This story is only a fiction and has nothing to do with any existing individuals, companies or products !
Once upon a time, long long time ago, there was a little boy - let´s call him: Tom.
Little Tom was living in Phantasicusland and was dreaming about becoming important, rich and all those other things little Tom thought that would be of value. So little Tom did all the things he thought that would be necessary to achieve this goal. He learned to play guitar, he smoked "forbidden cigarettes" and tried to have success with different rock-bands. In fact his success with this was more than poor. He was not such a good guitar player, even when he smoked this "forbidden cigarettes". But little Tom always thought, that the cause for this was his guitar, amp or pedals. He had a lot of pedals, every what was available for him.
With time little Tom found out, that he could try to modify his pedals to improve his guitar playing. So he went to an electronics-store and bought a soldering iron. With this soldering iron he destroyed a lot of pedals and electronic components. This resulted in a lot of money for the store-owner. Since this was a good business for him, he explained to little Tom what is a resistor, a capacitor or a transistor.
After some years even little Tom understood the basics of electronics and had some success in modding his pedals. The success was at least more than he had with his guitar playing. So little Tom decided not to play in rock-bands anymore. Instead he modded pedals and amps for guitar-players who had better skills than he himself.
But little Tom wanted to become important, a star. So he came to the conclusion that he has to invent something - something what was really new, something unique. Little Tom had a computer at this time and even access to the internet. Per chance he found a website where you could look all the patents online for free. Little Tom read all the patents he could find, but everything seemed to be invented already. He even talked with a lot of people in so called "forums" to get ideas how to achieve his goal to invent something unique.
With time little Tom found out, that nobody was ever granted a patent for a basic principle which was common technology with modern components but not with old tube-stuff. So he set down and developed all the papers necessary for a patent application. He even collected a lot of money so that he could pay the attorney he needed for filig his invention. The examiner held four other patents against the application of little Tom, but finally little Tom got his patent in 1998 even when it was valid only in Phantasicusland.
Little Tom thought, that he is important now, that he was somebody now. So he took his patent and knocked on the door of every manufacturer he could find. At last another aged hippie, whose own company has busted several years ago, pitied with him and sold some of his pedals conducted with his invention.
To defend his status little Tom was present everywhere, he even became the self-proclaimed "Keeper of Intellectual Property" which was something like the Internet-Police.
His life was not easy because the evil is always around, especially since "pirate-sites" like http://www.freestompboxes.org couldn´t be shut down. The worst of them was a guy, who was hiding as a moderator, but in reality was detected as the "Internet-Terrorist No. 1". He was well educated, with very good electronic skills but this guy was not only evil, he was the devil in person. He neither liked the behaviour of little Tom nor could he respect his hard work so the two became the biggest enemies.
Little Tom had put a lot of work in his patent application, he wrote in his patent claims like this:
In textbooks of tube-technology are a lot of schematics well-known, where frequency-dependend networks like phase-shifters or wien-bridges are fed back between anode and gate of a triode. In practice those have the defizit that they cannot be tuned over a wider range, since with lower impedance of the network the loading resistor at the anode becomes to low to keep the necessary gain....
....
The invention solves this problem in that way, that in a common two-stage amplifier the feedback network is connected between the cathode of the second triode and the gate of the first triode....
Claims:
.....
4.)A circuit like in 1, 2, or 3 characterized that the first stage is made by adding another triode to form a differential amplifier.
5.) A circuit like that described above and characterized that the network is connected via a voltage divider at the cathode.
.....
Little Tom even made a schematic drawing like this:

Little Tom was happy. He even wrote postings like this:
"Little Tom" wrote on August 04, 2008, 05:56:13 PM:
There`s no problem in defense, but furthermore it`s even cooler, as long as there are so-called "free" forum-moderators who take care to post that much illegal IP-stuff on their forum, that the fines they`re gonna have to pay because of their illegal actions will pay the lawyers...
Little Tom felt really strong - like somebody important.
But then - as you will know - the devil never sleeps. The evil moderator had a big magazine- and book-archive and good knowledge of it. Since he had nothing better to do he had a look into his archive and found this old german magazine from 1963:
Funkschau 15/1963 cover
In this magazine he found this article:
Funkschau 15/1963 article
In this article was printed exactly this schematic:

As you can see for yourself, there is a differential amplifier, a voltage divider at the cathode of the last tube and a feedback network connected between the voltage divider and the grid of the differential amplifier.... exactly as it was described as "new invention" by little Tom - one little problem: it was published only 35 years before little Tom made his big "invention".
Even the real inventor and the source of this schematic was mentioned in this article:
The invention of R. L. Ives was published first in the May 1963 issue of "Electronics World", looking like this:

You will ask ho much worth is the invention of little Tom, with this knowledge ?

"Little Tom" wrote on August 04, 2008, 05:56:13 PM:
There`s no problem in defense, but furthermore it`s even cooler, as long as there are so-called "free" forum-moderators who take care to post that much illegal IP-stuff on their forum, that the fines they`re gonna have to pay because of their illegal actions will pay the lawyers...
Yes ?






WARNING !!!
This story was only a fiction and has nothing to do with any existing individuals, companies or products !
enjoy freestompboxes.org,
analogguru