Was GHC’s innovation in aviation “unique enough” to be considered a separate invention, requiring no royalties to the Brothers? I’d really like to see all of the possible lines of reasoning, both pro and con.
I was going to use GQ but even surveying both sets of arguments is not asking a strictly factual quesion or questions. Besides this is bound to raise debate.
THIS IS NOT A QUESTION ABOUT PRIORITY OF INVENTING AN AIRPLANE. PLEASE DO NOT SURFACE-READ AND POST A NON-DEBATE!
In a nutshell, Glen Hammond Curtiss modified the airplane with airelons for turning instead of flexible twisting wings so that rudder use for compensation was not necessary.
The other side of the coin is that the Wright patent specifically noted that their solution for turning a plane was not the only one, and that other solutions would still fit into the broad definition of what they applied for patenting.
And how likely is it that a different “final” outcome would have been received if WW I had not made SCotUS pass on reviewing the case?
Are you referring to the innovation of using ailerons mounted in-line with the wings, or the one of making them separate surfaces between the wings? Regardless, the Wrights’ patents were easily and often evaded (or ignored) by many other aircraft designers, not just Curtiss. Good ideas almost always emerge somewhere, somehow, anyway.
It’s also true that the Wrights’ litigiousness, at least before Wilbur’s death in 1912 and Orville’s subsequent loss of interest, helped hold back innovation in the US while it was exploding in Europe, but the US’s lack of a major-scale aviation industry until very late in WW1 has more to do with its nonparticipation in the war.
Broad claims in patents are (and apparently were) routinely granted, btw, as long as they don’t get ridiculous. Each application has to be judged on its merits by the examiner.
Once more with feeling (hamsters ate my first post and this one will be much more concise as I do have to get back to work):
Patents grant only the right to EXCLUDE others from using the patented invention. This fact must always be kept in mind.
The Wrights patented an airplane with wings. I’m not sure how broad or narrow their claims were, but we can assume that they patented an airplane that had wings with some mechanism for turning the airplane as well.
Curtiss built a plane with wings. He also built a plane having wings with a new device called the aileron. Curtiss, I believe, patented the aileron.
Since the Wrights had the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an airplane with wings and/or an airplane with wings having a mechanism for turning the plane, Curtiss was in violation of the Wright’s patent, even though the Wrights had not specifically described Curtiss’ aileron.
On the other hand, the Wrights were not allowed to use the improvement embodied in Curtiss’ aileron as Curtiss had the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the aileron without his permission.
Simple no?
CJ, a registered patent attorney, not that that means much as I’ve never read the Wright or Curtiss patents.
Apparently the aileron as we know it was invented by Curtiss’ friend Alexander Graham Bell, of whom you may have heard.
There’s no mention of Supreme Court involvement. If the OP question is about how the question would have been resolved without the war, there’s no way to know.
An interesting technical point is that the Wrights quickly (IIRC, even before the Flyer) reached the point that the only part of their wings that warped was the ends - the inner section was trussed so as to be rigid.
And my understanding is that their patent covered not flying machines with wings (which certainly predated them), but their system of three-axis control: a movable horizontally mounted surface to control pitch, a vertical rudder to control yaw, and wings whose angles of attach could be simultaneously altered to control roll.
If this is correct, it’s easy to see why Curtis was seen as infringing the patent: the aileron was accomplishing the same thing that wingwarping was - changing the wings’ AOA - albeit in a simpler way.
I have no idea what view the Supreme Court would have offered, nor any real idea how to generate useful speculation on that.
This is essentially true, though it could be taken to imply that they didn’t file or defend patents in Europe, which they did.
But it’s also something of a non-sequitur to imply (as you seem to) that the Wrights should not have sought to defend their invention. It would probably be easy to find examples of inventions whose inventors could have forsworn their IP and thus enhanced early development. But the idea of patents is based on the premise that there’s value to the country in defending the IP of inventors. The Wrights made some huge steps forward, and I don’t see that we should look askance at their desire to benefit from their work.
Yes, but certainly less effectively than in the US.
I don’t mean that. I do mean they should have been more willing than they were to license use of their patents than deny them to people they took a dislike to. They might well have been better off financially, although they certainly weren’t hurting as it was. They would also have done more service to the development of aviation if they had used their energies more to continue innovating than to file lawsuits.
You are correct, but its been my experience that when its the actual inventors doing the licensing and general protection of the IP, things get weird fast. They have a tendency to identify personally with their inventions and get weird.
Yeah, you’re right - even though all of my patents are my employer’s property, I feel kind of proprietary about them anyway. They do have my name on them, after all, and I do get this nice little plaque and a check with a useful amount of cash from each - but that’s not nearly as much as if I owned them and could license them.
My understanding: Patents aren’t as valuable as many think. Enforcing a patent is entirely the responsibility of the patent owner. There’s no monitoring agency anywhere that can or will look for violations. If there’s an infringement, the patent owner has to be aware of it himself and file suit himself, and that puts the patent itself at risk of being overturned by the court. And that’s only for a patent that has commercial usefulness, and they’re actually a small percentage of the total.
The Wrights had representatives in Europe watching developments, but they couldn’t be everywhere, and furthermore the courts they had to file in were in the homes of the defendants and were presumably sympathetic to them.
I think the WB’s had a destinct edge regarding the concept of 3 axis control and also had the engineering knowledge to explain it. While Curtis was good with engines he didn’t exhibit a working knowledge of aerodynamics with his early airplanes. the WB’s had the data to explain their invention.
Sure wouldn’t mind going back in time and meeting both parties. Interesting persons all.
I’d like to know more about this - it’s the first statement I’ve heard that Curtiss’ designs didn’t use a rudder.
I did some Googling, but that wasn’t definitive. The June Bug clearly had vertical surfaces, but none of the sources I found were sufficient to determine whether they were moveable or rigid.
If Curtiss was using ailerons in a way that needed no yaw control, then his claims to originalty were stronger than I’d believed them to be. But this seems to have been a dead end, as it did not persist - the vast majority of heavier-than-aircraft use control in 3 axes, and always have.
Maybe, maybe not. If they had been more willing to license their inventions then others would merely copied what they did and that’s not innovation. If others couldn’t copy they were forced to find their own solutions, which is innovation.
The Wrights changed the angle of attack to get differential lift to control roll. Ailerons change both profile and the angle which isn’t exactly the same thing as just the angle.
Aren’t there rules against overly broad claims? What if I had patented a “flying contraption” of any method or shape - could I have pre-empted a flying contraption with wings?
The PCT has the Unity of Invention rule (the USPTO seems to have a slightly different rule) but this does not quite sound like the same thing.
Extending that, the Wright Brothers didn´t invent, neither discovered the wing twisting for control, let alone that birds have been doing it for a very long time, but most probably they got the idea from Alphonse Penaud , I do remember reading one letter he wrote to a friend explaining how he could control the direction of his Planophore by twisting the wings AoA.
They just implemented a working mechanical solution for wing twisting, therefore their patent should have been limited to that alone, the particular mechanical rigging they used; Curtiss´ system was, from a mechanical point of view, entirely different.
Unity of invention is not what you’re looking for. Broadly (and the U.S. has similar rules), unity of invention really just dictates how many different applications you’ll have to file to cover multiple distinct inventions.
The patent office(s) are supposed to police “overly broad” claims through application of the statutory requirements of:
Novelty – if “flying contraptions” in general were already known before you came along, you should not get a claim to such device, thus claimed, allowed in the first place, and a court should invalidate such claim upon a showing that it was anticipated.
Non-obviouness or inventive step – if contraptions very much like flying contraptions, though not identical, were known, you also shouldn’t get a patent claim to such obvious variant.
Written description, enablement, and best mode – Whatever words you use in the claim, read in light of the rest of the patent, must clearly delineate that to which you claim exclusive rights. If it wouldn’t be clear that a “flying contraption” included a flying contraption with wings, or if a contraption with wings were the best kind of contraption you knew of, but you failed to disclose that, or if you simply didn’t teach anywhere in your patent how to build a contraption with wings, your claim would be invalid as vague, overbroad, not enabled, etc.
Having said all that, the patent office(s) surely do screw the pooch on a regular basis and allow claims that violate some or all of the above requirements, or that create direct overlap between two granted and presumptively valid patents. There’s no real easy solution, especially when it’s not clear to the Examiner how the patentee may ultimately seek to twist the words of his claim to apply to different things, and when, to be practical, most Examiners are $38,000 a year (or whatever) civil servants, with limited legal training and sometimes limited technical expertise or even knowledge of English, under lots of pressure to process applications through to completion/allowance.
In this case, it seems to me it was more forcing others who couldn’t afford their royalty demands to invent inferior solutions, such as Curtiss’ separate-surface airfoil. A century later nobody has innovated a better approach than the aileron.
Their very extensive writings do make reference to their observation of birds. An idea they got from such observation and then first implemented could legitimately be called a discovery. But it should also be noted that the Wrights never claimed that the idea of creating differences in the wings’ AoA was any sort important innovation - they took it as reasonably obvious.
Their writings make extensive reference to sources they used, including Lilienthal, Chanute and others. But other than the fact that they had a model similiar to the Planophore when young (which certainly did not incorporate any wing-warping mechanism), there is so far as I know no reference to Penaud or his writings. (Was a translation even available as early as 1900?)
But their signficant innovation wasn’t wing warping - it was 3-axis control (which is what their patent covered).