Jan Rajchman
RCA researcher who filed his own magnetic-core-memory patent application — per a contemporary report, roughly eight months before Jay Forrester's — and whose application became the direct rival the U.S. Patent Office, and then a federal court, had to adjudicate against before Forrester's inventor status on the coincident-current core memory patent became official in 1964.
Matters to this vault as the figure who makes filing-date order and legal priority of invention two different questions in the same story: Rajchman filed earlier and still did not end up the patent's recognized inventor, a result reached by litigation rather than paperwork sequence. A second, independent complication (alongside An Wang's earlier-filed 1949 patent) to Forrester's "sole inventor" self-narrative.
References
Updates
- 2026-09-12: His father was Ludwik Rajchman, founding chairman of UNICEF and director of the League of Nations Health Organization — a completely independent institutional biography one hop away from the RCA patent dispute this page otherwise covers. (claim-ludwik-rajchman-unicef-founder-was-jan-rajchmans-father, entity-ludwik-rajchman)
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