List: Discovery and invention controversies

by likeorhate

•  Cold fusion

  Cold fusion refers to nuclear fusion of atoms at conditions close to room temperature, in contrast to the conditions of well-understood fusion reactions such as those inside stars and high energy experiments.

  

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•  Edwin Howard Armstrong

  Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – January 31, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Armstrong was the inventor of frequency modulation (FM) radio. Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in New York City, New York, in 1890. He studied at Columbia University and later became a professor there.

  

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•  HIV

  Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a lentivirus (a member of the retrovirus family) that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in humans in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections. Infection with HIV occurs by the transfer of blood, semen, vaginal fluid, pre-ejaculate, or breast milk. Within these bodily fluids, HIV is present as both free virus particles and virus within infected immune cells.

  

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•  Magnetic resonance imaging

  Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMRI), is primarily a medical imaging technique most commonly used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structure and limited function of the body. MRI provides much greater contrast between the different soft tissues of the body than computed tomography (CT) does, making it especially useful in neurological (brain), musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and oncological (cancer) imaging.

  

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•  Telephone

  The telephone is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sound, most commonly the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to one another. It is one of the most common household appliances in the developed world, and has long been considered indispensable to business, industry and government.

  

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•  Incandescent light bulb

  The incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is a source of electric light that works by incandescence (a general term for heat-driven light emissions, which includes the simple case of black body radiation). An electric current passes through a thin filament, heating it to a temperature that produces light. The enclosing glass bulb contains either a vacuum or an inert gas to prevent oxidation of the hot filament.

  

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•  Robert Peary

  Robert Edwin Peary (May 6, 1856 – February 20, 1920) was an American explorer who claimed to have been the first person, on April 6, 1909, to reach the geographic North Pole. Peary's claim was widely credited for most of the 20th century, though it was criticized even in its own day and is today widely doubted.

  

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•  Element naming controversy

  The names for the chemical elements 104 to 106 were the subject of a major controversy starting in the 1960s, described by some nuclear chemists as the Transfermium Wars because it concerned the elements subsequent to fermium (element 100). The final resolution of this controversy in 1997 also decided the names of elements 107 to 109.

  

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•  Richard Evelyn Byrd

  Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr. , USN (October 25, 1888 – March 11, 1957) was a pioneering American polar explorer, aviator and a recipient of the Medal of Honor.

  

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•  Johann Philipp Reis

  Johann Philipp Reis (January 7, 1834 – January 14, 1874) was a self-taught German scientist and inventor, who in 1860-1861 constructed an early telephone, today called the Reis telephone. He first publicly demonstrated it on October 26, 1861.

  

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•  Gordon Gould

  Gordon Gould (July 17, 1920 – September 16, 2005) was an American physicist who is widely, but not universally, credited with the invention of the laser. Gould is best known for his thirty-year fight with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to obtain patents for the laser and related technologies. He also fought with laser manufacturers in court battles to enforce the patents he subsequently did obtain.

  

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•  Frederick Cook

  Dr. Frederick Albert Cook (June 10, 1865 – August 5, 1940) was an American explorer and physician, noted for his claim of having reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908, a year before Robert Peary claimed to, April 6, 1909.

  

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•  Raymond Vahan Damadian

  Raymond Vahan Damadian (born March 16, 1936) is an American practitioner and co-inventor of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Damadian discovered that tumors and normal tissue can be distinguished in vivo by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) because of their relaxation times. Damadian was the first to perform a full body scan of a human being in 1977 to diagnose cancer. His invention was able to locate cancerous tissue without producing an image.

  

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•  Guanahani

  Guanahani was the name the natives gave to the island that Columbus called San Salvador when he arrived at the Americas. Columbus reached the island on 12 October 1492, the first island he sighted and visited in the Americas. Guanahani is one of the islands of the Lucayan archipelago in the Bahamas, but the exact island is a matter of some debate.

  

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•  Jacques Benveniste

  Jacques Benveniste (March 12, 1935–October 3, 2004) was a French immunologist. In 1979 he published a well-known paper on the structure of platelet-activating factor and its relationship with histamine. He was head of INSERM's Unit 200, directed at immunology, allergy and inflammation.

  

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•  Software patent debate

  The software patent debate is the argument dealing with the extent to which it should be possible to patent software and computer-implemented inventions as a matter of public policy. Policy debate on software patents has been active for years. The opponents to software patents have gained higher visibility with lower resources through the years than their pro-patent opponents. Arguments and critiques have been focused mostly on the economic consequences of software patents.

  

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•  First flying machine

  There are conflicting views as to what was the first flying machine. This kind of controversy of invention is not limited to flight. For example, debates over the tallest building tend to break into debates around what constitutes a building and what is the most important measure of such structures' height. In the same way some records of flying machines can come down to the exact definition of what, for example, constitutes a "flying machine", or "flight", or even "first".

  

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•  Nobel Prize controversies

  The Nobel Prize controversies are contentious disputes regarding the Nobel Prize. Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, the proceedings, nominations, awards and exclusions have generated criticism and engendered much controversy. In particular, the Prizes in Literature and Peace have generated a lot of criticism.

  

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•  Invention of the telephone

  The modern telephone is the culmination of work done by many individuals. Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent the telephone, an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically", after experimenting with many primitive sound transmitters and receivers.

  

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•  Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy

  The calculus controversy was an argument between seventeenth-century mathematicians Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz (begun or fomented in part by their disciples and associates – see Development of the quarrel below) over who had first invented calculus. Newton claimed to have begun working on a form of the calculus (which he called "the method of fluxions and fluents") in 1666, but did not publish it except as a minor annotation in the back of one of his publications decades later.

  

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•  Invention of radio

  "Great Radio Controversy" redirects here. For the album by the band Tesla, see: The Great Radio Controversy. This article covers the main arguments about who had what part in the early development of radio. For the general history of radio, see: History of radio. Within the history of radio, several people were involved in the invention of radio and there were many key inventions in what became the modern systems of wireless. Radio development began as "wireless telegraphy".

  

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•  Robert Kearns

  Robert William Kearns (March 10, 1927 – February 9, 2005) was the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper systems used on most automobiles from 1969 to the present. His first patent for the invention was filed on December 1, 1964. Kearns won one of the best known patent infringement cases against Ford Motor Company (1978-1990) and a case against Chrysler Corporation (1982-1992).

  

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•  Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy

  The Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell controversy concerns the question of whether Bell or Gray invented the telephone independently and, if not, whether Bell stole the invention from Gray. This controversy is narrower than the broader question of who deserves credit for inventing the telephone, for which there are several claimants.

  

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•  Discovery of Neptune

  Neptune is the only planet in the Solar System whose existence was mathematically predicted before it was directly observed. By 1846, the planet Uranus had completed nearly one full orbit since its discovery by William Herschel in 1781, and astronomers had detected a series of irregularities in its path which could not be entirely explained by Newton's law of gravitation.

  

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•  List of chemical elements naming controversies

  Vanadium (named after Vanadis, another name for Freyja, the Scandinavian goddess of fertility) was originally discovered by Andrés Manuel del Río (a Spanish-born Mexican mineralogist) in Mexico City in 1801. He discovered the element after being sent a sample of "brown lead" ore. Through experimentation, he found it to form salts with a wide variety of colors, so he named the element panchromium . He later renamed this substance erythronium, since most of the salts turned red when heated.

  

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