ZEITGEIST

The history of invention is populated with eccentric and willful characters, stories of serendipity, and accompanying flashes of insight. Bob Kearns was one of those characters. The tale of his epic and lonely fight against Ford Motor Company, which ended up destroying his marriage and taking over his life, kicks off this fascinating new collection of magazine stories by New Yorker Staff Writer John Seabrook (pictured to the right.)

This collection, as Seabrook explains in the book's introduction, is "about inventors, innovators, engineers, and entrepreneurs, some of whom are trying to get something built (or, in the case of the Antikythera Mechanism, re-built) and some of whom are coping with the consequences of their inventions." 

In addition to Kearns, we meet David Karp, "The Fruit Detective." Karp is a re-habillitated drug addict and Wall Street trader, who becomes a man obsessed with fruit. His work is to track down exotic fruits for high-end Manhattan groceries. We also meet Will Wright, "The Game Master," who is the creator of Spore; Chuck Hoberman, the creator of the Hoberman Sphere; Leslie Robertson, the engineer behind the design of the World Trade Center; and Stan Winston, the Hollywood genius and creator of the monster robot-puppets in blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and Aliens.

In the last chapter, we even meet the author's grandfather Charles Franklin (CF) Seabrook and many other members of his family, who were caught up in the drama of CF's business empire. CF turned his own father's farm and others' in South Jersey into Seabrook Farms, a large and extremely successful producer of frozen vegetables. In 1955, Life magazine called Seabrook Farms "the biggest vegetable factory on earth."

Seabrook maps out these individuals' lives, and the circumstances that produced many of the mechanisms and inventions that now make up the fabric of our daily lives. By the time you finish reading "Game Master," you'll have a new appreciation for the part in Spore that lets you colonize other planets. And you'll never look at a packet of Seabrook Farms frozen broccoli raab or spinach the same again after reading "The Spinach King." The same goes for the way you think about the Golden Gate Bridge after you read "American Scrap." 

The book's title refers to the first story of the collection, which in October was released as a movie starring Greg Kinnear as Bob Kearns. Kearns is the central animating character as the single-minded  seeker of justice who spent three decades of his life suing Ford, Chrysler and General Motors for stealing his patented configuration that brought the world his version of the intermittent  windshield wiper. The amazing aspect of the yarn is that Kearns managed to win his cases by doing much of his own lawyering.

Seabrook's story about Kearns first appeared in 1993. Nevertheless, it still resonates because it's increasingly ideas, rather than by manufacturing, that drive economic growth in the developed world. Thus any stories that bring color and drama to the dry subject of patent law performs the important job of illustrating to the public at large why there's a crucial need to clear the jungle-vine thicket of patent laws and litigation that has grown to threaten a crucial component of economic growth. Admittedly, Kearns' story is unusual, but Seabrook takes this story-telling opportunity to explain how the patent system has evolved, and why we need to reform it.

Seabrook manages to weave in the nuances of a complex reality, and to explain the history of how we reward inventors as he tells us the strange story of Kearns and the inadvertent role he played in creating our mangled system, which Congress, the Supreme Court and industry lobbyists have spent three years and millions of dollars trying to improve.

Kearns, a mechanical engineer,  came up with the idea of the intermittent windshield wiper in 1962 as he drove through Detroit in the November rain thinking about one of his eyes. A champagne cork had damaged it when he was opening a bottle on his wedding night nine-years earlier. He thought: Why can't windshield wipers be more like blinking eyes?

Kearns worked on the idea in his basement over the next year and showed it to executives at Ford, which was also working on a similar idea, by Seabrook's account. Those executives liked Kearns' idea and gave him the specifications that his system would have to meet before they would use his concept.

But despite the initial display of enthusiasm, the Ford people ended up turning their backs on Kearns. Nevertheless, he had obviously made an impression: Ford come out with its own intermittent windshield wipers with the same design six years later. Other car manufacturers followed.

Kearns eventually sued Ford and the other car companies for patent infringement in 1978. It took 12 years and the enlistement of his entire family as paralegals for his case to get to trial. When it did, the judge ended up declaring a mistrial because the jury couldn't decide how much he should be awarded for Ford's infringement. Kearns eventually settled the suit for a little more than $10 million. This came after several sets of fired lawyers and a refusal of a previous offer to settle for $30 million. Kearns declared that his crusade was never about money, but about justice.  Unlike many patent holders of modern times, Kearns actually dreamed of manufacturing his own windshield wipers -- he wasn't out to land a windfall from a giant corporation.

Kearns also won another infringement suit against Chrysler. But he never obtained the judgement of willful infringement that he spent his life campaigning for.

"The moral is that unlawful conduct does pay," he said after the Chrysler trial concluded. "I don't see how any of us could go home to our children and say that it does not."

After everything that Seabrook documented -- for example the fact that Ford and other companies at the time were already exploring the idea of intermittent windshield wipers -- Kearns' conclusion is one that best illustrates the frustrating reality behind society's attempts to pinpoint the originator of ideas: That many people have ideas, some of which are obvious to those who are expert in the field, and some that are not, and attempts to draw lines that everyone can agree on is hard.

The trick is to agree on the rules for drawing those lines. That is something that Congress and the courts need to accomplish in 2009.

(Images: Courtesy St. Martin's Press. On the right is the author John Seabrook, who is the author of "Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention." He's also the descendant of "The Spinach King," one of the characters in his concluding story of the volume.) 

The history of invention is populated with eccentric and willful characters, stories of serendipity, and accompanying flashes of insight. Bob Kearns was one of those characters. The tale of his epic and lonely fight against Ford Motor Company, which ended up destroying his marriage and taking over his life, kicks off this fascinating new collection of magazine stories by New Yorker Staff Writer John Seabrook (pictured to the right.)

This collection, as Seabrook explains in the book's introduction, is "about inventors, innovators, engineers, and entrepreneurs, some of whom are trying to get something built (or, in the case of the Antikythera Mechanism, re-built) and some of whom are coping with the consequences of their inventions." 

In addition to Kearns, we meet David Karp, "The Fruit Detective." Karp is a re-habillitated drug addict and Wall Street trader, who becomes a man obsessed with fruit. His work is to track down exotic fruits for high-end Manhattan groceries. We also meet Will Wright, "The Game Master," who is the creator of Spore; Chuck Hoberman, the creator of the Hoberman Sphere; Leslie Robertson, the engineer behind the design of the World Trade Center; and Stan Winston, the Hollywood genius and creator of the monster robot-puppets in blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and Aliens.

In the last chapter, we even meet the author's grandfather Charles Franklin (CF) Seabrook and many other members of his family, who were caught up in the drama of CF's business empire. CF turned his own father's farm and others' in South Jersey into Seabrook Farms, a large and extremely successful producer of frozen vegetables. In 1955, Life magazine called Seabrook Farms "the biggest vegetable factory on earth."

Seabrook maps out these individuals' lives, and the circumstances that produced many of the mechanisms and inventions that now make up the fabric of our daily lives. By the time you finish reading "Game Master," you'll have a new appreciation for the part in Spore that lets you colonize other planets. And you'll never look at a packet of Seabrook Farms frozen broccoli raab or spinach the same again after reading "The Spinach King." The same goes for the way you think about the Golden Gate Bridge after you read "American Scrap." 

The book's title refers to the first story of the collection, which in October was released as a movie starring Greg Kinnear as Bob Kearns. Kearns is the central animating character as the single-minded  seeker of justice who spent three decades of his life suing Ford, Chrysler and General Motors for stealing his patented configuration that brought the world his version of the intermittent  windshield wiper. The amazing aspect of the yarn is that Kearns managed to win his cases by doing much of his own lawyering.

Seabrook's story about Kearns first appeared in 1993. Nevertheless, it still resonates because it's increasingly ideas, rather than by manufacturing, that drive economic growth in the developed world. Thus any stories that bring color and drama to the dry subject of patent law performs the important job of illustrating to the public at large why there's a crucial need to clear the jungle-vine thicket of patent laws and litigation that has grown to threaten a crucial component of economic growth. Admittedly, Kearns' story is unusual, but Seabrook takes this story-telling opportunity to explain how the patent system has evolved, and why we need to reform it.

Seabrook manages to weave in the nuances of a complex reality, and to explain the history of how we reward inventors as he tells us the strange story of Kearns and the inadvertent role he played in creating our mangled system, which Congress, the Supreme Court and industry lobbyists have spent three years and millions of dollars trying to improve.

Kearns, a mechanical engineer,  came up with the idea of the intermittent windshield wiper in 1962 as he drove through Detroit in the November rain thinking about one of his eyes. A champagne cork had damaged it when he was opening a bottle on his wedding night nine-years earlier. He thought: Why can't windshield wipers be more like blinking eyes?

Kearns worked on the idea in his basement over the next year and showed it to executives at Ford, which was also working on a similar idea, by Seabrook's account. Those executives liked Kearns' idea and gave him the specifications that his system would have to meet before they would use his concept.

But despite the initial display of enthusiasm, the Ford people ended up turning their backs on Kearns. Nevertheless, he had obviously made an impression: Ford come out with its own intermittent windshield wipers with the same design six years later. Other car manufacturers followed.

Kearns eventually sued Ford and the other car companies for patent infringement in 1978. It took 12 years and the enlistement of his entire family as paralegals for his case to get to trial. When it did, the judge ended up declaring a mistrial because the jury couldn't decide how much he should be awarded for Ford's infringement. Kearns eventually settled the suit for a little more than $10 million. This came after several sets of fired lawyers and a refusal of a previous offer to settle for $30 million. Kearns declared that his crusade was never about money, but about justice.  Unlike many patent holders of modern times, Kearns actually dreamed of manufacturing his own windshield wipers -- he wasn't out to land a windfall from a giant corporation.

Kearns also won another infringement suit against Chrysler. But he never obtained the judgement of willful infringement that he spent his life campaigning for.

"The moral is that unlawful conduct does pay," he said after the Chrysler trial concluded. "I don't see how any of us could go home to our children and say that it does not."

After everything that Seabrook documented -- for example the fact that Ford and other companies at the time were already exploring the idea of intermittent windshield wipers -- Kearns' conclusion is one that best illustrates the frustrating reality behind society's attempts to pinpoint the originator of ideas: That many people have ideas, some of which are obvious to those who are expert in the field, and some that are not, and attempts to draw lines that everyone can agree on is hard.

The trick is to agree on the rules for drawing those lines. That is something that Congress and the courts need to accomplish in 2009.

(Images: Courtesy St. Martin's Press. On the right is the author John Seabrook, who is the author of "Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention." He's also the descendant of "The Spinach King," one of the characters in his concluding story of the volume.) 

Barack Obama's team arguably ran the greatest presidential campaign ever -- in the sense that it pulled out the rug from underneath the political establishment.

Of course the internet played a crucial role in raising money, building support for the candidate between new coalitions of people, and spreading his message. But just how important was that role, and can other political candidates replicate the Obama campaign's success?

To examine those questions, the Center for American Progress Action Fund recently held an event to sort through how it all worked. Threat Level participated in the discussion, as did several reporters from The Washington Post, Campaigns & Elections, and the founder, the editor-in-chief, and a contributor to TechPresident, a technology and politics web site based in New York City. You can view the panel discussion online by clicking through this link. 

Andrew Rasiej, TechPresident's co-founder, put his view out there in stark relief: Politicians' growing awareness of the power of social networks and internet tools will transform the business of politics in the same way that the realization that the earth is round transformed the maritime industry.

He offered a simple yet illustrative example during the panel discussion: His 82-year-old father was sending around Obama YouTube videos to an e-mail list of 50 of his friends during the campaign. Rasiej noted that his father never would have previously done anything like this in the offline world. It would have taken too much time, and besides, sending physical pamphlets to friends or phoning them about his support would have been too gauche, he said.      

Rasiej's example is just one of several such anecdotes I've heard during the course of this campaign. During a recent radio show hosted by Mario Armstrong, where I was a guest, several callers dialed in to share their own personal stories of how they had plugged into the Obama campaign through their gadgets or through the internet.

One man told a similar story of how his 72-year-old mother started texting for the first time. She spent the campaign forwarding all of the Obama's text messages to her friends and relatives. The show took place just a few days after Election Day, and the callers shouted down the phone lines with excitement. Their adrenaline and euphoria was still pumping through them as they recounted their stories of participation.

What became clear to me, during the past year-and-a-half, but especially in the very last phase of the 2008 presidential campaign, is that this cycle arrived at the tipping point of several converging factors, and that several specific political professionals who had anticipated this moment for years had finally found a candidate who could fulfill their ideas of how their "ideal" campaign could be run.

One of those people, for example, is Harvard professor and grassroots organizing guru Marshall Ganz. You can read more about him here, and hear an interview that NPR's On The Media show did with him below.   

Of course, there were plenty of external circumstances that tipped things in the Obama campaign's favor. Nevertheless, an undeniably crucial factor is that Web 2.0 and database technologies, and cell phone penetration had reached critical mass. That enabled millions of everyday people who aren't the latte-drinking political junkies of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign to easily get involved -- though many of those "Deaniacs" lead the charge this year-- four years later.

Obama's campaign had, crucially, hired a team who knew how to wield these tech tools in a smart way, bearing out the truism that every technologist knows: The tools are only as good as the people use them.       

The discussion between the panelists at the recent CAP Action Fund event yielded several useful insights, and I thought it would be helpful to summarize a few:

• Although it can appear that social networks such as Facebook,  MiGente, BlackPlanet, MySpace etc may offer less than meets the eye, their influence shouldn't be underestimated. They can exponentially magnify the scale of grassroots political campaigns. Nowadays, when people post a badge on their social nework, the aggregate numbers could add up to a couple of hundred thousand accounts online v. a couple of hundred cars with bumper stickers, noted TechPresident Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Micah Sifry.   
• Social networks external to campaigns are good places to reach supporters where they already conduct a portion of their social lives. The activity there can be tapped into from external campaign sites. For example, Facebook has an interface called Facebook Connect that enabled the Obama campaign to let supporters provide their Facebook friends with updates on the campaign activities that they recorded on my.BarackObama.com.
• The idea that politicians would only reach high-schoolers through Facebook advertising is a myth. Alan Rosenblatt, CAP's associate director for online advocacy, noted that a third of the 30 million Facebook members who hadn't opted out of the targeted-ad system are over 30, and 3.3 million are over 40.
• The internet, mobile and Web 2.0 technologies present a fundamental paradox to political campaigns: Obama's campaign exploited these networks in several instances to bypass the media and to connect directly to supporters (remember the vp announcement that told supporters that they could watch a Joe-Biden-Obama rally on BarackObama.com the next day?) But citizen-journalists such as Mayhill Fowler proved how that direct access is a two-way street, and can also take away message control from candidates.
• Microblogging service Twitter was most useful as a source of backchannel conversation at live events such as the speeches during the conventions. It's also useful for crowdsourced live reporting, such as when TechPresident teamed up with numerous organizations to live report voting irregularities through the Twitter Vote Report.
• Web 2.0 revived the role that political humor plays in underscoring some of the more absurd moments of political campaigns. Twitter, for example, hosted Fake Sarah Palin. But scores of other talented citizens used tools such as YouTube and their own brilliant senses of humor to make salient political points. 

The panelists made several other interesting points, and again, you can download the discussion. Since I've received several requests for thoughts on the internet-enabled campaign of 2008, I thought this session would provide a useful resource.

The Obama team ran an astonishingly disciplined people-powered campaign that vanquished the doubts of many long-time Washington, DC insiders, who privately wondered whether Obama could win the general election. Reams more will be written about how, exactly, the team accomplished this.

Gallery: Black Mesa Source

Gallery: Nikon announces D3x

Other than Kannagi, I haven’t really been super-wowed this season so far. Some series started off fast, but many tailed off quickly. I dunno if it’s the weather or the holidays or what, but everything felt a bit bleh this month.

Top Five This Month:

1. Kannagi: The voice work has impressed me more than any series in a long time. I just like all the characters, even if there is not really much of a story. Every character brings something each episode, and there’s even some Nagi mystery now.
2. Michiko to Hatchin: I like the direction this show is going in, and it feels quite a bit like Cowboy Bebop in its pacing and stylishness. Of course, this probably means we will be in for some massive sadness in the final third.
3. Gundam 00 Second Season: I’m rooting for Marie/Soma to pull a Villetta and shoot Allelujah in the kidney (before showing up as a gym teacher at a high school and then getting knocked up). The names of Ribbons’ henchmen have been getting dumber and dumber with every episode, and there is no end in sight.
4. Soul Eater: I have to admit that I kinda liked watching Maka get punched in the face. I bet the next day her cheek was all Black and BREW.
5. ToraDora: Taiga continues to tread water with me, but I enjoy the rest of the crew. Ryuuji is still my favorite, but I enjoy evil Ami and retarded-genki Minori.

Rising:

• Yozakura Quartet: I think we’re starting to get out of this character introduction hell, but this story really is moving unnaturally slowly. It is tragic when the universe conspires to keep a siscon away from his beloved neko-mimi imouto.

Falling:

• Shikabane Hime: Aka: This show continues to be kinda boring. The washed out dark palette is not really doing it for me either.

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