I've been thinking about a remarkable industrial designer, a man who built on previous innovations to produce an indispensable product and a corporate titan. Not Steve Jobs, of course, but Isaac Singer, the developer of the first commercially successful sewing machine.

Singer and Jobs have something else in common: their products both became embroiled in bitter legal wrangling over patents. Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that: “I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” Singer threatened to kick Elias Howe down the stairs when Howe demanded cash from him for infringing Howe's patent.

The courts eventually backed Howe but many other patents existed and soon the entire US sewing machine industry seemed more interested in suing rivals than selling sewing machines. That will surprise nobody who pays attention to the legal battles over smartphone patents - and many observers have come to the conclusion that patents are not helping innovation, but strangling it.