A Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors is an occasional Royal Commission of the United Kingdom used to hear patent disputes.
On 6 October 1919 the Commission was convened to hear 11 claims for the invention of the tank; one of the eleven "claimants" was a team of two (thus there were 12 individuals involved), [1] [2] two of whom were Winston Churchill and Ernest Swinton.
The Commission was reconvened in 1946 to hear claims of inventors who "allege that their inventions, drawings or processes have been used by Government Departments and Allied Governments during the War". [3]
Edwin Howard Armstrong was an American electrical engineer and inventor, who developed FM radio and the superheterodyne receiver system. He held 42 patents and received numerous awards, including the first Medal of Honor awarded by the Institute of Radio Engineers, the French Legion of Honor, the 1941 Franklin Medal and the 1942 Edison Medal. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and included in the International Telecommunication Union's roster of great inventors. Armstrong attended Columbia University, and served as a professor there for most of his life.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly, he designed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics, founded the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay-line memory.
A Bailey bridge is a type of portable, pre-fabricated, truss bridge. It was developed in 1940–1941 by the British for military use during the Second World War and saw extensive use by British, Canadian and American military engineering units. A Bailey bridge has the advantages of requiring no special tools or heavy equipment to assemble. The wood and steel bridge elements were small and light enough to be carried in trucks and lifted into place by hand, without the use of a crane. The bridges were strong enough to carry tanks. Bailey bridges continue to be used extensively in civil engineering construction projects and to provide temporary crossings for pedestrian and vehicle traffic. A Bailey bridge and its construction were prominently featured in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far.
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. A film star during Hollywood's golden age, Lamarr has been described as one of the greatest movie actresses of all time.
Granville Tailer Woods was an American inventor who held more than 50 patents in the U.S. He was the first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War. Self-taught, he concentrated most of his work on trains and streetcars. One of his notable inventions was a device he called the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, a variation of induction telegraph which relied on ambient static electricity from existing telegraph lines to send messages between train stations and moving trains. His work assured a safer and better public transportation system for the cities of the United States.
Jerome "Jerry" Hal Lemelson was an American engineer, inventor, and patent holder. Several of his inventions and works in the fields in which he patented have made possible, either wholly or in part, innovations like automated warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders, and the magnetic tape drive used in Sony's Walkman tape players. Lemelson's 605 patents made him one of the most prolific inventors in American history.
Rudolf Gundlach (1892–1957) was a Polish military engineer, inventor and tank designer. He headed the design division of the Armored Weapons Technical Research Bureau. He held the military rank of major in the Corps of Engineers of the Polish Army.
Thomas J. Armat was an American mechanic and inventor, a pioneer of cinema best known through the co-invention of the Edison Vitascope.
The "Grenade, Hand, Anti-Tank No. 74", commonly known as the S.T. grenade or simply sticky bomb, was a British hand grenade designed and produced during the Second World War. The grenade was one of a number of ad hoc anti-tank weapons developed for use by the British Army and Home Guard after the loss of many anti-tank guns in France after the Dunkirk evacuation.
The Livens Projector was a simple mortar-like weapon that could throw large drums filled with flammable or toxic chemicals.
Marie Van Brittan Brown was an American nurse and innovator. In 1966, she invented a video home security system along with her husband Albert Brown, an electronics technician. In the same year, they applied for a patent for their innovative security system, which was granted in 1969. Her innovation has had a huge impact on the entire security system. Her idea has expanded beyond just security for those at home, and her ideas can be seen with security systems in businesses around the world. Brown was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York; she died there at the age of 76 in 1999.
Major-General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, was a British Army officer who played a part in the development and adoption of the tank during the First World War. He was also a war correspondent and author of several short stories on military themes. He is credited, along with fellow officer Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Dally Jones, with having initiated the use of the word "tank" as a code-name for the first tracked, armoured fighting vehicles.
Plastic armour was a type of vehicle armour originally developed for merchant ships by Edward Terrell of the British Admiralty in 1940. It consisted of small, evenly sized aggregate in a matrix of bitumen, similar to asphalt concrete. It was typically applied as a casting in situ in a layer about 2 in (51 mm) thick on to existing ship structures made from 1⁄4 in-thick (6.4 mm) mild steel or formed in equally thick sections on a 1⁄2 in-thick (13 mm) steel plate for mounting as gun shields and the like. Plastic armour replaced the use of concrete slabs, which although expected to provide protection, were prone to cracking and breaking up when struck by armour-piercing bullets. Plastic armour was effective because the very hard particles would deflect bullets, which would then lodge between the plastic armour and the steel backing plate. Plastic armour could be applied by pouring it into a cavity formed by the steel backing plate and a temporary wooden form. Production of the armour was by road construction firms and was carried out in a similar way to the production of road coverings, the organization of the armouring being carried out by naval officers in key ports.
William Howard Livens, was an engineer, a soldier in the British Army and an inventor particularly known for the design of chemical warfare and flame warfare weapons. Resourceful and clever, Livens' successful creations were characterised by being very practical and easy to produce in large numbers. In an obituary, Sir Harold Hartley said "Livens combined great energy and enterprise with a flair for seeing simple solutions and inventive genius."
Lancelot Eldin "Lance" de Mole CBE, was an Australian engineer and inventor.
Colonel Robert Stuart Macrae TD was an inventor best known for his work at MD1 during the Second World War, his best known invention being the sticky bomb.
The death ray or death beam was a theoretical particle beam or electromagnetic weapon first theorized around the 1920s and 1930s. Around that time, notable inventors such as Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla, Harry Grindell Matthews, Edwin R. Scott, Erich Graichen and others claimed to have invented it independently. In 1957, the National Inventors Council was still issuing lists of needed military inventions that included a death ray.
Lieutenant-Colonel Latham Valentine Stewart Blacker OBE was a British Army officer and inventor of weapons; he invented the Blacker Bombard, from which was developed the Hedgehog anti-submarine spigot-mortar – and laid the basis of the PIAT anti-tank weapon.