No Pay – No Gain Part Two

Part Two focuses on two more inventors who failed to patent their inventions which resulted in no royalties when millions were possible.  Patents aren’t free, but without one, there’s no chance for royalties.  That’s why the article is called:  No Pay – No Gain.  Part One related the stories of Karaoke and Communications Satellites, both multi-billion dollar industries that returned nothing to their inventors.  This blog will explore two more stories of No Pay – No Gain inventors.

Edwin Drake

The father of the multi-trillion dollar oil industry was Edwin Drake in 1858.  Drake was hired to explore suspected oil deposits in Western Pennsylvania near Titusville.  He began with a steam powered drilling rig that was used for water wells, but the hole would always collapse in on itself.  Failed attempts mounted for well over a year resulting in the oil well being called “Drake’s Folly,” and he as “Crazy Edwin.”  In order to solve his dilemma, Drake devised a drilling method using principles still in use today.  Drake invented the concept of drilling inside of cast iron pipes pile-driven into the ground.  At 32 feet the cast iron pipes hit bedrock requiring the drilling tools to be inserted through the pipe.  Drilling was slow, but at 69½ feet oil was struck.  Soon the well was producing 25 barrels a day with the surrounding region reaching 5.8 million barrels a year.  The oil industry was born.

Prior to the Titusville Oil Well, oil could only be collected at the surface as it seeped naturally out of the ground.  It was Drake, however, who invented the method for finding oil from deep underground.  His method used a cast iron lining to prevent bore hole collapse which resulted in drilling deeper wells.  This was the inventive principle that is still employed by oil companies around the world today.  Rather than file for patent protection on his revolutionary drilling methods, Drake decided to start an oil drilling company.  Within four years, Drake’s company was out of business.  Without a patent, other companies freely copied Drake’s drilling process resulting in drastically lower costs.  Just twelve years after giving birth to the oil industry, Drake was broke and in ill health.  With a measure of compassion and appreciation for increasing the state’s economy, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted Drake a state pension of $1500.00 a year until his death in 1880.

John Sheppard-Brown

Although there are no records available, the person who has distributed the most money in history has to be John Sheppard-Brown, the Scottish inventor of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM).  As the story is told, Sheppard-Brown thought of the invention while sitting in his bathtub.  Earlier that same day, he had been unable to get cash after arriving at his bank one minute after closing.  He would later tell the BBC, “It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”  He approached Barclays (a major bank in Britain) with his idea.  They immediately authorized six machines for a June 1967 trial.  Needless to say, the ATM was an immediate hit for both customers and the banks.

What reason could there be for John Sheppard-Brown not patenting something that would become the most widely used invention of all time?  Carbon-14 is the reason. The first ATMs used checks coded with a trace of carbon-14 and not plastic cards.  Carbon-14 is a radioactive substance that has no ill effects in small amounts.  The worry of what carbon-14 could do is Shepherd-Barron’s reason for not filing a patent for his ATM invention.

And now for the rest of the story:  Another Scottish inventor, James Goodfellow, was the first to patent a cash dispensing machine.  In a newspaper interview, Goodfellow said, “It’s not sour grapes. He [Shepherd-Brown] invented a radioactive device to withdraw money. I invented an automated system with an encrypted card and a pin number, and that’s the one that is used around the world today.”

The moral remains clear:  No Pay – No Gain, which is still interpreted as: No Patent – No Royalties.