Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S2E30 1,000 Design Patents | Thomas Rinaldi
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Thomas Rinaldi is an architectural designer. He has degrees from Georgetown and Columbia Universities and has written several architecture books and his photographs have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Post. He has lectured widely, including at the New York Public Library and the Society of Architectural Historians.
Book link: Patented: 1,000 Design Patents
Co-Host Rafael Testai
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Rafael Testai:Wherever you may be, and however, you may be listening, welcome to The Being an Engineer Show with your co-host Rafael Testai, and my precious guest, Thomas Rinaldi. Thomas is actually the author of a book called Patented. And I'm going to let Thomas do an introduction of his book here. But this is right up your alley. If you're someone that likes design patents and wants to know more more about that subject. So Thomas, why don't you go ahead and take it away and explain to us what your book is, what is it about, and maybe do a little introduction of yourself?
Thomas Rinaldi:Ah, thanks. So Patented. My book is 1000 design patents. And it stems from a discovery that was a discovery for me, for some people, maybe it's old hat. But the idea that there's a whole category of patents out there that are called design patents, and they are specifically geared to protecting the appearance of things they beat, the US government began issuing them in 1842. And since 1842, they've now issued something like I think they just crossed the 900,000 mark for the number of design patents that have been issued. When most people hear the word patent, I think they think of utility patents, which are a separate category of patents the the predominant category, there are about 10 times as many utility patents as there are design patents and utility patents protect the way something functions and I think that's most people's understanding of what a patent is. So, like the cotton gin or, Edison's incandescent light bulb, that that thing. But design patents, like I said, protect the way something looks. So they're an incredibly valuable resource for design historians. And, having stumbled upon this suddenly, for me, it was the the appeal, the the fascination was that, here's this whole database of 900,000 patents that tell you who designed something, and when, and normally we think of works with design, people are thinking of higher levels of design, like architectural design or things like that. But to me, the incredible thing was that suddenly, through design patents, you could study everything from like staplers to lamps, to radios, to phones, to cell phones, in the same way that you would study, works of architectural, architectural history. And, there's this all of a sudden, there's all these Indian, what they're called inventors and patent parlance, but designers really, whose industrial designers, mainly whose names have been totally forgotten. But who were prolific and people who designed, the things that are on our desks at work, or the things that are on our kitchen counters at home. And, there are people who, who made whole careers and who have these incredible bodies of work that span decades and decades and decades. So that's what this is, this is a shortlist of 1000 design patents that I thought were most interesting and important, from 750,000 been issued since the year 1900.
Rafael Testai:Very well, as I received this book in the mail, before the podcast, I was showing some of my colleagues, other engineers, and we're flipping through and like you said, you see anything from rubber ducks, to a roller blades, a phone, a toaster, a chair, all these different design patents is a pretty thick book, think of it like a big thick encyclopedia. And I want to understand who is the audience for this book?
Thomas Rinaldi:Well, I think the audience is, anybody who's interested in design, you can be seriously interested in design or passively interested in design. If you're seriously interested in design, I think you'll pick this up and suddenly maybe realize that you've been surrounded your whole life by things that are really works of design, but you've never really thought of them that way. so like a pair of scissors, , or your computer keyboard or I mean, recent apple products, I think people think of his works of design, but more obscure things, I think a lot of people, maybe a revelation to realize that, oh, there's actually somebody designed this thing. And if you're somebody who's just passively interested in design, I think it might have the same impact, I hope, and so I hope people pick this up this book, and can open to almost any random page and find something that they recognize it's a very familiar object, and then, look up to the top of the page, and, see the date that this thing was designed, and the name of the designer, and very often the commissioning manufacturer, is also listed. And suddenly all these things you realize, are connected to each other in an interesting way.
Rafael Testai:Talk to us a little bit more about the connection in an interesting way, what are some that some of the take home points of the book that you've written?
Thomas Rinaldi:Well, I mean, for me, the connections are almost implied more than specifically highlighted in, in looking at design patents, if you really get into the nitty gritty of it. And, say now there are databases online, Google patents, and others where you can go on and search by a designer, so say, you stumble upon some object that's always been familiar to you, or that you've admired or that's interesting, it could be like, something as simple as a tape dispenser, and you suddenly now are armed with the name of the designer of said, tape dispenser, you can then go to the database and punch in that name, and suddenly see, in some cases, everything else that this designer has designed in, so it could be everything, from radios, to toys, to sometimes even buildings come up, industrial designers, the lines blurred a bit with architecture. And then from those topologies, across the breadth of any given topology, there are all these other designers who have dabbled in that same topology or been commissioned by someone to design something of like I said, it could be a pair of scissors. And so there are these like lineal lines of inquiry that that you can do, and it relates all these different objects to one another, in what I think is a very interesting way, I mean, things that you never really considered as being related, across spans of could be a gap of topology, totally disparate types of objects, or two objects of the same type ology, but that were made decades apart from one another, could be the work of the same designer, they might look completely different, if they were made 40 years apart, but there's, they're these like, interesting relationships, that was the name one of the main revelations of the project for, for me getting into it.
Rafael Testai:I see, I guess I'm somewhat of a novice when it comes to design, because as I was reading through, I was failing to make the connections and the relationships. So I was hoping that with the podcast, we could help some of our listeners who may be thinking about buying the book, what some of those relationships may be, so that as they're reading the book, and flipping through the patents, they can start to see them as they're flipping through
Thomas Rinaldi:that the book is arranged chronologically, because I wanted to array, all the different pens that are included in a straight line, so you could see how the way, their style, their various different styles evolved, transcended all the different typologies, there was their two ways to do a project like this, which is to group everything type of logically, or to do it chronologically. And we yield it to the temptation of doing a type of logical organization of things, by in the front of the book, pulling out 10 different case studies where you can see how cell phones evolved through time. And it's neat to see, like, every 10 years or so, a different cell phone, or cell phone every couple of years, a different cell phone design, see how, how that evolved. But for me, it was important to stress and underscore how the stylistic evolution involved transcended different topologies. So as he flipped through the book, you you might notice that there's an aesthetic that is shared between objects of all different kinds. And that aesthetic is a reflection of what the designers whose work is featured in the book had available to them in the way of manufacturing techniques and materials and materials, the material that was available to a designer say in 1930 versus 1950 versus 1970 was itself reflection of the manufacturing techniques that were available. And so these things are continuously changing. And so you go from the early part of the 20th century, where objects of all different kinds have, you'll very often see like classical motifs, the same kinds of design details that you'd see in classically inspired architecture of the period. And suddenly, in about 1930, this changes dramatically. And so all those old fussy details of classically inspired design as applied to, be a toaster or whatever else yield to this very pared down streamlined aesthetic. And also, at the same time you get Art Deco, is influencing the way things work. Art Deco yields to streamlining in the late 1930s. And after world war two things take on a different aesthetic. And so there's, this influenced by, say, the ability to make something by stamping it out of a single piece of metal versus having to, in years before assemble it from different pieces of metal that each individually had to be stamped, or the availability of plastics, early plastics, like Bakelite, or catalin. And then later plastics, more modern kinds of plastics versus having had to make things out of wood, in decades, earlier decades of the 20th century. And so these are the kinds of undercurrents that, steered and shaped literally how objects of all different kinds looked and how this, like I said, this style, transcends all the different topologies as it evolves through time. So I'm hoping that some of you could in theory, flip through the book, and just see, even if, like, say, take your glasses off, you could see like how things go from being like one shape to like, more rounded shapes to then being more square shapes, again, to it even on that basic of a level. there's this, this continuum, this this lineal trajectory that moves through time.
Rafael Testai:I see, it says that you're an architectural designer, that's not a term that a lot of our listeners are familiar with, including myself, could you explain what that is?
Thomas Rinaldi:An architectural designer is an architect, she doesn't have his or her architecture licensed yet, but they may find themselves as I do, doing very similar kinds of work to an architect. But for legal reasons. I can't call myself an architect until I have my license, hopefully.
Rafael Testai:What's the process like of getting the license? How many years is that take?
Thomas Rinaldi:It differs from state to state and country to country. In New York State, which is where I am, if you depends on what degree you have undergraduate or graduate degree, and then you just certain out of work experience, and then you can start taking your licensing exams, which, over the years that I've been procrastinating, doing this, the number of exams has changed, I think instead of five exams now, had been significantly more than that, at one point. Anyway, this is something I've got to get off my butt and do here soon. I've fulfilled my work experience by handy margin at this point. So no more excuses, plenty busy reading books.
Rafael Testai:That's the right mindset. I think we all have things that we want to do, and we sometimes procrastinate. But I think it's good that we're honest with ourselves. So that's good. So a lot of our listeners are proficient with SolidWorks and 3D CAD modeling. What if when they flip across your book or they listen to our podcast, they become inclined towards maybe helping an inventor do a design patent? Can a CAD person that's proficient in SolidWorks and CAD, help an inventor create some drawings is how it works?
Thomas Rinaldi:I think the short answer is yes, definitely. Yes. I approach this more as a design historian and approach the exercise as a curatorial exercise. But I mean, the world of patents is one of the things that like has really impressed me about the world of patents is, how in depth it is and how how many people have devoted their entire careers, just two patents, either as patent agents who are there for an adventure to approach called the Patent Agent say, I have this idea, can you help me like, apply for and get a patent for it, then the patent agents work with drafts people who actually like do the drawings, who is like a whole separate discipline, and then their patent attorneys, legions of patent attorneys and the whole world of patent law, which, there are the subtleties of the nuanced difference between design patents and utility patents that come into play here. And some people specialize in one or the other, maybe you're able to do a bit of both, but then you've got all the career professionals in the patent office, and it gets into the reviewers who are reviewing applications whose job it is to then look at these drawings. And in the case of utility patents, read the often very extensive accompanying text, and make sure this is in fact, something that's not overlapping with something that's already been patented. And they have to go through and do these side by side comparisons to, to make sure that this is a In fact, a new design, because a lot of applications get rejected, if it turns out it's not something new. One patent agent I talked with told me, I said, Do you have any patents of your own. And he said, I've applied for three, and I've been rejected, this is a guy whose job it is, he's quite successful at getting other people's patents, approved. But the ironic twist there...
Rafael Testai:To say, just my first thought that came in my mind is, we're gonna keep this person anonymous, but he must not be that good. If you can't get along with you...
Thomas Rinaldi:Really, really notice it, that's the irony,, is the guy's is a sharpshooter, a total ace it like getting, patents for other people, when it comes to his own patents rejected, I thought it was a funny irony, but I think he has a sense of humor about it, too. But, but yeah, then within the patent office, there are people whose job it is just to analyze the statistics. And, it's an insane amount of statistics that, patents can be analyzed for, I did a little bit of statistical analysis of my own and looking at them, but if you really have access to the full breadth of data, I mean, the, the statistical inquiry inquiries that you could do, becomes a whole rabbit hole of its own, I was interested in looking at, how many patents were issued to applicants from other countries, and then that's broken down by whichever country, and so it's interesting to see, for instance, over the past 20 years or so, the number of patents issued to applicants from China has gone from like 50 a year to, I think, broke 20,000, issued last year, to two applicants from China. And this is a really staggering trend, it's at the moment is, on a, on a graph, it's almost like a vertical line. So be interesting to see how that continues. And then through the years, they've been applicants from different countries who have had peaks, and then new numbers have plateaued and leveled off, it's an interesting indicator of globalization, as a phenomenon, too. So there's, there's lots of interesting things and that's getting into patents in a, in a in from an angle that it's completely different than the angle that intrigued first intrigued me about them. But it's also by way of saying just how rich the field like how actually very interesting it can it can get.
Rafael Testai:Alright, real quick, I just want to take a short break and share with our listeners that teampipeline.us is where you can learn more about how we can help medical device and other product engineering or manufacturing teams develop turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines to characterize, inspect assemble, manufacturer and perform verification testing on their devices. So back to the show here with Thomas. And I wanted to ask you, what's something that you think I should ask you that I haven't asked you yet?
Thomas Rinaldi:Uh, oh, gosh. Boy, usually new questions thrown at me. But that's the one. I could think of the kinds of questions that other people have asked me.
Rafael Testai:You may want it to tell a lot of people that's important that you haven't had a chance to.
Thomas Rinaldi:Uh, oh, gosh. Okay, that is a good question. Let me see if I can come up with a good answer for you here. Something I've wanted to tell a lot of people that haven't haven't had a chance to. Well, I have had a chance a little bit too. One of the things that I was happiest about with this project, both from my own like edification, but also because I think it's like a contribution to, like the study of design history of large is, how many prolific designers are alluded to this a little bit earlier. But how many prolific designers, I discovered in the course of doing this project, who I've never heard of these people before. And I'm somebody who's been interested in design history for a long time, and these people were not just obscure, but I don't know, like, I'm not gonna say, nobody's ever heard these names. But there are certain people out there for whom these are familiar names, but it's, it's not a very big circle. And so, I was able to go in and flip on the stadium lights and suddenly see, like, the entire bodies of work of these industrial designers who are as prolific as the ones you've heard of, like, a lot of people have heard of like Raymond Loewy, a lot of people have heard of Henry Dreyfus in more recent years, Johnny, Ivan apple and Phillipe Stark, and then other prominent names, but like, for every one of those prominent names that listener may have heard of, there are dozens of people who are like, just as prolific and have created the things that are there in the backdrop of our everyday lives, who whose names have just been totally lost, and so it's just, to me, like, I'm proud to have spotlighted, some of these forgotten figures a little bit. And there's some designers who, like, they went to 1000 patents that are in the book, and they will have a handful by this person or that person who turns out to be pretty important, actually, I think when it comes to the history of design history, but then I hope that people will take certain, I hope this book will be the book that launches like 1000, rabbit hole dives of people saying, huh, Oh, that's interesting, this person designed, I don't know, my, my mom's typewriter or this person designed this chair that I saw in a museum, like, I wonder what else they design and like, Okay, then, like, take that and like, do your own search, and see what I saw, which is everything else that comes up in a search, although the caveat there is that Google patents, which is currently really the easiest way to do that, is just hugely buggy, right now. So you can like punch in somebody's name and Google patents and like, get different results, depending on which internet browser you're using. In certain things that you research result you get one day you might not get the next day, I don't know what's going on with it. But in any case, eventually, they'll figure that out. And then you can take an obscure name, like Everett Worthington, and discover that this is a guy I've never heard of, who had he not died of a heart attack in 1938. He had been, up until that point, like one of the busiest hustlers in the whole industrial design. sphere, in its early years in the 1930s. Had he lived past World War II, he might have been one of the most familiar household names and design of anyone and he had all these accounts with like Coca Cola, and like Toastmaster, like these like, big, big businesses. And his career being cut short, like a lot of his accounts will end up going over to Raymond Loewy. And then what was the one whose name we know now, nobody's ever heard of Everett Worthington? But you can do that search and then suddenly see, like, all these things that he designed, and I think it's fascinating.
Rafael Testai:Right on so you, when you wrote thebook, you say we quite often did you have a call a co-author or a team I
Thomas Rinaldi:I didn't, no, I, I'm using the royal we a little bit and including my editor, Virginia McLeod Phaidon, who is really a collaborator in this project as well.
Rafael Testai:Okay, and how many books have you launched?
Thomas Rinaldi:This is my third book, not counting like a self published book in high school. But all three books have a couple of things in common. And the last one was a book called New York Neon, which was a look at neon storefront signs from before what I call like the Helvetica, watershed moment of about 1970 that are found throughout the five boroughs of New York City, a rapidly disappearing species here in the city. And the one before that was a book called Hudson Valley Ruins which I co authored. with Rob Yasinsac, and that looks at historic buildings in the Hudson River Valley of New York State between New York and Albany that have in common that they are threatened by neglect. So there are all kinds of studies in design history a bit, and they're all looking at the one thing that I think all three books have in common is a fascination with the passage of time. And its impact on the built environment, and the evolution of design and the aesthetic of manmade things, and how things come and things go and we build things. And then there's some fundamental change. And suddenly, things that we've built, become abandoned, and become endangered, and become interesting in a way that they might not have been interesting before, neon signs through the history of neon, which is this fascinating, like roller coaster of a history, neon was hugely admired as a symbol of authority, and then became really derided as a something that people thought of, is really tawdry and sleazy, and associated with grit and decay, and then became admired and beloved again, in a nostalgic way, in more recent decades. So I, I, and then when it comes to patents, like I said, having done this chronological arrangement of the things that are featured in the book, I think it's, it's very interesting to me, how the passage of what's really in the grand scheme of things a very, very, very short blip in history, you can go like, look at something that was made 10 years before something else and see this incred dramatic difference, you think of like a car, from 1930, versus a car from 1960. I mean, 30, what's 30 years, and then the history of the world is nothing, and yet, how incredibly different those two cars look from each other? It's just, that is something that seems to continue continuously interests me. So that's what the three books have in common, I think, not that you asked me that. There you go.
Rafael Testai:Alright, so where I was getting out with the book question actually wanted to know, what's the process, like, when writing a book and publishing it, I'm sure our audience would be interested in knowing that and not it's not a subject that nobody else I think has addressed in this podcast so far.
Thomas Rinaldi:Well, uh, I think it sounds probably a little cheesy, but perseverance would be, if I was talking to somebody who's interested in writing a book, I would just say, perseverance, like, just write it on a index card, they still make index cards, and like, pin it above your desk, and be prepared for having to overcome discouragement, in every imaginable and unimaginable form that it might come in, and be prepared to, like hunker down and like be pursuing this objective for years. But, I mean, for me, the the first book, I had this idea, I loved photographing these ruined and abandoned buildings in the Hudson River Valley, back in the 90s. And I thought, make a great book, these things are so photogenic, and really was just all about the aesthetic to me, but I said, Well, how am I gonna, like, actually, make this a book, like, how are we going to sell this idea to somebody. And there are books about writing book proposals. And so I got my hands on some of those books about book proposals. And then said about crafting a book proposal, which is basically like writing a small book, it's, like, you do an outline, like a table of contents, and you pitch your idea, and then you maybe have another section that gives a little mock up of what the book might actually look like, if it's gonna be, it may or may not be graphic graphics intensive, or it may be really text, heavy, but you do like some sample pages, basically, and then you have a section with, okay, well, who's the target audience of this, like, who's actually going to buy this? Like, have I thought about that? And how are you going to sell this to the skeptical editor at a publisher, and then you look at related titles for as you went to just like with patents, you want to make sure you're not doing something that somebody else has done before. And so you have to, like summarize all these things in a nice neat little like small book of its own, and then start shopping that around to publishers, you get to find shortlist, which publishers have published books of this nature. Before we, where the publishers who seem to have demonstrated an interest in this particular genre, whatever it is, I'm trying to get published here. And then sometimes you have to do the homework to get the editors names that may or may not be easy to find, you might have to get creative and tracking those people down. And then, more and more often, I found through the years publishers, we'll have you go to the website of almost any publisher, and they'll have usually submission guidelines to tell you exactly what format, they want a book proposal to come in, but very often, they'll have like, just don't send us anything. But you have to know how to be like, well, I'm gonna send this to you anyway. And, do it gently. I've even encountered some publishers in recent years that, like, you have to send them like 100 bucks or something, or they won't even look at your project. And I think that actually was enough to discourage me from submitting to those publishers. But, I did think about just sending them something anyway, without the 100 bucks and saying, if you're interested in this, take it out of my commission, if you're not interested that the 100 bucks isn't going to make the difference. But you could publish this or not, if you're interested in this idea, you're not gonna care about whether I sent you a check for 100 bucks, it's bigger than 100 bucks to you, as a publisher. So anyway, sometimes you have to get creative, and looking at whatever the challenges might be the myriad challenges anyway, I hope I didn't discourage people. Like I said, perseverance. It does sound like a lot of work. But, it's you got to look at it is unless, well, depending on how much free time you have, it's probably going to be at least a year process to develop an idea for a book and then pitch it and then hopefully get an editor. I mean, I started out looking at it as like it's going to be several years before I get this thing off the ground. And two of the three books had been lucky. And it was quicker than that. But the first book was, first books always gonna be the hardest. But the first book was, was yours was really yours. I was about to give up. But then along came, someone interested? Yeah, perseverance.
Rafael Testai:There's one thing that I wondered sometimes, and I think always discusses with other friends and colleagues, and I never had a chance to ask an actual author. And this is not about your book, in particular, just books in general. My question is, why are books so long? I mean, why can't we just get the idea across in 10 pages?
Thomas Rinaldi:Well, some are pretty sure. Behind me, I have some big books and some little books, my Patented is 1000 page book. Well, Kurt Vonnegut had, like, 10 commandments. For writers, I think I'm remembering this right, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, one of those 10 commandments was: Don't waste your readers' time. Patented is a very graphically intense book. So there's not a lot of text in Patented. I mean, you could spend hours and hours I spent years looking at that. And but I think he was more intending that particular commandment for people who are thinking about writing something, it was more text intensive. But if you could, don't waste your your readers time, I mean, if you have an idea that you can convey in 10 pages, right, in 10 pages, maybe it's a magazine article, and not a book, but if you have an idea that's going to take 200 pages, well, don't make it 500 pages, make 100 pages, and like the editors jobs are to look at a an idea. And if a writer gives them 500 pages to say, I think this can be on 200 pages. And but no, there's value in being succinct and this is something that I have, I didn't come to writing books, knowing this. This is something that I have had to work at, and it's incredible, how few words you can actually get a an idea across. And sometimes, maybe you thought it was going to take 500 words to articulate this and you could, you might be surprised when you could do it in 100. So, and there's real value, like you as a writer are like, totally, you think this is most interesting thing in the world. But your reader might not think it's the most interesting thing in the world or might not have as much time to give it as you do. And so like Kurt Vonnegut said, Don't waste your readers times one or two of my earlier editor's is going to hear me say that maybe in be like, what renaldi. to bed? Do you bet you hadn't read that Vonnegut thing before you sent me that giant wild grab?
Rafael Testai:I'll have to ask another question that only an author can can answer. These are very candid questions. So I hope you're not offended. But so like, for my question is from a purely selfish standpoint, what do you get out of publishing a book?
Thomas Rinaldi:I would say multiple things, not that hard of a question to answer. I don't think I'm not finding it hard. It's certainly gratifying. And this is, like, maybe the first thing that some people will think it's gratifying, and I'm, like, thrilled to think like, long after I'm dead. There'll be a book with my name on it spine in the New York Public Library somewhere, Lord knows what the future of libraries and books are, but like these ideas of mine have a life that's longer than mine. And that's that's just gratify Zeus playing gratifying, but I think, when I approach that I've written three books. Now, I hope to be able to one day say, I've written more than that it's not that many compared to a lot of authors. But when I approach a project, I do keep in mind, okay, is this something that has been done before? And if it has, can I really do it better? And even if I can do it better? Is that like, a waste of paper? Am I wasting the readers time? And if the answer is, yes, then well, there's plenty other ideas out there? Yeah, I think. So what do you then get out of, I don't know, I think you're wasting your own time as an author, if you're writing something that somebody else has already written in, then okay, I guess you get the gratification. But, I mean, for me that the gratification in that instance, would be quite a lot mitigated by the lingering thought that I had just wasted paper, just done something that, that somebody else had done before. So, I mean, there's certain subjects that I find quite interesting, and somebody has written the book, but then somebody else comes along, read book, there's another book, there's another book is a book here, this is another book. And it's really, we really need all these books on the same subject. But what do you get out of it? For Patented, this began as this is something that I found fascinating, regardless of whether or not it was going to be a book, regardless, it's, it's great to be able to share something that I think is really interesting with other people, and hopefully, maybe interest other people or, like, light up an interest in somebody else that they didn't even know, they had, I think that's, that's really great. But, for me, I just got a lot out of this rabbit hole of looking at all these patents, it's changed the way this particular book has changed the way I look at the world, I mean, almost any room I'm in at any given time, I'm sitting in my office today, and I had to go make a phone call. So I went to like the room and they in the office, where you could, like, make a phone call without bothering your co workers. And I'm sitting in the room and looking around the room and I'm like, Ah, that new computer, and I think I've found a design pattern for that computer. And I think to myself, Oh, I like but I can't remember the names of the designers. I got to go look that up, when I when I think of it, then I'm going to like see what else they designed and that you start to notice it's made everything so much more interesting. I wanted to BestBuy a few months ago. And it's just looking at all of these products, these vacuum cleaners and cameras and phones and computers and like it just they were so much more interesting to me because of this project. And I'm going to plug my Instagram I have my own Instagram but then there's an Instagram for the book. And it's it's design patent daily is the handle all one word design patent daily. And I try it turns out to not be quite daily, but I pick something usually something from the book almost always have something from the book. And I try to do like a little one paragraph blurb about that particular thing because the book I didn't really have the opportunity to tell you much about the things that are featured in the book. So when these Instagram posts, I can tell you a little bit more about what these things actually are. And the process of doing this, this is no longer a book, this is an Instagram account. But the process of doing this is just hugely informative, I look forward to doing these posts just so, so much, like, I'd be like, okay, what are the couple of patents, I might be able to do an Instagram post about today from the book, and look down this list of maybe six or eight things, and sometimes it's like, ooh, like, I want to, like, take that one. And I'm gonna, like, now I'm going to take a little time and research this thing. And then write a paragraph about this thing in the, the exercise of doing this, it's just, so I just loving doing it, and I'm learning so much in the, in the course of doing it. So, this, I'm giving a very long answer to this question, and I have more, We're gonna have to answer. But the New York Neon, for instance, the last week, I did, this started as photographs, I wanted to take photographs of these neon storefront signs, particularly neon storefront signs, in the five boroughs of New York City, because I saw that they were disappearing, and I wanted to get the pictures before what's seen, the pictures are going to be all that's left. And if I didn't take the pictures, they wouldn't even be that, and started just as photographs, but then I wanted to write an introduction to the book, to put these things into context and explain the significance. And the introduction turned out to be half the book, and it's much to my editors, conservation, but it got boiled down from what it was gonna be God, which everyone can be thankful for. But in the course of writing an introduction, I had to educate myself on well, the practical and the history of neon on a practical level, okay, when was neon gas discovered? And what are the tools and who are the people that made the signs, but then also the cultural history I had to get up to speed on, because we have these, neon is, is a subject that people have, like, very strong responses to it. And I was interested in sussing out like, okay, like, what's his steered those reactions that people have to neon, so I'm looking at neon is represented in song and neon is represented in literature, neon is represented in film. And so then I'm having to watch, like hundreds of movies, and I'm having to read, like, every book I can get my hands on, and not just like, histories, but books like on the road, like, I'd never read Jack Kerouac on the road. And I picked it up and read it to be able to inform what I was going to write in my introduction. And I found these incredible quotes where Jack Kerouac is specifically writing about, neon is a way of developing and illustrating his scenes and in that book, and then the hard boiled detective novels of a, a couple years, a couple decades before Kerouac, like the Dashiell Hammett kinds of novels, and reading those, I never read those before, and I'll sit down now and like, watch jeopardy, and I'll get, like a lot of things, right. And I'll think to myself, I never would have known that if I hadn't written that book, I'd never would like it's just it's so what is it? What I get out of it? What does an author get out of writing a book? It's, this would be different if it were the work of fiction versus nonfiction. But, there are some of the things in a very, very long answer. Things that they've gotten out of it besides just it being gratifying, but, yep.
Rafael Testai:All right. That is all we have for this episode. Thank you everyone for joining and until next time.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of Pipeline Design, and Engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode. To learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines and with product design, visit us at teampipeline.us. Thanks for listening.
