The key to Nakamata's long and prodigious career, which recently included a Nobel Prize for Nutrition, has been the protection of his intellectual property. Alas, things were tougher in the 19th century, when research was often simply appropriated, given a commercial spin and patented, to the detriment of the original inventor. None was more adept at the intellectual property game as it was then played than Thomas Edison, who had an undeniable gift for taking credit for other people's work, coupled with an implacable approach to business.
Perhaps best known is the length to which he went to convince the American public that his low-voltage DC electricity was superior to the competing high-voltage AC current of George Westinghouse. Beyond publicly staging electrocutions of animals with AC voltage to demonstrate its danger (including a circus elephant!), Edison played a key role in ensuring that the newly-developed electric chair used AC, again to scare the daylights out of people.
I can't resist one more Edison anecdote. Despite being invented by the Lumière brothers (why not watch the first movie ever made, shot in 1895?) Edison claimed moving pictures as yet another of his offspring and wasn't shy about hindering the success of competing systems and movie creators. George Méliès, a former French stage magician turned director, was one of the first geniuses of the nascent movie business. Méliès put everything he had into creating one of the first motion picture epics, his famous A Trip to the Moon. Initial showings went over well but he counted on extensive projections in the US to recoup the huge investment he had made in the film. It appears that Edison's agents bribed a theater owner to acquire a print, from which he made hundreds of copies for projecting the film extensively in the US prior to Méliè. With no public for his film, this aggressive pirating contributed to Méliès bankruptcy. He later becoming a toy salesman in a train station and was powerless to keep the celloid prints of hundreds of his pictures from being melted down by the French government to make bootheels for soldiers during the First World War. That's show biz!
Another of Edison's victims was also French, but last week history finally paid Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville his due. In the 1850's, Scott was actively exploring the capabilities of his phonautograph to record sound (shown above) by scratching smoke-covered paper. He duly deposited a patent application for the device with the French patent office in the late 50's, as well as phonautograms to support the application. Edison and his crew were well aware of the work and performed many phonautograph experiments of their own, eventually coming up with the phonograph in 1877 and laying claim as the inventor of sound recording.
And that would be that, except for the diligent work of the good people of FirstSounds.org, who in researching the history of phonautographs came across those ancient, smoke-covered recordings of Scott's and thanks to sophisticated reconstruction techniques actually managed to play them back. One was made public last week for the first time, a haunting voice singing a snippet of the French popular tune Au Clair de la Lune. Imagine, a voice from 1860, smokily coming to us through all the intervening decades. A poetic revenge indeed for Édouard-Léo Scott de Martinville, the true inventor of recorded sound.
Chris Dickman
Graphics.com | Also blogging on Photos.com
For those new to the Design Brief, this is a series of design competitions with each iteration consisting of a brief provided by a hypothetical client requiring a book jacket, CD cover, condiment label, and so on. Participants post their entries in the gallery on Graphics.com, where visitors can comment and submissions can be subsequently tuned and resubmitted. Part of the fun is to watch designs evolve as the result of such suggestions. At the end of each Brief, three entries are awarded subscriptions to the AbleStock.com stock photo subscription service, which is the source of suggested imagery for the designs.
Browsing through the entries for that initial contest, the evolution of the Challenge is clear, not just in the sophistication of the entries but in the nature of the competition itself. I conceived the Challenge as a way to show off the many facets of the Photos.com royalty-free stock photo subscription site, which contains a wealth of interesting imagery easily overlooked by a casual observer. In those days the collection provided 100,000 photos, a fraction of the 350,000 now available, but even then it contained imagery that I knew creatives would be able to run with as the basis for new compositions.
Strange the consistent appeal of faces designed originally for signage. P22's most recent release is 
Julien Janiszewskis is a young French designer who makes his fonts available through such vendors as T26, Bitstream and ITC. Monotype Imaging recently announced the availability of his Loft font in its May newsletter, with the example above being intriguing enough that I visited Monotype's Fonts.com site to learn more. The description was solid enough, providing background on Janiszewski's inspiration and design objectives for Loft, as well as a brief quote. We learn that he was inspired by late 19th-century wooden type and influenced by the lettering of Parisian street signs. 
Emboldened by this and subsequent efforts, I'm now trying to extend my abilities in this area, as time permits. To that end I have found the frighteningly-thick 
Regular readers (hi, mom!) know that I am a big fan of the OpenType format, even going so far as to designate 2005 as