It's fun to see the patterns of history repeat themselves. Two things stood out:
1. Open Source - auto inventors shared ideas because of their desire to prove skeptics wrong about their new industry, and in response to being sued by a patent troll.
> I believe I am entitled to say I have never collected a cent in royalties from them, nor will I. Lawyers have tried to argue me into bringing suits for infringements, but it so happened we pioneers always worked together. We loaned ideas. We loaned tools. We loaned patents. If we worked out a good idea, we loaned that.
2. Lots of Companies - most were either scams or too small to support their products.
> When you know that more than 500 automobile companies came in and went out in those first few years, you will better understand some of the forces working against those of us who were honestly trying to succeed.
AI is the new hotness now, and both of these patterns are in full force.
Worth contemplating are the unforeseen negative externalities of the automobile as they reached scale. The article, written 30 years later, didn't even mention any. Makes me think about what we won't be able to perceive and believe in our current tech. Just think of what we're still learning about the web's externalities some 30+ years into it!
That is an overly broad characterization. We can look to the Wright brothers as pioneers who vigorously enforced patent.
As the Wikipedia entry puts is: "The Wright brothers did not have the luxury of being able to give away their invention: It had to be their livelihood. Thus, their secrecy intensified, encouraged by advice from their patent attorney, Henry Toulmin, not to reveal details of their machine." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
http://wintonhistory.com/ adds "[Winton] was also generous in passing the technology along to competitors when safety was an issue." The steering wheel described fits that characterization.
] Unfortunately, Winton's local competitors were simultaneously working on a very similar system and beat him to the patent. The Ohio Automobile Company, later renamed the Packard Motor Car Company, added their version of the steering wheel, based on Winton's early developments, to the second car they launched in 1899. It was immediately successful, and Winton, whose company custom-made every vehicle, found the competition difficult and was forced to stop production in 1924.
Except that the Wright brothers would never have pursued powered flight without the prior pioneering example of Otto Lilienthal:
"Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted." ~ Wilbur Wright, 1912
What is your point? That the Wright brothers were not pioneers of flight?
In that case, Winton also was not a pioneer in the automobile industry, as he too built on previous work. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen came out a decade before Winton's first car, which in turn built on previous work.
Yet Winton called himself a pioneer.
And people at the time definitely considered the Wrights pioneers. Eg, the Aero Club of the United Kingdom gave them gold medals in 1908 for their "pioneer work".
1. Open Source - auto inventors shared ideas because of their desire to prove skeptics wrong about their new industry, and in response to being sued by a patent troll.
> I believe I am entitled to say I have never collected a cent in royalties from them, nor will I. Lawyers have tried to argue me into bringing suits for infringements, but it so happened we pioneers always worked together. We loaned ideas. We loaned tools. We loaned patents. If we worked out a good idea, we loaned that.
2. Lots of Companies - most were either scams or too small to support their products.
> When you know that more than 500 automobile companies came in and went out in those first few years, you will better understand some of the forces working against those of us who were honestly trying to succeed.
AI is the new hotness now, and both of these patterns are in full force.
Worth contemplating are the unforeseen negative externalities of the automobile as they reached scale. The article, written 30 years later, didn't even mention any. Makes me think about what we won't be able to perceive and believe in our current tech. Just think of what we're still learning about the web's externalities some 30+ years into it!