Home » The patent of the inventor who measured the temperature with the song of the cricket

The patent of the inventor who measured the temperature with the song of the cricket

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October 5, 2011 motivates Steve Jobs and it would be too easy to dedicate this Almanac to him, also because today you will read it everywhere. But October 5th of many years before gives us the opportunity to tell the story of a great unfortunate innovator. Because sometimes it is not enough to invent something ingenious, it is not even enough to patent it; sometimes you have spent a lifetime inventing the future and only enter the history books for a bizarre theory about crickets. Amos Emerson Dolbear was a physicist and enthusiast of nascent electricity.

It is said that in 1865 he invented the first telephone receiver with a magnet inside, 11 years before the famous Alexander Graham Bell patent; the case ended before the Supreme Court which in 1881 ruled that if Dolbear had diligently observed the procedures of the Patent Office, “it is possible that the talking telephone, now generally attributed to Mr. Bell, would instead be among his successes.” In short, he lost history for a technicality. And it was only the first time. In fact, the following year he managed to establish wireless communication between two devices about 500 meters apart. His invention rested on terrestrial conduction, which is different from the transmission of radio waves; but it worked and on 5 October 1886 he was granted the patent.

Three years later the New England Wireless Telegraph and Telephone Company bought it to attempt a lawsuit against Guglielmo Marconi accusing him of violating it. But the two technologies were substantially different and in March 1901 an American court agreed with Marconi because Dolbear’s invention “was unused and even if it had been used, it works according to completely different laws and electrical phenomena”. But after missing the second appointment with the story Amos Emerson Dolbear had his moment of glory: in 1897 he published an article entitled “The cricket and the thermometer” in which he tried to demonstrate a correlation between the external temperature and the rhythm with which a cricket sings. The hotter it is, the more the chirping, the crisp, the louder. It may seem nonsense and in fact someone noticed that there are twenty-one different types of crickets in Michigan alone and others argued that under a certain temperature the cricket does not sing so it does not serve as a thermometer; but the thing had some success to the point that it is called “Dolbear’s law”.

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