A few years ago I had an idea for what I thought was a very innovative software project, which I developed and which, sadly, had no market, so that was that. (or I’m a terrible salesman, take your pick).

Early on the question of patents came up. My friends, knowing even less than I, always asked if I were patenting it. Operating on a shoestring I certainly did not want to spend any money at all that I did not have to.

Articles like this make clear the reality I noticed then: the patent doesn’t matter until money is rolling in. Early on, when my project had no track record, why would I patent? Who would ever know or care unless it went somewhere? And if I became bigger than Apple, it would be all about who could afford the lawyers, and we’d take care of it then.

As it did not work out, I am sooooo glad I didn’t waste any money trying to patent anything.

I would second Gene Cavanaugh’s comments about not patenting basic research. I have just been rereading Robert M. Hazen’s _The Breakthrough: The Race for the Superconductor_ (1988, 1989). Hazen, a crystallographer at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, was a member of one of the four teams which tied for the first production of a high-temperature superconductor, a superconductor with a high enough transition temperature to be cooled by liquid nitrogen. People worked themselves into panics about who was stealing whose ideas, and employed lawyers, but in the end, nothing came of it.

One fact which comes through is that all the participants were, in hindsight, delusional. Most of the members of the leading teams came from either IBM or the old AT&T. The first was in the process of experiencing a market crash, due to the advent of small computers. The second was in the process of being split up, and was represented in the high-temperature superconductor race by people from both Bell Labs and BellCore, the research arm of the “Baby Bells.” Both IBM and the Bell family of companies would shortly reach the understanding that Nobel-grade basic science was none of their business, and that their business in a competitive market was to translate existing technology into useful products. The laboratories which produced Nobel laureates would be gutted.

There was an enthusiasm for computers built out of Josephson Junctions, and this was supposed to be a lucrative market for superconductivity. Again, with the benefit of hindsight, there were a lot of people at IBM and AT&T who hated and feared microprocessors, and were prone to fantasize about anything which would bring back giant computers, which could conveniently have their own nitrogen-liquefaction plants.

Likewise, the enthusiasts of superconductivity were trumpeting its uses in electric power, transportation, etc., but they were all pure physicists, pointedly removed from the grotty reality of electric power engineering or automotive engineering. The concerns of the electric power people tended to have to do with peak load and with power outages, ie. what happens if a short develops between one power cable and the ground, due to a falling tree, or (one case I heard about) a raccoon (Procyon Lotor) deciding to go exploring inside a transformer substation. Likewise, it was well known among automotive engineers that the limiting factor on an electric car was and is the battery, not the electric motor. The conventional electric motor, operating at 200-300 volts, is good enough, and that was what railroad locomotives had been using for fifty years previously.

What it came down to was that superconductivity turned out to be a niche technology, and high-temperature superconductivity turned out to be a niche technology within superconductivity.