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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Ellie and I'm joined by Laura and Antonia to talk about inventors product developers and what their work means for our daily lives so Laura what do you know about this so I'm a scientist uh I used to work at a university doing fundamental Research into things to do with nuclear waste so obviously my fundamental research had a
very clear application but it means I know a little bit about making discoveries in the laboratory and then what that means for the wide world so I'm kind of interested in understanding more about the difference between inventors product developers and how does product development actually make a difference to our lives there you go there we go Antonia you've got an engineering background so I guess you've got a little bit more of a different take yeah so I love science but I don't
think I can ever get right into the detail of how the fundamentals of the universe work I want to know what can we apply it to then there is also almost like a genre of YouTube where there are people with engineering or robotic skills and they make pretty useless inventions is any invention useless we'll get on to that I'm sure we'll find out but one of the YouTubers that I've watched before is Simone yet she made loads of useless robots and then she became a product developer or an
inventor depends how you want to phrase it one of the key things was she spent three years developing a coat hanger which she called a coat hinger I have seen this yes and I thought is this an invention or is this a new product I want to see what other people think about this topic yeah very interesting so I would say that Antonia probably cares more about the use of something perhaps and Laura cares more about discovering something brand new to the world definitely don't really care what
happens next just as long as I've discovered it I can pass it on to someone else do something with you found it so I think maybe we need some definitions to start with so what would you say is the difference then between inventors and product developers H I tried looking into this and I struggled with it I ended up looking at like patent law essentially how do you patent something I think that's a good start you've got to think about the legalities of these things oh yeah it's part of if
you've got a product that you think is unique and you want to make money off it I think that's one of the key differences a product is something you want to make money off and in invention or maybe a discovery I think there probably a difference there as well is just something you found out whether you want to make money off it or not or not in my case Antonio what do you reckon oh that's an interesting distinction yeah I suppose product is inherently something
you you try to sell invention you make I think one of the defining things probably is if it improves quality of life like it makes things better or easier or is that an altruistic view of what a invention is uh I feel like ultimately it should be when I looked at the difference between the US patent office and the UK intellectual property office the US patent office says it definitely has to be useful the UK intellectual property office doesn't really care I suppose you could also discover
something that doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on you you know if you discovered a new black hole or something like that it's good to know about but it doesn't really mean anything for your daily life particularly yeah but I feel like that's a discovery or something that's already in the natural world so it's not necessarily an invention I wonder if an invention should be something that wouldn't already exist in nature wouldn't have the potential to exist in nature that's an interesting
point yeah does it have to have some sort of human control or human Ingenuity to bring it into life perhaps then if those are the differences what are some examples in our lives that show these things that have developed yeah Antonia don't you have experience of working for a company that was a spin out from was it the University of Manchester or am I misremembering that it was I was thinking whether it was an invention or a discovery because the founder found a
better way to produce Quantum dots so they filed a patent for that so is that an enhancement of a process that already existed and so it's not really Discovery I would argue yes because presumably there was a way of doing it before and they found a better way so that to me me says product development rather than invention of something brand new maybe the process was so novel though that is kind of an invention though yeah perhaps I couldn't tell you enough about Quantum
dots to uh shed any more light on that I'm afraid what about something that we're all familiar with what about something like music see I was fascinated by this at one point cuz I grew up in the '90s and I used to record songs from the radio you know on the cassette by pressing play and record at the same time and then everything went online cuz I remember being like a huge Napster user I was trying to think of the first one I remember my brother downloading music for me as like the
very first iterations of you can have an MP3 file on your phone and you could have like five and you thought that was incredible yes see I remember a time when I said to my colleagues I've got an MP3 player and I've got a mobile phone wouldn't it be great if I could just combine the two so I don't have to carry one product around they all look at me like I was crazy and look where we are today exactly and we had a separate camera as well that's so true like smartphones I suppose are one of the
most combined Technologies is that an invention then to combine an MP3 player a phone a camera or is it product development that's made the three in one that we all have in our pockets there probably was an invention that made things small enough that it could fit onto a phone yeah but maybe the smartphone itself isn't an invention I don't know I guess maybe the first time someone did it it was quite revolutionary there was a big fan Fair made about it wasn't there yeah but like
you say there's an awful lot of fundamental science that went into making things small enough to fit them into something that actually worked that didn't do things like get hideously hot and set your clothes on fire maybe I mean they still do that sometimes don't they see those reports but yeah I think it's just it's a blurred line I don't think there is a hard and fast definition between invention versus product development maybe it just depends on how you want to spin it how
exciting you want it to sound because I think invention sounds more exciting than product development I do agree with that sentiment yes I think invention sounds cooler and like inventors I feel perhaps are less of a thing now than they were back in the day yeah I agree people would say like the invention of the light bulb or the internet or something like that as like a big fundamental change in human history whereas I don't think people would say the iterations of like an MP3 player to
an iPod to Spotify potentially have the same effect do you guys agree I think if you worked in a music industry you probably would disagree because it did quite fundamentally change how people knew how popular things were so the top 40 in the UK used to be someone phoning up different record shops and saying how much of this album have you sold wow and then totaling that up and then announcing it on radio and that was how everyone knew what the top songs were I
never thought of that I just always assumed they did it on I guess downloads or streams or whatever but that was much later well this was yeah this was before streaming music was a thing and back when we started streaming like MP3s people downloaded them maybe not through the proper Channel and so how did you actually account for that cuz then you're kind of losing out on your popularity there yeah absolutely yeah I say digital Rights Management is a big thing in itself isn't it if someone's
downloaded things illegally which is what Napster was kind of originally there for versus the legal download you do via Spotify now which are a lot easier I think wasn't that an innovation in the economy and how the product was sold was if we make streaming so easy people wouldn't find another way to do it I think that has to be a big component of product development do people find it easy to get what you're selling you could come up like the most amazing invention ever but if no one
knows about it or it's really difficult to use for some reason like it might be able to compose a symphony for you say but putting something into it to actually get a symphony out that people want to hear might be really difficult than would you use it well I suppose that's all the new ones now isn't it with the AI generators and chant upt and all the rest of it is you can put whatever you like and it will generate something but is it any good does it make sense is it useful for you and I
suppose if you're a company Could you actually Market it legally and have the patents and all the rest of it as well which is a big gray area as we're finding about the ease of things so in my job as an energy manager that actually plays quite a big part because even though though people might know fundamentally doing certain behaviors like turning off lights turning off things you don't use when you don't need them will save energy and therefore reduce carbon emissions trying to
convince people to do that all the time is not easy so I'm trying to find what way can I make it easier do I automate things do I set timers do I put things on schedules do I lock them physically out of turning things on at certain times I like that as an idea yeah you want a product that kind of replaces people's behaviors in that case yes also debatable like how good is AI at figuring out what people need and adapting to it if it was like air conditioning and having the right
temperature people experience temperature quite differently no one agrees on what temperature they want yes our old car had an automatic temperature setting I used to fight with it constantly what it said was 14° or de was not but that's interesting as well would you say that the invention of air conditioning is that invention or is that product development is the refrigeration cycle a discovery or is an invention oh I guess if you go back to the fundamentals it's all about
compressing a gas or a fluid to take in or release energy depending on if you're compressing or expanding it I mean that that's a fundamental piece of science that can be used in different ways and it has been obviously to make refrigerants um heat pumps air conditioning what about some more common things we mentioned before the internet what about that is that an invention or is that have we discovered the internet I think that has to have been invented it didn't exist in nature if you're
sticking with my definition of discovery but what was the need for it why did someone invent the internet yeah so the worldwide web was invented at CERN because scientists wanted to transfer data between computers so literally what what we wanted the internet for was to transmit information from one place to another for science for science now now not so much but I think the precursors to it were also very similar so they had computers on a local network but the
difference was I think having hyperlinks that would take you to a place that you didn't know before a virtual place you mean where where the files and the information was stored yeah instead of having like distinct you know my computer's connected to your computer ear yeah now you you go on a web page and you click on a link and it takes you to where that file is which was what they say was the start of the internet I would say that was probably then more of
an invention because nothing necessarily maybe slightly similar earlier iterations existed but nothing on that scale existed previously some people might argue it was a product development of people having the local network system and then it was the next natural progression to make it worldwide as they say what about inventions that might lead to Future Tech what could we be looking at in the next 10 years or 20 years or 100 years well I do a lot of reporting for the materials research
Society is a freelancer and I've come across lots of really cool discoveries that I think maybe could become products at some point in the future uh they're currently sort of a research level at universities at the minute but one really interesting one I think is um really tiny robots on the sort of microscope scale that can melt through bars the video is just you look at it and think wow that is futuristic this is very cool I well I came across this because one of my colleagues reported on
this at work when Laura says it's robots that can melt through bars she is not joking it's like little tiny Lego looking figures uh made of gallium and they melt and then reform very neatly on the other side of the little jail that they're in which is pretty cool the thing that impressed me was it didn't stay as a puddle yes melting is not that impressive the fact that it became the same shape again on the other side was my blowing so they do it use magnetic
field that creates an electric current which causes it to heat up that's what causes it to melt and they can control its movement using magnets as well so it's all about electromagnet magnetism essentially so they can get it to walk around which doesn't sound like it's got an application right doesn't like it could be a product it's just a novelty but it does have applications otherwise they wouldn't have got grant funding for it well what are the applications then
what do you think they're going to do with it in the future H so the example they were talking about when I interviewed them was uh from medical applications they could use the magnetic field to get this little robot to move around the body and it could do things like deliver a packet of drugs to a very certain location so you only need the drugs in that place which is a little bit how some um cancer therapies work okay they could also use it to go into to an organ and extract a foreign body
and pull it out depending on what it is if they can get it to form around it I guess create its own little cage and then pull them out I think so yeah that's how I imagine it anyway that might not be what the researchers are imagining maybe something more sophisticated yeah would you say that this then is an invention that they've invented this way of manipulating gallium to form and melt and reform or is it just something that they've discovered is it fundamental
science that they've applied in this way um it uses things that are found in nature I guess but it Engineers them in a different way doesn't it to do something that I doubt would really happen in nature I me in theory it could but the chances are so small I don't think it would no I don't think it's an invention yet because it's not doing something it's not a product I think it's a discovery yeah I think I agree with you I think it's more like we found out that it could do this yeah if we
manipulate it in a certain way rather than we've made something that you can all use though if anyone wants to gift me a tiny little melty Lego man I will happily take that does it get to be called an invention once they've got something that they know it can definitely get in and deliver drugs in a certain way or remove foreign bodies and then they've got an invention I think so yeah when they get that patent then I'll give it its invention title cuz we have that power to
Grant I do within the Realms of the podcast I do the technically speaking invention award oh maybe we should start that that sounds great these guys are based in the United States I know us universities are really big on spin out companies so I assume it will be product from a company at some point yeah that's true what about any other current Tech that we know of or current discoveries that could have future applications I think you'll like this one Antonio cuz it's about the industry and
sustainability oh yeah but uh something else I reported on was about creating semi-transparent photovoltaic cells so solar cells essentially that you can use to make glass panels of a greenhouse and also power the greenhous as well so if you want to control the temperature and the humidity and whatever else in there you can use electricity from the photovoltaic cells to do that so you have better food security lower carbon footprint and your Greenhouse is your
Powerhouse that's pretty cool I like that lot so were they still clear or were they like I'm imagining them green for no reason I'm thinking leaves they transmit wavelengths at the plants can use so they they're not fully transparent to all wavelengths of visible light but they do absorb at a particular wavelength that the solar cell can use this is a big thing about um solar panels they're only what like 20 or 30% efficient because they can't absorb all wavelengths of light so it
makes sense to have something that will pass through that would be useful in some way see this to me sounds more like an invention that they've invented this special type of photo glass or photo material or is it still because it's still a solar panel they've just developed a new type of solar panel but it sounds really good cuz people are often talking about whether or not we should be using farmland for solar Farms you know where you put loads of solar panels in a field yes we have to kind of
balance food security with energy security but in some ways the land owners are just selling it to the highest bidder yeah I think the innov here or the discovery is that these are really really thin solar cells which is one of the reasons they can transmit the light but when you get to that sort of scale of like nanometers what you see is the different surfaces in your solar cell are actually really rough which means that the electrons can't flow very well between one layer and another so
they can't get out into forming your electrical current and powering things so they figured out a way to make those surfaces less rough which is an evolution of the original technology I guess but they have to go all the way down to that tiny length scale to make something that is an engineering scale useful product I'd like to see that hit the uh commercial market and things be made out of that save a bit of energy grow some more plants I feel like if it's transparent that is Way Beyond what
solar cells currently do so I think that would be a new invention at that point once they've got it all working and can sell it to you to use on your Greenhouse yeah it's got to reach a commercial Market first maybe to uh be considered a true uh profitable invention I have one more that definitely isn't an invention yet this is very much fundamental stuff okay I want to mention it because I got to go and meet them in Japan a few years ago to film them as they were working
produce a documentary for them these guys were using a giant laser that uses x-rays to look at these tiny crystals that they'd grown in the lab and what they want to know is what the structure of these crystals is which will help them understand how they can transport electrons which could have loads of different applications not just for making solar cells and electronic components but for making chemical reactions happen and various other things so it could be useful for carbon
capture x-ray crystallography is already an existing technology yes so how is this different so that's limited to crystals that are sort of millimeter size so you can really obviously see them by eye these ones are much smaller than that like micrometer scale when they showed me this bottle of crystals in liquid that they had you could just see little sparkles in it like glitter so it was pretty tiny and the idea is they can use these tiny crystals to do things once they figured out what their
structure is and how they trans electrons cuz the tiny difference in the composition of the crystals makes a big difference to how they function so say they figured out how long does they get from that stage to something that we can use to do something like carbon capture or something in Tech or anything like that I would not be surprised if we're looking at sort of decades to develop an actual product but if they put a lot of effort into it they could get there a
lot quicker I guess it depends on how much more funding they can get it always comes back to the money as we're discovering it does convince people you've got a valuable thing that is good for Humanity is uh a lot of grant funding stuff in Academia I feel like a lot of scientists and Engineers when they're in the research field are looking at The Cutting Edge though because they need those Advanced Technologies to progress the next thing it's like the technology or our current
understanding is the barrier to The Next Step so maybe if it's well known enough it could really push people's research it's just whether or not they can make these laser x-rays happen in their own lab or will it be too difficult to to do the analysis would be highly specialist because it's quite intense x-rays they're using there are only six facilities in the world that can produce x-rays this intense uh but they do want to make it more accessible to The Wider
research organizations um so they are developing a way of analyzing their data that they will share freely to any scientist that wants to use it oh that's nice we like that yeah so they're doing something for free and also I guess eventually looking to product they can sell yeah like if more people need it then they get more money too absolutely what would we like to see because I remember being a kid and being told oh in the future we're going to have flying
cars like that was the big push for like the mid 2000s like 2050 we'll have flying cars but I don't see anyone developing that I don't see that happening anytime soon but what would you like to see happen teleportation yeah oh yeah that's a good one that's a solid choice how would you do it probably the energy required to make us into a dispersable format and then reconstitute us would you disperse it like in Star Trek or would you just make a copy and then destroy the original
Oh I could just see that going horribly wrong if you forget to destroy the original and then there's two of everyone or 10 of everyone walking around that's a Sci-Fi plot waiting to happen yeah you'd have to have some sort of um mechanism in there that would stop you just making multiple copies of a person and you'd have to figure out the whole Consciousness thing as well which scientists are working on I keep seeing news articles about quantum entanglement
in people's brains as what helps lead to Consciousness oh do you think we're going to all be uploaded into some great superc computer in the future we'll get rid of bodies and we'll just be internet consciousnesses floating around I think so but I don't want that I think we discussed this in a previous episode about do you want to live forever and I I'd like being out in the world and feeling things but what if you you know all the impulses in your brain was telling you you are experiencing this
you are outside was it Plato's Cave that thought experiment if that's all you see that is your lived experience then how is that any different from you actually experiencing it but that's not my experience now right and I feel like on some fundamental level I'd know whether I'm a biological entity you'd know what you were missing yeah cuz I've already experienced it yeah you've tried 3D glasses and you can't be convinced that that 3D movie was actually 3D oh my God
no they give you a headache though things no oh is that an invention that's a good one the you know the Oculus quests and whatever else they're called the virtual reality headsets or is that again just product development from I don't know 4K 8K TVs and IMAX Cinemas and all the rest of it combin other Technologies didn't it with like you know the Wii remote when it could see where you're pointing on the TV it kind of knows which way you're facing so as a kind of gyroscope so it's better you
know it's different from a TV I'm guessing it's been patented or patented depending on where you are in the world so I guess it is class as an invention I think probably it's an invention we didn't have anything really like that before in the same way that we do now yeah I've been doing a lot of sewing at the minute to change T entirely and I sometimes fight with my sewing machine probably because I'm not a very good machinist but I also don't think the sewing machine has changed a lot since
it was come to widespread use in I think it was like the 1840s or something there were various patterns taken out around from that time it was around the time of Industrial Revolution so it's no surprise they were looking at ways to make labor saving devices for things people genuinely have a use for like wearing clothes yeah but it would be nice to see a machine that is easier to use and I don't have to get as annoyed with but what that would look like I don't know do you think it would be
fundamentally different I would like to think it could be fundamentally different because it is a little bit of a fa to load up all the threads and get everything lined up and then manage it and like ultimately you manage um how fast it goes with just pressing your foot on it pedal yeah which is actually kind of difficult I mean it's like driving a car so you'd think it wouldn't be difficult but my machine seems to be worse than a car what would you rather have would you rather have some sort of
touchscreen buttton that would control the speed or would you rather have a dial or voice activated sewing machine ooh that would be helpful cuz you end up using all three limbs at various points to control it in a certain way or do you flip it on its head there's 3D printed knit wear so instead of having two control it all together you put in your pattern but it's in 3D and it off it goes just like a 3D printer so we've taken Laura completely out of it we've
just made it I do nothing yeah you do nothing you just press go and your garment is created for you when I try to make clothes sometimes cutting fabric was really difficult you wouldn't think it would be either but yes I have the same thing and it ends up not being exactly the way you wanted it to be yeah especially cuz depending on the texture of it it would move yeah I feel like our entire audio is just saying you just buy clothes though you don't need to make
them yeah I think this has been invented out for you we've got but someone's still making them yes or even if it's largely you know much more scaled up on a big production line yeah there's a lot of bits that a machine still cannot do yeah and if you've ever used a sewing machine like mine is incredibly noisy when it's at full speed imagine an entire Workshop floor of noisy sewing machines I know older people that have hearing problems because they worked on
a machine shop floor their entire life so there's definitely a human quality of life Improvement element to do there obviously those people still need jobs though and that was a big thing about sewing machines in the industrial revolution some people didn't patent their idea because they thought people would lose their job it's like um automated supermarkets now that don't necessarily need anyone to be on the checkout they just need people to restock the products on the shelves so
you go in immediately the camera's clock that you're in there the cameras know what you're taking off the shelves by the time you get to the till there's no person it automatically knows what you've picked it fills your basket you pay you don't interact with another human it's all entirely automated which is nice in some ways but also a little sad that you can get all the way through something like that without talking to a human being yeah it's very interesting
how much the Machine World will uh take over and how automation can become such a huge part of daily life yeah I think that means there would be a shift in how Society fundamentally Works which could also be classed as a sort of invention if society's doing new things do we will shift from more just making things to a a more of a like a service type industry where everyone's you know going on holidays all the time and experiencing new things having guided tours of
mountains and whatever else I mean that doesn't sound terrible I'd like to go on holiday all the time that sounds like a Utopia well I think maybe we've wandered a bit too far away from what we were talking about before so we've gone all the way from what is an inventor what is a product developer through the definitions we've talked about spin outs we've talked about about the evolutions of things like music from cassette to MP3 players and streaming services we've
even talked about where the future might lead and The Cutting Edge of Science and new materials thank you very much for listening the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to
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