5 Inventions That Their Inventors Refused to Patent for All Our Sakes

Copyrighting a vaccine should be a one-way ticket downstairs

Patents serve an important function — keeping inventors from being ripped off for their lifes work. But sometimes that lifes work is something thats to the benefit of everyone elses lives as well. In which case, the idea of putting up red tape starts to feel just the littlest bit evil. If you invent something that can very clearly improve or save human lives, and then your next step is trying to figure out how much people would be willing to pay for it? Theres a little monster in your brain. 

Thankfully, some inventors out there understand that the betterment of the human race is something that will, in fact, bring you peace on your deathbed — unlike a bank account.

Here are five inventors who refused to take out or pursue patents in the name of global goodwill…

Jonas Salk, the Polio Vaccine

This feels like it might be the first gimme question on an ethics test. “Youve invented a vaccine that prevents a disease thats killing or maiming a huge amount of the worlds children. How much do you sell it for?” The answer, obviously, is zero. Though Im not sure most current CEOs would pass. 

Thankfully, Jonas Salk had his head screwed on straight and his feet not planted firmly in hell. Salk was interviewed on the day his vaccine was declared safe, and when asked who owned the patent, he responded, “Well, the people, I would say,” following it with “Could you patent the sun?”

Nils Bohlin, The Modern Seatbelt

Volvo

Its ubiquitous enough that you might not think the modern, three-point seatbelt you (hopefully) click in every time youre in car belongs to any particular manufacturer. It seems like something a governmental agency would have cooked up and distributed as a new requirement. 

In fact, that seatbelt was invented by Volvo, specifically an engineer named Nils Bohlin. The President of Volvo, Gunnar Engellau, had put Bohlin on the case himself after a tragic car accident killed one of his relatives. In that same spirit of preventing such occurrences in the future, Volvo did patent the new seatbelt design, but also immediately made it freely available to all of its competitors. 

To this day, we should be thankful its Bohlins design keeping us from ricocheting around car insides like a wet pinball, something the previous, two-point lap safety belts werent very good at stopping.

John Walker, Friction Matches

Shutterstock

Another invention youve probably used thousands of times in your life: the simple friction match. It seems like the sort of perfect invention that immediately sets you up for life, something that everybody is going to use for centuries, like the zipper or Scotch tape. When John Walker realized what hed created, though, no Looney Tunes dollar signs spun into his eyes, slot machine style. Instead, although he was urged to take out a patent on his matches, he made the recipe open to the public

Did his invention also inadvertently cause a horrible sickness among the people who manufactured them? Yes, but come on, he did his best.

Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web

Paul Clarke

The very thing youre reading this article on is also the gift of a well-meaning inventor named Tim Berners-Lee. When he came up with the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989, he could have had a monopoly on a technology that will affect, outside of a full apocalyptic scenario, the rest of human history. But he saw the capacity of his creation to connect the world and further the advancement of science and humanity, and let it remain unpatented. 

Of course, not sure he loved where we all went with it, but thats human nature. You want to let scientists share ideas across continents in seconds, youre also going to get stuck with Sonic the Hedgehog pornography.

Benjamin Franklin, Everything

Public Domain

Benjamin Franklin is one of the most famous inventors of all time, which might make it surprising to learn that he never held a single patent. Not because they werent available to him, but because he steadfastly refused to patent any of his inventions. Clearly, he believed that if someone wanted to use a kite to electrify themselves, they should be able to do it for free. 

Absolute legend.

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