{"id":906856,"date":"2026-06-16T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T12:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cri-one-origin-the-book-that-started-everything"},"modified":"2026-06-16T08:21:49","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T08:21:49","slug":"the-book-that-started-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/16\/the-book-that-started-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book That Started Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the twenty-fourth of November in 2017, a brown cardboard envelope arrived at my house. Inside it was a paperback book I had written and self-published a few weeks earlier through CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand imprint at the time. The book was called Invent Depositions<\/em>. It carried the International Standard Book Number 9781979767897. It listed me as the sole author. It contained, across two hundred and sixty pages, one thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine numbered invention entries that I had written, each one accompanied by a Firefly-rendered cover image and each one stamped with my copyright and the words “patent pending abstract utility.”<\/p>\n

Most authors describe the day a self-published book arrives in the mail as a small milestone. For me it was something else. It was the day every idea I had been writing down for years stopped being an idea and started being a public disclosure with a documented ship date. Every entry in the book carried, from that day forward, a legally meaningful priority date \u2014 the day I had publicly disclosed the concept in a printed, ISBN-registered, commercially distributed publication. The clock for any party who might later want to file a formal utility patent on any of those concepts started ticking on November 24, 2017. Mine started before everyone else’s.<\/p>\n

I want to talk about why I did it that way, because the strategy turned out to matter as much as the inventions themselves.<\/p>\n

What’s actually in the book<\/h2>\n

A reader who opens Invent Depositions<\/em> for the first time will find something that looks more like an inventor’s working notebook than a book in the conventional sense. There is no chapter structure, no thematic organization, no narrative arc. Instead, there are 1,739 numbered entries running consecutively. Some entries are a single line; the shortest is sixty-eight characters and reads “ricochet laser foresighted led energy.” Some entries are four thousand characters of dense, sometimes poetic engineering description. The entries are not grouped by subject. A chemistry deposition might sit next to a satellite deposition, which sits next to a mathematical claim, which sits next to a proposed civic reform. The book is, in plain commercial terms, an unstructured catalog. In patent terms, it is a body of public disclosure that establishes priority on every concept it contains.<\/p>\n

The entries cover, taken altogether, just about every subject I had been thinking about in the years before publication. There are entries on computing architecture, on photovoltaic cells, on chemical synthesis, on satellite communications, on consumer electronics, on building-scale energy systems, on monetary policy, on civic identity systems, on medical devices, on recycling chemistry, on military equipment, on transportation, on agricultural sensing, on a hundred other categories. Some of those categories have since become full commercial projects on cri-one.com. Some are still waiting their turn.<\/p>\n

What every entry has in common is that it carries a date and a copyright line. The earliest entries in the book were originally written in 2015 and 2016, drafted before I knew there would be a book at all. The latest entries were added in the months before publication, in the autumn of 2017. The book also has a small number of entries that were added in follow-on filings in 2018 and 2019 \u2014 that’s where the deeper voxel-architecture work and the LED-pumped optical-cavity work appear, which I’ll write about in the next article in this series.<\/p>\n

The compliance language<\/h2>\n

If you flip through the book quickly, you will notice that every single entry ends with the same legal language: “copyright \u00a9 2017 chris g brown” followed by “patent pending abstract utility.” I deliberately attached this phrase to each entry rather than putting a single global notice at the front of the book. The reason is technical: patent law cares about per-claim disclosure, and a global notice in the front matter is sometimes argued to apply only to the book as a whole rather than to each independent claim. Per-entry tagging eliminates that ambiguity.<\/p>\n

The phrase “patent pending abstract utility” was carefully chosen. “Patent pending” is the standard legal indicator that the inventor intends to pursue formal protection. “Abstract” means that the entry is at the conceptual level rather than at the embodiment level \u2014 the entry describes the invention, not a specific embodiment. “Utility” means that the invention is functional rather than purely aesthetic or decorative, qualifying for a utility patent rather than a design patent. The three words together make a precise legal statement: that the author, on the date of publication, was claiming priority on a functional invention at the conceptual level and intended to pursue formal patent protection.<\/p>\n

I am not a patent attorney. I am an inventor. The strategy I followed in 2017 was based on consultation with attorneys who were friends and colleagues, with publishing professionals at CreateSpace, and with the inventor community I was part of. It was not unique to me, but it was unusually thorough. Most self-publishing inventors do not stamp every entry the way I did, because most are not thinking ahead nine years to a commercial portfolio. I was.<\/p>\n

Why self-publish instead of file?<\/h2>\n

This is the question I get more than any other. If the goal was patent protection, why didn’t I file utility patents directly? Why use a self-published book as the disclosure vehicle?<\/p>\n

The short answer is cost. Formal utility patent filing in the United States costs, all in, between fifteen and forty thousand dollars per patent. Multiply that across 1,739 entries and you arrive at numbers that no inventor without venture-capital backing or institutional support can afford. The math is simply impossible.<\/p>\n

The longer answer is that a public disclosure with a documented ship date achieves much of what a filing achieves, for the inventor’s purposes, at one-thousandth of the cost. A public disclosure does not prevent a competitor from later filing their own patent on the same concept and being granted it \u2014 but it establishes that you disclosed the concept first, which means that if you later wanted to challenge their filing as anticipated by prior art, you would win. It also means that if you later want to file your own formal utility application, you can do so within a one-year grace period and claim back to the original disclosure date. The disclosure is a placeholder. It is a way of putting your flag in the ground cheaply, while preserving the option to file formally later when you have evidence of commercial demand and capital to spend.<\/p>\n

The other thing self-publishing does, that filing alone does not, is that it creates a public record that anyone can read. A patent filing sits in a database until it issues, which can take three to seven years. A self-published book is available the day it ships, indexed in WorldCat, listed at Amazon, archived in deposit libraries. Anyone who searches for prior art on any of my inventions, from 2017 forward, will find the book. That visibility is itself a form of protection: it discourages reinvention because the reinventor knows their work will be challenged.<\/p>\n

A self-published book also satisfies the inventor’s instinct to publish<\/em>. The act of putting a body of work into the world, with one’s name on it, is psychologically and commercially different from the act of submitting an application to a government office. I wrote the book in part because I wanted to be a published author of inventions. I am one.<\/p>\n

What happened next<\/h2>\n

The years from 2018 through 2025 were spent in two parallel activities. The first activity was elaboration: I continued to develop several of the deposition entries into more concrete engineering specifications, prototype designs, and commercial product concepts. Some entries that started as a single line in the book grew into full project folders with manufacturing schematics, patent claim drafts, and market analyses. The second activity was platform-building: I built the cri-one.com storefront, which today carries forty-eight productized projects spanning the original deposition catalog, organized into acquisition tiers (full acquisition licenses, evaluation licenses, mathematical deposition products) that allow buyers to engage with each invention at the depth they need.<\/p>\n

The platform is the harvest. Each product on cri-one.com today corresponds to one or more entries in the 2017 book. The IC-LASER-SOLAR-2017 product is the building-scale realization of entry #284’s principle. The IC-GOVT-2017 product is the bundled assembly of one hundred and five government-related depositions including the 16-digit-treasury concept that anticipates the 2025 Trump Gold Card. The AutoPhi V20-Epiphany Collection product is the chip-scale realization of the voxel architecture in entries #1609 through #1616. And so on.<\/p>\n

Looking back from 2026, the strategy worked. The book established priority on a body of inventions that have, in some cases, become commercially significant well after the disclosure date. The price of doing it this way \u2014 self-publishing rather than filing \u2014 was the price of one paperback printing. The benefit has been nine years and counting of documented priority.<\/p>\n

I will say one more thing about the strategy before closing this first article, because it matters. The book did not just secure priority on the things that I knew were valuable in 2017. It also secured priority on the things that I did not yet know would be valuable. The 16-digit-treasury entry, #27, was not one of my flagship inventions. It was a single line. I wrote it because I had been thinking about how the federal government tracks the tax base, and I thought there was a better way. I did not know, in 2017, that in 2025 the President of the United States would sign an executive order establishing a program \u2014 the Trump Gold Card \u2014 that incorporates several specific elements that my single-line entry had anticipated. I did not have a market thesis on it. I just disclosed.<\/p>\n

This is the strongest argument for the self-publishing strategy that I have. You cannot predict, at the time of disclosure, which inventions will turn out to be valuable. Most will not. A few will. The book covers the space<\/em> of inventions, not the selected portfolio<\/em>. Filing one-by-one on selected inventions forces you to bet on the winners in advance. Publishing all of them at once lets the future reveal which ones win.<\/p>\n

The book is also, I should mention, still in print. It is available at Amazon and through most bookstores under ISBN 9781979767897. The cover is plain \u2014 title, author, ISBN, year \u2014 because the book is not aiming to be a coffee-table object. It is aiming to be a legal record. Read it as a notebook, not as a polished work, and you will see what I was doing.<\/p>\n

In the next article in this series I will pick one specific entry \u2014 entry #284, the “lasers + solar receiving cells = high potential energy” line \u2014 and walk through how it grew from a single sentence in 2017 into the Artificial Laser Solar Recycle Building<\/a> product, which is now live on the cri-one.com storefront with a thirty-one-page documentation package and a target acquisition price of half a billion dollars. The arc from that one sentence to that one product is the case study for everything I’m trying to say in this series.<\/p>\n

That article comes next.<\/p>\n

\n

Christopher Gabriel Brown is the founder of cri-one.com and the author of *Invent Depositions<\/em> (ISBN 9781979767897). Inquire about acquisitions at cri-one.com<\/a>.*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the twenty-fourth of November in 2017, a brown cardboard envelope arrived at my house. Inside it was a paperback book I had written and self-published a few weeks earlier through CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand imprint at the time. The book was called Invent Depositions. It carried the International Standard Book Number 9781979767897. It listed me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[626],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-906856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-origins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":906881,"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906856\/revisions\/906881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cri-one.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}