The Wall Street Journal reports that tinkering is making a comeback: numerous tinkerers, in the form of students, entrepreneurs, and just plain old mechanical aficionados (micro-gearheads?) have taken to spaces varying from dorm rooms, to clubs, to incubators, in an effort to come up with a better mousetrap, so to speak. The advent of Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) devices has now made modeling of devices, ranging from scaled down versions of large gear assemblies to scaled up assemblies of micro-machines possible, even within a dorm room.

 

CNC devices are not necessarily the key, they were available some years ago, what is more interesting is the advent of workshops such as NYC Resistor, A2 Mech Shop in Ann Arbor, and Hive 76 in our hometown of Philadelphia, where tinkerers are performing their own form of mechanical invention that may well be the equivalent of the inception of integrated circuits in Silicon Valley in the 60s and 70s or the development of software in the late 80s and 90s.

 

The trouble is, it is hard to connect the dots between automated bartending machines (I prefer the human kind of bartender) and Kurtzweilien nanobots eliminating cancers and disease within our bodies, but somewhere between those two extremes there may be a significant number of important mechanical inventions and advances that are not only revolutionary or evolutionary, but highly patentable and which will result in blockbuster patents. What if the “next big thing” isn’t software, a virtual machine, a social network, but rather a very tangible assembly of interacting parts that reduces energy consumption, converts one form of energy to another, or solves a difficult problem in an elegant mechanical fashion? Will all of the electrical engineers and computer scientists die of embarrassment? I don’t think so, we’re open minded enough (or at least I’d like to think so) that we can step aside and provide support if that is what is needed.

 

From a patent perspective, given the current state of business method (and potentially many software) patents, with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruling on Bilski resulting in pending Supreme Saga, patent claims covering moving parts – no mater how small they are – seem exceedingly attractive right now.  But I guess it is important to remember that the grass always looks greener on the other side. Mechanical inventions, especially those dealing with either combined functionality of existing mechanical systems, or miniaturization of larger machines, could be subject to obviousness type patentability attacks under KSR or for simply miniaturizing known inventions.

 

Stay tuned and don’t be surprised that if commensurate with an increase in the enrollment in mechanical engineering, that there is a significant increase in the number of filings of patents in the mechanical area, ranging from energy related innovations to household devices, new materials, paints, surfaces, and medical related micro-mechanical components. It’s inherently impossible to predict exactly where this surge will take us, but it is pretty clear that the demand for innovations in energy, both that the residential and grid levels, coupled with a painful evolution in the transportation arena (can automotive engineers be retrained?) and a continual evolution in areas such as biomedical components, micro-manufacturing techniques, nanomachines and nanomaterials in general are making mechanical engineering the wave of the future.