Item — HN Reader

You're missing the historical context. Prior to patents, inventions would commercialized as magic tricks and the mechanisms hidden. Then the inventor died and the secrets were lost.

For example, Cornelis Drebbel air conditioned Westminster Abbey in 1620. King James I (of the Bible) thought it was a cool party trick. But there was little ecosystem to commercialize and Drebbel moved on with his life, trying to sell other products with temperature controlled feedback loops + a submarine. Then he died.

The only commercialized invention of his was creating a dye that was redder than others. His son-in-law kept that a family secret and focused on selling this improved dye throughout Europe, since that didn't require revealing the secret.

The rational move was to give up on a multitrillion dollar HVAC industry to sell redder dye, since the second could be a trade secret.

2 comments

> + a submarine

We still don't know how he solved the problem of carbon dioxide build up. We know he solved it, though!

Comments like this are the absolute best part of HN. Thank you for sharing this.

Likewise.

And after reading the Wikipedia article on Drebbel, how have I never heard of this guy?

I'm particularly curious how the Royal Navy failed to realize the value of the submarine.

Reading over the article on the history of the torpedo, it sounds like early attempts to weaponize, by Drebbel and others, were unsuccessful.

Even so — bearing in mind that this a undoubtably a reflection of my own bias as a child of the Cold War raised in the shadow of the largest military-industrial complex the world has ever known — I can't help but marvel at the fact that no spare-no-expenses crash development programs arose to operationalize effective submarine-based warfare by the naval powers of the time.