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Credit Where Due

by Donald Christiansen

Assigning credit to one individual for a particular technical development is harder than it used to be. So much creative engineering is now done in teams that isolating one member would most likely be unfair, if not impossible. Nearly parallel work done by teams in competing organizations complicates the matter.

I always supposed that the very early formulators of electrical science, like Volta and Ampere and their contemporaries, seldom encountered these questions of priority. For one thing, there were so few of them. Some were given what is perhaps the highest individual accolade — having electrical units named for them. Others, like Kirchhoff and Fourier, were immortalized through their identification of physical laws or mathematical relationships. Most of us accept these time-honored credits as unequivocal. Yet, because these early theorists and experimenters often worked in isolation and published sparingly, they sometimes pursued similar paths to unknowingly reach similar conclusions. And because first publication might be in Latin, German, Dutch, French, Italian or English, translation delays slowed the dissemination of results. Indeed, historians question the absolute accuracy of some of the "firsts." Here are a few examples. They are not meant to denigrate the importance of these early contributors, but rather to illustrate how difficult it was even then to establish priorities and give credit where it is deserved.

• The Wheatstone Bridge was developed by Hunter Christie, a lesser-known inventor than Charles Wheatstone. But the configuration was popularized by Wheatstone, who in his lectures gave full credit to Christie.

• American physicist Joseph Henry appears to have experimentally discovered electromagnetic induction before Faraday. But Faraday was first to publish, and so was credited with the discovery. Today, it is generally accepted thet Henry discovered self-inductance, while Faraday discovered mutual inductance.

• Henry Cavendish, the meticulous British experimenter for whom the famed Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge is named, studied electrical phenomena for many years. He left stacks of unpublished works, and it was not until Joseph Maxwell, nearly a century later, edited and published a volume of Cavendish’s results that it was found that some of his major findings had predated similar conclusions by Faraday and Coulomb.

The importance of publishing

Cavendish's failure to publish during his lifetime and the consequent failure of the electrical community to credit him with significant findings may be the outstanding example of “publish or perish.” But there were others:

• Carl Friedrich Gauss would often react to fellow scientists’ disclosures by stating that he had known these things for years, but had not felt it important to publish them. Historians believe that some of these claims may be legitimate, as Gauss, a loner, had such a strong reluctance to publish.

• Hans Orsted’s experiments prompted Georg Simon Ohm to conduct his own. He is thought to have confirmed Ohm’s Law by 1825 or even earlier, although he first revealed it formally in an 1827 publication. Even so, leading physicists seemed to misunderstand or resist his findings. He was finally given full recognition when the Royal Society (London) gave him the Copley medal in 1841.

The issue of priority notwithstanding, many of the 19th-century experimenters were able to profit from their contemporaries’ work, and most gave credit to them. Orsted’s experiments produced a flurry of experiments by others, including Biot and Savart, Poisson, Faraday, Ohm and Ampere. Ampere pursued a combined theory of electricity and magnetism in the early 1820s, encouraged by Orsted's disclosures.

Maxwell, it seems, was little influenced by ego or the Not Invented Here syndrome, open to the findings of both predecessors and contemporaries, and always ready to give credit to them. He agreed that his mathematical theories on electricity and magnetism were made possible by Faraday’s experiments and his recognition of lines of force. Hertz later confirmed Maxwell’s concepts experimentally, and he became a great champion of Maxwell.

Changing times

As the electrical engineering profession moved into the 20th century, a new dimension was added. Patents became a key to establishing priority and gave the holders access to substantial monetary rewards. Among the notable cases of contentious patent disputes were these:

• Television priorities were the issue between Philo Farnsworth and RCA. Pride of invention and potential profits were both at stake for Farnsworth, while RCA's David Sarnoff was concerned principally with the latter.The storied contest entered the public domain through accounts in two recent bestselling books.

• A dispute raged on in the courts for years concerning the origin of the regenerative radio circuit. The principal contenders were its developer, Edwin Armstrong, and Lee de Forest, who claimed he had thought of it earlier. A technically illiterate Supreme Court decided in favor of de Forest. Others claiming credit were Irving Langmuir and Alexander Meissner, who sued each other as well as Armstrong and de Forest.

• A bitter legal dispute between Sperry Rand, on the one hand, and Honeywell and Control Data on the other, was based on who developed the first digital electronic computer. Although John Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert were issued the first patent, it was disclosed that John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry had actually built the first computer. Mauchley had visited Atanasoff and studied the details of his computer before applying for a patent on the ENIAC, which was ultimately assigned to Sperry Rand. Iowa State University, where the Atanasoff-Berry computer was built, had failed to file for patents, and the ENIAC patent was applied for without citing the earlier computer. The courts ultimately ruled in favor of Honeywell and Control Data, and thus belated recognition went to Atanasoff and Berry.

In today’s complex world, determining who’s first has two equally important implications for the engineer — first, peer and, sometimes, public recognition, and second, potential monetary reward. Timely recording and publication of work, and holding a first-patent position are both important. But getting your name on an important design or development will probably be as part of a team. And the chance of having an electrical unit named after you is nil — I think.

Resources

For more on the pre-20th-century electrophysicists, see:

Dibner, B., Ten Founding Fathers of the Electrical Science, Burndy Library, 1954.

The Electric Pantheon, Eta Kappa Nu, 2005.

Bordeau, S.P., Volts to Hertz, Burgess, 1982.

For more on 20th-century inventors who had to contend for credit, see:

Mollenhoff, C., Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer, Iowa State University Press, 1988.

John Vincent Atanasoff Papers, Iowa State University.
Schwartz, E. I., The Last Lone Inventor (Philo Farnsworth vs. David Sarnoff), Harper Collins, 2002.

Stashower, D., The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television, Broadway, 2002.

Lessing, L., Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, Lippincott, 1956.

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.