Intellectual Ventures Lab

On September 4th, 1888, 122 years ago, George Eastman applied for a camera patent. It wasn’t the first camera, but it was the first portable film camera.

George’s interest with cameras had first ignited when he planned to take a camera on vacation to Europe. He ended up canceling the trip, but he became obsessed with photography. It was such a hassle to take a picture with the glass plates and wet chemicals and so he was a banker by day and chemical experimenter at night spending all his time after work scheming up a way to make the camera portable. He started experimenting with taking photos on paper that had been painted with emulsion and later he got the combination right by putting photos on cellulose which allowed him to easily roll the film up for storage and development later

In his patent he refers to it as a “detective camera.” I can only imagine that it’s because a detective would be the type of person who would need a portable camera. The way it worked is you would take 100 pictures and send it to Kodak for processing and they would send you back 100 pictures and a new roll of film.

Even though he had a patent the roll film camera, he chose to focus on creating film. Because he created film for every camera that came out, camera manufacturers became his business partners. Sometimes the greatest innovations aren’t the “big ideas” but in finding a way to apply the big ideas in life. You don’t always need to find new big ideas to innovate, you can enter a space and explore the world that new big ideas open up. George Eastman continued to innovate until he retired and became one of the big philanthropists of the time.

It doesn’t stop there, In my research, I learned that Steven Sasson is credited with the invention of the digital camera in 1975 while working at Kodak. It’s cool to think that the folks who brought the camera and put it in the hands of ordinary people innovated into the digital space!

Learn more about George Eastman on the Kodak site and on Wikipedia.

1. How is the electron beam in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) generated?
2. How does hitting a sample with electrons give us images?

For answers and more photos, Read more…

Want to learn more about what the Lab is about?  Starting today, and for the next week, Gizmodo will be running a series of stories on Intellectual Ventures and some of the projects that are underway.  The first story about invention gives a brief mention of us. The second, more extensive, piece describes who we are and why we’re here, including a video tour of the facilities. Keep an eye out this week for a lot more coverage from Gizmodo.  We’ll link to the articles below as they are released.

• Eureka: Hello Invention (8.25.10)
• How Intellectual Ventures Wants to Reinvent Invention (8.25.10)
• Why Ideas are Expensive (8.26.10)
• Why We Need More Inventions. Lots More Inventions (8.26.10)
• Why Failure Is an Option at Intellectual Ventures (8.27.10)
• How Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures Would Change the Patent System (8.27.10)

For three years, Nathan has been directing and funding a team here at the Lab dedicated to culinary sciences. Chemists and chefs from some of the best restaurants in the world working on the cutting edge of applying scientific knowledge to the way we prepare food. They are just about to ship the cookbook they’ve created – Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking is a 2400 page tome (in six volumes) on the science of cooking, available to pre-order from Amazon. Check out the 20-page excerpt for a preview. The Lab kitchen has a drill press, a bandsaw, a rotary evaporator, a homogenizer and a pharmaceutical freeze dryer. They cook with liquid nitrogen and most of the rest of the periodic table. They’ve kept our machine shop busy with requests like “can you cut this microwave in half?” to make cross sectional images of cooking processes so cool that kitchenware companies have started sending us their products in hopes that we will cut them in half too.

We’re proud of this team, some of the hardest working people in the lab. Hopefully they can take a good break and then come back to work to help us invent the future of food.

Lots of people are inspired by inventions, but they rarely get a chance to be inspired by the inventors directly.  This is largely because they are out of view, sequestered in a basement finicking with soldering irons and zip ties.  Les Paul was a prolific inventor who has inspired nearly everyone indirectly, and a lot of people directly.  His inventions have probably had the biggest impact on the sound of popular music over your lifetime.

Les Paul invented the solid body electric guitar, multi-track recording, & tape delay.  He died one year ago today.

Here is a wonderful interview by NPR from 1992.

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is a process of suspending tiny tracer particles in the air and illuminating them with a laser sheet plane. The process is used to visualize and measure the movement of fluids. In this case the fluid is air, which is being displaced and agitated by water. Notice the airflow in the wake of falling droplets and along the borders of the subsequent splashes.

Download the HD vesion

Last weekend we held a smallish release party for Make Magazine Issue 23 at Ada’s Technical Books in Seattle.    The cover features none other than the Photonic Fence project, and contains a lovely write up by 3ric Johanson with support from many folks here at the lab & Make Magazine.

Copies of the issue were passed out in exchange for participation in a single-question survey.   Here are the results:

Just tell us what you like to make.

monkey men, circuit bending, tesla coils, amps, lasers, machines of death and destruction, furniture, low cost audio computers for info access to reduce poverty, sewing projects, gardening projects, foody makery, ceramics, a robot that clears large areas of weeds on a steep inline, alternate histories, redesigned clothing, web apps, movies, self-replicating Reprap 3D printers, news, music, friends, smiles and stuff, backyard crucibles, laser light plane touch surface, drones, free enterprise, modeled computers, 3D objects & 3D objects that make 3D objects, metalwork, sustainable design, sculpture, housing, fashion, electronics, embedded CPU projects, trouble, RC aircraft…then crashing them…then re-making them, ATM prototypes, 3ric, anything original or wicked fun, software, cardboard creatures with electric eyes, simulations of societies, AI stuff, coin-shrinkers, fulgurites, wood carvings, wooden things, books, knives, motorcycles, theramin, machines to learn, soldered pysanky, yarn, block prints, costumes, handicrafts, kinetic LED sculptures for “still” photography, lego robots, Craft Robo paper cut art, electronics for scientific computing, clothes, gadgets, clothes with gadgets, FPGA boards, edible sound, magnetic art, new and infeasible ideas, shiny photos, random thing driven by microcontrollers, making people jump (parkour), skin/skeleton/guts electronics, mobile robots, dangerous toys, cupcakes, new and amazing hacking tools, concrete structures,  projBox kit, video games, companies, making people ride bikes to power the entire Seattle Bicycle Music Festival.

The most popular things people like to make according to this very formal and controlled study are robots and trouble.  Needless to say, Make Magazine caters to a hands-on and creative, though unmistakeably diverse, crowd.  Find the latest issue covering our mosquito laser on newsstands everywhere.

For photos from the event: Read more…

Ever need to keep your hot and cold liquids in the same cup, but don’t want them to mix until they hit your mouth? Well,we’ve got just the thing.

We built a solid acrylic divider that can be used to seal two sides of a cup and then be removed when you need it to be. The design process starts with a simple photograph of the cup and inserting it into SolidWorks, where a spine was drawn along the inner surface of the cup.

The shape is then cut out with the laser cutter and silicone RTV (a sealant) applied to the edges. A thin layer of wax paper was then attached to the outer edges and the divider inserted and allowed to set to the exact shape of the cup.

Lets see it in action!

Even though the left side looks red, it is actually due to the reflection of the right side….trust me on this.

If you’re just stopping there, you may want to make a divider with a lower profile  so that you can more easily drink from the cup.  However, we were exploring a process developed by The Fat Duck for a drink called Hot & Iced Tea.  By varying the viscosity on each side with a  thickener, the divider can then be removed.  The left side remains cold and the right side remains hot.  The same technique can also be used for drinks with different textures (fizzy/still) or different colors.  Can you imagine the possibilities?  If you have a great drink idea to share, post it in the comments below.

Yuck, my brood of dipteran eggs is filthy.  If I don’t do something fast, my unborn larvae may never live to see their third instar.

Fortunately Emma’s here to save the day!  She gives a how-to on cleaning mosquito eggs in order to improve their life expectancy in the insectary.

This was actually a deleted scene from the Insectary video, a previous post on our blog.

We hope you had a great 4th of July weekend! What better way to celebrate than with fireworks and a high-speed camera.

Watch closely in the beginning of the video. You can see smoke from the firecracker rising to create gray bubbles on the water’s surface. Later, during the explosion, notice the little streamers of water which shoot up from where the bubbles were. 3ric Johanson explains that when the explosion’s shock wave hits the smoke bubbles, it causes those bubbles to burst and send up the streamers.

filmed at Hackerbot Labs