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There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part One Hundred and Five

Robert Propst (1921 – 2000)

An inventor has many obstacles to overcome to bring their idea to fruition. But even when it has seen the light of day and made their fame and fortune, they may be struck by another problem, something that might be characterised as inventor’s remorse. They have released a genie from the bottle and wish that they had let things be. One such, whom I featured in my recent book, The Fickle Finger, was Walter Hunt who came up with the first workable sewing machine and immediately feared for the employment prospects of hand weavers and sought to suppress it. Robert Propst could fairly be claimed to be another.    

Colorado-born Propst was a serial inventor with some 120 to his credit, including such things as a vertical timber harvester, a quality control system for concrete, an electronic tagging system for livestock, and a mobile office for quadriplegics. His claim to fame and the root cause of his bout of inventor’s remorse was to invent the Action Office whilst heading up the research division of furniture manufacturers, Herman Miller. In the 1960s Propst set out to reinvent the rather sterile office environment, based on the underlying premise that he worked better and seemed healthier and happier when he had different surfaces upon which to work.

In an attempt to move away from the serried rows of desks and the cacophony of noise and the clouds of cigarette smoke that were typical of offices at the time, with only the management having discrete areas of their own, he proposed what he called the “Action Office”. The layout of an office was to be defined by lightweight sitting and standing desks, filing systems and each worker’s space compartmentalised by acoustic panels which muffled extraneous sounds of conversation and typing.

Revolutionary as this way of organising and furnishing an office was, it did not meet much favour with the American corporate world. It seemed to be designed to meet the needs of the lowly workers rather than the businesses that needed to house them. Beloved by designers and, ironically, bought by executives for home use, Propst’s Action Office proved a damp squib.

Showing the tenacity that characterises many an inventor, Propst was undaunted and worked on a mark two. This time the acoustic panels were designed as miniature walls, varying in height, allowing the worker inside to have a degree of privacy and seclusion and yet see and communicate with their colleagues. As they were much lighter in weight and easier to construct, they were highly flexible. The corporate world saw the sense of having office furniture offering an extremely flexible and dynamic solution to fitting an ever-changing number of employees into limited floor space. Propst’s Action Office 2 went down a storm.

Unfortunately, businesses saw Propst’s invention as a perfect opportunity to cram as many workers into a set floor space as possible. Instead of an employee having a roomy workspace enclosed by partitions of varying heights allowing different sightlines to enjoy, corporate America installed tiny boxes with partitions of uniform size, making them seem like cages. The eager adoption of Propst’s design system was also aided by a change in tax laws which made it easier for businesses to write off furniture and prompted the adoption of temporary, throwaway structures.  

There were also health concerns. With more workers rammed into smaller spaces, contagious diseases spread more easily, productivity fell, and with more energy efficient and airtight offices, some of the more volatile organic compounds used in the construction of the cubicles like formaldehyde lingered in the air and caused illness. The materials used to construct the cubicles were changed but as time moved on open floorplan configurations became the office layout of choice. That said, some 30% of workers are still housed in box like cubicles.

Propst was horrified by the way his designs were used, spending much of his later life apologising for what he had done. “Not all organisations are intelligent and progressive”, he moaned. “Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places”.

But as Walter Hunt found out over a century earlier, once the genie is out of the bottle, it is difficult to put it back in.

If you enjoyed this, check out The Fickle Finger by Martin Fone.

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/computing-science-education/the-fickle-finger/

There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part One Hundred And One

Ian Shanks (1948 – present)

Whilst a laudable idea in principle, patents, which give the inventor some time to exploit the fruits of their inventive streak without giving them an everlasting monopoly, can be fraught with difficulties and often the only winners seem to be the legal profession. One area of difficulty is who owns the patent when an employee invents something during the course of their employment and, even if they concede ownership of the patent, are they entitled to a share of the profits made by the invention, over and above their normal employment benefits? The case of Ian Shanks has done much to clarify this grey area, in the UK at least.

I am a bit of an aichmophobe and so I have the greatest admiration for diabetics who regularly puncture their skin with a needle to get their shot of insulin or to test their glucose levels. If it was a matter of life or death, I am sure I would overcome my fear, it is only a state of mind, after all. Undeniably, though, what has helped diabetics immeasurably is the nifty little glucose testing kit which has simplified the process and improved the accuracy of the readings. This was the brainwave of Scottish scientist, Ian Shanks.   

Shanks was already a leading scientific pioneer, publishing the first paper on 3D televisions and being at the forefront of the development of liquid crystal display (LCD) technology. Around the summer of 1982 he wondered whether he could deploy LCD technology to make some form of biosensor. If you could suck a liquid, blood, for instance, between two glass plates and coat one of the plates with a material that broke up the molecules you wanted to measure, say glucose, then you should be able to measure its concentration.

Using the glass slides from his daughter’s toy microscope, Shanks played around with his idea until he had developed a working model. Excited by his discovery, he had the prototype for a cheap, pain-free device to test glucose levels, he took it to his employers at the time, Unilever. As Shanks was their employee, Unilever took ownership of the idea and filed for a patent, which was granted. And then they did nothing.

Grudgingly, in the 1990s Unilever began to sell off licences relatively cheaply to other companies to manufacture and sell the glucose sensors. They revolutionised the lives of diabetics but, for reasons best known to themselves, Unilever had missed the boat, earning around £24 million from the licences rather than a billion or so they would have amassed if they had taken the trouble to market and distribute the device themselves. As for Shand, apart from his salary and employment benefits, he got nothing and he wasn’t happen.

Now Section 40 of the Patents Act 1977 enters our story. Under this piece of legislation an employee, who invents something from which their employer derives an “outstanding benefit”, is entitled to a “fair share”. Suitably vague wording, a clause described by an Appeals judge as drafted “on Friday night and after closing time”, it nonetheless offered Shand some hope. He sued his employers and after many a knockback, it took him thirteen years to get justice, in October 2019 the Supreme Court found in his favour.

Lord Kitchin, in his judgment, opined that the rewards Unilever enjoyed “were substantial and significant, were generated at no significant risk, reflected a very high rate of return and stood out in comparison with the benefit Unilever derived from other patents”. Their lordships awarded Shand £2 million. He had got there in the end. The first award made under section 40 was not made until 2010.

Millions of diabetics around the world owe a great debt of gratitude to the genius of Shand.

If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone https://martinfone.wordpress.com/fifty-clever-bastards/

And look out for The Fickle Finger, now available in e-book format.

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/computing-science-education/the-fickle-finger/

There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part One Hundred

Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958)

I am a great fan of crime stories from the period between the two World Wars, known as the golden age of detective fiction. Policemen and amateur sleuths had to rely on their wits and their powers of analysis, reason and deduction to solve many a fiendish crime which, at first blush, seemed both impossible to have been committed and to crack. They invariably did, though, usually because the felon left some tell-tale sign that led to their undoing.

Life has moved on and these days the police have a more powerful array of tools at their disposal, at least if you believe the police dramas which are the staple fare of our TV screens, not least DNA testing. If I had even the faintest inkling to commit a crime, the threat of being unmasked by my DNA would be enough to put me off.  Interestingly, the tale of the discovery of DNA is a murky one with elements that would not have been out of place in a good whodunnit.

Rosalind Franklin always wanted to be a scientist, even though her father tried to steer her away from a career path that was nigh-on impossible for women to make much progress in. She was fortunate enough to attend St Paul’s Girls’ School, one of the few schools at the time that taught physics and chemistry to girls, and then graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge.

During the Second World War, Rosalind studied the structure and uses of coal and graphite, publishing several papers and contributing to the development of more effective gas masks. She was awarded a PhD in Physical Chemistry by Cambridge University in 1945.

After the war, Rosalind went to Paris to work under Jacques Mering, from whom she learned about the use of x-ray diffraction techniques to explore and understand the molecular and atomic structures of crystals. Then, in 1951, she made the fateful decision to accept a three-year research scholarship at King’s College, London.

Maurice Wilkins was trying to understand DNA by using X-ray crystallography and so Rosalind was perfectly equipped to contribute to the project. But Wilkins, who was away when Rosalind arrived, assumed that she was hired help rather than be someone who could more than contribute to the project.

Their relationship never recovered from this rocky start.   

Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Rosalind continued to refine her X-ray images of DNA fibres, using ever finer strands. Wilkins, in somewhat of a huff, spent increasingly more time with his friend, Francis Crick, at the Cavendish Laboratory, where Crick and James Watson were attempting to understand the structure of DNA by using a model-based approach.

Around this time Rosalind made a dramatic discovery when looking at what later became known as Photo 51. The DNA in the image had a distinct helical structure with two strands attached at the middle. She gave details of her findings in a lecture but no one seemed to pay any notice.

However, at a conference, at which Crick and Watson rolled out their theories about the structure of DNA, Rosalind challenged them, pointing out that she was working with empirical data not highfalutin ideas. This open criticism of his friends worsened relationships between Wilkins and the woman he now called the Dark Lady. Sensibly, Rosalind decided to move on and took a position at Birkbeck College in 1953.

But during the move, Wilkins came into possession of the famous Photo 51, certainly without Rosalind’s permission, and showed it to Crick and Watson. It was an earth-shattering moment. Here was the missing piece of information, which Crick and Watson needed to complete their accurate model and proof positive that DNA’s helical structure had two strands attached in the middle by phosphate bases.

The duo rushed to print, publishing an article on the structure of DNA in a 1953 edition of the scientific journal, Nature. Ironically, the same edition carried articles by Wilkins and Franklin on the X-ray data they had compiled about DNA but it gave the impression that their contribution was supplementary to rather than one that had informed Crick and Watson’s discovery.

Rosalind continued her researches at Birkbeck, now turning her attention to the structure of tobacco mosaic virus before succumbing to cancer, which she may well have contracted through her work with X-rays.

In 1962, Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. There was no mention of Rosalind and it is only recently that her contribution to the understanding of DNA has been acknowledged. The Nobel Prize, of course, cannot be awarded posthumously.

Did Crick steal the photograph? Perhaps we should run a DNA test.    

If you enjoyed this, look out for Martin Fone’s new book, The Fickle Finger, which will be published in April 2020. For details follow this link https://martinfone.wordpress.com/the-fickle-finger/

In the meantime, to get your fix of unfortunate inventors, try Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone, details of which are here https://martinfone.wordpress.com/fifty-clever-bastards/

 

There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Ninety Nine

Elizabeth J Magie (1866 – 1948)

I’ve always had a love hate relationship with that board game that is trotted out when families and friends gather, Monopoly. On the one hand, it is enjoyable, engaging and can keep everyone entertained for several hours. On the other hand, for someone with socialist leanings, it disturbs me that it seems to bring out the worst features of a grasping capitalist out in many of the game’s participants. 

Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends and family as Lizzie, was from Scottish immigrant stock, living in Prince George’s county in Washington D.C at the turn of the 20^th century. She was known for her progressive political views and was looking for a way to bring her concerns about the economic impact of the monopoly on land and property owners on the common folk to a wider audience. At the time board games were becoming increasingly popular amongst middle class families and this seemed to be the best medium to spread her message.

What Lizzie developed was a game called the Landlord’s Game, designed, as she said, as “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences…contain[ing] all the elements of success and failure in the real world”.

The elements of the game will be familiar to many readers, players progressed around the outer rim of a board, receiving $100 every time they passed the Mother Earth space and going to jail if they trespassed on land. Properties were available to buy and then collect rents from. Those unfortunate enough to run out of money were sent to the Poor House. There were two sets of rules; one which rewarded all players when wealth was created and one where the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.

Satisfied with her game, Lizzie applied for and was granted a US Patent (no 748,626) on January 5, 1904. The Landlord’s Game gained some popularity with intellectuals and university campuses (the two are often mutually exclusive, I find) and was revised and improved over time. In 1924, recognising that her patent had expired and that she needed to re-establish her ownership of the game, Lizzie applied for and was granted another patent (no 1,509,312).

It is now time for Charles Darrow to enter our story.

In late 1932, Charles, unemployed and desperate for money, was introduced to a property board game by Philadelphia businessman, Charles Todd. Darrow was taken by the game and saw an opportunity to make some money, initially hand-producing the game which he called Monopoly and then a printed version, obtaining a copyright for it in 1933.  

Sales of the game were so promising in the run up to Christmas 1934 that Parker Brothers, now part of Hasbro, approached Darrow and, on March 18, 1935, bought the game, the remains of Darrow’s stock and helped him to secure a patent. But a month later Parker Brothers became suspicious of Darrow’s claims that he was the sole inventor of the game and, in a smart move, approached Lizzie to buy the patent for her Landlord’s game and a couple of other games she had created. They proposed to her a payment of $500, which she accepted, but they did not offer her a share of the royalties.

At the time, Lizzie didn’t smell a rat, even writing to the treasurer of Parker Brothers that when the prototype of her game arrived, she had a song in heart”. But in January 1936 her mood changed. The Washington Evening Star carried a picture of her holding a board from her Landlord’s Game and one from a game called Monopoly. The similarities were striking, as they would be. She was angry, steadfast in her belief that Parker Brothers had stolen her best-seller of an idea.

 A best seller it was too, taking off in the States and becoming an international favourite. Darrow, who had a slice of the royalties, made millions from the game. When asked by the Germantown Bulletin how he came to invent such a wildfire success, Darrow replied, somewhat ingenuously, “it’s a freak…entirely unexpected and illogical”.

Lizzie’s role in developing the game was effectively airbrushed out of history. When she died in 1948, a widow with no children, neither her obituary nor her tombstone bore any reference to her role in developing one of the world’s best-known games. The website of Hasbro, ironically named for the eighth year in succession in 2019 as one of the world’s most ethical companies by the Ethisphere Institute, is silent on her contribution.

There matters would have remained but for an American economics professor from San Francisco University, Ralph Anspach. In 1974 he launched a game called Anti-Monopoly and was immediately sued by Parker Brothers for breach of copyright. In preparing his defence, Anspach uncovered the history of the Landlord’s Game, Lizzie’s role in developing it, and how Darrow had been economical with the actualité in explaining his how he had come across Monopoly. After a ten-year legal battle, Anspach prevailed and Lizzie has now begun to receive the credit she deserved, at least in some circles.

If you enjoyed this, look out for Martin Fone’s new book, The Fickle Finger, which will be published in April 2020. For details follow this link https://martinfone.wordpress.com/the-fickle-finger/

In the meantime, to get your fix of unfortunate inventors, try Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone, details of which are here https://martinfone.wordpress.com/fifty-clever-bastards/