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ramriot t1_iydckgh wrote

Reply to comment by BailoutBill in TIL The inventor of the television was a 15 year old farm boy who got the idea for scanning an image in rows from the back and forth motion of plowing a field. by chapstickninja

They both used a scanning line technique for camera & display. The key difference as I understand was that Biard's system was electromechanical while Farnsworth's was an all-electronic system. Baird was admittedly 1st, Farnsworth produced 2d something possibly independently that was more commercial & open to ongoing improvement.

If we follow the same logic for say the Phonograph then we acknowledge Edison for the cylinder phonograph but call Bell's Volta Laboratory the inventor of the modern disc phonograph.

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Scottland83 t1_iydk7ek wrote

The French had scan-line fax machines in the 1850’s right?

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ramriot t1_iye6a14 wrote

With synchronized pendulum clocks that could perhaps produce a single halftone document copy in perhaps 10 minutes. Bit of a far cry from producing & transmitting 15-25 greyscale images a second.

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Scottland83 t1_iyeepya wrote

But same concept using scan lines and one-dimensional signal.

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ramriot t1_iyf2ms9 wrote

Certainly the pantelegraph of the 1860's was conceptually a scanning device to output a serial transmission. One could argue by the same logic that taking words in lines on a page, converting & transmitting them as telegraph code serially & assembling the output back into words on a page is the same concept, something Morse & others were doing in the 1840's.

In the end all discovery is seeing a little further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Which means we acknowledge what went before but also acknowledge the thing that makes something patentable i.e.

  1. Patentable subject matter, i.e., a kind of subject-matter eligible for patent protection
  2. Novel (i.e. at least some aspect of it must be new)
  3. Non-obvious (in United States patent law) or involve an inventive step (in European patent law)
  4. Useful (in U.S. patent law) or be susceptible of industrial application (in European patent law[1])
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