KNOWvember: Day. Twenty-Five Kia Silverbrook

​Four years ago, I came up with is idea to meet 30 new people in 30 days. That was the extent of my genius. Perhaps the last great thought I had.

Now let's be honest, or maybe even serious for a moment. When you think of brilliant minds and great inventors, I am sure my name is not the first to come to mind. You will not pop up next to Nikolai Tesla, Thomas Alva Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, or Alexander Graham Bell. But then again, your list probably doesn’t have Kia Silverbrook’s name on it either.
 
My friend Bob Carpenter told me I should know this Australian inventor, scientist, and serial entrepreneur. Why? Good question. Because this man, who is only 12 years older than me has already amassed 9,700+ patents. This makes him, as everyone who writes about him would say, the most prolific inventor in the world.

His inventions and the companies he has founded cover a wide range of disciplines, including computer graphics, video and audio production, scientific computing, factory automation, digital printing, liquid crystal displays (LCDs), molecular electronics, digital music synthesis, 3D printing, molecular electronics, cryptography, nano technology, microfluidics, security inks, photovoltaic solar cells, interactive paper, and that is only scratching the surface.
 
Starting his inventor career at Fairlight Instruments back in 1977, Silverbrook’s first invention was a real-time video effect computer that was released in 1984. That’s where it all began — he later quit the company and started founding a business after a business. One being Silverbrook Research, an R&D and invention licensing company. A few of the inventions done by his firm include the printing technology Memjet and Netpage, a software system that makes printed paper interactive.  
 
While a lot of his inventions are built around photography and printing-related industries, he has numerous patents in mechanics, optics, and even medical diagnostic devices – including a diagnostic device can detect infectious diseases from a sample of DNA, and it can be operated with a smartphone.
 
Even though we use many of his inventions every time we take a picture on our phones, Silverbrook remains pretty much unknown to the world. It’s not because he is shy or has a poor public relations team. Like most inventors, they are done for other companies. For example, over 250 of his photo-related patents – like facial recognition on phone cameras – were acquired by Google, Facebook, and Apple.
 
So I guess we know what Kia Silverbrook like to do with his hands. He invents stuff.  I can kind of assume when he leaves a party (especially one with a bunch of inventors in attendance) what people are saying about is probably heavily slanted with envy and jealousy. And I like to think that if he were to go back in time, to visit any era, it would be back in the late 15th Century when Leonardo Da Vinci was sketching out ideas on flying machines. I like to think Silverbrook would show him thing or two on how to make that become a reality.
 
While I couldn’t tell you the last place he walked, I’d wager a guess that it was up in the clouds. For a person like Kia Silverbrook, not even the sky is the limit to making one’s imagination come to life. But more importantly, and this is a lesson for us all, his inventions not done merely because he had an idea but because he had a vision for the world and all of us who live in it. We are the benefactors of his creative intelligence. Imagine what our would could achieve if we used our minds for building back a better humanity.
 


http://kalamfanclub.com/kia-silverbrook-the-man-with-9700-patents-and-inventions-under-his-name/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Silverbrook
https://medium.com/@ILMM_Magazine/kia-silverbrook-the-world-s-most-prolific-inventor-501c38abf572