AG Bell wasn't the first one to conceptually invent the telephone, he was among the first (along with Elisha Gray) in making practical working telephone and later a practical working telephone system.
Sometimes the inventors are so far ahead of their time that the materials science first has to catch up (in some cases only a few millenia) before they can realize their devices. Effectively it is then the first person after whoever did the materials science part to create the device that gets to claim the invention.
So we get Sikorski, and not Da Vinci.
We get Arthur C. Clarke who claims the 'communications satellite' even though the moon was there all along and the Sputnik was the first working very crude device (it was one way only, it said 'you lost the space race' in a single bit of message).
We get Newcomen, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (I had to look that up, I can never remember the man's full name), and Hero of Alexandria competing for the steam engine title, with all of them holding some part of the credit.
Pointing at an inventor is hard, and 'who built the first working device' is one way of doing this but it assumes a singular effort whereas most things are team efforts and misses the bit that the idea itself can be an instrumental step in getting your 'true' inventor to make their claim, standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. In isolation, we all probably would invent the hammer in our lifetimes, if that.
Thomas Savery too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery
I always wondered what the effect of these in absolute time is. Consider: if someone had come up with a viable steam engine in the year 1000 or so, how would that have change the course of history?
"A translation of Legat's article on Reis' invention was obtained by Thomas Edison prior to his filing his patent application on a telephone in 1877. In correspondence of 1885, Edison credits Reis as having invented "the first telephone", with the limitation that it was "only musical not articulating"." [1]
Fascinating stuff nonetheless, these inventors and their ideas... See also previous experimenters [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reis_telephone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis#Previous_e...
https://down-ph.img.susercontent.com/file/sg-11134201-7repx-...
Later it was superseded with lead wrapped in paper, until the Knob and Tube system. This comprised of single-insulated copper conductors installed within walls and ceilings, this wiring was encased in porcelain insulating tubes with cloth-lined sleeves.
One knob for Live and one knob for Neutral. The wires were held in place by porcelain knobs nailed to the house frame. Where wires passed through wood framing, they were threaded through porcelain tubes to prevent them from contacting the wood.
* if the physics is so completely understood that you can confidently predict something will work from your sofa, and give an error-free recipe to build it, you indeed can invent from theory... but how deep can this invention be if the problems of the field are completely solved?
* if you are working in a field at the edge of human understanding, you cannot have the confidence in your ideas without having tested them experimentally; a theoretician makes at most a minor contribution to the actual inventions being realized, because he's producing - most likely somewhat wrong - hypotheses.
This latter kind of "theoretical" inventions are heavily subject to survivorship bias. Fifteen competent theoreticians make different predictions - all according to best, though incomplete, model of the world; a successful experiment validates exactly one of them, and we end up exalting the lucky winner as the "inventor".
You're confusing depth with originality.
A field may be very well understood, but also very deep.
In practice, any unexplored corner of the field will contain surprises; these will require extra theoretical development to cover.
Usually things like imperfect understanding of materials get in the way. Pretty much the reason you need both theory and experiment to make progress in every single area of matter-based technology (i.e. not software).
A while ago there was an artical posted here about all the world changing inventions that came out of Bell Labs. It was easy to show for most of them that they weren't the actual inventor, and in many cases not even the first producer. They were the first to make it practical for mass production, however.
"Later, some people claimed that Lilienfeld did not implement his ideas since "high-purity materials needed to make such devices work were decades away from being ready,"[CHLI] but the 1991 thesis by Bret Crawford offered evidence that "these claims are incorrect."[CRA91] Lilienfeld was an accomplished experimenter, and in 1995, Joel Ross[ROS95] "replicated the prescriptions of the same Lilienfeld patent. He was able to produce devices that remained stable for months."[ARN98] Also, in 1981, semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman confirmed that "Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many occasions".[EMM13]"
For many things (computers, rocketry, aerospace, etc.) and different reasons, Germany in the years around the second world war, was a pretty bad place to get international credit for your accomplishments.
>Where are the physical limits? According to Bremermann (1982), a computer of 1 kg of mass and 1 liter of volume can execute at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1032 bits. The trend above will hit the Bremermann limit roughly 25 decades after Z3, circa 2200. However, since there are only 2 x 1030 kg of mass in the solar system, the trend is bound to break within a few centuries, since the speed of light will greatly limit the acquisition of additional mass
They shift from talking about the transistor density to somehow considering a supermassive construct. Reminds me of LLM mashups.
It's a theme that sci-fi authors have explored deeply. Accelerando is a particularly fun and worthwhile read if you haven't already!
So we talk about the supercomputers we call cell phones that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the desktop computers I used years ago.
It doesn’t make sense to talk about making super large computers before reaching the density limit, that’s a confusion of concepts.
Making computers faster has involved making them smaller because the speed of signal propagation.
I've always wondered if Warlock from the New Mutants was made of it.
> The naive extrapolation of this exponential trend predicts that the 21st century will see cheap computers with a thousand times the raw computational power of all human brains combined
i.e. putting an upper bound on the exponential with solar system mass
Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for heresy. Boltzmann died by suicide after lack of acceptance by the scientific community. It's a very long list and something that's been studied, actually.
You criticize me for "not doing my homework" yet you haven't heard of Castelli[0]? He's even in the fucking Wiki article on Galileo lol[1]
> Boltzmann died by suicide after lack of acceptance by the scientific community.
> It's a very long list and something that's been studied, actually.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Castelli
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ov...
[2] https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/85etf-7ecf8/Opinionat...
@book{Kuhn1962,
author = {Kuhn, Thomas S.},
title = {The Structure of Scientific Revolutions},
publisher = {University of Chicago Press},
year = {1962},
address = {Chicago},
note = {Often cited with various editions, e.g., 50th ed. 2012},
keywords = {paradigm shift, normal science, scientific revolutions}
}He's now officially become a full-blown pariah in the AI world, most relevant people in the space running away at the first sight of his goatee at conferences, knowing exactly the kind of complete and utter crank he's become.
Not sure "need" is the appropriate word here.
Grab anyone in who has worked on AI in the last 30 years, and pronounce the word "Schmidhuber" and watch the face of you interlocutor: you'll either get an eyroll or a smirk, but rarely a lively discussion on what he's "invented".
Nothing vitriolic about describing reality.
> but rarely a lively discussion on what he's "invented".
In fact I am generally ignorant on the topic of who invented the transistor, nor do I in general particularly care about who invented what.
The quest for academic fame is something I've always utterly failed to understand.
And, if it the author was anyone but JS I'd not have said anything.
What honks me off about this guy though is to see a someone who did in fact do early impactful work on recurrent neural networks believe that:
a) that automatically gives him some sort of special status wrt the rest of humanity
b) because he didn't get the recognition he believes he is due, has completely stopped doing anything useful in the field, turning instead into an absolute crank that every one in the AI field makes fun of, and with a holy mission to rewrite history to assign credit where credit is due everywhere he believes there was an injustice.
c) every time I see someone with an exceptionally well-working brain waste their time because of ego or sheer stubbornness on shite like this instead of using it to do more interesting work, it makes me very sad.
Schmidhuber is a textbook example of this, and the other perfect example of this is Chomsky, a very smart man, who basically - because of his oversized ego and profound stubbornness - ended up wasting his entire life energy working on a linguistic dead-end AND a political philosophy dead-end.
I have a real hard time understanding how the brain of that kind of folks operates, being so bright on certain axes and totally and utterly dumb on others, especially the total lack of self-awareness.
Nope. The contrary as a matter of fact. But the facts are:
1) nothing worth talking about since the LSTMs
2) most of the reasons why he's been visible in the last 20 years is because of shit like this (JS harassing Ian Goodfellow about attribution in the middle of a technical presentation. Watch the face of Ian, pretty symptomatic of when AI folks have to interact with JS these days).
Funny, btw, that nobody here has mentioned that Lilienfeld also invented the electrolytic capacitor.