould invented it in his attic, had his 1957 notebook notarized, and spent 30 years fighting to Stop the Steal. The other genre is, eminent scientist Charles Townes leads Bell Labs in a brilliant collective effort to imagine the laser into existence, despite the sad later efforts of gadflies with dubious prior claims to its invention. What are the essential features of a laser? As Hannibal Lecter might say, first things, Clarice. One guy’s claim has essential features 1,2,4,6, and 9. The other one, the winning application, has features 1,2,3,5,7, and 8. It’s like a Hollywood lawsuit: At what exact point does a generic idea become a copyrightable original one? What standards apply?

Laser, by Nick Taylor, feels reasonably trustworthy. Unlike other authors addressing the case, he wisely acknowledges that there were a lot of people working on the idea of an optical maser that would act as a hyper-dazzling focused light amplifier; this “lone inventor” stuff needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The only sorta-semi cases of lone wolf 20^th century invention that I’m personally acquainted with are, coincidentally, related to uses of light: Polaroid, Xerox, and Kodachrome.

Taylor is mostly sympathetic to Gordon Gould, a colorful, gifted and troubled character, but he points out serious flaws in Gould’s patent application, and in some of the strategies he and his lawyers used to try to invalidate Bell Labs’ patent. Cases like this can turn into zero-sum games: it’s not enough to show that I came up with the idea first; when you do get the idea, I’ll accuse you of outright stealing it from me. The idea that the well-funded, well-established, fully documented Townes laser program stole the idea from Gould’s handful of handwritten notes doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, then or now.

But there’s still that one nagging fact, that one blinking light on history’s instrument panel: By luck, happenstance, whatever, he hit on a workable scheme to make a laser the year before Townes did. That’s a fact that doesn’t go away, and a quarter century later, Gordon Gould was recognized in court as at least the co-inventor of the laser. By that point, it was more than a symbolic victory; even a small, mandated slice of laser revenues harvested millions.

Let’s look at the case of ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer. To set the scene: Ages before Silicon Valley, or even Boston’s Route 128, the Philadelphia area was a major center of America’s electronics industry. It was the home of Philco, the country’s largest radio manufacturer, and across the river in New Jersey, of Philco’s biggest rival, RCA and its factories in nearby Camden. The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, responded to this hive of regional activity with nationally admired programs in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

During WWII, college teacher John Mauchly and his friend, Penn engineer Presper Eckert, proposed that the school host the long construction process of their War Department-funded project, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), a super-calculator with no moving parts. It would do jobs like recalculating complex artillery firing tables of launch angles, weight, muzzle velocity, and wind speed. They hoped it could also do things like improve weather predictions. Eckert and Mauchly were joined by Army liaison Herman Goldstine, who got them the funding, and together they built the computer. Starting from scratch in fall 1943, by the beginning of the summer of 1944 the physical framework was filling in and the first computations made. (There have been plenty of good books about computer history, but IMHO the best single one about this moment in time is Scott McCartney’s starkly titled ENIAC.)

A small crew of programmers learned to operate the machine, many of them women with a math background who’d been recruited for wartime jobs. The war ended before ENIAC had a chance to make an impact, but its significance for postwar civilian work was recognized right away when the Army publicly announced its “electronic super brain” at a headline-grabbing unveiling in February 1946.

That’s when a hasty, informal set of wartime provisional partnerships started falling apart, and the fights over credit for the invention broke out. The one partnership that didn’t waver under pressure, then or (apparently) ever was the core one between Pres Eckert and John Mauchly. They were and remained the inventors of record on the patent. There was some resentment on the part of their nominal boss, Herman Goldstine, and their top-ranking technical deputy, Arthur Burks, that they weren’t listed as co-inventors, and that’s perfectly normal. There often isn’t a hard and fast rule, and sometimes it’s more subjective than ideal. In the sciences, the patent was widely accepted as fair.

Moore School administrators had come to regret the generous patent rights deal that Penn gave the ENIAC team in 1943, but those rights didn’t necessarily extend to the greatly revised Mark II machine already in progress, EDVAC. It would work at much higher speed, with only a quarter of the vacuum tubes, and had advanced features like mercury delay lines for short-term storage, making it closer to a modern computer.

Penn unwisely gave Eckert and Mauchly an ultimatum: sign over their future patent rights to the school. Deadline: today at 5. Instead, unsurprisingly, they quit on the spot, going off to start the first of many such startups in the brand-new computer industry, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company. Goldstine and Burks, still miffed, stuck with the university, finished EDVAC, and went off to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1949, the Eckert-Mauchly team made the first sales of a new design, UNIVAC, a name so widely and instantly popular in the Fifties that, like brand names Kleenex and Xerox, it came to be synonymous with its entire category.

It may seem strange that the pioneers of the entire industry never pocketed so much as a thousandth of what later tech creators did, but there was no precedent for Jobs or Gates, for Ellison or Zuckerberg. Not in 1949. By mid-century standards, Pres Eckert and John Mauchly did very well for themselves. The inventors assigned their patent rights to EMCC—the only way they could capitalize their new company—and when they sold the company, piece by piece, what they were selling was control of the patent. The new owners, Remington Rand, merged with Sperry Gyroscope. Sperry needed access to some IBM patents, and IBM needed the Eckert-Mauchly patents, so the two formed a secret pact. And there, things rested for nearly a decade.

Until Honeywell saw a legal opening to blow the cartel apart. Their attorneys dug up the forgotten claims of John Atanasoff, an Iowa college teacher and early computer experimenter who Mauchly visited and corresponded with. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer, as they later dubbed it, was no more than a “breadboard,” on about the scale of a science fair project. It didn’t operate, and even if it had worked, it had no ability to execute an If…Then instruction. It had one feature that was more advanced than the vastly larger, more complex ENIAC, though: it was binary—in the 1940s, the wave of computing’s future. So was EDVAC, but one didn’t necessarily follow from another.

In October 1973, a judge made the momentous declaration that John Atanasoff was the inventor of the computer, and the Eckert-Mauchly patents, though still valid, were unenforceable. For a few years, the David-vs-Goliath aspect of the feud caught the public’s sympathy. But then, slowly, the opinions of the field reasserted themselves. Atanasoff has some place in history, but it was Eckert and Mauchly who invented the computer.

The judge’s edict had the practical effect of liberating the computer industry from royalties on the underlying technology, but the patents were due to expire in 1981 anyway; all it bought the industry was an earlier start on a new phase of explosive growth. However, those were particularly critical years for computing.

Sometimes the (metaphorical) little guy does win after a long legal struggle, as in the case of the laser, and it seems like a victory for justice. But sometimes, as in the case of digital computers, the little guy wins, after a long legal struggle, and it sure seems like an injustice. Most people who knew the facts about Honeywell v. Sperry came to hold contradictory opinions about the verdict: it was unfair to Eckert and Mauchly personally, and yet it was, regrettably, necessary to break a patent stranglehold that was a more up-to-date, genteel version of George Selden’s automobile patent trust, or Thomas Edison’s longtime hold on the early motion picture industry.

Patents, copyrights, the whole idea of intellectual property: Balancing private incentive and the public good are essential parts of progress. Finding that balance isn’t an exact science, alas.