Jerry Merryman RIP

Jerry Merryman, co-inventor of the first handheld electronic calculator at Texas Instruments, died February 27 (link). I had not heard of him. I recently read Walter Isaacson's The Innovators. It included a half page about the invention of said calculator. It referred to Patrick Haggerty and Jack Philby, but did not mention Merryman. So I sought to learn a little more about him.

This led me to a two-part article in ElectronicDesign about Merryman and the invention of said calculator. Part 1 download page. Part 2 download page. Registration is free. "How the Computer Got Into Your Pocket" is another story about the early years of the handheld calculator, with more details about Merryman's role.

Income Taxes 2018 #2

One week ago I posted about the many news stories I saw about tax refunds being smaller than last year. By innuendo said stories alleged the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act didn't reduce taxes after all.

Such allegations were based on the earliest filed tax returns. Since then with more returns filed, the average refund has risen to be slightly greater than last year. The Washington Examiner notes that the newsrooms that rushed to report tax refunds were smaller this year -- such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio -- have been silent on the IRS data showing the average refund has since increased.

Income Taxes 2018

I have seen many articles about people receiving lower tax refunds. There is more than one reason why. For some people, such as those living in high tax states, it could be the new limits on itemized deductions. The deductions for state and local taxes, which includes real estate taxes, are now limited to $10,000 due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The most common reason, however, is probably the following. New withholding tables quickly followed the Act's passage. For the most part, employers were instructed to withhold less tax from workers in 2018, so that more money would land in their paychecks. As such, much of the money that many filers are expecting this season has already been paid to them via lower withholding last year.

Incidentally, one reason for my lack of posting in the past several weeks is income tax work. Last month I did five days of training in preparation for being an AARP Tax-Aid volunteer three days per week during the tax season, February 1 through April 15. This is my fourth season as a volunteer.

The Wright Brothers #6

Competitors of the Wright brothers experimented with alternatives to circumvent the Wright brothers' patent. Foremost was Glenn Curtiss, who invented ailerons ("little wings") instead of wing warping for flight control. (Curtiss also pioneered in attaining more speed.) The Wright brothers sued for patent infringement, starting a years-long legal conflict. Curtiss's company obtained patents, too. Until he died from typhoid in 1912, Wilbur took the lead in the patent struggles.

David McCullough's book devotes little space to the patent wars. McCullough says nothing about how the patent war ended. Wikipedia has an article devoted to them, which says the following. It was ended by the U.S. government. By 1917 the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization (a patent pool), the Manufacturer's Aircraft Association.

All aircraft manufacturers were required to join the association, and each member was required to pay a comparatively small blanket fee (for the use of aviation patents) for each airplane manufactured; of that the major part would go to the Wright-Martin and Curtiss companies, until their respective patents expired. This arrangement was designed to last only for the duration of the war, but the patent war did not resume later. Orville had sold his interest in the Wright Company to a group of New York financiers in 1915 and retired from the business. The "patent war" came to an end. The companies merged in 1929 to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which still exists.

The Wright Brothers #5

The Wright brothers continued their experiments with powered flight after the one at Kitty Hawk in December, 1903. They did longer flights with more control of the aircraft, attaining 24 miles in October, 1905. They got a patent approval in 1906. Their fame grew slowly initially. The American press and government expressed little interest. The U.S. goverment wanted drawings and descriptions enough to enable construction, but the brothers refused. Their fame did grow rapidly after Wilbur did demonstrations in France in 1907-8.

Wilbur lost control and crashed a plane in 1905 with minor injury. Orville did, too. They flew little for about two years, trying to commercialize their invention. In September, 1908 Orville crashed a plane and was badly injured, with multiple broken and fractured bones. His passenger was killed.

They formed the Wright Company in 1909. They sold their patents to the company for $100,000 and also received one-third of the shares in a million dollar stock issue and a 10 percent royalty on every airplane sold. With Wilbur as president and Orville as vice president, the company set up a factory in Dayton and a flying school/test flight field at Huffman Prairie, Ohio; the headquarters office was in New York City.

The Wright Brothers #4

Especially helpful to the Wright brothers were Octave Chanute, a civil engineer, builder of bridges, railroads, and gliders and Samuel Pierpoint Langley, astronomer and head of the Smithsonian. Langley, with help of Smithsonian funding, had helped create a pilotless "aerodrome."

Other experimenters in controlled flight were Sir George Cayley, Sir Hiram Maxim, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. In France the government spent a considerable amount of money on a steam-powered flying machine built by Clement Ader, who gave the word avion, airplane in English, to the French language. Along with the cost of experiments, the risk of failure, injury, and death, there was the inevitable prospect of being mocked as a crank, a crackpot, often for good reason. The experimenters served as a continual source of popular comic relief.

Among the material supplied by the Smithsonian to the Wright brothers was Pierre Mouillard's Empire of the Air, which exalted the wonders of flying creatures. Wilbur took up bird watching on Sundays, observing what Mouillard preached. The dreams of Wilbur and Orville had taken hold. They would design and build their own experimental glider-kite, building on what they had read, observed of birds in flight, and spent considerable time thinking. They became familiar with aeronautical terms such as equilibrium, lift, pitch and yaw. Equilibrium was all-important to them. Wilbur's observations of birds and how they adjusted their wings to maintain balance inspired him to the idea of building a glider with "wing warping" or "wing twisting." This made an immensely important and original advance to their goal.

The Wright Brothers #3

For a few weeks each year in 1900-02 the Wright brothers experimented with gliders at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Wikipedia has greater detail about the gliders. Kitty Hawk had a small population, the men were mostly fishermen, and the living conditions were uncomfortable and often harsh. It  was quite a journey to get there. However, the Wright brothers chose this place due to the fairly steady wind conditions and the sand bars which afforded the best landing surface.

After their 1901 visit to Kitty Hawk they built a small wind tunnel. It was only six feet long and four feet square, but their experiments with it and numerous wing shapes greatly increased their understanding of flight.

They went again to Kitty Hawk in 1903. This time they had a biplane with motor and propellers. Their long-time bicycle shop employee Charlie Taylor became an important part of the team, building their first airplane engine in close collaboration with the brothers. On December 17, 1903 they made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air, fixed wing aircraft. Their fundamental breakthrough was their invention of three-axis control, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft effectively and to maintain its equilibrium.