Women Inventors

>> Thursday, April 12, 2012

That's the title of a book written by Stephen Currie that I've just read recently.
In the book, he has written about the following ladies:

Temple Grandin
A professor who invented ways to do better animal livestock farming. Interestingly, she is autistic and is a strong autism advocator. A movie has been made about her in 2010.

Madame CJ Walker
An entrepreneur of successful beauty and hair care products who invented new ways of marketing them.

Rose O'Neill
An illustrator who created a popular comic and doll craze Kewpie.

Grace Hopper
A computer scientist and US Navy officer who is a pioneer in the field, developed the first compiler of computer programming language, and conceptualised the idea of machine-independent programming language (leading to COBOL).

Margaret Knight
An inventor (mechanical engineer?) who invented a number of machines (she has almost 100 patents), mostly for industrial uses including to make shoes, but also with engines. She is most famous for her machine that produces (cheap) flat-bottomed paper bags.


It's amazing how inventors in America are filing patents left, right, and center even in the early nineteenth century.

Do we have such a culture in Malaysia?
Sure we have the official body in the form of Perbadanan Harta Intelek Malaysia, or Intellectual Property Corporations of Malaysia, but we don't seem to hear much about the happenings in the media.

Wait. The website share their statistics. Cool. Let's check it out.

I attempted to replicate the tables here, but they come out weird (yes, I'm clueless with html programming!), so please click here to see the numbers for yourself.

For the past 3 years, the annual number of patents filed (applied) has exceeded one thousand per annum, with about a fifth of them being granted. And the Malaysia has been the third countries with the most patent and certificates of utility innovation granted after USA and Japan. Wow! What patents are those? I would like to know!

0 comments:

Post a Comment

  © Blogger template Webnolia by Ourblogtemplates.com 2009

Back to TOP