Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, designs, info-tech and confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. Read, post comments and participate!

The team is Eleonora Rosati, Annsley Merelle Ward and Merpel. E-mail the Kats here!

The team is joined by GuestKats Kevin Bercimuelle-Chamot, Jocelyn Bosse, Alessandro Cerri, Anastasiia Kyrylenko, Marcel Pemsel and Anna Maria Stein.

SpecialKats: Verónica Rodríguez Arguijo (TechieKat), Rose Hughes (PatKat) and Chijioke Okorie (Africa Correspondent).

InternKats: Asude Sena Moya and Söğüt Atilla.
Home / / A fond farewell to a great inventor

A fond farewell to a great inventor

The IPKat learns that the inventor Robert Adler has died at the grand age of 93. While other news stories (see here) focus on him being the inventor of the television remote control, this particular Kat was more impressed that he invented a particular type of piezoelectric actuator over 20 years before a certain Dr Pearce (as he then was) came up with a similar idea. This spurred Dr Pearce on to invent something better, which eventually led (for better or worse) to a career in IP.


Left: The ingenious Adler device in question.
This Kat recognises the valuable contribution that inventors make, which can spread far and wide and end up influencing far more than the bottom line of the companies they may work for. Even apparently dead-end inventions (the spring above was never commercialised, or even made until this author had a go) can have beneficial results.
A fond farewell to a great inventor A fond farewell to a great inventor Reviewed by David Pearce on Monday, February 19, 2007 Rating: 5

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousMonday, 19 February 2007 at 11:12:00 GMT

    Dr Adler invented the ultra-sonic remote control. The one that both controlled the TV set and disturbed the dogs. A colleague at Zenith had earlier designed a light operated remote control; Adler acknowledges it in his US patent. Cheap IR LED's have effectively changed controllers to the earlier system.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom )
Powered by Blogger.