Short Takes #25: The Hyper-Lightspeed Antenna

Hey Dan, thanks for joining in. Good solid information, appreciate it. Hard to believe someone would go to this much work, pay for a patent attorney and so on. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Important not to confuse 'feasibility' with "enablement".

Claims don't have to describe a "useful" invention. They have to describe a novel invention that is not prior art, not obvious to one skilled in the art, and one the passes the flag of enablement. Among others.

Patent examiners have a checklist that requires hitting the high points of rejection. They also are often reviewed by supervisors.

Patent examiners in modern times have a bad habit of asserting obviousness, rejecting most or all claims in round 1, and then making it the task of the inventor/RPA/patent attorney to show why that is wrong. Essentially your lawyer bill is often, but not always, paid to 'educate' examiners.

Note that inventors, on rejection, can ask the examiner to suggest wording on a claim that would take the patent application 'in allowance' on a claim.

I have found examiners to actually be pretty friendly and informed--and better informed after a phone call!

73
Chip W1YW

 

One of the parts of patent law that is most fraught with peril is that claims are interpreted with the meanings of the terms as used in the disclosure. Therefore it can be nearly impossible to know if you're infringing on another patent or not, and establishing infringement one way or the other can be very difficult. It's basically impossible to be certain what a claim means until its litigated, so that patents end up being more valuable in their ability to intimidate potential rivals rather than their utility as describing an invention (which was their original purpose), even though they are supposed to be enabling. As an inventor, it's more or less impossible for you to know if you are infringing or not, and if it is established that you willfully infringed because you read a patent to understand its contents, you might end up paying triple damages. The uncertainty of the outcome of litigation can make it risky for both the plaintiff and the defendant, especially if embarrassing material comes out during discovery, and so some sort of settlement is usually encouraged.

Because of this, the contents of a patent are often less material that its origins, and whether or not it might be attacked on grounds of existing prior art, or attacked because it is not the work of the inventors, or based on work of someone who was not credited as an inventor, or an important piece of background material was withheld known to the inventors, because a defense based on whether it is enabling or whether or not the claim language covers the infringing invention could be tricky. When it gets to this level or argument, only the lawyers win.

73,
Dan
KW4TI

 

I was production manager of the local radio station. I went in to work the midday shift and found the morning man a basket case. We recorded al the scripts because we didn't think we could get through them live. He had the cart in the machine and was ready to interrupt network news when the network announcer said "Hold It'!, which he did. After that, he didn't say a word on air and played records until I got there.

 

Mikel, sounds like your morning man saved the day by playing records. I would indeed have been pretty nervous myself. I was in the studio at Ohio University when the teletype machine went nuts with ringing (something it only did if there were REALLY big news stories coming). I looked over at the machine and it had printed out that students had been shot and killed by the National Guard at Kent State University, right up the road from us. It was a shocker. Dave, W7DGJ

 

I see what others have mentioned. "A Known Speed of Light" and a "New Dimension" Theoretical yes, maybe...at least enough for issuance. Practical or usable, that would be a NO from what I have read.

 

This seems idiotic, the submitter is attempting to redefine terms. Your punking us for April 1 right Dave?
Bob H N9NRW

 

Many entities are willing to spend money on patents to see what "sticks to the wall" universities and research centers have patent lawyers on staff. I worked at Honeywell and we had a huge team of them.

 

To be honest, I imagine there are some who seek a 'vanity patent'. I have met and known about 60 independent inventors--its not as if we have conventions-and all of them either had the expectation of benefiting from their patent, or actually had done so. One became a billionaire. Another drives a Maserati. Yet another has a 70 foot yacht. Most are still trying to climb the success ladder (God bless'em!)

Some are hams.

Not one applied for a patent for their vanity.

The 'wall of lawyers ' is quite real and IMO often (but not always) unethical. Many of those inventors do NOT actually invent, but throw out ideas. Now, ideation is a key and early component in 'pre-invention'. But its not invention. If so, we would have to say Jules Verne invented the the moon rocket and Capek invented AI robotics. Ideas are not inventions. BUT--'wall of lawyers' like to wordsmith so it SOUNDS like there are inventions. Thus the sad state of affairs where an idea becomes a patent without demonstrable novel invention. Assertions but not enablement. Patent without demonstrable benefit.

Patent examiners nowadays keep enablement as a negative in rare case--such as an invisibility cloak. I know. I did it. I showed them the data and invited them for a demo. A TLA colleague had come for a demo and apparently conveyed what he saw to the USPTO. Patent issued.

Obviousness and prior art are the reasons given for rejection, I would say, about 85-90% of the time.

73
Chip W1YW

 

And quite interesting!

73

 

Hi Bob -- Nope! Directly out of the US Patent Office. You can find it on Google Patent as well, Dave

 

The last job I had, before retirement, involved producing a high-speed (pico-seconds), high-current (kilo-amperes), high-voltage (kilo-volts) optically-triggered switch using semi-insulating gallium arsenide wafer material. This type of switch had been extensively tested and explored at Sandia National Laboratories in the 1990s for their Z-Pinch fusion experiments. Later, it was apparently abandoned because of its inability to conduct uniformly after triggering. The discharge occurred in "lightning-like" threads whose current density caused failure of the device after just a few trigger cycles. It's main "claim to fame" was its ability to be triggered into avalanche conduction with very little optical energy, whereupon it remained conducting until the current decreased to less than an certain value. Pretty much like a solid-state thyratron.

Sandia was eventually able to "solve" their problem by using cylindrical lenses to direct the illumination onto narrow parallel paths that more or less forced the current into narrow parallel channels. This was considered to be impractical by Sandia, so they "gave up" on the idea and went with other optically-triggered switches.

A few decades later the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, needing a high-speed, high-current, high-voltage switch to build an EMP simulator, suggested that we use our particle accelerator to implant oxygen ions in parallel paths to make the GaAs an insulator where the ions were implanted. Areas that did not receive oxygen ions were free to conduct after illumination by a near-infrared laser diode source.

So we bought some GaAs wafers from China, sliced and diced them to make Photo Conductive Semi-conductor Switches (PCSS), had some stainless steel slotted masks made, and proceeded to implant oxygen ions through the mask at about eleven or twelve different energies. After adding, through vacuum evaporation in an e-beam furnace, layers of gold, germanium and nickel for electrical contacts at opposite ends of the PCSS, we sent some off to our sub-contractor L3 Pulse Sciences in California for testing. The result was a million dollar follow-on contract to build a prototype modular EMP generator, which was successful.

My company tried to obtain a patent on the ion isolation implant technique, naming me and my supervisor as the inventors. It was twice denied by the patent office examiner on the basis of "prior art" although clearly it was not. The head cheese shrugged her shoulders and moved on to other things. I was allowed to hang around on overhead funding for another year, but they decided there was no path to profitability for their particle accelerator. So they "fired" me, but provided a letter saying it wasn't my fault and I could draw unemployment benefits while I sought another job. I was more than seventy years old by then, and drawing social security income because I was now on part-time status. So I retired. Who wants to hire someone that old anyway?

 

Hey Hop! Good to have you here, thanks for the comment. Man, that is some kind of sad story of innovation, isn't it? Sounds like you've been right on the firing line (of innovation, that is) most of your career. I wish I had the brains to do that kind of work, even though as you have demonstrated, the work output isn't always treated as it should be. Instead, I worked as a headhunter finding scientists and engineers to work on big time investments into innovation, across the biotech/medical/device industries. Never worked in aerospace or defense, where so much goes on. In your story above, you were certainly not treated well by the examiner that you had to deal with. Don't you agree that SO MUCH of the success of a patent application has to do with the examiner? As I mentioned somewhere in this thread or in the article, there's a website out there that tells you about the different examiners and how easy/tough it will be to get their buy-in to the application. The guy responsible for this antenna still works in the USPTO. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Thanks for your comment, Dave! I have been aware of the problems associated with patents for quite some time. It is these problems that make we want to discourage youngsters (anyone younger than 60?) from attempting to secure their name on a patent.

Many folks don't know that patents are NEVER issued to corporations. Only living, breathing, people may be granted a patent. The patent holder may grant a corporation the right to use the patent, for which UES pays their employees one dollar. The problem is this: only corporations can afford the process of getting and defending a patent. Unless you are independently wealthy (like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, just to give two examples) the cost of obtaining and defending a patent is beyond your means.

I ran across another problem while working for the University of Dayton Research Institute in the 1970s. I was then an electronics research technician, working full time, but going to school part time to obtain a BEE (Bachelor or Electrical Engineering) degree. I was also working closely with an electrical engineer, Karl Leinberger, who was trying to measure the speed of hypervelocity projectiles shot inside a two-stage gas gun. This was part of research the Air Force did for NASA to evaluate meteorite damage and the possible effects of such damage on our astronauts. They were preparing for a manned Moon mission.

Anyway, Karl had discovered a way to use a Doppler velocity laser interferometer to take "snapshots" of the projectile velocity. He wanted to patent the improvements he had made on a commercial VISAR (Velocity Inteferometer System for Any Reflector). It never happened.

Karl was also involved in our laser weapons investigations, building calorimeters to measure laser power. These devices were simply a stack of thin, black-anodized, aluminum wedges, bolted together with a thermistor or thermocouple embedded in the base. The entire contraption was thermally insulated from the environment while being laser-illuminated on the tips of the wedges. Light hitting the sides of the wedges was either absorbed (leading to heating) or it was bounced back and forth between adjacent wedges, which eventually also led to heating. Very little energy was reflected from the sharp tips of the wedges, but I did see one calorimeter whose tips had been melted off, so the design was not a panacea for measuring laser energy and power. Measuring the temperature rise that occurred after illumination with a pulsed laser source gave a rough measure of the energy in the pulse. No patent, AFAIK, was issued for that either.

Karl was full of ideas, but he was never able to get the university to get behind him on filing for patents. I lost contact with him shortly after I graduated from UD in 1978, but I heard later that he had given up on engineering. Sad.

My situation with the GaAs PCSS devices was more a cultural matter than anything else. UES, Inc., my employer, was (and still is) top-heavy with PhD scientists who make their living from small business innovative research (SBIR) contracts that the Government sets aside money for each year. Although these contracts are competitively awarded, it is not too difficult for a credentialed scientist to suck off this particular government tit for decades or longer. It's either that or do something productive.

My supervisor's entire career at UES was funded by Phase I and the occasional Phase II SBIR contract. If a particular type of research led to a profitable product, a Phase III outcome, it was spun off as another company to preserve the SBIR eligibility of UES. Having the company, which was privately owned with only employee stockholders, being handed over to the CEO's daughter, after her post-graduate bio-engineering education and his retirement, only served to cement this paradigm as official UES canon.

I don't think UES really wanted a patent that could have brought in huge profits, because that would have put a lot of PhDs out of work and would have changed the bio-engineering direction, toward which she wanted the company to go.

So, without consulting me, UES had their corporate attorney write up and file the patent papers. My boss may have been involved in the application, but I only got to read the patent application after it was rejected by the USPTO the first time. I was not consulted when they tried again and were rejected again. Eventually I was "fired" because they no longer wanted anything to do with the particle accelerator. Nor, apparently, with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency either. That decision finalized my decision to become a retired warmonger... for now.

Hop - AC8NS

 

Super interesting story, Hop. Thank you. Dave