I had the pleasure of meeting Kees Schouhamer Immink at an IEEE conference recently. It was Kees who developed the digital coding technologies for essentially all consumer optical and magnetic recording formats such as CDs and DVD.

He recommended an enthralling book to me,

"Empire of the Air: The men who made radio" by Tom Lewis.

Ostensibly the story of David Sarnoff, Edwin Howard Armstrong and Lee de Forest and their respective roles in the history of radio, it is a gripping tale outlining yet again the degree to which scientists and engineers fail to recognise the power of commerce, politics and the law to bend reality.

Referring the the court battle between Armstrong and de Forest over the regeneration circuit, the author quotes Armstrong's lawyers:

"The Patent Office declares that A (the invention) equals B (the language of the courts). The Court of Appeals declares that B does not equal A, but C (something different). This in the Patent Office, then results in the equation A=C."

The author goes on to say:

"Using such a verbal charade, the courts might have said that the person who invented the pocket comb actually had been anticipated by the inventor of the picket fence, for if reduced in size, the fence might become a comb. The courts had decided in the past that the inventor of the hose extension for a vacuum cleaner was not Clements, who first conceived of and built one, but another who had once sold a vacuum cleaner with a hole into which he might have inserted an extension. They had also decided that it was not Curtiss, who conceived of and constructed the first hydro airplane, but a man who had once applied for a patent on a boat with wings that was never built and would not fly.

In the case of the regeneration suit, language was altering and twisting thoughts in such a way as to give a person a patent for a circuit that his assistant had described as no good; which would no work in a radio, and indeed was to be avoided."

How history repeats itself.