People with more than one major invention

Who are some people with more than one invention

The obvious example is Steve Jobs with

Apple/Mac
Ipad
Iphone
Pixar (to some extent)

But also there is

Chuck Peddle

On the team with the 8080 processor

Led the 6502 Processor development

Developed the Commodore PET Computer which was then used as the basis of the VIC 20

Built another computer, the Victor 9000 (ahead of its time) but it could not overcome the PC dominance.

There is also Thomas Edison

He had 1093 Patents :eek: including the light bulb, phonograph, motion picture camera, stock ticker, car battery, electric utility, and a few more

Anyone else ?

Thomas Midgeley

How is Thomas Edison not the obvious example? Geez Louise. Man, Steven Jobs.

The other one is Hipster Thomas Edison, aka Nikolai Tesla, who invented or at least messed around with alternating current, radio, and remote-controlled vehicles, among other things.

Here is a list of Inventors

I can see also

Robert Rines - Sonar and Radar

Thomas Midgley jr - Ethyl Gasoline and Fluorocarbon refrigerants

Wilhelm Maybach - Carburetor and Radiator

Howard Head - Oversized Tennis Racket and Laminated Ski

William Goddard - Hard Drive and Floppy Disc

Emile Berliner - Gramophone and Microphone

Luis Walter Alvavez - Radio Distance and Direction and Hydrogen Bubble Chamber

However, in terms of numbers of inventions, it is Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison from what I can tell

Thanks

I did mention Thomas Edison at the end of my original post but Steve Jobs came to my mind first as he is the most recent multiple inventor.

I suppose Elon Musk could be added as well but he is still going

SpaceX, Paypal, Telsa, Gigafactory

It feels like someone should mention George Washington Carver, with the paints and the adhesives and the soaps and the laxatives and the shoe polish and so on.

Adding Lead to Gasoline (which worked) but it also caused an environmental disaster including poisoning himself.

Also, his cause of death was interesting:eek:

Dr. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine, then demonstrated that one could give such a thing away for the good of humanity.

Charles Kettering, founded Delco and head of GM Research division, holder of 186 patents, some big ones.

An interesting (to me) one is Oscar U. Zerk, who held around 300 patents, but the one that made him the most money was the specific type of check-ball grease fitting on millions of cars and trucks and equipment even today.

Does Jobs really count? After the initial Apple computers, the Macs were based on ideas developed by others at Xerox. Did he really “invent” the iPod and iPhone, or did he have an idea which his team developed? Not in the Thomas Edison sense (although I’m sure Edison had assistants), and Edison’s inventions covered a pretty wide area, whereas Jobs’ “inventions” were all computing devices.

Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, the flexible catheter, swimming fins, and the Franklin stove.

With 4,711 US utility patents Kia Silverbrook is considered the most prolific inventor of all time, at least in terms of number of patents.

Shunpei Yamazaki is a close second with 4,063.

Edison clocks in about 9th and Jobs doesn’t make the list.

Dean Kamen is not nearly as well known as he deserves to be.

He’s best known for the Segway, but he’s done a lot more than that.

?? I had the impression that Steve Wozniak was really the inventor of the Apple I, while Jobs was the businessman.

It should go without saying that everyone on this list benefited from the work done by others before them.

The PARC project at Xerox inspired Jobs to invent something that they hadn’t invented. Despite having much of the technology for the Mac in bits and pieces it hadn’t occured to them yet what they could do with it all.

Steve Jobs has 313 patents in his name which is certainly no slouch on the invention scale but not even the same ballpark as someone like Edison. His talent was hiring the right people to make his vision reality (Apple as a company holds many thousands of patents) but if there is any one legacy that could be rightfully considered all his it was ‘inventing’ the Macintosh.

For a long time now anything worth inventing has required input from a number of geniuses.
But we still like to have this fantasy of a single visionary in his private workshop having a eureka moment, but it’s just not like that in most cases.

And ironically the OP picked classic problematic examples in Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison.
e.g. With Jobs and the iPhone…obviously the iPhone is a complex device and we can discuss how much credit he should get versus many of the employees at Apple, the people who’ve written killer apps for the device, the people who’d already thought about how such a device would interface (e.g. pinch to zoom out), and of course there’s Wozniak. Finally there were already somewhat smart phones out there…clearly the iphone was a big jump but we get into the subjectivity of what we consider a fresh invention to be.

And with edison, it’s even more subject to dispute. Many of his most famous inventions he just bought a patent, and the patent wasn’t even for the most revolutionary step. But he was much better than most engineers at getting his name out there and getting credit (and money) for things.

Excellent points, thanks for all the input.

Yes, I am well aware that a lot of these inventions are build on other people’s ideas and the person who takes credit for it is the one who knows it the best.

Very good point with Steve Woznick and Steve Jobs. Yes, Woz was the technical genius behind the Apple but it was the Steve Jobs combination of making it useable and presenting as a great idea to the public.

Also, a lot of the subcomponents of the Apple (Floppy Drive and Hard-drive for example) were developed by others but it was Steve Jobs that put it all together in one package first.

Same point with the Macintosh, as mentioned, in that Steve Job took an idea that was already in development and assembled it together and got it out to the public.

Same point with Thomas Edison as no doubt he had a large staff supporting him, but there has to be someone putting this all together and history has given him credit even though others may have done more of the ground work.

There is also something to be said about being the first to develop a product in that it has name recognition even if the following products are better or more used.

Case in point: Xerox (the company) built the first photocopier and other companies have built better ones since then, but Xerox is still be used when referring to making a few copies.

My point on bringing this up, is that after developing a major inventions, I was wondering to see if any inventor/engineer ever had success in a subsequent invention. (Literally, lightening striking twice!! considering how rare multiple success were.)

Generally what I found is that the ones who had multiple successes were usually in the same field or related.

IE, Steve Jobs and his series of telecommunication/computing devices, although Pixar is slightly different but it still used a computers to present a graphic display.

Thanks for the comments and anymore are welcome

This is another good list of inventors - quite interesting and Steve Jobs is NOT on this list.

Another interesting item is that almost all of these people with multiple patents are male. :smiley:

It must be something about the Male mind that leads to invention although there certainly are exceptions.

Thanks

http://appft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/index.html

US Patent office search.

Interesting to see some of the patents put out.

Here is one for a vehicle capture

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=982&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&p=20&S1=weatherford&OS=weatherford&RS=weatherford