“Yet I would also contextualize the response to Mohamed …”
" If Ahmed Mohamed’s technological project can help us revise our
national narratives of invention and identity, he will have achieved an
even more important milestone."
To the author,…don’t over-think this incident.
Not always. It depends on what prior arrangements have been made. I myself have two patents. The university where I worked helped with the legal end of getting the patent established and the arrangements for an outside company to market the product from one of those patents. My co-inventors and I retained rights to being identified as the creators and we also equitably divided up whatever profits between us inventors, the University, and the company. It was a good deal since I made the down payment for my house out of the deal.
There’s much true here, and although surely race is a part, I think here class and capitalism are most responsible.
At least that’s my perspective as a white, male co-inventor.
I bristle when Steve Jobs - and worse, Bill Gates - are referred to as “inventors.”
Jobs was at best an industrial designer. It was people like me and hundreds of others that brought you the smart phone in the palm of your hand. Steve Jobs just made it pretty and easy to use. But Jobs wouldn’t have understood the first thing about the radio technology needed for the iPhone.
Thanks for the comments, all. One more way to frame my goal (which we’re all achieving in this great discussion):
To me, contextualizing isn’t about explaining in a one-to-one way, suggesting that X caused Y. Partly because I don’t think events work that way or can generally be boiled down in that way. And partly here because, as I noted in the opening and in a comment above, I certainly agree that anti-Muslim sentiment and authority/police overreaction are the two most prominent factors in what happened to Mohamed. We can and should talk about those things, and we have been since the moment this story broke.
So for me, contextualizing is about recognizing that there are also longstanding histories and narratives to which current events are also always connected, and in the evolving story of which they can have a role. I believe our collective narratives of inventions and inventors have been framed in certain, limiting ways when it comes to culture, community, and identity–and that the more we can talk about those frames, the more we can work to revise and expand them as we move forward, and to create a fuller sense not only of current events but of our collective histories and identity.
Mohamed’s situation can help us do that–and the comments here have demonstrated just how many different factors and concepts can be better engaged with if we have those conversations. So thanks!
Ben
I’m an evil white male and I never got that memo.
Where’s the complaint department?
All joking aside, what was done to this kid is fucking embarrassing.
And let’s not forget that Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant. Steve also said that his time in India was key to success by learning to blend aesthetics with technology. Even Ben Carson was hugely innovative when he developed the surgical procedure to separate conjoined twins at the head–but John Hopkins deliberately downplayed that fact because it didn’t fit with the traditional archetype of the American genius.
Obviously the author’s experience is different than mine. I would credit Steve Wozniak as being among the unsung heroes… quite the opposite role than the one asserted in the article. He did after all singlehandedly invent the computer than put Steve Jobs on the map, But I guess since they were both white suburbanites, it doesn’t make sense to include them in the discussion unless Woz is somehow considered to be unfairly elevated. The truth is quite the opposite.
No mention of the greatest genius of the 19th and early 20th centuries?
Nikolai Tesla.
He also worked for Edison fixing Edisons flawed DC generator design and then Edison refused to pay him so he quit and went off and invented the entire framework of the 20th century; 3-phase power, radio, radar, wireless communications and others.
Edison made it his mission in life to destroy Tesla and sued him into oblivion with the help of his powerful political connections, but his inventions are the basis of modern society.
I hear you on Wozniak, but I do believe he already has a far more significant place in our narratives of the computer than, say, Boykin–without whose inventions personal computers wouldn’t work the way they do either.
Thanks,
Ben
Yeah, I tried to figure out a way to get Tesla in there but didn’t succeed. I appreciate your adding him back into the conversation where he belongs!
Thanks,
Ben
I should probably propose this to Josh as a standalone article. This myth really hit us with the World Wide Web which was created by a team of over two dozen people. Having spent quite a bit of time working as an expert witness in patent cases arising from the Web, I have become something of a historian of the project.
When I worked with him at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee was always emphasizing the collaborative nature of a project whose original purpose was to develop a tool for collaboration. The Web wasn’t just being developed at CERN, it was being developed at NCSA in Illinois. Before I joined Tim at CERN, I had been working on the Web at DESY, Dave Ragget was working at HP, Dan Connolly was working at an SGML company whose name I forget.
Naively in retrospect, Tim presented this to the journalists who visited to get the scoop on a computer network growing at 140% a week. It didn’t fit the narrative their audience was familiar with. And so following their journalism school training, they changed the story to fit the more compelling narrative. [Oh yes, that really was the style at the time which was one of the reasons we were building the Web in the first place].
So the journalists found an undergraduate student at NCSA who had been working with a guy called Eric Bina who everyone who has interacted with him knows as one of the best programmers who has ever lived. Eric had been working on a widget for displaying rich text and images at NCSA called the Mosaic widget. The undergrad persuaded him to use the code library which CERN had placed in the public domain to turn it into a Web browser. That is where Mosaic came from.
Unlike Tim who was telling a complex, unfamiliar story, the undergraduate was telling a simple story that the readers could connect with. And so they presented him as the Web’s lone inventor. The NCSA documentation did not contain a single mention of CERN or the use of CERN code in the documentation. A fairly clear example of plagiarism. And this had serious consequences for the Web at CERN. The original plan for W3C was to have an office at MIT and an office at CERN. The CERN management sabotaged the EU grant application for the CERN office with an openly skeptical and lukewarm endorsement.
Fortunately, MIT stepped in and we were at least able to ensure that Tim got the credit he deserved. Which had become critical because Netscape was busy trying to turn the Web into their proprietary property. Which in turn forced W3C to react by becoming a standards body rather than the advanced research lab that Tim and I had originally intended.
Ugh. Really? Firstly, non-white inventors have been given credit for many years for their inventions in general. George Washington Carver is a household name. Let’s not write about invented social problems.
Secondly, this article conflates two completely separate issues: 1. the myth of the individual inventor, which is actually a thing; and 2. the myth of the white inventor, which is not.
I don’t disagree that there are separate issues/narratives at play here, but I also would argue that our collective narratives emphasize white inventors far more consistently and centrally than non-white ones. Here’s one small but telling piece of evidence:
A list of 40 famous inventors, with exactly one non-white one (the Chinese inventor of paper from thousands of years ago). Bell, Edison, Jobs, etc. all included. Folks like Latimer, Boykin, even Carver (whose counter-example I did cite in my piece) not.
Just one example, but there are many others like it. We need to better remember the Latimers and Boykins of our history, along with the collaborative nature of invention (which I agree are two distinct but I would argue also interconnected issues).
Thanks,
Ben
Ultimately, who cares? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. That companies name inventors on the product they are selling? That people who write and sell songs professionally to other artists be credited on the album more prominently than they are? Song writers always get credit on songs they contribute in the liner notes. Also, who says,
Not sure most people care who wrote what. Also not sure they want to know who invented what. You’ll probably never hear “Hey, did you see the new razor with 5 blades that joe shmo invented?” They want to know that it works better than the one with 4 blades.
You seem to assume that Latimer, Boykin, and Carver didn’t make the list because they are black. I think it is much more likely that they didn’t make the list because they are not in the top 40 inventors of all time. They are not Isaac Newton, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Alan Turing. Or even close.
I’m fully on board with the notion that the institutional oppression of minorities throughout recent history, especially in the west, has led to the unfortunate consequence that there are few, if any, minority inventors in the top tier of inventors in history, but you are asking people to celebrate inventors because they’re black. Instead, let’s celebrate inventors because of their inventions.
Last from me on this, but I’ll just add: Bell, Edison, and Jobs are all on that site’s list too. Can we say definitively that they are on there instead of Latimer and Boykin (for example) because their contributions to the respective inventions were that much more significant? Or is it possible that these two narratives of individual and, yes, of white inventors have played a role in creating that perspective on history? I don’t know the answers for sure–but I believe that asking the question, and adding more figures and histories into our memories as a result, is a very good goal.
Thanks,
Ben
oh look, Ahmed is flashing a terrorist gang sign in that photo! ARREST HIM!
That this was a silly article. That was the point of the initial post.
LOL@this article complaining about certain people not getting credit for their inventions while misstating the inventors of several others, wat
Which of those in the top 40 should not be on the list and replaced with Carver, and why?
I would also note that the “Chinese Inventor” was listed second, and I’d say the invention of paper by Cai Lun was quite a significant invention, huge deal.
Carver was a remarkable man with some great inventions, no doubt. But all those people on that list had much more significant inventions.