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Einstein, Inventors, and Invention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Thomas P. Hughes
Thomas P. Hughes
Affiliation:
History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
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Abstract

Albert Einstein had more than a passing and trivial involvement with patents and inventions. The historian seeking to fathom Einstein's thought processes would be ill-advised to pass lightly over his years at the Swiss Federal Patent office (1902–1909) and to consider his professional advice-giving about patents and his patenting of his inventions as merely peripheral to his core concerns and cognitive style. Years of reading patents and visualizing the machines, devices, and electromagnetic phenomena described in them is a formative experience. A number of inventors besides Einstein enhanced their power of visualization from reading and writing patent claims. It is reasonable to conclude that the Patent Office years honed his remarkable gift for visually conceptualizing systematic artifactual relationships that he used in articulating theory.

Type
The Early Professional Context
Information
Science in Context , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 1993 , pp. 25 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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