Steve Jobs was a visionary, a futurist and a business genius … but he was also an inventor with more than 458 patents to his name. What better way to spend this holiday weekend than getting yourself up to speed with the inventions of one of the most prolific patenters of the 20th century?
Over at MIT’s Technology Review, there is a fantastic overview of Jobs’ incredible library of patents, from his first one in 1983 for a Personal Computer to the designing of the dramatic glass cube outside Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store.
I always knew Jobs was prolific, but this overview puts in new perspective just how active he was. In fact, even three years after his death, Jobs is still having patents awarded to him.
That’s not to say Jobs was an inventor in the same way that Benjamin Franklin or Nikola Tesla was. Most of his patents are for the look, feel and design of objects, not the nitty-gritty of how they work. According to his some of co-inventors, many times Jobs would end up on the patent just because he gave formative input on the details of a product. “He had useful comments, suggestions, and it’s worthy of him being on the patent,” said Tim Wasko, who developed the interface for Apple’s QuickTime player and the iPod.
If you’re interested in Jobs’ life and legacy, this is an excellent article to read. Just going by the patent record alone would be enough to make Jobs one of the most influential people of the last 50 years.
Source: Technology Review
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
One response to “A third of Steve Jobs’ patents have been awarded since his death”
In reality, the vast majority of these patents are design patents, so the requirements of patentability are very different and easier to achieve than a patent on an invention. Of the rest, the two I looked at were purely about user interfaces, and if we’re honest wouldn’t meet the standard for patentability outside the US (regardless of the fact that software isn’t patentable in most jurisdictions). For example, US 6,538,665 seems to protect the use of a scrollbar for scrolling through a QT movie, regardless of the fact that such capabilities have been around on computers since the 1990s (and which were themselves copied from VCR machines). I’m sure there is something novel and inventive about US 6,538,665, but it seems so narrow I can’t believe it has any value whatsoever, and certainly wouldn’t be defendable (except perhaps as one very minor feature of a very deep thicket).