Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

Rory Sutherland is a vice president at Ogilvy in the UK. His YouTube videos advertise and promote the powers of myth, emotion, creativity, and passion. He tells good stories. He nods to reason, logic, and rationality because those are the proof of known, workable solutions. Sutherland’s thesis is that if we have a problem now it must be logic-proof or it would already have been solved and would not now exist. 

This is my summary. I recommend that you watch the video for yourself with CC:Closed Captions on. 

Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

1. The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. When we narrow down all options to the single rational choice, if it fails, no one can be blamed because they followed the data and the model. In fact, problems often have multiple solutions, different alternatives for other people whose values are not our own. 
2. Do not design for the average. Look for the extreme. The average person will reject the unknown until other people make it a trend. Go for those other people.
3. It does not pay to be logical when everyone else is logical. To overcome your competition in the market, find the errors in their models and meet those needs. He points out that every military seeks to design and implement surprises. 
4. The nature of our intentions is the source of our internal tensions. His example is extreme though telling. His best hotel experience was in an East Berlin pad that must have been a police cell. If you were looking for a Ramada Inn you were going to be disappointed, but he wanted the experience of an East Berlin vacation and he was ecstatic. Know your true intentions and it will minimize your emotional tensions.
5. A flower is just a weed with an advertising budget. Nature rewards and invests in reproductive strategies that are effective, even when seemingly inefficient. 
6.  Logic kills off magic. The payoff for magic is the change in perception. Apple changed the perception of the computer. 
7. A good guess plus empirical observation is still science. You can have a lucky guess and be right. **See below.
8. Test the counter-intuitive things because nobody else will. Businesses must mainly follow the rational and logical and the data-driven because that is what is known to work. You still must set aside space—I take that to mean organizational as well as physical—to test random journeys.
9. Rationality is a tool. If it is your only tool, then you are playing golf with just one club.
10. Dare to be trivial. The butterfly effect is that a small change can have a large consequence. Add one sentence to the script of a call center and see what change it brings. 
11. Do not limit yourself to ten rules. Rational people are everyone else. So, if there is a problem not solved now, it is logic-proof or would not exist. Be creative.
12. Dare to look stupid. “Why do people dislike standing up on trains?” In fact, some prefer it for a moderate ride of 20 to 30 minutes because they have been sitting in a chair all day. If you notice, some people still stand even after sufficient seats have been vacated. For others, it might be the physical challenge of juggling one’s kit after you are already latched on to a pole. Ultimately, now we have privileged window seating perhaps with a tray or armrest and so on, and with others forced to stand in the middle with not much to do. He asks, what if, instead, we had rows of seats in the middle with the spaces near windows specially designed for restful standing, perhaps with cellphone chargers as well. Now, it looks different.
13. Create net utility with a multivariate choice. Give people choices that optimize or minimize more than one variable and in disproportion so that whatever the outcome for the individual, you bring less regret. This is adaptive preference formation, a narrative for the support of choices.

** (Rory Sutherland cites Paul Feyerabend in asserting that advances in science have not come from applications of the scientific method but from intuition and insight. What the postmodernists ignore and would have us ignore in their program against reason is that you can only prove that your intuitive insight is truly scientific by following the scientific method so that you first and then others can test and replicate your work. Otherwise, you have nothing. The flash of insight and awareness can only be a reward for the rational, logical, empirical, experiential modes of learning as the preparation for better understanding and, ultimately, therefore, material abundance.) 

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AMERICAN LABOR DAY 2025: Why I Work

These quotations are from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, most of them spoken by the story's hero, Howard Roark. 

 “I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I am only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition.”  (Plume Edition, 1994. Page 16)

“An open car drove by, fleeing into the country. The car was overfilled with people bound for a picnic. There was a jumble of bright sweaters, and scarf fluttering in the wind; a jumble of voices shrieking without purpose over the roar of the motor, and overstressed hiccoughs of laughter; a girl sat sideways, her legs flung over the side of the car; she wore a man’s straw hat slipping down her nose and she yanked savagely at the strings of a ukulele, ejecting raucous sounds, yelling, “Hey!” These people were enjoying a day of their existence; they were shrieking to the sky their release from work and the burdens of days behind them; they worked and carried burdens in order to reach a goal—and this was the goal. (Plume Edition, 1994. Page 131)

 “… There will be thousands passing by your house and by the gas station. If out of those thousands, one stops and see it—that’s all I need.”

“Then you do need other people, after all, don’t you, Howard?”

“What are you laughing at?”

“I’ve always thought that you were the most anti-social animal I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

“I need people to give me work. I’m not building mausoleums. Do you suppose I should need them in some other way? In a closer more personal way?” (Plume Edition, 1994. Page 158)

DefCon 512 June 2013

“Why are you a good architect? Because you have certain standards of what is good, and they are your own, an d you stand by them. I want a good hotel, and I have certain standards of what is good, and they’re my own, and you’re the one who can give me what I want. I’m doing—on my side of it—just what you’re doing when you design a building. Do you think that integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something that one doesn’t borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to chose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn’t choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I’d choose three gilded balls.” – Kent Lansing. (Plume Ed., 1994. Page 321)

“I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.”

(Plume Edition, 1994. Page 480)

“From different states, from unexpected parts of the country, calls had come for him: private homes, small office buildings, modest shops. … The story of every commission he received was the same: “I was in New York and I liked the Enright House.” “I saw the Cord Building.” “I saw a picture of the temple they tore down.” It was if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places. They were small, inexpensive jobs—but he was kept working.” (Plume Edition, 1994.  Page 533)

Austin Astronomical Society
13 October 2023

“Three quarters of them don’t know what it’s all about, but they’ve heard the other one-quarter fighting over your name and now they feel they must pronounce it with respect.  Of the fighting quarter, four-tenths are those who hate you, three-tenths are who feel they must have an opinion in any controversy, two-tenths are those who play safe and herald any new ‘discovery,’ and one-tenth are those who understand.” (Plume Edition, 1994. Page 536)

“One cannot collaborate on one’s own job. I can co-operate, if that’s what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can’t help them to lay bricks and they can’t help me to design the house.” (Plume Edition, 1994.  Page 569)

American Numismatic Association
Rosemont (Chicago) 2019

“Roark got up, reached out, and tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tenses against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want out of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life. … Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it.” (Plume Edition, 1994.  Page 577)

American Numismatic Association
Chicago Virtual 4 August 2020

“But first, I want you to think and tell me what made me give years to this work. Money? Fame? Charity? Altruism?... You see, I’m never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building’s theme and problem, as my building’s material—just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action …”  (Plume Edition, 1994.  Page 604)

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Money as a Crusoe Concept. 

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Recent Astronomical Observing 

Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos

The writing is direct, intended for the interested and educated general reader. I learned a lot, of course, though I did have some quibbles with the details of culture and sociology. Eventually, even after the problem was nominally solved, and the distances to some stars were directly measured, ten new uses were found for parallax.

The title of the book could be a metaphor for the history of astronomy. We tend to view the history of astronomy as if through one eye: the arrangement of the universe, from the geocentric model to the heliocentric model, to the understanding that our own Milky Way is not the universe, but just one of billions of galaxies. Viewing the history of astronomy through the other narrative eye of measuring the size and scale of the universe reveals the depth of the problem and of the geniuses who attempted to solve it. 

 

Explaining Copernicus’s world of 1500, Hirshfeld writes: “Scholars communicated with one another freely, exchanging ideas that centuries earlier might have brought them to the stake.” In fact, the problem of Easter—identifying the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring—required reconciling the solar and lunar calendars. Using astrolabes and water clocks, Medieval astronomers knew that the geocentric model of Ptolemy required corrections. They had calculated the orbit of Saturn to be one billion miles from Earth and the stars immeasurably beyond that. That only reinforced the unimportance of worldly concerns and the grandeur of heaven. No one was burned at the stake in 1250 for worrying why the calendar was off by six hours, though they knew that it was. 

To earn a baccalaureate degree at a Medieval university, you had to complete seven classes in the Liberal Arts. First were the trivium: Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. Following that were the quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music. Even today a liberal arts degree requires classes in mathematics and science, in addition to the humanities of language and fine arts.

Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos 
by Alan W. Hirshfeld, 
W. H. Freeman & Co., 2001.  
Alan W. Hirshfeld is Professor of Physics, 
and Director of the Observatory at the 
University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, 
and an Associate of the 
Harvard College Observatory. 
He currently serves as the past-chair 
of the History of Astronomy Division 
of the American Astronomical Society.

Hirshfeld repeatedly blames Aristotle for an inventory of untruths that were not his fault. What were essentially Aristotle’s lecture notes had been transcribed and collated by his student, Theophrastus. The Macedonian royal family squabbled over the library and the books were stashed by being buried. Second-rate scholars reconstructed the worm-eaten scrolls. All of that aside, generally, Aristotle worked by gathering what was known or claimed by the savants before him. He then gave his opinion based on his assessments of the facts that he knew. He was an encyclopedist. Aristotle’s strongest writings were in biology because he worked first hand as an observer. His embryology of the chick remains an unassailed classic. But you can hold a hen, an egg, and a chick. Comets are intractable. Everyone was guessing.

 

“One issue that Ptolemy had to deal with was the patently nonuniform motions of certain celestial bodies. The Sun, for example, appears to move through the sky with varying speed depending on the time of year. Planets, too, appear to speed up and slow down as the months pass. But according to the writings of Aristotle, whose word was law in those days, heavenly bodies, in fact, move always at constant speed in circular orbits.” (page 24) 

 

Aristotle’s word was not law. He was just one philosopher among many. Cicero was an educated Roman and he gave more attention to the Epicureans and Stoics than to the Peripatetics of the Aristotelean tradition. In any case, there was no legal enforcement of any theories of natural philosophy. 

 

Looking back to the 12^th century from the 21^st century, Hirshfeld too easily collapses time, forgetting that decades mark lifetimes and a century envelopes three generations. He delivers a rich tapestry of evolving theory when he writes about astrophysics, yet he encapsulates ten lifetimes in the phrase “the Church of the Middle Ages” and fails to differentiate it from “the Church of the Counter-Reformation.” 

 

There’s always a better approximation and it is interesting that one correction to Hirshfeld came 20 years later from his collaborating editor at the History of Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society. Writing about the star Eltamin or gamma Draconis, Hirshfeld explains: “The name Eltamin derives from Al Ras al Timmen, ‘the Dragon’s head’… The more prosaic designation Gamma is first encountered in the beautiful Uranometria sky atlas drawn by German celestial cartographer Johannes Bayer in 1603. In Bayer’s system, a constellation’s brightest star is labeled Alpha, the second brightest Beta, and so on.” (page 136). That is a common claim. It does leave us with problems, however. 

 

Castor in Gemini is Alpha Geminorum but it is less bright than Pollux, which is Beta Geminorum. Other examples are easy to find. Some astronomers explain that the absolute magnitudes of stars can and do change over time. 

 

In fact, the answer is that “… Bayer divided the sky into strips and then identified the brightest stars within them. …It  was originally thought that the stars were assigned labels in alphabetical order according to their brightness. However, in many constellations the brightest star is labelled β, leading astronomers in the 18th century to speculate that many stars had changed in brightness from Bayer’s time. The 19th century German astronomer F. W. A. Argelander discovered that Bayer had used a north-to-south ordering system within magnitude bins.⁵ Once Bayer had run out of Greek letters, he switched to Latin letters.” [5: Babinger, F. 1915, “Johannes Bayer, des Begründer der neuzeitlichen Sternbenennung,” Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, 5, 108.] Cited in This Month in Astronomical History: September 2020, by Jason E. Ybarra, Bridgewater College.

https://aas.org/posts/news/2020/09/month-astronomical-history-september-2020

 

Of necessity, our macroscopic sense of place paralleled the discovery of the microscopic. The same lenses served both purposes. It is telling that Joseph Fraunhofer’s 1829 heliometer, the most exacting measuring telescope created up to that time, included a microscope for reading its extremely precise scale. 

 

Science is an integration. Internally consistent theories explain observable facts. It is how we know anything. More to the point, facts and theories do not exist in isolation. Seeming contradictions must be resolved or eliminated. That speaks to the problem of parallax. 

 

Herschel’s case, in particular, exemplified the exacting standards to which all scientists adhere. It can be hard to know when your very correct theory only awaits the predicted facts and when the discovered facts demand a new theory. 

 

Like Galileo and the savants who followed, Herschel expected that all of the stars are more or less arrayed at random, that the universe is uniform. Thus, stars that appear to be close to each other are not physical companions. This led astronomers to seek pairs of stars, one much brighter than the other in the expectation that the brighter was the nearer of the two and thus a good candidate for measuring parallax. After years of searching with a behemoth reflector, Herschel announced on July 1, 1802, that many double stars are indeed gravitationally locked. As the problem of parallax was attacked over the centuries, the attempts revealed other truths. Foremost, perhaps, was that many stars are systems of doubles, triples, and sets of them. 

 

Writing before 2001, Hirshfeld expected new measurements from missions that unfortunately were cancelled. 

• DIVA: Double Interferometer for Visual Astrometry (uncertain)
• FAME Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer was cancelled in 2002.
• SIM: Space Interferometry Mission was cancelled in 2010
• GAIA is a space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 2013 aboard a Soyuz and expected to operate until about 2022.

Gaia has been successful and its empirical results are the foundation of new theories. At the 52^ndmeeting of the Division for Dynamical Astronomy of the AAS, held May 17-21, 2021, eleven papers cited Gaia data.

 

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Rescuing Aristotle and the Church 

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Circumference 

 

The Status of ORIGINAL Property

Original property is newly invented or newly discovered.  It had no previous owner.  In fact, it did not exist – or its existence was not perceived – until the original inventor created it or the original discoverer found it.  How do we recognize such property?  What rights does the inventor or discoverer hold?  Are some or all of those those objective, absolute, or conditional? 

A sailor finds an uninhabited island.  Can she claim the whole thing for herself?  An astronaut lands on an asteroid, a moon, or a planet.  Can she claim the whole thing for herself?  A physicist discovers a new form of energy. Can she claim it all for herself?  A radio hacker finds that 1100 KHz AM is owned by a broadcast company. Can she use a chopper to parcel out nanoscopic slices of the wavelength for herself, given that her presence will never be detected and her presence will never interfere with their existing use of the wavelength?

The Ether did not exist for George Washington.
You could have had it all to yourself for all he knew.
Library of Congress.

It could be argued that the 1100 KHz frequency already belongs to someone.  However, the property is actually the amplitude modulated (AM) use of that frequency.  In theory, frequency modulated (FM) and phase modulated broadcasts are both possible on 1100 KHz without interference.  They are just not technologically useful today.  This is not new.  

(Actually, the property status is limited in space, as well.  That, too, is a different problem, caused by a misperception of the potentials in technology. One of the nice features of 550 to 176 meter wavelengths is the way the waves bounce off the ionosphere.  That was discovered as a by-product, entertaining teenagers who listened to far-away stations.  It could have been commercially exploited.)  

Thomas Edison was a telegraph hacker.  He discovered how to multiplex and quadriplex messages on the same wire.  Granted that the wire was someone’s property, it could, nonetheless have been leased out to different people using different blocks of time-passage on the same wire.  Also, in theory, it could have evolved that the telegraph wires would have been the broadcast source for what we call radio.

When a direct current circuit is closed and opened, a magnetic field is created and collapsed.  That is an alternating field.  That field could have been used to transmit information, as in fact, the “ether” was used by actual radio (initially called “wireless”).  So, you could have paid the telegraph company its tariff for sending messages, but have no concern for the literal transmission but been sending “open” and “close” signals to create a carrier wave for transmissions of your own.  Who would have owned that ether?

 

The Personal Computer Revolution
 saw the use of voice grade telephone lines
for data transmission.
(Wikipedia)

Lasers can carry messages.  It could have come that a network of  lasers made of ruby crystals doped with chromium and pumped by xenon flash would have been a continental system, point to point, with relays and amplifiers every 20 miles or so. Then, someone with a YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) laser could have a network whose beams crossed those in space but without interference because the beams are of different frequencies.  Thus, no violation of property rights would have occurred. 

Original property brings a special challenge to the law because no previous legislation anticipated it.  Ayn Rand attempted to delineate the proper role of government in her essay "Property Status of the Airwaves."  Twenty years later, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was created to bring law and order to cyberspace.  Rand did not stray far from the mainstream.  Her essay never questioned the Federal Communications Commission - though she excoriated it in other writings - or the law that created it with power to rule by decree.  The EFF has been fighting a war of attrition while bunkered within the First Amendment.  The next new invention will leave them to defend an old technology without new ideas.

I believe that rather than looking to legislation or administration, these problems are best settled in courts.  The English system of justice works because of what American conservative complain about as "judicial activism."  The other way is the Continental theory of "civil law" in which the legislature spells out the law in detail and the courts only enforce it.  In other words, in the English system, the court fits the law to the case, making case law, whereas in the Continental system, the court fits the case to the law.  (In American today, the courts do both.  The court of original jurisdiction applies the law.  Appellate courts test the law.) The English system is better at protecting individual rights because those are the implicit foundation for judging the law and for making new rulings that create precedents.

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NOT INVENTED HERE

I believe that the best way to define and protect intellectual property is to follow the academic model. Invention and discovery are highly valued. Plagiarism is severely punished. However, the longer the bibliography, the better: you must acknowledge the shoulders on which you stand.  You get full credit for your original work, even if it is only a book review.  It remains that the academic researcher holds a very narrow claim.  Many people can "market" their own presentations of the same idea; but the work of others must also be acknowledged.  The person who published first gets the most credit.

Intellectual property is different from land.  Land is rival and exclusionary: if I have it, you cannot; and my having it prevents you from it.  Most economists define "public goods" as non-rival and non-exclusionary. A sunset is an example.  That also applies to an idea.  The difference is that sunsets exist in nature and ideas are man-made.

Back in the 1970s Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw (writing as Skye d'Aureous and Natalee Hall in their Libertarian Connection) insisted against even Ludwig von Mises that beauty must be created, and truth must be discovered; so, those, too are economic goods.  When they are created by human action, beauty and truth deserve protection under law.  

1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen
(Wikipedia)

That being true, it is also true that beauty, truth, and intellectual property in general are not land.  You can buy an artist's painting and never share it; but once you do, you cannot take back the experience. Anyone who saw Henry Ford driving his automobile could make one of their own.  More to the point, the idea of a "horseless carriage" was practicable since the development of steam engines in the eighteenth century.  Several experimental devices were constructed and tested, including those of Karl Benz, Wilhelm Maybach, and Gottlieb Daimler all of which used internal combustion engines. The automobile was not unique in having a long pedigree.

NOT INVENTED HERE

Originally published online July 23, 1993

Part 1. THE TELEGRAPH

Samuel F.B. Morse was a painter.  Returning from Europe in 1832, he was told over dinner that electricity could be sent along a wire of any length.  From 1837 to 1844 he worked at perfecting his telegraph.  A stipend from Congress in 1843 for $30,000 funded the construction of a line from Washington to Baltimore along which "What hath God wrought" flashed in May 24, 1844.

The Cooke-Wheatstione patent. June 10, 1837.
(Distantwriting.co.uk)

Samuel Morse met some resistance when he applied for a patent on the telegraph.  Others had already announced similar devices.  In fact, Galvani himself (1737-1798) theorized that electricity could be used to send messages. On February 1, 1753, Charles Morison, living in the town of Renfrew, wrote to the Scots Magazine describing his telegraph.  Small, light balls were suspended and dropped, one for each letter of the alphabet.  Morison's article describes the system in full detail and then goes on to suggest two alternatives.  One is a simple system of bells.  The other method, from our vantage point in time, can only be called a teletypewriter.  Morison's correspondence from 1753 was reprinted in The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review (London) for November 5, 1886. 

Part 2. THE TELEPHONE

On May 15, 1876, The Telegraphic Journal reprinted an article from Scientific American Supplement of February 5, 1876.  That piece describes a telephone built by a "Professor Reuss of Friedrichsdorf, near Homburg, Germany."  Also referenced in the same article is a telephone built by the Polytechnic Club of the American Institute and demonstrated at Cooper Union school in New York in 1868.

Telephone 1893 from Imagining the Internet
from Elon University.  It could not send a selfie.

"It is recorded that Minerva sprang full armed from the brain of Jupiter... The speaking telephone is the Minerva of to-day and Prof. Bell is the Jupiter."  So quipped Prof. A. E. Dolbear writing in The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review (London) for October 8, 1886.

According to Dolbear, Bell himself, addressing the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on May 10, 1876, referenced no fewer than 60 papers on the subject.  Dolbear's article highlights eight of these.  European journals from the 1850s and 1860s provide texts and graphics to show how sound can be sent electrically. Dolbear concludes: "However much the present telephones may perform better than the early ones, it is only a matter of degree.  It will also be apparent that one who was acquainted with the literature on the telehone previous to 1876, was fairly well equipped for making telephones, and lastly he will be persuaded that the telephone of 1876 had a pedigree and was not a new creation."

An anonymous article in the same journal for November 26, 1886, tells of an American patent (number 77,882) granted to Royal E. House in 1868 for "an electro-phonetic receiver."

Part 3. THE TELEVISION

In 1914, Gosset & Dunlap published Victor Appleton's Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone.  We are still waiting for the commercial visiphone, though several RJ-11 compatibles are available.  The fact is that the device built by the fictional Tom Swift came from the pages of the technical journals of the day. 

The Telegraphic Journal for February 15, 1879, reported the construction of a "telectroscope" by "M. Senlecq of Ardres, France."  This was hardly front-page news.  "The device consists in an autographic telegraph similar to D'Arlincourt's but the sending pencil is of selenium, which, as is well known, varies in electrical resistance with the degree of intensity of the light falling on it."  Again on March 1, 1881, the same journal reported on a "tele-photography" device based on a selenium cell. 

George R. Carey's selenium-based system
for recording and  transmitting images
(June 5, 1890)

Later, in March of 1899, the Journal of the Franklin Institute carried an article entitled "Seeing at a Distance by Electricity."  This telectroscope also depended on the photovoltaic properties of selenium.  "So rapid are the oscillations of the mirrors that the tenth part of a second is sufficient to analyze the image of an object in the transmitter, and to render it visible at the receiving station.  It is therefore possible to transmit a continuous action, such as a theatre performance over the the wires of the telectroscope, since the pictures received follow one another so rapidly as to produce the impression of a moving image, just as the numerous separate pictures of a chomo photographic apparatus reproduce past actions."

By September 19, 1908, Scientific American could report that a "New Telephotographic Device" was an improvement on four previous methods.  None of these was the one used by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884, though Nipkow is commonly cited as an important contributor to the idea of "television."

Part 4. FAX

In 1972, I worked for the Varsity Cab Company of East Lansing, Michigan.  The office was a Western Union station and they had a fax machine.  It was crude, even by the standards of the day and no one seemed very excited by it.  In truth, fax was widely used along railroad lines for sending orders.

Associated Press wirephoto (fax) of President Kennedy
receiving President Woodrow Wilson's
Hammond typewriter. Image from the
OzTypewriter website of Canberra.

Electrical Communication, the ITT technical journal, carried articles in 1940 and 1943 describing how convenient it is to be able to send hand-written orders via telegraph.  The ITT devices allowed the sender to specify the number of copies so that each member of the train crew could have their own.

Actually, fax was old technology by then.  Scientific American for December 21, 1907, and for June 12 and August 21 of 1909 reported on two different devices for sending black and white raster graphics via telegraph.  By this time, the idea was 20 years old.

The Journal of the Franklin Institute for December, 1885, tells of "fac-simile."  A paper by Edward J. Houston reported on the "Delaney apparatus."  "Writing, sketches, maps, etc., produced at one end of a telegraphic apparatus are automatically reproduced at the other."

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Objective Intellectual Property Law
Patent Nonsense
U.S. Patent Law Does Not Add Up
Copy Rights and Wrongs