Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #invention

Most recents (8)

Basant Kumar Chandrakar, a resident of Chhattisgarh and a famous ‘bhajia’ stall owner, has made a handheld machine to ease his work. Now, over 200 shops in the city are using his device.
“Every morning, there would be a long line of people waiting for the pakora/mango, but I was never able to make it fast enough to get it to them. Unfortunately, no such machine was available in the market, so I decided to use the time and resources to make one.
I knew exactly what I needed the machine to do. So, I started by using various materials to build one. I would wake up early and start working on the product. With every new prototype I made, I learned something new and improved the product."
Read 5 tweets
🇫🇷1914-1915 Boirault “Anti-Barbed-Wire” Machine🇫🇷

#war #wwi #ww1 #invention #oldinvention
The Boirault Machine was an early French experimental landship, designed in 1914 and built in early 1915. It has been considered as "another interesting ancestor of the tank", and described as a "rhomboid-shaped skeleton tank without armour, with single overhead track".
Ultimately, the machine was deemed impractical and was nicknamed Diplodocus militaris. It preceded the design and development of the English Little Willie tank by six months.
Read 3 tweets
I get asked by young #entrepreneurs what is the cost and the output of R&D activities and how long would it take to reach certain milestones? There is considerable variability in the amount of investment in R&D needed to generate a patentable #invention 1/7 🦋
When we started @Metamaterialtec with @timaras we found that #IBM spent about $6 billion on R&D in 2011 and generated 6,146 patents, implying an average R&D cost per patent of $976,000. At same year #Qualcomm, spent $2.3 billion on R&D and generated 1,000 patents, 2/7 🦋
implying an average R&D cost per patent of $2.3 million. #DuPont spent $1.4 billion on R&D and generated 500 patents, implying an average R&D cost per patent of $2.8 million. Even when companies have access to this amount of cash, it takes several years to develop new tech 🦋 3/7
Read 7 tweets
I’m back. So how potentially serendipitous is this? Thanks to this med I will be on for life, I am now a chronic “dry mouth” (Xerostomia) sufferer (which can destroys teeth and sleep). Today I learned that one of my doctors has spent the last 2 years patenting a …
prototype device that solves the very problem. What are the odds? I mean, to paraphrase Rick, “Of all the doctors in all the towns in all the world, and I walk into his.”

Like many inventors, he’s so close to it, he’s focused on the details of making the product …
work perfectly, and not on the bigger production and marketing picture. Millions need his invention, but they will never afford the current $2500 price tag. It needs to be more like $500. I thought of 3 ways to slash his costs in one 20 minute discussion. A top …
Read 6 tweets
After 6 months of #lockdown and #lab shutdown I spent a full day 9 am-8 pm in lab doing experiments! New #grad students in #lifesciences: There is always light 💡 and #fluorescent images at the end of the tunnel! Filing a #patent on my #invention from #phd work soon @OrganOnAChip
This is an Organ on a Chip platform that enables mimicking #tissues and #organs in a high throughput manner! The main focus will be towards developing #mucosal organs with tissue resident #immune cells and lining #epithelial cells for #testing #COVID19 treatments #covidvaccines
I recently gave a talk at #oooc2020 organized by @GVNlab at @Columbia. In the talk I demonstrated the #ease of fabrication, #functionality, and #modularity of this platform.
We’re open to #collaborate with interested #researchers! Interested to learn more:
Read 11 tweets
In the first post of breakItDown, we look at the history of telephones and phone nos. Let's dive deep into the technology that changed the world and brought it closer.
Initially, 2 telephone endpoints were hardwired and couldn’t talk with anyone else but the already existing telegraph network changed that. Telegraph worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. These stations were used as telephone exchanges.
Telephone endpoint was connected to a telephone exchange which routed the call to the other end point. Initially, this was done physically via switchboards which were restricted to a small local area.
Read 30 tweets
This is a very nice piece: bit.ly/2TcSZz1. @johnsalvatier points out a fundamental feature of #invention, whether in research or creating technology (thread)
You have a problem and can see/measure misc. details of it. Some of these are key to solving the problem, and they are right before your eyes. But they are INTRINSICALLY not distinguishable from the rest until you know how to solve the problem=which ones are important.
As we search for the key details, we need both hard work, careful scrutiny of facts, constructing and testing models of reality, AND thinking about what we're not thinking about. And it'll be excruciating along the way.
Read 5 tweets
"You don't see radio changing gradually and suddenly become radar. #Darwin's theory doesn't work for #technology, and we have to make a new observation."

- W Brian Arthur at SFI today

#evolution #innovation #invention
"Novel technologies are constructed from existing technologies. These offer themselves as components for the construction of further technologies."

- W Brian Arthur at SFI today

#evolution #innovation #invention #technology #engineering #design
Unlike the two-parent #inheritance typical to (but not ubiquitous among) #complex organisms, #technology inherits features from n parents - a "vast ancestral #network" more like horizontal gene transfer networks in #bacteria.

W Brian Arthur on sumulating #invention on a chip:
Read 18 tweets

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