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Comment by guappa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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