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Dyson Vacuum Cleaners. One sole inventor who developed 5,127+ prototype designs and clearly brought something unique to the marketplace. Gave his whole life an
by taligent 14y ago
Dyson Vacuum Cleaners.
One sole inventor who developed 5,127+ prototype designs and clearly brought something unique to the marketplace. Gave his whole life and money to the product.
Almost immediately after it came out Hoover copied the design and basically would have put him out of business.
The patents were the ONLY thing that protected him from a huge multinational who didn't invent anything.
Now Dyson went on to invent a whole range of very cool gadgets which never would have existed without patents.
- radio4fan 14y agoInterestingly, the Dyson design was based on an existing cyclone system widely used to separate out dust and particles in industrial settings. The innovation was using the process in a domestic vacuum cleaner. So it's not too far removed from the "thing-that-already-exists but on the internet" patents which are a large part of the problem, or the "thing-that-already-exists but on a mobile" patent which is biting Notch's ass at the moment. Not that I'm saying Dyson's patents are invalid, nor that his designs haven't improved the state of the art in several fields, but he didn't invent the cyclone technology in a... vacuum.