5 Inventions That Their Inventors Refused to Patent for All Our Sakes
Patents serve an important function — keeping inventors from being ripped off for their life’s work. But sometimes that life’s work is something that’s to the benefit of everyone else’s lives as well. In which case, the idea of putting up red tape starts to feel just the littlest bit evil. If you invent something that can very clearly improve or save human lives, and then your next step is trying to figure out how much people would be willing to pay for it? There’s a little monster in your brain.
Thankfully, some inventors out there understand that the betterment of the human race is something that will, in fact, bring you peace on your deathbed — unlike a bank account.
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Here are five inventors who refused to take out or pursue patents in the name of global goodwill…
Jonas Salk, the Polio Vaccine
This feels like it might be the first gimme question on an ethics test. “You’ve invented a vaccine that prevents a disease that’s killing or maiming a huge amount of the world’s children. How much do you sell it for?” The answer, obviously, is zero. Though I’m not sure most current CEOs would pass.
Thankfully, Jonas Salk had his head screwed on straight and his feet not planted firmly in hell. Salk was interviewed on the day his vaccine was declared safe, and when asked who owned the patent, he responded, “Well, the people, I would say,” following it with “Could you patent the sun?”
Nils Bohlin, The Modern Seatbelt
It’s ubiquitous enough that you might not think the modern, three-point seatbelt you (hopefully) click in every time you’re in car belongs to any particular manufacturer. It seems like something a governmental agency would have cooked up and distributed as a new requirement.
In fact, that seatbelt was invented by Volvo, specifically an engineer named Nils Bohlin. The President of Volvo, Gunnar Engellau, had put Bohlin on the case himself after a tragic car accident killed one of his relatives. In that same spirit of preventing such occurrences in the future, Volvo did patent the new seatbelt design, but also immediately made it freely available to all of its competitors.
To this day, we should be thankful it’s Bohlin’s design keeping us from ricocheting around car insides like a wet pinball, something the previous, two-point lap safety belts weren’t very good at stopping.
John Walker, Friction Matches
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Another invention you’ve probably used thousands of times in your life: the simple friction match. It seems like the sort of perfect invention that immediately sets you up for life, something that everybody is going to use for centuries, like the zipper or Scotch tape. When John Walker realized what he’d created, though, no Looney Tunes dollar signs spun into his eyes, slot machine style. Instead, although he was urged to take out a patent on his matches, he made the recipe open to the public.
Did his invention also inadvertently cause a horrible sickness among the people who manufactured them? Yes, but come on, he did his best.
Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web
The very thing you’re reading this article on is also the gift of a well-meaning inventor named Tim Berners-Lee. When he came up with the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989, he could have had a monopoly on a technology that will affect, outside of a full apocalyptic scenario, the rest of human history. But he saw the capacity of his creation to connect the world and further the advancement of science and humanity, and let it remain unpatented.
Of course, not sure he loved where we all went with it, but that’s human nature. You want to let scientists share ideas across continents in seconds, you’re also going to get stuck with Sonic the Hedgehog pornography.
Benjamin Franklin, Everything
Public Domain
Benjamin Franklin is one of the most famous inventors of all time, which might make it surprising to learn that he never held a single patent. Not because they weren’t available to him, but because he steadfastly refused to patent any of his inventions. Clearly, he believed that if someone wanted to use a kite to electrify themselves, they should be able to do it for free.
Absolute legend.
