Collaboration

Off the cuff, this word appears over 100 times within our data, though documented collaboration between inventors, drawn from patent data and from aeronautical history more generally has only been semi-consistently noted as such. It will absolutely factor into Early aero-technical development analyzed as a social network.

Of course there are famous cases, and there are extensive quantities of less famous cases which can largely be tracked via the co-filing of patents, which data we are refining. Among other things, we are interested in the deep data-based specifics involved in this, the sporadic and dovetailing of collaboration as tracked within specific patent families and so on.

Collaboration may occur between two aero-specialists. This may or may not be the majority. Collaboration may also occur between an aero-inventor and a fellow inventor well-accomplished in non-aero mechanics of one kind or another, the results becoming aero-pertinent in the process of the collaboration. See Adhémar de la Hault, prolific aero-author and developer of the orthopter, relative to the Jules Miesse name-based results on Espacenet. These men filed at least Patent GB-1909-7524 collaboratively, and it gives priority date status to a Belgian predecessor filed likely by the two of them.

Similarly, a collaborative patent filing may occur between an aero-inventor and an aero-established firm, the firm itself having developed from the work of one or more other inventors. See Patent GB-1913-29313, in which the fairly unknown Arthur Edward Pink files in collaboration with the Talbot Quick Waterplane Company. We do not know the extent of the role played by either William Basto Quick or John James Talbot in such a filing, or in the precise extent to which their consultative input was technological, rather than corporate.

The case of George Holt Thomas, the Director or Managing Director of Aircraft Manufacturing Co. and Managing Director of Airships, Limited, gives us an example in which an inventor has a fair bulk of patents filed, most of which in collaboration with other inventors. Numerically, this pans out as Thomas being a relatively leading figure, with his corporate affiliations being treated in terms of his occupation, as an individual, with the other inventors being lesser. That his role could be relatively or heavily corporate, bearing on phenomena of industrialization, with the chance that the innovation resides more with the other inventors, would cast an entirely different light on these numbers.