Inventors Whose Ideas Took Decades to Reach a Wider Market

Nipkow applied for his scanning patent in 1884, and Germany granted it the next year. As the holes in the spinning disk passed in front of an image, they scanned it line by line. John Logie Baird’s company sold mechanical Televisors based on that principle in 1930, years before electronic systems took over.

Carlson and Otto Kornei made their first successful xerographic copy in 1938. The technique reached buyers in earlier machines, including Haloid’s manually operated Model A. The Xerox 914, unveiled in 1959 and first shipped in 1960, brought automatic copying on plain paper to offices.

Woodland and Bernard Silver received their patent for a machine-readable code in 1952. The grocery industry eventually standardized a different shape, the linear UPC developed by an IBM team led by George Laurer. The first retail UPC scan came in 1974, after stores and manufacturers agreed on a mark their scanners could read.

Blumlein filed his stereo patent in 1931 and made experimental recordings with his team at EMI. Commercial stereo discs followed in the late 1950s. His demonstrations let you hear the problem the patent addressed: keeping the apparent location of sounds intact when they are played back.

Engelbart’s idea for a pointing device became a working prototype in 1964 with lead engineer Bill English and colleagues at SRI. Engelbart demonstrated a later mouse in 1968. The Xerox Star in 1981 and the Macintosh in 1984 put the device alongside on-screen objects and commands that users could point to.

Babbage proposed an engine that would calculate and print tables, and a working section of his design was built in 1832. Georg and Edvard Scheutz made a machine that could do both jobs. The Dudley Observatory bought their engine and received it in 1857, a practical market for a kind of machine Babbage never finished.

Whittingham began work on rechargeable lithium batteries at Exxon in 1972. A version reached a Swiss clockmaker in small numbers. Work by John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino helped bring lithium-ion cells to market in 1991, and by the end of the decade they had become a common power source for laptops and cell phones.

At Bell Labs, Boyle and George Smith sketched the charge-coupled device in 1969. Michael Tompsett later helped turn it into a practical image sensor. It found early specialized uses, including video cameras fitted to airliners in 1980, and reached professional digital still photography with systems such as Kodak’s in 1991.

Sasson’s 1975 Kodak prototype showed that a camera could store a photo as digital data. Kodak brought out a professional digital camera system in 1991. Twenty years after the prototype, Casio’s QV-10 helped open up consumer digital photography by letting people review a picture on the camera’s built-in screen.

Ohl’s early 1940s experiments with silicon at Bell Labs helped lay the groundwork for the practical solar cell Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson developed in 1954. Satellites were an early application. In the 1970s, cheaper cells made uses such as offshore warning lights and railroad crossings more affordable.

Whittle filed his jet-engine patent in 1930, and his engine powered the Gloster E.28/39 test flight in 1941. Commercial jet passengers flew on the de Havilland Comet in 1952, powered by Ghost engines developed under Frank Halford. The two aircraft trace the passage from Whittle’s early design to a market for jet travel.

Judson showed his clasp locker at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Gideon Sundback later made a more reliable fastener with interlocking teeth. B. F. Goodrich used Sundback’s version on rubber boots in the 1920s, three decades after the fair, and helped give the zipper its name.