The Legal Expropriation

I. A puzzle for experts

The principle is so simple that every child knows it from the Spirograph. Workpiece and tool rotate at the same time, their axes are offset from one another, and the ratio of their speeds produces the shape: a triangle, a hexagon, a polygon, inside and outside, in a single clamping, without reciprocating masses. In 1982 Hans Ley filed a patent application for the process and refined it with further applications.

The patents were granted, and it worked. From 1988 Heckler & Koch built the “FDZ 100 System Ley” form-turning centre. In 1990 this machine turned the receivers and shanks of the Capto tool-clamping system of the Swedish company Sandvik, which since 2008 has been standardised worldwide as PSC in ISO 26623. The cage rings of a major rolling-bearing manufacturer, the Swedish company SKF, have been produced in series by this principle for more than thirty years.

Polygon shaft-hub connections, which the invention also makes economical to produce, transmit more torque in less space than the feather key or the spline shaft, which are still standard in mechanical engineering. Polygon connections used to be regarded as better, but too expensive to produce. Since the inventor presented his process at the EMO in Hanover in 1985, that no longer holds: since then polygon connections have been not only better but also more economical to produce than the usual types of connection. The most striking figure for this was supplied, of all people, by Professor Peter Werner Gold of RWTH Aachen in 2006, in his article “In acht Sekunden zum Polygon” (“To the polygon in eight seconds”): around eight and a half seconds for a polygon turned from solid, roughing and finishing included. He did not name the inventor.

Every unbiased expert who sees this asks the same question: why has such a simple and useful invention not found a market worthy of it in forty years? The answer does not lie in the technology. It lies in the conditions under which an invention has to become an innovation, and in the people who stand at those conditions.

II. The typical inventor’s situation

An independent inventor has something many others lack: the knowledge, the idea, the understanding of the principle. He lacks what some others have: capital, production, distribution, access to customers. The typical independent inventor is an unprovided haver — the counterpart of Günther Anders’ well-provided have-nothing.

This imbalance produces an asymmetry of time. Developing and building machines costs money, patent attorneys are expensive, patents cost a fortune — the annual fees being the least of it — and patents expire after twenty years. The inventor has to live, finance his development, defend his rights. His counterparts — companies, banks, institutes — can wait. Every year without a reasonable agreement on equal terms weakens the inventor and strengthens the others. In the end he does not have to be persuaded. He is exhausted.

The pattern is not confined to engineering. The songwriter who signs his rights over to a label because the rent is due. The farmer who sells his harvest at any price to the region’s only wholesaler because otherwise it rots. The author who parts with his first novel for a fee he can live on for six months. In every case it is not the value of the thing that sets the price, but the question of who can wait longer.

III. Chicken and egg

The second condition is a chain in which everyone waits for everyone else.

A machine builder does not build a machine for a process nobody asks for. A designer does not use a polygon connection as long as there is no standard, no calculation rule and no machine to supply it. A standard emerges only once enough users demand it. A calculation rule emerges only once someone pays for the research, and research follows the interest of industry, which has none yet.

Every link in this chain acts reasonably. Together they block each other. The standard for the geometry of H-profiles appeared in 2021, almost forty years after the patent. The parts on calculation and manufacture are still outstanding. This is not a sign of unsuitability; it is the speed at which a chicken-and-egg chain dissolves on its own.

IV. The valley of death

Between invention and market lies what innovation researchers call the valley of death: the phase in which a process is technically proven but not yet commercially tested. Research no longer funds this phase, the market does not yet. Most inventions die in this valley — not the bad ones, but the ones without a bridge.

In the mid-1990s there was such a bridge for polygon turning, after the Heckler & Koch bridge had collapsed in the peace crisis that followed the end of the Cold War, and the subsequent bridges via MAHO and WIHA/INNOVAT had not proved viable. Together with Professor Gold, already mentioned, the inventor had approached Ford’s transmission plant in Düren and proposed using his invention to manufacture the parts for constant-velocity joints that were needed in large quantities. As he recalls, Ford wanted to produce a considerable share of these parts with the process. The development costs had been approved in writing by the company’s headquarters in Dearborn. Then GKN, the established maker of such joints, put an offer to Ford that the inventor still regards as a sham. Ford in Dearborn halted the project. Later GKN withdrew the offer.

GKN knew the process. As early as 1983 and 1984 the inventor had been in contact with the group through one of its subsidiaries. In 2002 GKN was to appear once more, with an opposition against a patent that emerged from the project we describe here.

When Ford halted the project, the inventor gave up. That the halt would only be temporary, he could not know at the time. After so many years in which every bridge had proved fragile, he lacked the strength for another attempt. An employee in a large corporation may read this as personal failure: whoever gives up after only fourteen years of struggle is no great loss; he deserved to go under. That is how someone judges whose salary arrives at the end of the month whether his project succeeds or not.

V. How the game turned

Adolf Kochsiek was not an established machine builder. He had lost a firm of his own earlier and ran a small design office which, among other things, designed agricultural machinery for the Frost company in Petershagen-Friedewalde. In the Ford project he was intended as the designer, and only as the designer – a service provider.

At the start he was a potential contractor of the inventor. The inventor had the process, the patents, the know-how, the contact with Ford and the written approval from Dearborn. Kochsiek was to receive a contract as soon as the agreement with Ford had been concluded.

Then GKN made the offer already mentioned. Ford in Dearborn halted the project, and after so many years of struggle the inventor gave up in frustration. When GKN’s offer became obsolete, the threads were held by the responsible development manager at Ford, Steinmeier.

He had the renewed approval from Dearborn, he decided whether and with whom the project continued, and when it revived he carried it on — not with the inventor, with whom he no longer had contact, but with the designer Kochsiek, who had kept in touch. Kochsiek seized the opportunity. Who first had the idea of cutting the inventor out, the inventor does not know.

He was brought back in only when Kochsiek told him that he no longer wanted a partnership with him — he wanted to buy the patents. The one who had hoped for a contract had become the buyer; the one who would have awarded it, the seller.

Nord/GI, the venture-capital arm of the regional bank Nord/LB, had taken a silent partnership of 500,000 marks in the inventor’s company in 1985 and had secured a lien on all his patents in return. After eleven years it had long since run out of patience and wanted to close the case with a small purchase price. Because it held the lien, it could sell the patents just as it could sell the machine. All that was left for the inventor was to sign. In the summer of 1996 he did. Iprotec GmbH, based in Friedewalde, took over the patents, the applications, the machine and the know-how. A few days or weeks earlier, on 21 June 1996, Kochsiek had filed a patent application for a variant of the process in his own name.

VI. Everyone optimises for himself

One could tell this as the story of an individual who exploited another’s weakness. That falls short, because Kochsiek could only do what his surroundings permitted and rewarded. Every participant had his reasons.

Steinmeier, the development manager at Ford, carried the risk of a new process, while the established supplier GKN stood ready. A counter-offer, serious or not, supplied a reason to stop. And when the project revived, a designer without rights or claims of his own was a more convenient partner than an inventor who wanted a say in his process.

GKN protected its own process. An offer that holds up a project costs little if one can withdraw it later.

Professor Peter Werner Gold, who knew the inventor from earlier collaboration and had approached Ford together with him, needed projects, industrial partners and doctoral theses. A new company, run by a seemingly experienced designer – while the inventor said of himself that he was no designer –, with a proper registered office and with a machine and patents cleverly acquired for little money from NORD/GI, was a better partner for everyone involved than a lone, exhausted and frustrated inventor without a firm. At Gold’s institute at RWTH Aachen a doctoral thesis appeared in 2000 that rests on the machine now owned by Iprotec and that passes over the inventor in silence, just like the 2006 publication already mentioned. Throughout, Gold and his doctoral student Gödecke refer to Iprotec as the developer of the process. In the thesis the turned profiles even received the name of the patent holder: PI profiles, the I standing for Iprotec.

Nord/GI wanted to close a case that had cost it eleven years. It held the lien on the patents, and patents can be sold; patience cannot.

And Kochsiek, a designer without production of his own, received what he could never have achieved by his own strength: a company with a machine, a finished process and the patent rights. He also received a powerful customer with an attractive development project, for which he had done nothing and which, to the inventor’s knowledge, brought him a first payment of one million marks on signing the contract.

Each of these decisions can be justified from the point of view of the one who made it. That is precisely the mechanism. An expropriation needs no thief when everyone optimises for himself and the sum of the optimisations calculates the inventor out of his own invention. In a valley of death the decision does not go to whoever made the invention or understands it best, but to whoever is still standing when the others give up.

VII. The expropriation of authorship

Rights can be sold; authorship cannot. In the patent register Hans Ley remained entered as inventor even after the transfer to Iprotec in 2000. In the technical literature he disappeared all the same.

In 2006 Gold presented the process in the journal antriebstechnik as a development of Iprotec and traced its history back to Musyl and the Viennese firm Krause, without mentioning the inventor or the form-turning centre of 1988. In 2012 the VDI nachrichten called Iprotec the inventor. Technical papers from 2012 to 2020 cite Iprotec’s patent for the “two-spindle turning process”.

Each citation takes over the previous one. No individual strikes the name. It drops out because an independent inventor has no institute to write theses about him, no press office and no conference. The sociologist Robert K. Merton called this the Matthew effect: to him who has, more shall be given.

When a researcher was made aware of the missing reference in 2024, he assumed the error lay with the patent office, which must have overlooked the older patent. The patent office had not overlooked it: Iprotec’s own patent specification names it. It was the technical literature that had overlooked it.

VIII. The united expropriators

One could close the story here as an ordinary case of market power. The unusual part comes afterwards, and from the inventor’s point of view it is the real scandal: those who appropriated the process made nothing of it.

Marx wrote that in the end the expropriators would be expropriated. Something more banal happened here: they failed at what they had taken over. The project to manufacture constant-velocity joints, with which everything had begun, came to nothing, as far as is known. The institute in Aachen produced a thesis and a journal article, but no market. Iprotec paid the patent fees until the end of their term and admitted in 2012 that the solution received little attention in practice because designers fell back on familiar methods. That is exactly the chicken-and-egg problem the inventor had wanted to solve and the buyers did not.

Technically, in the inventor’s assessment, Kochsiek never got beyond the simple two-spindle process. His only invention of his own in this field is a U-axis in which the tool is not shifted radially but swivelled about a transverse axis and adjusted hydraulically. Iprotec filed a patent application for it in 1997; in 2016 Kochsiek filed a modified version again as a tool spindle, and the examiner cited the older application against it. The inventor considers this a detour with disadvantages. Swivelling changes the cutting conditions at the tool, and hydraulics on a rotating system is not something that excites users in machine-tool building, where hydraulics has largely died out. Tellingly, this patent specification, too, names the basic patent of 1982 as known prior art. As far as is known, Iprotec today turns polygons as contract work. The process that could have changed an entire class of machine elements has become a niche business.

From the inventor’s point of view this is a concerted incapacity. Each of the participants understood enough to secure the process, but none enough to make it prevail. The institutions that carried them did not restrain them but reinforced them, because they reward the securing of rights, not the creation of a market.

This is why the unbiased expert cannot understand why the process found no market: he examines the technology and finds it good. But the obstacle is not in the machine; it is in the machinery around it. Lewis Mumford called it the megamachine. It needs inventions, but not inventors. It absorbs the knowledge and casts off the person who produced it. And the damage does not fall on him alone, but on everyone who has used feather keys for thirty years where a better connection would have been possible. An expropriation without innovation is a loss without winners.

IX. How this essay could be refuted

The thesis would be refuted if it could be shown that the process is technically or economically inferior and has therefore rightly found no market. Thirty years of series production at SKF and the research results on the load capacity of H-profiles argue against this. It would be weakened if the buyers had demonstrably made serious efforts to create a market and failed because of external circumstances. And it would be overstated if authorship were correctly represented in the rest of the technical literature. A 2024 research report by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology explicitly names the patent of Ley and Schmidt as the origin — but only after the inventor had pointed it out to the authors in February 2024. Correction, then, is possible, but it does not happen by itself.

X. What remains

The third part of DIN 3689, which is to describe the manufacture of H-profiles, is in preparation. It will enshrine the two-spindle process as the state of the art. Whether it names its origin correctly will show whether a discipline can correct its memory.

The invention is now free; the patents have expired and anyone may use it. What is missing is the same as in 1996: someone who breaks the chain of chicken and egg and crosses the valley. The inventor is ready for it. He has waited forty years, and by now he knows exactly why it failed last time.

To those involved he can only call after them what people say in Colombia when they cannot settle an account themselves: Dios le pague — may God repay you.