Did You Know...
...that while attempting to develop a super strong glue, 3M employee Spencer Silver accidentally developed a glue that was so weak it would barely hold two pieces of paper together? However, his colleague Art Fry needed the glue. Fry sang with his church choir and marked the pages of his hymnal with small scraps of paper that often fell out. He used Silver's glue to hold the papers in place. Today we call this invention Post-it Notes.
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| Number | Title | Issue Date |
| 6950609 | Tunable, multi-port optical add-drop multiplexer A tunable (reconfigurable) OADM provides multiple drop ports and multiple add ports by which desired channels can be removed from, or added to, a composite optical signal. In one embodiment, a programmable demultiplexer is arranged to receive an input signal contain... | 09/27/2005 |
| 6819481 | Bidirectional wave division multiplex systems A bidirectional WDM optical system in which crosstalk between interleaved channels of different wavelengths is suppressed by the inclusion in the amplifier gain block of four-port filters that discriminate on the basis of the wavelength of the interleaved signals pa... | 11/16/2004 |
| 5224194 | All-optical timing restoration Timing restoration for a series of input pulses is performed optically in a transmission or switching system, using a nonlinear material with negligible walk-off that also receives an essentially orthogonally polarized series of reference pulses. In the n... | 06/29/1993 |
| 5212727 | Queuing trigger in call processing A telecommunications switching system is disclosed which integrates intelligent network (IN) services with regular telephone services. A service control processor, which implements the IN services is also periodically made aware of regular network functio... | 05/18/1993 |
| 5206899 | Arrangement for outbound telecommunications A subscriber can dynamically provision, i.e., assign desired characteristics to any "target station", which is an active phone accessible to a telecommunications network. A call thereafter originated from the target station (including a pay phone or a mob... | 04/27/1993 |
| 5181210 | Electrically tunable fiber ring laser A compact all-fiber, electrically tunable ring laser includes a diode-pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier. The frequency of the laser is tuned by a fiber Fabry-Perot (FFP) etalon that is electrically tuned. An in-line optical isolator is used in conjuncti... | 01/19/1993 |
| 5136581 | Arrangement for reserving and allocating a plurality of competing demands for an ordered bus communication network A method and system for allocating a constrained common resource (such as capacity in an ordered bus network) among a plurality of demands for the resource. The allocation arrangement receives from a source, demands for allocating the resource (network) f... | 08/04/1992 |
| 5134476 | Video signal encoding with bit rate control Individual frames in a video signal are encoded using different coding techniques such as intraframe, motion compensated prediction and motion compensated interpolation coding. The encoder output, which is produced at a first highly variable rate, is appl... | 07/28/1992 |
| 5132976 | Electrically tunable fiber ring laser A compact all-fiber, electrically tunable ring laser includes a diodepumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier. The frequency of the laser is tuned by a fiber Fabry-Perot(FFP) etalon that is electrically tuned. An in-line optical isolator is used in conjunction... | 07/21/1992 |
| 5119196 | Ghost cancellation of analog TV signals Ghosts are canceled in received analog TV (for IDTV, EDTV, and HDTV) signals by utilizing the fact that there are short periods of time without the analog signals (the horizontal flyback interval between the lines) to process the received signal on a line... | 06/02/1992 |
| 5111322 | Polarization multiplexing device with solitons and method using same The single-wavelength bit-rate capacity of an ultra long distance soliton transmission system is increased by using a combination of polarization and time-division multiplexing. More specifically, two streams of differently (preferably orthogonally) polar... | 05/05/1992 |
| 4483012 | Differentially convolutional channel coding with expanded set of signalling alphabets A technique for converting a sequence of binary digits into a sequence of signalling alphabets of a modulated carrier signal for data transmission. By introducing additional redundant signalling alphabets and differentially coding incoming data in a state... | 11/13/1984 |
