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The tech you're reading these words on – you have two Dundee uni boffins to thank for that
Every time you use a smartphone, glance at your smart watch, fire up a computer, watch TV or endure a PowerPoint presentation, you experience a little bit of Dundee. The flat-panel technology we use in modern devices wasn't invented by megacorps in Japan or Silicon Valley but by a pair of academics in Scotland's fourth-largest …
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 12:16 GMT Alien8n
Re: Wonderful.
Which goes to show where the patent process is broken. Unfortunately they created the physics behind the technology but the patent is for the process of creating the technology. As they had no process they had nothing to patent and by the time they worked out the process they'd given the Japanese enough time to work out and patent the process before they could.
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Thursday 26th April 2018 08:44 GMT anonymous boring coward
Re: Wonderful.
"As they had no process they had nothing to patent and by the time they worked out the process they'd given the Japanese enough time to work out and patent the process before they could."
That's because the Japanese make stuff.
The sad other side to this story is the fact that we don't.
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 12:28 GMT Mage
Re: TFT patent?
They were not a large USA Corporation. Or Maybe German, Finnish or Asian.
Ironic that RCA was gone by 1976. The dregs bought by French Thomson. Now name may be owned by Nokia.
UK from 1850s to 1970s was brilliant at innovation. More rarely at comercialising. By 1960s most of the original UK Electronics had either been morphed to MOD contracts or run by bean counters with no vision. Acorn's ARM was really the only one that escaped the curse and only by giving up making, but licensing.
Thorn went downhill after Jules Thorn retired (and died not long after, he had a long reign).
Mullard was Philips by 1928. EMI (HMV etc) lost their way in 1970s. Ferranti, Plessey, GEC, Inmos, ICL, Ever Ready, Burndept, Vidor, Rank Radio (Bush / Murphy). Sinclair was a serial disaster, certainly a show man. Alan Sugar /Amstrad. The other UK companies in Telecoms & Computers.
Most Edison & RCA patents were bought in, intimidation, ignoring prior art, simply invalid etc. To and extent Bell Labs/AT&T (The UNIX land grab of work done by the Universities) Though all did innovate too.
The USPTO especially needs reformed.
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 10:07 GMT Jan 0
Superb article!
Alistair, this is by far the best non-humorous article of yours that I’ve read. It is a shame that the monument is posthumous, but at least it gives hope to other unsung heroes and will be greatly appreciated by their families. I really appreciated the factual and historical content.
Thanks too for, as usual, producing an article that isn’t full of typos, schoolboy errors and grammatical mistakes. All in all a wonderful (late) breakfast read.
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 11:43 GMT FIA
Every time you use [something vaguely useful or life saving]
[it was probably invented by someone from Scotland]
FTFY.
(Seriously, it's amazing quite how prolific the Scottish are at coming up with cool stuff).
TV, marmalade, the coma scale, the tractor beam, Grand Theft Auto, the list goes on...
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 12:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
"[it was probably invented by someone from Scotland]"
Except that neither or the inventors in this case were themselves Scottish, and nor did Alistair actually claim that in the original wording.
The discovery was made at the University of Dundee, but Walter Spear was German, and Peter LeComber was English. They first met and worked together in Leicester and LeComber followed Spear to Dundee in the late 1960s.
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 12:39 GMT Mage
TV
Baird didn't invent TV. He was an entrepreneur promoting an updated mechanical system proposed by Nipkow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gottlieb_Nipkow Electronic TV was proposed in 1906 and working versions developed by others, though Baird's nearly instant film to electronic transmission was used in satellites to have high resolution and low data rate. From the beginning the problem was how to make the camera target. The CRT already existed and was the obvious thing to use as part of a camera, not just the display.
Farnsworth didn't invent TV either. His system was technological dead end. The big problem was viable electronic camera. EMI/RCA collaboration based on Vladimir Kosma Zworykin's work started at Westinghouse in 1929.
http://www.earlytelevision.org/rca_story_brewster.html
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 16:21 GMT Alistair Dabbs
Re: TV
Funny you should mention Baird but I wrote about him with respect to another IEEE Milestone bronze plaque last year: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/30/john_logie_baird_bronze_plaque/
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Thursday 26th April 2018 05:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Every time you use [something vaguely useful or life saving]
[it was probably invented by someone from Scotland]
FTFY. (Seriously, it's amazing quite how prolific the Scottish are at coming up with cool stuff). TV, marmalade, the coma scale, the tractor beam, Grand Theft Auto, the list goes on...
Another notable contribution comes from the Stevenson family, famed builders of lighthouses, bridges, harbours, dredgers of estuary channels, they really pushed the science of civil engineering along. There's even Stevenson inspired lighthouses in Japan, such as this still functioning one. Even the lighthouse keeper's house looks like it belongs in Scotland.
One of the saddest episodes was the failure of the Scottish ship yards to adopt block construction, at a time when they were still profitable post WW2, preferring to stick with the old fashioned way. Now the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, etc dominate ship building using block construction, and the Clyde is a shadow of its former self. It's a most painful lesson; Develop, or Die.
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 12:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Another British invention making money for elsewhere
Public key encryption.
Another British invention (right down to discovering the algorithm that was later rediscovered as RSA). It is only officially commemorated by an IEEE plaque at GCHQ to James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson. Ellis died before the plaque was unveiled, and indeed before the government agreed their contribution could be made public.
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 21:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Knighthoods all round!
I posted almost exactly the same response, then deleted it after realising it (broadly) made sense- they're saying it took place too far away from the mainstream media (based in the up-its-own-arse centre of the universe, AKA London) and that the people involved weren't self-promoting or greedy enough.
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 12:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Spear
> Walter Spear was born in Frankfurt in 1921 but his father, being Jewish, moved the family to London in the nick of time in 1938
Damn immigrants, coming over here, inventing world-changing technologies, become a Fellow of the Royal Society, blah blah
[Warning: post may contain irony.]
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 13:20 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Re: Spear
Otto Frisch too, who founded Laser-Scan, which worked with RSRE on liquid crystal displays (see my earlier post).
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Wednesday 25th April 2018 13:03 GMT Alan J. Wylie
RSRE and Laser-Scan
RSRE (as it had become by the early 80's) and Laser-Scan in Cambridge worked on an alternative to individually driven LCD pixels, by drawing vector graphics using an infra-red laser to switch the phase of the LCD.
Reference to 1984 paper: Laser-Addressed Liquid Crystal Displays
I can still remember the goggles, locked doors and notice: "Do not stare into laser beam with remaining eye".