It's Not a Bug, It's a (Ka-boom!)

Tim Wu recounts the checkered past of John Logie Baird, one of the pre-inventors of  television:

[Prior to TV] his greatest invention had been a type of  hosiery designed to absorb dampness, known as the "Baird undersoc."  Less successful was his follow-up effort, pneumatic footwear (a crude  precursor to Nike's "Air" shoes) that had an unfortunate tendency to explode underfoot.

Link. My friend Harold used to talk about the thrill of playing golf in a thunderstorm: you never know which stroke will be your last.

Grab it While you Can

My newsreader brings me an ad for a book called Invention Analysis and Claiming; A Patent Lawyer's Guide.  The blurb says it offers me "a comprehensive approach to analyzing inventions and capturing them in a sophisticated set of patent claims."

I suppose I'm just carping here but I don't see anything in this blurb about actually inventing the stuff.  I haven't read the book, but I wonder: is there anything there about inventors, or is this simply a book for the Bill Gateses and Guglielmo Marconis  of the world, whose real skill seems to come in the deploying--and profiting from--the creativity of others?  Analyzing and capturing indeed.  Sophisticated set of claims, oh dear.