Early aero-technical development analyzed as a social network

Geographical information

A certain amount of disambiguation will be necessary here, particularly relative to the word region, which is a general concept not to be confused with official administrative units such as the région française, or the régions belges, for instance. The région française, as such, does not come up very often within our data, though its sub-unit, the département, comes up quite a lot indeed. Various of these usages overlap internationally, and we are not sure how far we will have to go into disambiguation.

Formal geographically administrative units

The city in which an inventor is located is usually quite relevant, and is occasionally the only location data, with patents filed in Hungary and Germany, for instance, often giving this data, and only this data.

In terms of purely administrative technicality, the French or Belgian city will be called a “commune”. A location such as Courbevoie will be well within département Seine, but not within the “commune” or city of Paris.

Presently, our page region is serving as somewhat of a disambiguation page, in terms of the interplay between formally administrative and general usage of various location terms.

Country

The country data, on whichever inventor, is known in the case of virtually every patent. The country in which the patent is filed is known, along with the country or countries from in which the inventor is or the inventors are filing.

Patents filed in France, by inventors located outside of France, almost always give only the country of the inventors.

Region as opposed to Région

Region, in the general sense, as an English word, will likely be relevant, within nations, and possibly beyond, being that a few countries are rather small, and share language and commerce with others.

Région, as a French word, officially administrative, in France, may not come up very often, but it is to be noted, and is pertinent relative to Belgian administrative usage.

See more Anglo-French disambiguation on Region.

Département

This is a peculiarly French administrative unit. In the case of French patents filed by French inventors, it is often the only location data we have, particularly when the location data of a patent agent is emphasized. In the case of département Seine, we are almost always talking about a Parisian location. In any case, this administrative unit almost always fits relative to location data we get from non-French sources.

City

Hungarian patents, for instance, almost always offer this data on the inventor. They usually offer little or no other data, even in the case of Hungarian nationals.

Specific location

This data is most consistently offered on British patents, along with the city and country, naturally, and on rare occasions even the French département, as such, is included, on the British patent, in the case of French inventors. Inventor address data is also found rather consistently on Belgian patents, and within RdBdI entries.

Broad phenomena as gathered and tracked from within our data

Industrialization

Atelier, workshop, communities of practice, apprenticeships, working groups, and groupe industriel

These are formalized patterns of cooperation, which we may track, and upon which there is literature. These are somewhat "social", and are very definitively proto-industrial.

Collaboration

The word "collaboration" presently gets over 270 hits within our data. Some of these pertain to collaborations between patent agents. In terms of inventors, we have only noted a fraction of them. We've missed some in the case of auto-links from Espacenet, for instance, displaying only one inventor, with patent pages still needing to be fleshed out based upon examination of the originals. The word "collaboration" has often been used when inventor pages have been created, and a consistent or sporadic collaboration between inventors has been described as appropriate.

Some of these are famous. Others may be tracked from within our data, and may prove to be of interest, whether in terms of the individual cases or when assessed as a patterned phenomenon.

The role played by official events and establishments

These data naturally dovetail with the factors we'd consider more per se "social", though this dovetailing, as such, may not be a priori documented. These data illustrate institutional and formal correlations of background, at the macro level, lacking the intimacy and detail we find among Letters between individual inventors.

Conferences

These are also key, in that they are documented, with much of their attendance being documented as well.

Documented examples of specific influence

EXAMPLE: Wels' exposure to the aircraft of the Wright Brothers, which he saw in Paris, led to a split with Etrich over the question of whether to build a monoplane or biplane.

Correspondence between inventors

Letters between inventors, or between an inventor and some other interested party, are of clear significance in that they explicate the direct exchange of ideas.

Pre-existing resources on social networks per se

Any inventor or organization may have a SNAC ARK ID.