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> "Even though Superfest glasses were ubiquitous in every bar, canteen and household in the Soviet satellite state, few people had heard of Paul Bittner, Fritz Keuchel and Tilo Poitz, the design collective who gave them their shape."

I guess that it is in the same way you do not hear about the engineers and designers at Apple, Space X, etc.

> I believe the technology in itself, is a bit more admirable and the people involved mentioning, than the mere shaping.

But we hear all the time about CEOs and their opinions, thou. And they are way less interesting that the tech and the engineers that work at their companies.

Yeah, how many designers and inventors of industrial processes, or materials, or techniques or such we know widely in the west?

Never mind that even for those well known to us engineers, regular people couldn't name what they did either, except maybe Edisson, Tesla, Wright Brothers, and a few more. E.g. would even more modern PhD holders know what Watt contributed? Or Lord Kelvin?

People like Gates, Bezos, Musk, and Jobs on the other hand, everybody knows.

Yes, the engineer CEOs like Gates, Musk and Jensen Huang certainly become very well known. Not so much for their engineering prowess (though it is typically great) but for being the symbol of the products they create.

> Not so much for their engineering prowess (though it is typically great) but for being the symbol of the products they create.

They are mostly known for being rich. Very very rich. Way better engineers creating way better products are not well known.

"Great engineering" is not the word choice I will go for to describe their legacy.

I've listened to a (bad) podcast about women scientist and the host went on a rant about how the evil men took away from the real inventor of the fridge, that was a woman, to give it to a man.

I challenge anyone to name the inventor of the fridge. At least in my country it is completely unknown who it was.

I was a chemistry major in college. I dated a girl who was also a chem major. Her senior year, she took a women's studies class on Women in Science.

She did not have a lot of positive things to say about that class. Of note, she was the only science major in the class.

The author of this podcast is a woman with a degree in physics. She failed to explain how a fridge works. She just mentioned the components. If I didn't know how it works I wouldn't have understood from what she said.

I mean, Wikipedia says "the history of artificial refrigeration began when Scottish professor William Cullen [made a fridge]"

But, again (merely sourcing from Wikipedia) the idea of evaporative cooling is ancient.

Ideas and techs are consequences over previous discoveries so it is never a process with a single person.

Even Einstein, it’s the continuity of previous works, etc.

Failures that other did are also saving precious time.

This is why the idea of patents is just absurd.

Everybody should have the right to create anything they want, and the natural selection will do its work on keeping the best implementations alive.

> This is why the idea of patents is just absurd.

Well, not absurd. The last person on the chain contributed a lot to extending the chain.

But yeah, ridiculously overblown. Patents should be a much lighter thing.

Maybe 5 years or so. Not like music where unrelated people are earning millions on royalties of Ravel’s pieces that they inherited because so far-away relatives were cleaning their living room.

What you see there are the workings of power, particularly of large corporations. Not that different from copyright and Disney.

>I mean, Wikipedia says

Yes, but the claim was that some kind of fame was stolen from the "real inventor of the fridge" (sic).

And the parent's point is that the one considered the inventor atm (deservingly or not), hardly has any fame to begin with. Sure, he might have a Wikipedia entry, along with OnlyFans creators and every minor character in Star Wars lore. Including non-movie characters.

> Potassium ions need more space, pressing harder against neighbouring atoms and building up more tension that needs to be overcome for the microscopic cracks to get bigger.

I just posted a comment in which I doubt the article's explanation of the physics behind the process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41180590

You can look them up in the patent which also explains in pretty good detail how the process works: https://patents.google.com/patent/DD157966A3

So Siegfried Schelinski, Dieter Patzig, Klaus Heinrich and Bernd Grueger did the main work inventink the "unbreakable" drinking glass. Just for the record.