Patents And Cartographic Inventions
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Patents and Cartographic Inventions
This book explores the US patent system, which helped practical minded innovators establish intellectual property rights and fulfill the need for achievement that motivates inventors and scholars alike. In this sense, the patent system was a parallel literature: a vetting institution similar to the conventional academic-scientific-technical journal insofar as the patent examiner was both editor and peer reviewer, while the patent attorney was a co-author or ghost writer. In probing evolving notions of novelty, non-obviousness, and cumulative innovation, Mark Monmonier examines rural address guides, folding schemes, world map projections, diverse improvements of the terrestrial globe, mechanical route-following machines that anticipated the GPS navigator, and the early electrical you-are-here mall map, which opened the way for digital cartography and provided fodder for patent trolls, who treat the patent largely as a license to litigate.
A Directory of Cartographic Inventors
Author: Mark S. Monmonier
language: en
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Release Date: 2018-03-10
As its title and subtitle imply, this book is a collection of short biographies of people awarded United States patents for inventions intended to improve map use or map making. We say "intended" because, as with most patented innovations, their clever ideas seldom made it to store shelves, magazine ads, or mail order catalogs-a fate shared with most improvements proposed in cartography's scientific-technical journals. This collection is a spinoff of a project focused on inventions rather than inventors. The project's principal product was Monmonier's book Patents and Cartographic Inventions: A New Perspective for Map History, published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan. As its chapter titles confirm, the emphasis was on genres of innovation like route-following devices and map folding, rather than on their inventors, whose diverse life stories could too readily distract from a narrative focused on technological trends, clever ideas, and wider impacts.
Clock and Compass
Author: Mark Monmonier
language: en
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Release Date: 2022-04-12
"A city guy who aspired to be a farmer, John Byron Plato took a three-month winter course in agriculture at Cornell before starting high school, which he left a year before graduation to fight with US troops during the Spanish-American War. After the war he worked as a draftsman, ran a veneers business, patented and manufactured a parking brake for horse-drawn delivery wagons, taught school, and ran a lumber yard. In his early thirties he bought some farmland north of Denver and began raising Guernsey cattle, which he advertised for sale in the local paper. When an interested buyer eager to see his calves couldn't find his farm, Plato realized that an RFD postal address was only good for delivering mail. Farmers had started buying cars and trucks, but without adequate maps and signage townsfolk couldn't visit them and they couldn't easily find each other. Plato's solution was a map-and-directory combo that used direction and distance from a local business center to give farmers a real address, just like city folk. He patented his invention and tried to sell it to the Post Office, which took a pass-their business was delivering mail, not facilitating travel. Because the clockface's hours provided the directions, he called his strategy the "Clock System." Some Chicago promoters became intrigued but after their plans failed to gel, he decided to produce the maps himself. Rural sociologists at Cornell, who considered the Clock System an antidote for rural isolation, encouraged him to start a business in Ithaca, where he mapped a dozen New York counties until the Great Depression intervened and he left to work as a government mapmaker in Washington. Between 1936 (after his patent had expired) and 1940, some Ithaca businessmen validated the concept by making "Compass System" maps for half the state's counties"--